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On Saturday, as Pakistan was in the middle of mediating hard-won ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Iran, Saudi Arabia made a sudden revelation that appeared to undermine Pakistan’s status as a neutral host. In a statement posted on X, the Saudi Ministry of Defense announced “the arrival of a military force from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan at King Abdulaziz Air Base in the Eastern Sector,” adding that the force would include a contingent of military aircraft and would improve “operational readiness between the armed forces of the two countries.”

Those deployments are the result of a defense pact signed last year between Riyadh and Islamabad that has now been activated amid an ongoing regional war and numerous Iranian attacks against military and energy targets in Saudi Arabia.

Ceasefire talks collapsed over the weekend in Pakistan, with the American delegation leaving without an agreement. But Pakistan is far from out of the picture; secret documents obtained by Drop Site News reveal the extent to which Pakistan is committed by treaty to potentially become a participant in the war it was attempting to mediate.

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The details of the Pakistan–Saudi Arabia defense agreement have never been made public or even reviewed by Pakistan’s parliament. They are being reported here for the first time based on an archive of classified documents about the pact obtained by Drop Site.

The risk that Pakistan may itself be pushed into the war is also important context for the zeal of Pakistan’s leaders to bring an end to the fighting. Pakistan enjoys good ties with both Iran and the U.S., and relies heavily on financial support from Saudi Arabia. Following news that the United Arab Emirates had recalled a loan from Pakistan last week, Saudi Arabia and Qatar stepped up with $5 billion aimed at propping up Islamabad’s foreign reserves as it deals with fallout from the economic crisis caused by the war.

Talks in Islamabad

After weeks of intense fighting, Pakistan emerged as an unlikely mediator seeking to bring an end to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. Pakistan does not have an extensive history of mediating conflicts in the Middle East, and is mired in its own conflict in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan was extremely motivated to end the war. Early on, Pakistan attempted to broker an arrangement under which Iran would refrain from attacking Saudi installations. On March 3, a few days into the war, Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar referenced the Saudi-Pakistan defense agreement and stated that he had communicated Pakistan’s position to Tehran. “We have a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, and the whole world knows about it,” Dar said. “I told the Iranian leadership to take care of our pact with Saudi Arabia.”

On April 8, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that Islamabad had successfully negotiated a two-week pause in fighting between the parties, intended to apply to the entire region and laying the groundwork for talks in Islamabad that could produce a more lasting deal. “With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote in a post on X.

(Later, it turned out that Sharif’s message was likely vetted—if not written by—the Americans. The initial post on X, edit history shows, had a heading that read “*Draft - Pakistan’s PM Message on X*.” The New York Times reported the U.S. had signed off on the statement, though the White House denied actually writing it.)

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance, envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and a technical team flew to Islamabad to meet with a large delegation of Iranian diplomats and technical experts. Shortly beforehand, Saudi Arabia, which has been relatively tight-lipped about damage in the country, revealed that attacks on a critical pipeline had wiped out 10% of its export capacity.

On Saturday, April 11, right as Vice President JD Vance was conducting negotiations with the Iranian leadership in Islamabad, the Saudi Ministry of Defence announced that Pakistan has sent its forces, including fighter jets, to Saudi Arabia under their defense pact. Pakistan had actually been quietly conducting airlifts of military equipment throughout December and January, noted by open-source intelligence monitors. The announcement coming on a day of consequential negotiations in Islamabad could be seen as a form of pressure on Iran. Notably, the Pakistani government did not release a corresponding statement about the deployments.

While Pakistani officials have periodically referenced this pact, which has been in place in various forms since the 1980s, its details have largely remained secret. The current iteration, the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) was signed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Sharif on September 17, 2025—but it was never even presented to the country’s parliament for review.

The documents were provided to Drop Site by a source who requested anonymity in order to share classified documents. They include historical versions of the pact as well as internal Pakistani memos and analysis detailing how the treaty has been updated over time—giving critical insight into Pakistan’s stance on the ongoing war with Iran, as well as the risks that it faces as the conflict continues.

Historical Pacts

The pact began with a confidential agreement signed between the two countries on December 14, 1982. A revised version entitled the Military Cooperation Agreement (MCA) was signed on July 30, 2005.

The classified 2005 agreement—a copy of which was obtained by Drop Site—states that the goal of the MCA is “to develop and strengthen cooperation in the military field between the two countries through expansion in areas such as training, deputation of personnel, defense production and transfer of technology, exchange of experience, purchase of weapons, equipment, spare parts and military medical services.” The document also includes provisions allowing for both parties to amend and expand the pact over time.

While the 2005 agreement was significant, it limited the scope of the bilateral military relationship to cooperation in training and equipment sharing. It did not obligate Pakistan to engage in actual military action or assume responsibility for the defense of Saudi Arabia.

In later years, the scope of Pakistani commitments to Riyadh would grow substantially. In August 2021, a summary of a new amendment to the defense agreement was sent to the government of then-Prime Minister Imran Khan. The amendment added a profoundly important new component to the pact, effectively committing Pakistan for the first time to engage in the physical defense of the Saudi government if requested.

Pakistani foreign policy has long been determined by the country’s powerful military establishment, which serves as kingmaker for Pakistani politicians and has conducted clandestine agreements and diplomacy for decades outside the purview of the country’s weak democratic institutions.

But for almost a year, the amendment to the 2005 pact sat on Imran Khan’s desk. The description of Pakistani obligations also left ambiguous the question of whether the threat to be combatted at Saudi government request was foreign or domestic. According to two former officials who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive information, Khan was apprehensive about signing an agreement that would obligate the Pakistani military to participate in a foreign war.

“The second party [Pakistan] is obligated to send its forces to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia upon a request of the first party, to support the armed forces of the first party in dealing with any threat that affects its security, safety, sovereignty, territorial integrity and interests,” the amendment stated. “A protocol will be signed between both parties and attached to this agreement to clarify the details of such arrangements.”

While imposing sweeping obligations onto Pakistan, the text of the document did not commit Saudi Arabia to any specific reciprocal support. Instead, Saudi Arabia has provided financial support to Pakistan’s unstable economy over the years. The Kingdom currently holds more than $5 billion in deposits at the State Bank of Pakistan, which are rolled over periodically.

Between August 2021 and April 2022, commentators aligned with the Pakistani military continuously pressured the government over its policy towards Riyadh—alleging that Khan, who had continued to hedge on signing the agreement, was destroying the country’s relationship with Saudi Arabia.

A prominent critic of Khan, Najam Sethi, noted in an op-ed around the time, “General Qamar Javed Bajwa, has paid countless visits to the Kingdom to smooth the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman’s ruffled feathers, over transgressions by Imran Khan.” The alleged transgressions included, “an attempt to set up a rival bloc comprising Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia” against the Saudi-led Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and to “don the mantle of an interlocutor between Saudi Arabia and Iran without the blessing of MBS.”

In April 2022, Khan was removed from government in a thinly veiled military coup. The summary was ultimately signed in February 2024 by the military-backed caretaker government that came to power after imprisoning Khan and banning his political party.

The amendment was speedily approved by the caretaker federal cabinet appointed by Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir. However, documents show that the language of the new amendment expanding Pakistani obligations to Riyadh was hotly debated inside the military establishment after it was signed. The amendment was one-sided, some worried, and would obligate Pakistan to defend Saudi Arabia, without imposing a reciprocal obligation on Riyadh.

Assessments also noted the amendment did not clearly differentiate between conventional and nuclear forces. The documents show that the Pakistani military was only interested in committing conventional forces to any deal with Saudi Arabia, and sought to explicitly exclude nuclear capability from the obligation.

Internal debates also noted that threats to Saudi sovereignty and interests might not remain confined within Saudi territory, and could require military action outside Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani side subsequently sought to narrow the scope of its obligations to Saudi territory.

Many of these concerns were eventually addressed in the 2025 SMDA, signed months before the Iran war. Even though the immediate catalyst for the SMDA seemed like the Israeli strike on Qatar last year, it was always clear that the agreement was directed at Iran—as has all Pakistan-Saudi cooperation since the 1980s. The SMDA is not part of the leaked documents. But public disclosures from Pakistan suggest that the new agreement was an update to the old MCA; renaming the agreement while including additional amendments to the security relationship.

Bypassing Parliament

According to the joint Saudi-Pakistan press release announcing the 2025 SMDA, “The agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.”

The conditions in which such reciprocity may be triggered remain unclear, however. Saudi Arabia has limited capacity to provide military assistance to Pakistan in a conflict. The primary strategic rival to Islamabad remains India, which enjoys close political and economic ties with Riyadh. Pakistan is also currently involved in a fierce cross-border war with Afghanistan, for which Saudi Arabia has not provided material assistance.

Despite their numerous private agreements, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had a difficult history actually enacting meaningful security cooperation.

In early 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a military coalition to intervene in Yemen’s civil war, targeting the Ansarallah movement, which had swept south from its northern strongholds and forced the internationally recognized government out of the capital, Sanaa. At the time, Riyadh asked Pakistan to contribute warships, aircraft and ground troops to help fight the group. The request was rooted in decades of financial patronage and the assumption that the signing of the 2005 MCA would enable such collaboration.

However, in the absence of a clear bilateral framework, and not wanting to involve the country in an increasingly ugly civil war in Yemen, then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif referred the matter to the Pakistani parliament. In April 2015, in a rare display of democratic cross-party consensus, Pakistan’s National Assembly passed a resolution rejecting military participation in the Yemen war and calling for neutrality to allow a mediating role. The vote was embarrassing for Riyadh and a shock to Saudi-Pakistani relations.

The war with Iran has once again raised the question of if and how the agreement can be enforced. The current version of the defense pact signed in 2025 has already been called into question, as Pakistan has been loathe to involve itself in a military confrontation targeting Iran, which currently enjoys widespread support among the Pakistani public.

“The Saudi pact is becoming a problem for us,” a source described as being familiar with Pakistani military decision-making told the Financial Times in an article about Pakistani mediation efforts on March 28. The comments also shed light on what Pakistan expected to get out of the deal: “It was supposed to be cash for deterrence. But we’ve not gotten any new Saudi investments, and deterrence failed.”

Iran has launched numerous attacks on U.S. forces based at Saudi military facilities who have been assisting in attacks against Tehran. On April 6, in retaliation for Israeli attacks on its own energy infrastructure, Iran also bombed Saudi Arabia’s Jubail petrochemical complex—one of the largest industrial complexes in the world and, according to some reports, responsible for 7% of Saudi GDP.

For now, the deployment remains largely symbolic and is not likely to have an immediate effect on the war as a whole. A Pakistani military expert who spoke to Drop Site News on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter said the deployment on Saudi territory offers limited utility in the current scenario. Iran is not conducting—and is not expected to conduct—a ground invasion of the Arabian Peninsula. Pakistani support for missile and drone defense would also not add much to the U.S.-provided defensive support that Riyadh presently enjoys.

Under the current terms of the deal, which is entirely defensive, Saudi Arabia could not request that Pakistan counterattack Iran, even from Saudi territory. An attack launched from Pakistani soil also appears unlikely, and would likely fall outside the scope of the SMDA.

Even a limited conflict with Iran would be politically radioactive inside Pakistan. It would place Pakistan on the side of the Israel-led coalition—an allegiance that would be highly unpopular with many Pakistanis. And it would also be a strategic nightmare for a country that is already facing two other hostile countries on its border, and would risk the prospect of total encirclement if ties deteriorated with Tehran.

Pakistan has a large Shia population which acts as a strong bridge between Islamabad and Tehran and the conflict has raised tensions with the government. In a late March meeting with prominent Shia clerics who had expressed concerns about the war, Army Chief Asim Munir reportedly told those assembled, “If you love Iran, go to Iran.” Syed Ahmad Iqbal Rizvi, deputy head of the Muslim Unity Movement, an umbrella body for Shia parties, pushed back in a recorded statement: “We boldly respond to the army chief’s remarks: we love our country, but this war is between right and wrong. We stand with the right, with Iran.”

In that light, Islamabad’s continued commitment to acting as a peacemaker makes sense as an attempt to ward off a strategic disaster that could engulf its own interests. In a statement the day after the collapse of the talks, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Muhammad Ishaq Dar held out hopes that Pakistan would continue to find a way to bridge the gap between Washington and Tehran.

“It is imperative that the parties continue to uphold their commitment to the ceasefire,” said Dar. “Pakistan has been and will continue to play its role to facilitate engagement and dialogue between Iran and the U.S. in the days to come.”

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The strike came on the same day Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a leading political figure in the country. Soleimani was killed along with several other Basij commanders in a separate strike on a combat tent encampment in the city, part of a bombing campaign targeting police stations, checkpoints, roadblocks, and other sites associated with the Basij.

Israel has publicly said these bombings are aimed at provoking a revolution or coup via aerial bombardment. The Israeli military claimed it targeted ten Basij posts in Tehran on Tuesday and released a video of a strike targeting a checkpoint on a busy thoroughfare in the capital—firing a missile at what it called “Basij soldiers,” while a civilian bus and other traffic were directly passing through the area.

After the killing of Ali Khamenei and the naming of his son, Mojtaba, as the next Supreme Leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump called on the Iranian people to revolt—portraying their own attacks on the country as an operation intended to clear the way for an uprising. Former Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi has also issued calls for individuals inside Iran to rise up and topple the government.

Trump has since taken a more ambiguous view of his endgame in Iran, however, and on Tuesday the Washington Post reported on a State Department cable circulated by the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem claiming that Iranian protestors would “get slaughtered” if they launched an uprising. The cable stated that the Israeli assessment is that the Iranian government is willing to “fight to the end” and maintains continued capacities to rule and suppress internal dissent.

The Basij, established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution, claims millions of registered volunteers and maintains units embedded across workplaces, universities, and neighborhoods throughout the country, though its actual numbers are likely smaller. They are widely known for carrying out waves of violence targeting internal dissenters—including a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests in response to the death in police custody of a Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini in 2022, as well as involvement in the killing of thousands of opponents of the Iranian government during the most recent uprising in January. In these episodes, as well as previous incidents of unrest, Basij units were deployed alongside police and Revolutionary Guard forces to disperse demonstrations, conduct arrests, and maintain neighborhood surveillance.

The following dispatch, filed by a reporter in Tehran, features interviews with members of the Basij as the U.S. and Israel continue their relentless bombing. If people do rise up against the government inside Iran, the Basij have vowed to forcefully confront anyone they see as supporting the U.S. and Israel. The interviews occurred before Soleimani’s killing. The reporter asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.

—Murtaza Hussain

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Story by a correspondent in Tehran

TEHRAN, IRAN—”We have to protect our sacred Islamic Revolution,” said Amir, a 29-year member of the Basij manning a checkpoint in Tehran on Saturday who joined the organization as a student in order to help defend the government. “I don’t care what the people think of us. Our Imam, and our Leader have said that protecting the Islamic Republic is the most vital thing we have to do, so we are protecting it however we can,” he said.

Amir and his friends have been stationed at the checkpoint since last week. They are armed with assault rifles and check every vehicle that passes for suspicious items, as the state braces itself against the threat of an internal uprising.

The checkpoints remind many Tehran residents of those set up by Basij in years past, when the group was primarily responsible for enforcing—often violently—the Islamic Republic’s strict morality codes. The group’s members were notorious for accosting women caught in public without religious headscarves, as well as policing the possession of contraband, including alcohol, while intimidating members of the public with their weaponry and authority to intervene in their lives.

Today, instead of attempting to enforce the increasingly relaxed morality codes of the government, the Basij are looking for weapons and Starlink equipment, used for internet connection during widespread and frequent blackouts. During the January uprising, the U.S. helped smuggle thousands of Starlink devices to help encourage opponents of the government to organize.

Since the war began, the Islamic Republic has held large state-approved public demonstrations in cities across the country to both rally support and signal in a concrete way that it has a base who are ready to retaliate against an uprising that they believe is being encouraged from abroad. “Your presence in the streets has bewildered and enraged the enemy. This humble soldier of yours has three requests from you: the streets, the streets, the streets,” said Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament. “Your children in the armed forces have taken their lives in hand to defend Iran; strengthen their backs by holding the streets firm.”

The demonstrations have shown a degree of support among a significant sector of the Iranian public, but the government does not permit counterdemonstrations during wartime and the Basij, now mobilized throughout the capital, threaten to meet them with violence.

Amir described Tehran as a place that he loves and that shaped him as a person. But when asked how he feels that the city is under constant heavy bombardments, he told Drop Site that he “doesn’t care about Tehran right now.” He added, “Buildings can be rebuilt. Ideologies can’t. What matters to me the most is protecting the Islamic Revolution, and annihilating the evil Zionist regime off of the face of earth,” he said.

Like many members of the Basij, he also expressed a willingness to die in a coming confrontation.

“If I’m about to die, I’d rather die like my guide and leader, the great Khamenei,” he said. “There is nothing in this world I’d cherish more than martyrdom.”

“We are at war”

While the Basij was originally imagined purely as a defense against external aggression, the kind of help that it has provided to the state has changed drastically in over the past two decades as it has transformed into a paramilitary group that is tasked with suppressing Iranian protesters—or “rioters,” as members put it to Drop Site—during periods of domestic unrest.

Passing through Basij checkpoints is often a terrifying experience for people in Tehran, as individual members of the militia are empowered to detain individuals on suspicion of espionage or working for a foreign intelligence agency.

Sina, a 21-year old member of the Basij force, who is also out on the streets at another checkpoint, says he is “ready to shoot at anyone who’d come out on the streets” in response to calls from Israeli or Reza Pahlavi to revolt.

“I don’t see anyone on the streets now and that is a good thing. We are at war right now. This is no time to protest against the system. That can happen later. Right now, anyone I’d see on the streets of Tehran, I’d immediately shoot. These won’t be protesters. These guys would be the agents of the enemy. They’d answer the Zionist regime and Pahlavi’s calls. They certainly strike me as the enemy. We stand ready to shoot them,” Sina told Drop Site.

Sina expressed the same willingness as Amir to be killed for the cause of defending Iran and fighting the Israeli and American attack on the country.

“I’d rather die a martyr than to be alive and witness the Islamic Republic being—God forbid” said Sina. “Now, the child-killer Netanyahu says he wants to provide a condition for an uprising in Iran. Over my dead body.”

This uncompromising message of being willing to kill and die to protect the government from an existential threat line was echoed in a March 10 interview with Tehran’s Police Chief, Ahmad Reza Radan. During the interview, Radan said ”We don’t see people who come to the streets at the request of the enemy as protesters anymore, we see them as the enemy, and we deal with them just like we deal with the enemy. Our forces stand ready to shoot, to protect the Revolution.”

Since Radan issued that call, Tehran, already reeling from Israeli and American attacks, has felt like a soulless city. The normal bustle of commerce and social life—already heavily suppressed by the war—has come to a total standstill as people avoid unnecessary outings out of fear of both bombings, and the threat of an uprising and government crackdown that could target anyone.

Iranians, still bracing from the trauma of the violence in January that killed thousands, now face the prospect of both external aggression and renewed domestic infighting that many fear could lead to civil war.

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Commonwealth Secretary-General Shirley Botchwey has summoned the Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to appear before the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG) on March 7 in London, according to an internal Commonwealth document leaked to Drop Site News. In the meeting, the CMAG will formally interrogate Islamabad’s military-backed government on “developments in regard to the rule of law and other principles enshrined in the Commonwealth Charter”—specifically, the recent constitutional amendments designed to neuter the judiciary, the reinstatement of military courts for civilians, the ongoing imprisonment of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and what the letter diplomatically calls “allegations around restrictions on media and political freedoms.”

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, was scheduled to represent the Pakistani prime minister for the hearing but has excused himself from appearing citing the Iran war days before the meeting. He is likely to send the Pakistani High Commissioner Dr. Muhammad Faisal in his place.

CMAG has the power to censure, formally investigate, and recommend suspension of any member state that commits “serious or persistent violations” of the foundational charter of Commonwealth values. It has suspended Pakistan’s membership twice in the past—first in 1999 after the military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, and then again in 2007 when General Musharraf declared emergency rule.

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In November, the Commonwealth had written a letter to the Pakistani government lodging its dissent against escalation of state repression in the country. It was the first time the Commonwealth had mentioned Imran Khan’s detention since he was arrested more than two years ago. Ministers at CMAG’s September 2025 meeting had already formally asked for updates on developments related to rule of law. Pakistan apparently didn’t provide a satisfactory answer.

Last year, the Commonwealth Secretary General did not release a report on Pakistan’s February 2024 elections that found evidence of widespread fraud—effectively providing cover for the Pakistani government. The report was leaked to Drop Site last September and then released by the Commonwealth. The CMAG’s summons indicates that Pakistan’s authoritarian trajectory is now becoming impossible for even its allies to ignore.

“I invite Pakistan to send a written submission ahead of the meeting to CMAG and to attend CMAG to directly engage with Ministers on the following matters,” the letter, dated February 5, reads. Despite the invitation, Pakistan has failed to provide a written submission, and the level of representation has been steadily downgraded.

Pakistan continues to arrest people for social media posts

Among the “restrictions on media and political freedoms” alluded to in the letter are a growing number of people arrested for social media posts.

On February 19, Hamza Ahmad Khan, a 37-year-old Pakistani-Canadian PhD student at the University of Toronto who was visiting Pakistan to conduct field research for his dissertation, disappeared while going to a friend’s house, where he was staying, in a taxi. For three days, his family didn’t know what happened to him. Police in Lahore refused to file a report of his kidnapping till the Canadian government took an interest in the case, after which they filed a First Investigation Report (FIR). Hours after the police filed the report, Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) claimed that they had taken Ahmad Khan under custody.

NCCIA claimed that they had come across Ahmad Khan’s social media posts during a “routine cyber patrol” and found that he was “actively spreading misinformation and disinformation targeting state institutions.” According to his family, however, Ahmad Khan had been picked up by the Pakistani intelligence services and was only produced by the NCCIA due to the pressure from the Canadian government—another Commonwealth member.

Since Pakistan’s 2024 elections, several people have been targeted for posts on social media by the Pakistani government. On January 24, a sessions court sentenced human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari and her husband Hadi Ali Chattha to a combined 17 years in prison under the same law. They received ten years each for “cyber terrorism,” five for “glorification of an offence,” and two for spreading “fake and false information.” They were convicted for tweets posted between 2021 and 2025, many of them expressing solidarity with Baloch and Pashtun activists and criticizing the military’s role in human rights abuses.

Since Pakistan’s February 2024 elections, thousands of Pakistanis have disappeared, some later appearing in military courts and others remaining unaccounted for. These military courts and the constitutional amendments that made the trial of civilians in these courts legal is one of the topics of the Commonwealth hearing in March.

Khan discussed in the House of Lords

The CMAG will also ask about the treatment of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who remains under solitary confinement after almost 3 years in prison.

In February, after Khan suffered a health crisis in solitary confinement, he was briefly hospitalized. On February 25, Khan was again taken to the hospital secretly in the middle of the night as his health continued to deteriorate. He has almost completely lost vision in one of his eyes, according to Khan’s sisters, and the government has been refusing to allow him to see his personal physician.

On Tuesday afternoon, February 25, the British House of Lords took up a question that the UK government has avoided for the past few years: what exactly is it prepared to do about the imprisonment and deteriorating health of Imran Khan? During the question, one peer after another pressed the British government about Khan’s imprisonment and human rights abuses in Pakistan.

Zac Goldsmith, a former UK Foreign Office minister and Khan’s former brother-in-law, called Khan’s treatment “an international outrage” and urged the Foreign Office to intensify diplomatic engagement.

“He’s been denied access to his family, including his two sons, my nephews. He has been denied access even to doctors. We understand that he has spent much of his time in prison in solitary confinement, and that his health is deteriorating rapidly,” Goldsmith said.

Another peer, Lord Prem Sikka, pointed out the British government’s hypocrisy: “Successive governments show selective outrage at repression by authoritarian states such as China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, but offer very soft criticism when identical acts are committed by trade and defence partners,” he said. “The government have the tools: they can exert pressure on the army generals controlling Pakistan by ending aid and imposing trade sanctions, but they have not. Can the minister refer me to any moral principle guiding the government’s foreign policy?”

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere delivered what may have been the session’s most clarifying remark.

“I do not think that any British Government can be indifferent to the fate of Pakistan, a Commonwealth ally to which we are intimately linked—there are nearly 1.5 million Brits of Pakistani origin. The reason why Imran Khan is in prison is that he would win a free election, and Pakistan cannot begin to have stability and the investment that would flow from that until there is a restoration of democracy.”

Pakistan has been asked to submit a written response and send a delegation to engage directly with Ministers and explain why none of this constitutes a “serious or persistent violation” of Commonwealth values. Ishaq Dar, the same Foreign Minister who spent last summer trying to convince the Commonwealth’s former secretary general, Patricia Scotland, not to release its own election observer report, has reportedly been in contact with Botchwey’s office.

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Fifteen thousand workers went on strike at a major gas field in Iran last week, demanding improved wages and working conditions at the economically critical South Pars field. Earlier this month, the Association of Gas Industry Workers’ Unions of Bushehr Province—the largest labor organization representing the workers of Iran’s gas refineries at South Pars—announced a weekly work stoppage over longstanding grievances at the site.

A letter announcing the strike, authored by union head Alireza Mirghaffari, laid out several key demands that the workers had put to Iranian authorities related to inequitable pay, difficult working conditions, and inadequate leave time for workers at the site. Many of the demands also point to widespread unhappiness over wage suppression and violation of labor laws. The conditions, the letter said, “long burdened those who sustain this key industry and source of Iran’s national wealth.”

“South Pars produces 40% of Iran’s income and 70% of the energy of the nation. So it is an incredibly strategic place for workers to have power, and to be able to build a base to achieve our demands,” Mirghaffari told Drop Site.

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A large portion of Iran’s oil and gas workforce is employed through temporary contracts or as private contractors rather than as permanent employees, leaving them without stable wages, benefits, or job security, and vulnerable to dismissal if they speak out. Inflationary pressures triggered by U.S. sanctions and corruption by Iranian officials have also drastically reduced the purchasing power of ordinary Iranians, including those who work in this sector. Iranian oil and gas exports are the country’s most critical economic lifeline, but working in the field has been notoriously grueling for decades—especially in remote areas like Khuzestan and Bushehr where workers face extreme heat and substandard housing conditions.

Mirghaffari told Drop Site that the strike is also intended as an expression of national pride by Iranian workers after their country was directly attacked by Israel and the U.S. over the summer. He described the strike as intended to send a broader message of solidarity, not just to fellow Iranians but to others in the region who have also been under attack.

“Our country is consistently a target of imperialism and our sovereignty has been targeted for decades,” Mirghaffari said. “We see our strike as being in support of the liberation of Palestinians, as well as the struggles of people in Yemen and Lebanon. It is because of our faith and because it is a moral duty, but also because we understand that our interests are intertwined.”

Despite a general climate of political repression inside Iran, labor activism has grown in recent years. Oil and gas workers have launched strikes in several different provinces. In 2021, thousands of refinery workers across the country went on strike to protest poor wages and punishing conditions under the banner “Campaign 1400,” a reference to that the current year in the Islamic calendar used in Iran. Among other demands, that movement demanded wage increases for workers in the sector in response to the rampant inflation after the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and reimposition of sanctions.

“It is very hard for any labor movement in Iran to balance legal concerns and the need to protect the country’s sovereignty, while also fighting the faction within the state that does not see these labor actions as favorable,” said Esmaeel Mohammadvali, a longtime labor activist in Iran who has been documenting the South Pars strike from the ground. “On top of that it is often a struggle to even convince workers themselves that a strike is in their interests because of their job security concerns.”

That this strike is taking place is “nothing less than a miracle,” Mohammadvali continued. “They have been able to do so because of the structure that has been built that allows over 15,000 workers to coordinate and reduce the risk of punishment and retaliation for expressing their demands.”

Labor strikes in Iran are also forced to navigate an increasingly hostile and suspicious relationship with the U.S. and fears that another Israeli attack on Iran may be imminent. In that context workers at South Pars have said that they were policing their movement to protect it from being hijacked by outside actors.

“There are political risks because foreign actors and enemies of the country often try to exploit labor strikes for their own benefit. Labor movements are particularly vulnerable to regime-change operations due to poor economic conditions, sanctions, and internal contradictions, making them easy to hijack,” said Mohammadvali. During the Cold War, the U.S. at times backed labor organizations in Latin America, Asia, and Europe with the aim of destabilizing foreign governments by using legitimate worker grievances as a vehicle to achieve political aims. It is a concern that Mohammadvali says that Iranian oil workers are sensitive to and which led them to draw clear lines in their messaging about the aims of this strike.

“What sets the South Pars labor association apart is that it has been able to protect itself and create a ‘safety zone,’ remaining unreceptive to outside interference,” he said. “Smaller groups were often infiltrated, politicized, or forced to leave the country, causing their struggles to stall or be suppressed. In contrast, South Pars has built trust with both workers and the government, framing their demands as an extension of Iran’s sovereignty.”

Thousands of workers plan to stop work again this coming Tuesday as part of the ongoing labor action at South Pars. In their letter to authorities, the workers wrote, “We will continue to organize, to educate, and to stand in solidarity with workers both within and beyond Iran’s borders, recognizing that the struggle for justice is neither fleeting nor confined—it is the living pulse of a people resolved to uphold integrity, sovereignty.”

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The Quincy Institute recently published a report on Qatari influence in the United States: "Soft Power, Hard Influence: How Qatar Became a Giant in Washington." Nick Cleveland-Stout is one of the co-authors of that report. In the article below, Nick shares an investigation into a controversial non-government research organization working on the pro-Israel side, called the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy. The organization’s recent claims and shoddy statistics are now attempting to shape policy in Washington, at a time when the Trump administration is looking to justify a broader crackdown on domestic opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

—Murtaza Hussain

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In a congressional hearing in July of last year, a research scholar on antisemitism named Charles Asher Small shared an explosive finding: Funding from the government of Qatar had fueled a 300% spike in antisemitism on university campuses in the United States.

Members of Congress responded with rapt interest. “I want everybody to hear this. So universities that took money from Qatar had a 300% increase in antisemitism [compared to] other universities?” said Iowa Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra.

“Yeah. Compared to American universities that are not receiving money from Qatar,” responded Small.

“Unbelievable,” said Rep. Feenstra.

The statistic about Qatari funding for antisemitism became the highlight of Small’s testimony to Congress. But this precise statistic was never actually recorded in his study.

Small repeated the same claim in a Senate hearing in March of this year. But when contacted for comment about the figure, ISGAP could not point Drop Site to any specific report or finding. One ISGAP study published in 2023 did report that, from 2015-2020, universities that received money from “Middle Eastern” donors had a 300% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to those that do not. But this report is also disputed—and there is no data in it specifically linking Qatari funding to a rise in antisemitic incidents.

Small is the head of the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy (ISGAP), an organization billed as a research center, “dedicated to scholarly research into the origins, processes, and manifestations of global antisemitism and of other forms of prejudice.” But despite its influence among policymakers who continue to rely on ISGAP to provide them with data and analysis, the organization has a track record of promoting unsubstantiated claims.

Drop Site interviewed over a half-dozen former employees and scholars of ISGAP, many of whom explained that the organization has strayed from the mission of academic study of antisemitism into a hyper-fixation on Qatari funding of U.S. institutions—while ISGAP itself has accepted foreign funding from Israel.

Israel and Qatar have maintained diplomatic and trade contacts for years. But they have been in conflict recently over numerous issues, including Qatar’s support for media organizations critical of Israel such as Al Jazeera, and their conflicting alliances during the Arab Spring. The standoff between the two countries escalated sharply last week when Israel carried out an attack again Hamas in the Qatari capital of Doha.

Small also testified, without evidence, that pro-Palestine groups Students for Justice of Palestine (SJP) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) are funded by Qatar. During the Senate hearing in March, Small was asked why Qatar is funding universities. “I think it is the use of soft power. It's funding certain institutes and professors in the classroom and connected to the encampment. SJP comes out of AMP, which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Small then went on to compare Qatari funding and pro-Palestine organizations to Hitler. “The teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood is that the true believer, the true Muslim is obligated to complete the work of Hitler. This is what is now entering into our universities unchecked.”

Fixation on Qatar

The Israeli-funded ISGAP has become a go-to source for lawmakers seeking to draw critical scrutiny towards pro-Palestine protests on college campuses. The organization takes credit for helping trigger a series of high-profile hearings by U.S. lawmakers, while promoting the theory that the protests are being driven by money provided by the government of Qatar. “All these hearings were the result of our report that all these universities, beginning from Harvard, are taking a lot of money from Qatar,” ISGAP chair Natan Sharansky said during a recorded conversation at the Palm Beach County Country Club.

One former employee, granted anonymity to freely discuss their former employer, explained to Drop Site that they had concerns that the organization’s fixation on Qatar lacked hard evidence. “Charles [Dr. Small] had a theory that Qatar was funding academics and donating money to universities to get them to emphasize the Palestinian experience,” the former ISGAP employee said. “That’s when the wheels started to fall off the bus.”

Another ISGAP report estimated that Qatar has given Columbia University $7.1 million in unreported funding since 2006. The $7.1 million figure would rank Qatar 31st among the highest foreign donors to the school—but even that figure is highly inflated. Half of the unreported funding is based on tuition dollars from 14 Qatari students at Columbia between 2006 and 2023, less than one student per year. The rest of the figures are estimates for research projects to study anything from hydrogen production to water desalination.

Despite giving less money to Columbia University than Liechtenstein gives to the university, ISGAP claims that Qatar’s funding of the university is grounds for a federal investigation to “explore the impact of Qatari funding on the increase of antisemitism.” ISGAP also cited this funding as evidence to “investigate and prosecute any undisclosed Qatari and foreign funding of U.S. university programs or personnel as illegal, unregistered foreign lobbying.”

In its flagship report on foreign funding of universities, ISGAP also claimed that the Department of Education had found $13 billion in undisclosed contributions from foreign governments—led by Qatar—to American colleges and universities between 2014 and 2019. However, the report that ISGAP cited revealed $6.5 billion in unreported funding, not $13 billion. In a scathing review of the study, foreign policy analyst Mitchell Bard wrote that “the problem with this report is that it starts with the conclusion reflected in the title and then tries to contort the data to fit it.”

ISGAP did not respond to a question about this discrepancy, but appears to have quietly corrected their number, using $6.5 billion in recent testimony. The $13 billion figure, however, had already been reported by the Free Press and tweeted out by the House Committee on Education & Workforce.

In response to a question about the organization’s focus on Qatari funding of universities, ISGAP defended its research: “The ISGAP report, Corruption of the American Mind study, demonstrates a correlation between foreign government funding and increases in antisemitic incidents on U.S. campuses. Qatar emerges as a particularly influential actor within that category. This is not speculation.”

ISGAP’s own report acknowledges it is speculative research, concluding that “because our analyses were entirely correlational, we cannot make clear claims about causal directions.”

Small has gone beyond university campuses with his theory about Qatari influence over American society. In a July interview with the Canadian Jewish News (which Drop Site obtained a transcript of), Small claimed that New York Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani is “funded by Qatar” and said that “Canadians need to be proud to be called Islamophobic.” Canadian Jewish News was forced to retract the podcast, saying “some readers pointed out that some of the content within the podcast was Islamophobic.”

Doha’s Influence

Notwithstanding claims of a grand conspiracy promoted by Small, Qatar does have significant influence in the United States. Qatari lobbyists score more in-person meetings with political contacts such as members of Congress and their staffers than any other country. At least three former consultants for Qatar now boast cabinet positions in the Trump administration. The Qatari government even gifted a $400 million Air Force One jet to Trump earlier this year, triggering bipartisan concern over potential conflicts of interest.

ISGAP notes that Qatar is able to exert its influence over campuses in Education City, a hub of education centers in Qatar that hosts campuses from American universities such as Cornell, Texas A&M, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgetown. For instance, the organization points out in a report on Texas A&M’s contract that changes to curriculum require "advance consultation with Qatar Foundation.” After public pressure, Texas A&M decided to shutter the campus in Qatar by 2028, a decision ISGAP applauded.

But that is happening in Qatar, not the U.S. While Qatar is the largest foreign government funder to American higher education, the vast majority of that funding stays in Education City. For instance, Qatar pays Northwestern University some $70 million a year, 90% of which is spent in Qatar. 75% of the students in Education City are Qatari citizens or residents.

On U.S. campuses, ISGAP’s allegations rely on loose evidence. For instance, the organization claims that Georgetown professors Jonathan A.C. Brown and Nader Hashemi are examples of how “Qatar-linked intellectuals can steer discourse away from evidence-based scholarship and toward overt apologetics for political Islam.” ISGAP’s evidence is Brown’s marriage to an Al Jazeera producer. In the section on Hashemi, the report does not mention Qatar once.

One former ISGAP scholar defended the organization’s focus on Qatar, saying the Gulf Arab country is “funding universities to push their narratives and their narrative is against the existence of Israel as a state.” But at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in May of last year, then Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said she had not seen any evidence that Qatar was supporting the campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Israeli government benefits from casting pro-Palestine protests on campuses as Qatari-funded. In an interview with Breitbart in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Qatar has spent “billions on American universities, vilifying, vilifying Israel, vilifying Jews, and also, frankly, vilifying the United States.” With eroding support, especially among young people, for Israel’s war in Gaza, Qatari funding of universities has emerged as a catch-all explanation for those seeking to explain Israel’s loss of America’s youth.

Another former ISGAP employee, granted anonymity to speak freely about the organization, said that the organization’s programming “tended not to focus on experiences of bias or anti-Semitic bigotry, but rather on public perception of and support for Israel.”

The Forward reported that in 2018, ISGAP received 80% of its annual revenue from the Israeli government. According to the grant agreement, the grant was for, among other items, seminars on antisemitism and “conducting research in the field of anti-semitism/delegitimization against Israel.” While there are conflicting reports about how much the Government of Israel has funded ISGAP with estimates ranging from $123,000 to $1.7 million, the grant agreement indicates it was for $889,000 over two years. In a statement to Drop Site, ISGAP said that it “did win a government grant in the amount of $889,000 over two years for multiple activities” but that the organization “ultimately received only $123,000 for one educational activity before ending of the contract.”

The Israeli government has also maintained control over the organization’s research agenda. “The project will be managed through a steering committee in which representatives of the [Israeli] ministry will have 50% representation of the committee members. The decision-making mechanism that will be formulated will ensure the need to obtain the consent of the ministry representatives.” In an email, ISGAP told Drop Site that “there was absolutely no interference from the Ministry in the academic content of ISGAP’s programs or research.”

ISGAP does not reveal a donor list, but other known donors have ties to far-right pro-Israel organizations. The Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, one of the only known financial backers of the anonymously-run doxxing website Canary Mission, donated $10,000 to ISGAP in 2023. The Jewish Communal Fund, which gave over $60,000 to ISGAP in 2023, backs Israeli right-wing organization Lehava, a group that marches through Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem chanting “death to the Arabs.”

Several of ISGAP’s advisors are former high-ranking Israeli officials. Former Chief Censor of Israel and lDF officer Sima Vaknin-Gil co-chairs ISGAP’s board of trustees, while former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Knesset member Natan Sharansky serves as the chair of the board of advisors.

Deeper Into Advocacy

In the sworn statement that he provided to Congress during his testimony this year, Small made no mention of any organizational funding from Israel. In order to testify in front of the House Ways and Means Committee last year, he was required to fill out a witness disclosure form. In response to a question asking him to list out foreign government grants, Small opted to leave the question blank.

ISGAP has not registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the U.S. law that requires disclosure of foreign lobbying activities. An organization spokesperson told The Forward in 2020 that the organization does not need to register as a foreign agent because they are an academic institution. This exemption can apply to organizations so long as they do not engage in “political activities,” meaning any activity intended to influence the U.S. government or public about U.S. policy or other foreign interests.

ISGAP is insistent that it is an academic institution and not a political outfit. A former ISGAP employee recalled that on one occasion, Small took umbrage at their suggestion that ISGAP had a political agenda.

However, since October 7, 2023, the organization has waded deeper in political advocacy. In February of 2024, ISGAP hired a lobbying firm, Kasowitz LLP for “issues related to contemporary antisemitism and the timely and accurate reporting of foreign donations to the Department of Education, and FARA registrations.” ISGAP frequently hosts briefings and workshops on Capitol Hill. Ten days after meeting with Small and ISGAP’s lobbyists, Utah Republican Rep. Burgess Owens published a letter asking Northwestern University to cut ties to Al Jazeera.

Small has straddled the line of academia and politics before. Before founding ISGAP, Small was the director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), a Yale-based institution similarly dedicated to the study of anti-semitism. Yale closed down the center after only five years, with some blaming Small’s lack of academic rigor.

Jeffrey Alexander, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Chronicle of Higher Education at the time that "most—not all—of the people at YIISA's conferences have conflated any criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism.” Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University,said at the time that, despite participating in a few of YIISA’s activities, some of the research was “not scholarly in nature.” Lipstadt later became Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism under Biden.

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$8,000 to supply the Israeli military with a thermal drone, $600 for a helmet, $150 for a rifle plate: these are some of the tax-deductible donations that American citizens can make to support the Israeli military.

The campaign is run by a registered U.S. charity that, since the early months of the war, has been fundraising to purchase drones and other military equipment for the Israeli military. The organization, American Friends of Judea and Samaria (AFJS), is a registered nonprofit whose advocacy focuses on strengthening Israeli control over the occupied West Bank and first launched an “Emergency Tactical Gear Campaign” in the weeks after October 7, 2023. AFJS has continued fundraising asking for tax-deductible donations from Americans to help supply Israeli soldiers with a range of equipment including vests, rifle plates, helmets, medical kits, and thermal imaging drones.

AFJS has close ties to the far-right settler movement in Israel and has become increasingly focused on not merely doing advocacy for Israel in the U.S. but also providing the Israeli military with direct material support on the ground via funds raised from American citizens. The contributions allow donors to reduce their own tax burden to the U.S. government in order to channel funds to the Israeli military for its wars in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East.

“As the war progresses towards a total IDF victory over Hamas, AFJS is trying to get the soldiers fighting on the front lines the essential equipment they need to achieve that victory,” a since-removed campaign pitch for another AFJS “Thermal Drones Campaign” launched in 2024 stated. That campaign was said to be launched on behalf of “our heroes” fighting in Gaza for the Israeli military. “Each thermal drone costs $8,000. Please partner with us, in order to get the drones to the IDF units, which need them the most. Donations towards the drones are tax-deductible—501(c)3, via AFJS.”

Numerous promotional videos, posted across AFJS’s social media accounts, parade purchased drones and other equipment as they are received and deployed by the Israeli military. This includes footage of Israeli soldiers operating inside the Gaza Strip using drones labelled as provided by the organization. In one video showing Israeli soldiers operating a drone, a soldier filming the scene says, “AFJS drones, inside Gaza. We use it for one of the biggest operations against Hamas. We are here, start to work with your drones AFJS, thank you very much. Thank you from Gaza. Am Yisrael Chai,” a Hebrew phrase that means “the people of Israel live.”

In other footage posted to the organization’s social media channels, individuals representing AFJS deliver equipment directly to IDF military units in Israel for deployment in the field, including handing over a box containing a small consumer drone to members of the 646 Paratrooper’s Brigade, which has been active in recent fighting near Gaza City.

Members of the 646 Brigade, of which AFJS co-founder Yigal Dilmoni has served as a commander during the current war, have made genocidal comments about their intentions in Gaza. Major Ben Yakov Sabo, a Commander of the Frontal Command Unit of the brigade, tweeted that “In Gaza… there is not a single innocent person” and that “a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza is not even a sufficient punishment for these bacteria.”"

Dilmoni is also the former CEO of the Yesha Council, an Israeli organization that serves as an umbrella organization of municipal councils representing the interests of West Bank settlers. The advisory board of AFJS also includes another former Yesha Council head, Shira Livman; the council’s current chairman, Yisrael Gantz; and the mayors of several West Bank settlements.

In addition to promoting the settlement of the West Bank, the Yesha Council has publicly demanded that the Israeli government formally annex the territory as a means of preventing the eventual emergence of an independent Palestinian state. In a recent meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, a Yesha council member reportedly told the Israeli leader, “Imposing sovereignty only after a UN declaration would be seen as a reactive step and would grant legitimacy to the narrative drawn by Israel’s enemies. We must reverse the order—sovereignty first, and then there will be nothing left to declare,” adding that, “Israel’s hesitation in recent years is what fuels the diplomatic moves advancing the idea of a Palestinian state.”

In its 2023 tax filings, AFJS stated that it “provided villages in Israel with protective gear, vests, first aid kits, and drones to protect the people of the valley, as well as leading tours from the United States educating people about the history of Israel.”

That year the organization listed contributions received in the amount of $137,525. The same filing lists an amount of $132,481 donated that year to an organization in Israel with a listed address in “Giva'at Hashlosha, Samaria” called the Ari Fuld Project. That organization—named after an American-Israeli pro-settlement activist who moved to the West Bank and was killed by a Palestinian in a stabbing attack in 2018—describes itself as involved in directing equipment to Israeli military units in the field. The equipment provided by AFJS to the Ari Fuld Project includes “vests, first aid kits, and drones for protection.”

In addition to helping arm Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, AFJS has been raising funds to help support its war effort in Lebanon against Hezbollah. Yet another fundraising campaign targeting American taxpayers, called the “Emergency Campaign for the North,” asked for donations for military supplies to help fortify Israel’s northern border, including offering donors the ability to sponsor full packages of military aid: thousands of dollars drone equipment, cameras, and fiber optic systems for provision to the IDF.

“This is our time to act and donate in order to help provide our army with important life-saving equipment, enabling our soldiers to become stronger and well-equipped for now, as well as for the time that will follow the war,” the campaign pitch stated.

“The Go-To Organization for Anything Connected to Judea and Samaria”

AFJS was launched in January 2023 with the aim of being “the go-to organization for anything [connected to] Judea and Samaria,” according to Rafi Lazerowitz, a Brooklyn-based businessman who leads the organization. “Judea and Samaria” is the term used by religious extremists in Israel and the U.S. to refer to the West Bank—occupied territory that is recognized by international law as grounds for the creation of a future Palestinian state.

In addition to running campaigns raising funds for occupation efforts—and to provide equipment for the Israeli military—AFJS also bills itself as an education and advocacy organization raising awareness about the need for Israel to annex the West Bank. They instruct the public and U.S. policymakers on “the damage that the lack of Israel sovereignty does to the State of Israel and how the application of sovereignty will benefit all who live in the region, and the State of Israel.”

AFJS is one of a number of organizations using U.S. nonprofit tax status to fund Israeli military units or settlements. Drop Site reported last year on another charity that was supporting an IDF sniper unit. Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 raised over $300,000 to support an Israeli military unit whose members shared video of themselves shooting unarmed Palestinians while operating in Gaza.

Other groups are working to evict Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank. A 2021 investigation by journalist Alex Kane found that a U.S.-based nonprofit called the Israel Central Fund was funnelling money to groups working to evict Palestinians from Jerusalem. These connections are also longstanding. Prior reporting by the Israeli publication Haaretz found that between the years 2009-2013, charities registered in the U.S. had funnelled a staggering $220 million to Israeli settler organizations.

But this type of U.S. nonprofit activity in support of the Israeli government has taken on fresh expression during the current genocide, extending to buying equipment expressly intended to support violence.

In addition to AFJS, another 501(c)3 non-profit that has raised money for the purchase of drones for use by the IDF provided support to armed emergency response squads in the West Bank is Israel Friends. According to their latest filings, the organization, officially registered as Worldwide Friends Foundation, raised over $12 million for their programs in Israel. Among their fundraising programs is their “Advanced Technology Solutions” package dedicated to purchasing various drones for the Israeli military, that cost up to $10,000 for a full thermal camera system. Their glossy “Eyes in the Sky” promo video, which includes IDF drone footage of the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, shows potential donors the various ways that drones can be used.

Other high-profile U.S. non-profits have also worked in partnership with Israeli organizations to support so-called “Lone Soldiers,” a reference to American citizens who move to Israel to fight with the IDF, or to place American citizens on volunteer trips that include stints working on Israeli military bases.

The ties between AFJS and the Israeli military and government run deep in its leadership. Gabriel Boxer, a board member of AFJS who is listed as director on its non-profit filings, is also a social media influencer who goes by the name “Kosher Guru.” In addition to launching a run for the New York State senate in 2022, Boxer is reportedly an advisor to Israeli Knesset member Simcha Rothman, and recently filmed himself inside the Gaza Strip on a trip embedded with the Israeli military.

In a video posted to his Instagram in December 2023, Boxer can be seen wearing an IDF t-shirt while speaking with former Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy with a caption that reads, “We have every right to defend our homeland and our nation. This is a just war perpetrated against Israel.” In an interview with Jewish News Syndicate in August, Boxer also described what he saw inside the besieged territory while embedded with the IDF, stating that the Israeli military is, “the most caring and moral army in the world,” and that he had been shown Hamas tunnels filled with weapons built directly under children’s cribs.

In previous trips to Gaza, which Boxer had also shared on social media, the influencer can be seen embedded with IDF troops of the 646 paratroopers brigade, narrating for the camera as they conduct detonations of houses and other buildings inside the territory.

In one video Boxer posted to his personal Instagram account while embedded with the IDF, he animatedly describes the soldiers demolishing Palestinian homes with explosives. “We just, uh, yeah, saw those houses being blown up over here in the back in Khan Younis,” Boxer says in the video.

“Wow, that’s all I can say!”

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In late July, the U.S. cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks (PANW) announced that it had acquired the Israeli identity management and information security firm CyberArk, paying a staggering $25 billion dollars worth of cash and stock to purchase the firm. In addition to potentially injecting billions of dollars into the Israeli economy, Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of CyberArk further strengthens the relationship between Silicon Valley and Israel’s security-intelligence apparatus.

Palo Alto is one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, and provides infrastructure protection, firewalls, and cloud security services to tens of thousands of companies internationally. Udi Mokady, CyberArk’s founder and executive chairman, is an alum of Unit 8200, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate’s elite signals intelligence division. So are the four co-founders of Wiz: the Israeli cloud computing firm recently bought by Google for $32 billion. So, too, is Palo Alto’s Founder and Chief Technology Officer Nir Zuk.

Palo Alto has expanded through a spree of high-profile acquisitions over the past decade, paying sometimes up to billions of dollars for startups aimed at expanding its cybersecurity offerings. Nearly half of these have involved companies with origins in Israeli intelligence, raising concerns about access to the vast amounts of data around the world that the company is charged with protecting. Palo Alto Networks did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Some of these purchased firms—LightCyber, Dig Security, Talon Cybersecurity, Secdo, and Bridgecrew—were founded and led by publicly identified Unit 8200 veterans. Other major acquisitions include Cyvera, Twistlock, and Puresec, whose founders also come from the Israeli Defense Forces’s “cyber, intelligence, and commando units.”

“These acquisitions are a way to take people from Unit 8200 in Israel, and bring them into influential positions in the U.S. tech industry,” said Paul Biggar, founder of the tech startups CircleCI and Darklang and head of the activist group Tech for Palestine. “These companies handle their customers' customer data. If you are a bank, and you are using Palo Alto Networks, the data about all your customers, and their transactions, are passing through servers that are controlled by spies, or former spies.”

As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech—with 900 of those coming from Unit 8200 alone. That number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as being both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.

The database was assembled by an independent researcher, who is remaining anonymous for personal security and has dubbed the database the “Eagle Mission” influence network. The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200, Israeli military intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defense Directorate working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records in the database for accuracy.

“This does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv,” the researcher emphasized. “But it does create a serious vulnerability. No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector. We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.”

The global tech giant Microsoft is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit, alongside other major multinational companies including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel, and Apple, many of whom employ dozens of individuals drawn from the unit. Microsoft was recently revealed to have closely collaborated with Unit 8200 leadership on the creation of cloud services intended to store millions of private communications of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Microsoft declined to comment.

While the CyberArk acquisition deal drew criticism from some investment analysts due to the seemingly disproportionate price tag—with shares of Palo Alto Networks declining in the immediate aftermath—the intelligence ties were not mentioned in public statements about the acquisition.

A History of Spying

The presence of current or former intelligence agents from foreign countries in key industries in the U.S. is generally considered a source of concern due to counterintelligence and industrial espionage threats. For decades, Israel has been identified as a major counterintelligence threat in the U.S., particularly for the targeting of industrial and technical secrets.

In 2015, former American intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was released from prison after serving 30 years of a life sentence for spying and providing top-secret classified U.S. intelligence to Israel. After the end of his parole restrictions in 2020, Pollard, who was granted Israeli citizenship in prison, and whose cause had long been supported by pro-Israel groups and Israeli politicians, moved to Israel. Weeks after his arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, where Pollard was personally greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump gave a full pardon to Aviem Sella, the Israeli spy and military officer who had been charged with working as Pollard’s handler.

The Pollard case strained U.S.-Israeli relations. But accusations of spying and industrial espionage have continued. Last year, U.S. defense company Conflict Kinetics filed a lawsuit accusing an Israeli Ministry of Defense official of stealing trade secrets to create a shooting simulator tool for training of its soldiers. The Israeli official, Daniel Goldfus, was a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and allegedly promised the company that it could get contracts with the Israeli military. Goldfus has been serving as a commander in the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

“Its unlikely that we would let any country, even an ally, have this level of access to our most sensitive industries. It’s also important to remember that both the CIA and FBI openly rank Israel among our top counterintelligence threats, alongside Russia, China, and Iran,” said the researcher, who added that many individuals formerly affiliated with Unit 8200 or other Israeli security agencies had begun scrubbing information about their affiliation from their public social media profiles since October 7, 2023. “It’s remarkable how many people openly are willing to identify as having worked for a foreign intelligence agency, and that is only the ones who have shared information about their connections publicly.”

Instead, the connections between Israeli intelligence and American tech have largely been celebrated. A story in the Wall Street Journal from August 2024 lauded the fact of the unit’s expanding influence in Silicon Valley, stating that “there are at least five tech companies started by Unit 8200 alumni publicly traded in the U.S., together worth around $160 billion,” and praising veterans of the specialized unit for their “high-pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking.”

The article noted that major Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital were hiring partners and buying companies built by founders with backgrounds in Unit 8200. Sequoia recently came under scrutiny for political statements made by a prominent partner, Shawn Maguire, regarding Israel and related subjects in U.S. domestic politics, including vociferous, public defenses of Israel’s war on Gaza and denunciations of its critics, including New York mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, as “Islamists.”

Biggar characterized the actions of Sequoia, Greylock, Palo Alto Networks, and other Silicon Valley firms as part of a political shift driven by an influence network of closely connected individuals that have worked to reshape the ideological character of the industry.

“U.S. tech has gone political. Once upon a time they made great search engines and email, and now they sell AI to genocidal countries,” Biggar said. “There is a very tight network of people who believe the same things, and use their influence to import more people who share their views. It affects very much how these companies now behave.”

“Similar Values, Strong Cultures”

Unit 8200 has been an integral part of the Israeli military apparatus, including during the current genocide in the Gaza Strip. In addition to conducting electronic surveillance of communications, the unit has been involved in the creation of AI-generated targeting programs for use in Gaza, feeding targets to human operators to create what one former Israeli intelligence officer referred to as a “mass assassination factory,” sometimes approving the killing of hundreds of civilians in order to target a single individual alleged to be a Hamas commander.

In addition to its collaboration with tech giants to help carry out the current genocide in the Gaza Strip, Unit 8200 has also been developing surveillance technologies to monitor and control the population of the West Bank, including, most recently, the creation of AI-driven large language models trained on millions of conversations of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the territory.

In its press release announcing the acquisition, Palo Alto highlighted the expected role that CyberArk would play in developing its own AI-driven cybersecurity and identity-management platforms, stating the acquisition would, “unite two security leaders with similar values, strong cultures, and talented teams.”

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Amid the ongoing instability in Syria, the country’s Christian minority has also been targeted by extremist groups that have sought to capitalize on the security vacuum and reassert their presence. Shortly before the violence began in Suweida, a gruesome terrorist attack targeting a historic church in Damascus highlighted the ongoing danger to the country’s ancient Christian community, amid an unstable and deteriorating security situation. The story below, written by journalist Santiago Montag, highlights the voices of Syrian Christians responding to attacks on their communities and aiming to survive in Syria’s uncertain present.

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—Murtaza Hussain

Report by Santiago Montag

On the evening of June 22, Elias Bshara, a 56-year-old civil servant, headed to the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus with his children, wife, and several other family members. The Bshara family was going to attend the Divine Liturgy in honor of an aunt, who passed away earlier that month. The Mar Elias Church is located in the Christian-majority neighborhood of al-Duweila, located just one kilometer from Bab Sharqi, the Christian quarter of the old city of Damascus that is host to its most historic churches.

The Divine Liturgy’s weekly mass began at 6 p.m. with chants. As the liturgy began, Elias, together with his family, were in front—close to the priest conducting the ceremony. An altar, alongside dozens of ornate icons, watched over them from the walls of the historic church.

But, in an instant, the tranquil religious ceremony was upended by horror.

“Suddenly we heard gunshots, the glass on the walls exploded,” Bshara told Drop Site News. “Everyone went crazy, nobody understood what was going on, people started running and screaming.”

A man armed with an AK-47 had burst into the service from the front yard of the church, where he had already killed five people. In the chaos, Bshara rushed over to his children to protect them.

“The bullets ran out. He walked about three steps with complete confidence, as if dominating the place,” Elias said, describing the attacker.

As congregants fled in every direction, his two brothers, Jiris and Petros, ran to the front of the church and came face-to-face with the assailant, whom they attempted to restrain as he reached for a grenade. They were joined by another man, a 37-year-old church worker named Milad, who threw himself on the grenade when it fell to the ground, ultimately without detonating.

The three men struggled to keep the attacker under control, grabbing his arms and legs in an attempt to restrain him. Amid the struggle, the men and other onlookers realized that the shooter was also carrying explosives in his backpack. “They held onto him to prevent him from detonating the bomb, but it was already activated," Bshara recounted in anguish. "Within 10 seconds of the struggle, the bomb went off a metre from the door."

The explosion killed the attacker, along with many others, including Bshara’s two brothers and Milad.

“I am sure that if my brothers had not given their lives, many more would have died,” Elias said proudly. ”During the fight they bought some time for many children to hide in the basement of the church.”

Residents in the area who heard the explosion and rushed to the church to help encountered a scene of horror A group of locals who had previously established a support group to provide security and other basic services after the collapse of the government functioned as de facto first responders at the scene of the massacre, offering first aid to the many wounded and dying.Minutes felt like hours. As forces from the General Security department of the new Syrian government arrived about 10 to 15 minutes later, alongside the White Helmets rescue team, the chaotic situation was gradually brought under control. Wounded survivors were transported to the hospital and a security cordon was placed around the church by government security forces.

"Those were difficult moments. Doctors and members of the administrative staff volunteered to help triage the injured,” Maryam al-Saeed, a 30-year-old doctor at al-Mujtahid Hospital in Damascus, told Drop Site. “Some cars arrived carrying body parts, which were immediately sent to the morgue. Some individuals were brought in already deceased, unidentified, and there were many injured.”

She added, ”Everyone was in shock, overwhelmed with compassion, working tirelessly in an innocent attempt to cope with the tragedy and [to] embrace those affected by the disaster.”

Elias suffered a severe blow to his leg that shattered some bones. He is now recovering at home after a complex operation. “I was conscious the whole time, but on the ground,” he said pointing to his leg with an external support embedded in its bones. “I was just worried about my children.”

“Strike at the Heart of our Community”

An initial statement by the Syrian Ministry of Health stated that 25 people had been killed in the attack on Mar Elias, along with 63 injured. But, as the days went by, the toll rose, as others who were wounded in the attack passed away in hospitals. The church was heavily damaged. The pews are now unusable, the icons ruined, and the paintings that adorned the walls of the ancient building are stained with blood.

In the aftermath of the attack, Damascenes have been united in horror. Father Yuhanna Shahadeh, who was present during the attack, told Drop Site that the church had, ”received the solidarity of the neighborhood who gathered for days to clean the church.” He added that the attack, “was against all Syrians, not only against the church, so among those who helped and sent their condolences there were also people from other religious communities.”

Nasser, a 24-year-old telecommunications worker who lived in the area added that al-Duweila is a close-knit community where hundreds of people attend mass each Sunday. His friend, Marian Aldrra, 22, who conducted volunteer activities for impoverished children in the neighborhood, was badly wounded in the attack, dying in hospital two days later. "The aim of the attack was to strike at the heart of our community," he said.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Syria’s new president, Ahmad al-Shara, expressed condolences to the community, promising justice against those who perpetrated the attack. The government’s new Ministry of Interior immediately attributed responsibility to the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS), dispatching special operations troops to conduct raids to dismantle alleged ISIS cells in the Damascus suburbs, and arresting at least one man in the vicinity of al-Mujtahid Hospital who was accused of planning a follow-up attack.

Despite the initial attribution of blame to ISIS, the group did not claim responsibility for the massacre at Mar Elias. Instead, a shadowy new group, dubbing itself Ansar al-Sunna, issued a statement taking responsibility for the killings. The origins and structure of Ansar al-Sunna are largely a mystery. Joseph Daher, a political economist and author of the book “Syria after the Uprisings: The Political Economy of State Resilience,” described the organization as a splinter group from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, adding that it had previously been implicated in crimes against the Alawite community in the country, including a massacre of over 1,500 people in coastal Syria earlier this year.

The attack on Mar Elias took place amid a larger security vacuum in the country since the fall of the Assad government. After the regime fell in an HTS-led offensive, many of the country’s security institutions abruptly collapsed, after already being hollowed-out by 14 years of war, sanctions, and a much longer legacy of dictatorial rule and corruption. Many militia groups now fill part of the vacuum left by Assad’s former government. Some have attempted to reorganize themselves and challenge the new provisional government.

The new government, led by veterans of HTS, has attempted to chart a course in governing Syrian society that would win the confidence and support of foreign powers and reintegrate Syria into the global economy. But much sectarian violence has still broken out in the country since the fall of Assad, including not just attacks on Christian sites like Mar Elias, but massacres of Alawite communities, and clashes with Druze militias.

"The administration seeks to consolidate its power through various means, including the instrumentalisation of sectarianism,” said Daher.

The massacre that took place on the coast this year, after an aborted uprising by coastal Alawite militias, reportedly enjoyed support from senior figures in the chain of command of the new government—the denials of official involvement notwithstanding. But the situation of Christians in Syria is different in many respects. Unlike the Alawites and Druze, the Christians do not have their own militias, nor are their communities concentrated in well-defined geographic areas.

“Christians are unarmed, dispersed across towns and villages throughout the country, often in small numbers,” said Youssef Sabbagh, a Syrian lawyer and human rights activist. “The new authorities have not issued any statements labeling Christians as enemies. This contrasts with their stance toward pro-Assad Alawite militias and Druze groups that refused to allow the new authorities into their territories.”

There are lingering suspicions about the intentions of Syria's new rulers.

“During the funeral of some victims, Patriarch Yazigi delivered a sermon calling on the state to take responsibility. His words resonated with the Christian community, but the authorities dismissed his message as unwise,” added Sabbagh. “Christians were also disappointed by the government’s official condolences, criticizing the use of terms like ‘victims’ or ‘dead’ rather than ‘martyrs’—a term traditionally used in Syria for such incidents.”

"We want Peace and Security"

The Syrian Christian community has been beleaguered by the country’s civil war, dwindling from nearly two million in 2010 to an estimated half-a-million today. Many Christians fled the country to escape the fighting, as well as the economic devastation caused by sanctions and corruption, while others were killed in attacks by extremist groups or while doing forced conscription service in the former Syrian army.

While the fall of Assad has been a cause for relief for many Syrians, including many Christians who had hoped for a change in the country’s dire economic and political condition, it has also fostered a climate of uncertainty and fear.

In this environment, many Christians who survived the war are now contemplating their future in the country.

At Al-Maryamyeh Church in the old city, Bishop Musa, representing the Damascus Patriarchate in the heart of the old city, told Drop Site that "we are experiencing threats since the fall of Assad, which was not the case before". The bishop described threatening graffiti and messages on social media directed at Syrian Christians that have unnerved much of the community. In early June, a shooting attack took place at another in the city of Homs, though no one was injured.

Father Fadi Barkil, 45-year-old, at Saint Sergios church in Maaloula, told Drop Site that Syrian Christians "don't feel safe," adding that their feelings of uncertainty are shared by other Syrians as well. “In general, Syrians see that there is no security. The government is doing their best, but it is not enough.”

Father Barkil added that, despite its claims to inclusivity, in practice “the government doesn’t include all Syrians, and there are Islamic extremist groups that threaten us.” The fall of the government has also introduced new divisions, and the shock of the attack on Mar Elias has led to fears that more generalized targeting of Christians may soon become the norm. "Before we were in the same position as all Syrians, we suffered equally, but this attack was something specific,” he said. “If the situation continues like this, no Christians will be left in Syria.”

His fears are shared by many Syrians. In the wake of the Mar Elias, many WhatsApp groups in the country have become active to share advice and information for Syrian Christians on how to leave the country. Both the security and economic future of Syria appear deeply uncertain, raising the prospect that a final exodus of Christians may take place in the years to come.

Yet Bishop Musa vowed that attacks like the one at Mar Elias would not break the will of the Christian community to stay in a country where they have maintained thousands of years of presence.

"We have been on this land for 30 years after Christ’s death," he said. "They will not expel us. We will not leave."

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Story by Murtaza Hussain with on-the-ground reporting provided by Egab.

SWEIDA, SYRIA—On Wednesday afternoon, famous landmarks in the Syrian capital of Damascus became scenes of carnage as Israeli airstrikes struck major government buildings in the heart of the city. Among the sites hit by a wave of Israeli attacks were the General Staff headquarters of the new Syrian military, located in the city’s iconic Umayyad Square, as well as a building on the outskirts of the Syrian presidential compound.

Hassan Al-Mukhtar, a 29-year-old Syrian journalist working at the Syrian Radio and Television Corporation, was in the area of the General Staff headquarters when the Israeli airstrikes hit.

"When I arrived in front of the main gate of the General Staff headquarters in Damascus, I was shocked by the second of a double airstrike that targeted the Defense Ministry’s building, close to where I was standing only seconds earlier," Al-Mukhtar recounted. "The force of the explosions threw me off balance on my motorcycle, and I fell to the ground. Stones and shrapnel began raining down on me and scattering all around me."

Dramatic images of the bombing of the General Staff headquarters were broadcast live on multiple Syrian news channels. Anchors were interrupted mid-broadcast by a series of large explosions that destroyed parts of the building, while sending civilian traffic and pedestrians fleeing from the assault. Meanwhile, smoke was visible in the hills above the city from a separate wave of Israeli strikes that reportedly hit a building on the outskirts of the presidential palace compound. Initial reports suggested that at least three people were killed in the Israeli bombings in Damascus, along with dozens more wounded.

Al-Mukhtar sustained minor injuries and smoke inhalation, but said that the psychological impact of the attack on a major landmark in the center of Damascus was profound. "The terror in their eyes was immense," he said of the civilians caught in the attack.

The Israeli government has claimed that its attacks on Damascus were intended as a defense of the Syrian Druze community. In recent days, deadly clashes between Druze militias, Bedouin tribes, and armed groups associated with the Syrian government have taken place in the southern governorate of Sweida. In a statement giving the reason for its assault on the capital, the Israeli military said that, “the military headquarters in Damascus is the location from which Syrian regime commanders direct combat operations and deploy regime forces to the As-Suwayda area,” adding that the Israeli military “remains prepared for various scenarios.”

The Syrian government led by interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa issued a speech late Wednesday night characterizing the violence as part of an Israeli effort to divide the country along sectarian lines. “The Israeli entity—which has always sought to destabilize us and sow discord among us since the fall of the former regime—is once again trying to turn our sacred land into an endless arena of chaos,” Sharaa said in a speech. “Through this, it aims to fracture our people’s unity and weaken our ability to continue the path of reconstruction and national revival.”

Prior to bombing Damascus on Wednesday, Israeli forces had also carried out airstrikes targeting Syrian forces around Sweida earlier in the week that killed a number of Syrian troops. After the Israeli attacks earlier this week, the Syrian government issued a statement stating that it, “condemns in the strongest terms the treacherous Israeli aggression carried out today through coordinated drone attacks and military airstrikes,” adding that, “a number of our armed forces and security personnel” and “several innocent civilians” were killed in the attacks.

The clashes in Sweida that preceded the Israeli assault on Damascus began after the government dispatched troops earlier this week to quell fighting between Druze and Bedouin militias in the region that was triggered by the reported abduction of a Druze merchant by Bedouin groups and retaliatory attacks by Druze militias that have maintained an autonomous presence in the region. Pro-government militias are then alleged to have engaged in attacks on Druze groups in the region, which had previously rejected government authority being imposed on Sweida.

The fighting drove thousands from their homes while resulting in disruptions of internet, electricity, and even water to the region on Syria’s southern border near Israel. Civil activist Mulehm Alabaza said that the hellish week in the region encapsulated the "humiliation and helplessness,” felt by many Druze residents, “because they couldn't defend their homes."

Alabaza, 37, had traveled from Lebanon months earlier for what should have been a peaceful family visit and farewell before he joined his wife in Italy. Instead, he found himself trapped in a nightmare, one of just ten families who couldn't escape the Teachers' Housing complex as militants prowled the streets, ensuring no civilian could safely leave their homes.

"There was no electricity and no water and fuel was scarce for generators across the city. Moving from house to house on Tuesday and Wednesday was unsafe," Alabaza told Drop Site News. His account was one of several from Druze residents in the region who testified to abuses by pro-government and Bedouin militias in the region, including an attack on a guesthouse owned by Alabaza’s brother-in-law which killed nine people. Drop Site News was unable to independently verify the details of these reports.

As of Thursday a tentative ceasefire appeared to be coming into place in the region, including the withdrawal of government troops. But the toll of the fighting had been devastating for Sweida. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 516 fighters and civilians were killed on both sides across four days of violence in the region. Videos on social media appeared to show both dead and wounded Druze and pro-government fighters, as well as instances of humiliation including the forcible shaving of beards and mustaches of captured Syrian Druze. In the aftermath of the government withdrawal, revenge killings targeting Bedouin civilians by Druze militias have also been alleged.

In his address on Wednesday night, Sharaa attempted to send a message to the Druze community in Syria reassuring them after the reported sectarian attacks in Sweida. “I extend a special message to our Druze brethren, who are an integral part of this nation’s fabric: Syria will never be a land of partition or fragmentation or division between its sons. Protecting your rights and freedoms is a top priority for us.”

The attacks in Sweida and Israeli intervention come after repeated Israeli incursions into southern Syria since the fall of the previous government. The Israeli military has expanded a military occupation in the region, aimed at creating a growing “buffer zone” on Syrian territory, and has used protection of the Druze minority which is based in Sweida as part of its justification. The efforts have been denounced by the Syrian government and its supporters as part of an effort to cause the dissolution of the country by partitioning it on ethnic lines. But Israel’s reasons for escalating may have just as much to do with its own domestic politics.

Israel is home to a small but highly visible Druze minority that serves in its military, and from which the government has sought to win favor. Responding to what they described as calls from Israel’s own Druze minority to intervene in Syria, Israeli officials have vowed to escalate their attacks. "Druze brothers in Israel, you can count on the IDF to protect your Druze brothers in Syria. Prime Minister Netanyahu and myself, as Defense Minister, have made a commitment and will abide by it,” Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said in a statement on social media, announcing that Israeli attacks against Syria would continue.

Other Israeli officials have gone even further, suggesting that the real goal of Israeli operations should be the destruction of the new government entirely. On Tuesday, Israeli Minister for Diaspora and Combatting Antisemitism Amichai Chikli called for Israel to assassinate Syrian interim president Ahmad al-Sharaa, stating, “Anyone who thinks Ahmad al-Sharaa is a legitimate leader is gravely mistaken. He is a terrorist, a barbaric murderer who should be eliminated without delay.” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed these statements in a video, stating that, “the only thing that needs to be done with Jolani is to eliminate him.”

The operation against Syria has also had a personal benefit for Netanyahu. The bombing of Damascus this Wednesday led to the abrupt adjournment of his testimony in an ongoing criminal trial related to corruption charges.

Druze Divisions

Since the fall of the previous Syrian government, leaders from the Syrian Druze community have been split on their stance towards the new government. While the majority of Druze factions in Syria have aligned with the new government in Damascus, factions in the south, led by influential Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, have demanded administrative autonomy, and declined to lay down arms or integrate with the central government. Al-Hijri denounced the new Syrian government this March as an “extremist government in every sense of the word,” and has repeatedly appealed for Israeli support and intervention in Sweida.

Although the situation has tentatively stabilized following a ceasefire and withdrawal of government troops from Sweida, the violence this week will likely exacerbate divisions in the region and make it harder for the government to reassert authority over the region.

Seventy-seven-year-old Hassan al-Atrash, a retired biology teacher, said that he witnessed attacks by government forces near a local hospital while trapped with his family during the fighting.

"Armed forces were specifically stationed at the vicinity of the hospital," al-Atrash, who lives nearby the hospital, recounted, his voice heavy with disbelief. "There were attempts to prevent people from accessing the emergency room. More than one person was killed by gunfire besieging the emergency area... We haven't heard of such things except in Gaza."

In response to the attacks, Israeli Druze leaders close to al-Hijri held public demonstrations demanding the Israeli government intervene in Syria in support of him and the broader Druze community in Sweida. But views among other Druze figures in the region are divided. Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who has built ties with the new government in Damascus, called for dialogue to end the fighting, blaming Israel for attempting to use divisions to cause the dissolution of Syria. “Israel protects no one,” Jumblatt said on Wednesday. “It seeks only to fuel further bloodshed and chaos in Sweida and Syria at large.”

The Israeli attacks this week were just the latest in a long campaign of airstrikes and ground operations carried out by Israel in southern Syria since the fall of the Assad government last December. For the time being, the attacks in Sweida may have helped the Israeli government shore up support from its own Druze community, while the bombings against high-level government targets in Damascus sent a message to the new authorities in Syria that their government could be terminated at will.

While Israeli media reports have suggested that Syria and Israel have been engaged in backchannel talks on security issues and possibly even normalizing relations between the two countries, violence, has expanded almost continuously since December, alongside the growing Israeli occupation of southern Syria. The attacks on Damascus drew the condemnation of the Syrian government, as well as a large group of regional countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Turkey, denouncing what it called attacks on Syrian sovereignty by Israel.

The U.S. has sought to portray itself as mediating between Syria and Israel amid the growing conflict. In an Oval Office press conference, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that a “misunderstanding” between the Syrian and Israeli governments had led to the wave of Israeli airstrikes on the Syrian capital.

But for some locals in Sweida, the violence wasn't just about territory or politics—it was an existential assault on Druze identity itself. "You cannot enter the city of Suwayda as an aggressor," Al-Atrash declared, regarding the decision by pro-government militias to deploy to the region following clashes with bedouin groups. "The Druze Mountain residents historically don't accept that. The government should have reached an understanding with Suwayda residents through negotiations, not arms."

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

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Story by Murtaza Hussain and Aly Afdal Zadeh

After a series of airstrikes ordered by President Donald Trump against three key Iranian nuclear sites on June 22—attacks that Trump claimed “totally obliterated” the facilities—the actual level of damage has become the subject of heated controversy. The question of whether Iran’s nuclear program was really destroyed, or even meaningfully impeded by the attacks, now looks set to define the next stage of conflict between Israel, Iran, and the U.S.

After the bombing, the Trump administration issued a number of self-congratulatory statements touting the success of the attack. “Iran's nuclear ambitions have been obliterated,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said during a Pentagon press conference after the attacks, adding that "the operation President Trump planned was bold and it was brilliant."

Contrary to the quick assertions of total success, military analysts have long maintained that assessing the actual impact of a bombing raid against fortified, underground Iranian nuclear facilities would likely require boots on the ground conducting visual verification themselves, or voluntary confirmation from Iranian authorities doing their own investigation.

The U.S. strikes hit three separate Iranian nuclear complexes located at Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow. Of the three, Fordow was the most heavily fortified, built deep inside a mountain in order to be resistant to aerial attacks. The Iranian government has sent mixed messages about the extent of the damage suffered by their nuclear program as a result of the bombing. But Iranian sources with a background in the nuclear program who spoke to Drop Site claimed that the facilities had been built to withstand such bombings, and that preparations had already been made in anticipation of the war to transport sensitive materials to other locations to preserve them from a long-expected U.S. attack.

Mahmoud Reza Aghamiri, an Iranian nuclear engineering professor and former scientist at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) who continues to work as a consultant at the organization, told Drop Site News that Fordow in particular had been evacuated of sensitive materials well prior to the American attacks. “Fordow facility was emptied of centrifuges and fissile material two months before the war,” Aghamiri said. Aghamiri further claimed that sensitive nuclear centrifuges had been dismantled and distributed to five different locations far from the facility.

“Iranian authorities claimed heavy damage to the facility to avoid international scrutiny into the fate of the enriched uranium stored there,” Aghamiri added.

The facilities were targeted with multiple 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOP) dropped by the U.S. 's B-2 Spirit bomber aircraft. The Israeli military does not possess these aircraft or munitions and direct U.S. involvement was needed to strike the targets. The attacks did verifiable damage to overground facilities related to the program, but the level of damage to fortified layers underground is not visible on satellite imagery.

“The explosions affected the upper and middle infrastructure, while the fortified lower infrastructure remained unaffected, which undermines the credibility of American statements about comprehensive damage,” Aghamiri said about the attack on Isfahan in particular, adding that Iran’s existing stockpile of roughly 460 kilograms of enriched uranium was unaffected by the attacks.

Aghamiri’s claim about the transport of sensitive material out of the targeted sites cannot be verified independently and it is also unclear whether sensitive equipment like nuclear centrifuges could have survived shockwave impacts from U.S. heavy munitions. Other Iranian officials have made mixed statements about the impact of the attacks on their nuclear program, which also included a wave of assassinations that killed up to a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists. Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei said that the attacks failed to “accomplish anything significant.” In contrast, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Aragchi, stated that, “the losses have not been small, and our facilities have been seriously damaged.”

But Aghamiri’s comments echo statements made by Mohsen Rezaie, the former chief commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and an advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who told Iranian television after the attacks that government officials had concluded that a war had been coming since March, and had begun moving unspecified nuclear materials to alternative sites before the war.

In the days prior to the attack, satellite footage from Maxar Technologies showed a large number of trucks near the Fordow facility. Some officials speculated that these trucks had been involved in backfilling entrances to the site in order to prevent a rumored Israeli commando operation discussed publicly in the weeks before the attack.

Following leaks of classified intelligence assessments about the bombings, the level of damage became a matter of intense public dispute in the U.S. A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report published after the bombing had claimed that the attack “did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months.” The leaked report was angrily denied by the Trump administration, which issued calls to find and prosecute the leaker. The administration also cited counter claims from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, that U.S. bombing had rendered the nuclear sites “severely damaged” and “inoperable.”

Experts on nuclear proliferation say that the conflicting statements likely represent a dispute over the level of damage done to the underground sites. But they added that the impact of repeated attacks with MOPs, which were designed in part for the purpose of targeting Iran’s nuclear program, likely did do serious damage to their ability to function.

Ankit Panda, an expert on nuclear proliferation and the Stanton Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stated that "what the DIA is likely getting at is that the bombing likely didn’t collapse the underground centrifuge halls at Fordow. But what’s important to understand is that it’s still extremely unlikely that the bombing didn’t disable any centrifuges that were there.” He added, “These are extremely delicate, precision-engineered machines—shockwaves or power outages could easily cause them to spin out of control and destroy themselves. So, it’s possible for both things to be true: Fordow may have been disabled as a site for uranium enrichment, even if the facility itself wasn’t completely imploded."

Following the attacks, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told U.S. senators that the U.S. did not use bunker buster bombs at Isfahan, as facilities at that site were buried so deeply that the munitions would have not affected them. U.S. officials have suggested that Iran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium, enough to fashion several nuclear weapons if Iranian officials chose, may be buried at Isfahan and Fordow.

But no verification of this has been provided, and concerns have been raised that the easily transportable materials may have been transferred before the war and are still available to the Iranian government. Although facilities associated with the Iranian nuclear program suffered extensive damage, some of which is verifiable from satellite photographs, there is no indication that this damage would put an end to Iran’s nuclear program, or even impede Iran’s ability to develop a weapon using its existing stockpiles of enriched uranium if it chose to do so.

"There are a lot of unknown unknowns—ambiguities about covert facilities and the status of highly enriched uranium. There are doubts about whether the Iranians moved the enriched uranium, but it’s something we have to take seriously,” said Panda. “Think of it this way: these can be a few objects the size of beer kegs. You could throw them in the trunk of a car, and drive them away, but the centrifuges are a different story. They're large, precise instruments that need to be moved with extreme care. At Fordow, if the centrifuges were destroyed, it would likely be easier to rebuild them than to attempt repairs."

Ceased Cooperation

Iranian authorities have taken a defiant stance in the wake of the conflict. Following the U.S. and Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites, the Iranian parliament moved to stop further cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as reportedly banning surveillance cameras required by international monitoring agreements from its existing facilities. In a speech after the war, Hamid Reza Haji Babaei, vice speaker of the Iranian parliament, said that, “The recent 12-day war is a continuation of the 47-year-old hostilities led by the United States against the Iranian nation. The core of this enmity is not about missiles or the nuclear program—it’s about the people of Iran.”

Iranian officials had previously signalled that they had contingencies in place to both retaliate and preserve their nuclear capabilities were a war to break out. In April, Ali Shamkhani, the former head of Iran’s National Security Council and a negotiator in the nuclear talks with the U.S. that the war interrupted, posted on social media that, “The continuation of external threats and Iran being in a state of military attack may lead to deterrent measures, including expulsion of inspectors from IAEA and cessation of cooperation. Transfer of enriched materials to secure locations may also be considered.”

Shamkani was injured in an attempted assassination by Israel on June 13 that targeted him at his home. Initially reported dead, Shamkhani resurfaced days later at public funerals for those killed in the attacks, where he reiterated his message that the nuclear program would continue. “Even assuming complete destruction of the facilities, the game will not end, because the enriched materials, local expertise, and political will still remain. And, now, the political and practical initiative, along with the right to legitimate defense, is in the hands of the party that plays smartly and avoids random firing,” he posted online, adding, “The surprises will continue!”

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Rafael Grossi, director of the IAEA, has warned that even with heavy damage to nuclear sites, Iran could restore its enrichment capabilities within a matter of months as it retained its uranium stockpile and technical expertise. “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that,” Grossi said.

The Iranian government had long resisted weaponizing its nuclear program, instead using the program as a bargaining tool for the removal of Western economic sanctions on the country. Following the attacks, calls have grown inside Iran to withdraw the country from global nonproliferation agreements and potentially develop a weapon as a deterrent in order to protect it from further attacks.

Taghi Azad Armaki, professor of political sociology at Tehran University, told Drop Site that Iran’s response to the U.S. or Israel would be measured in order to allow Iran to “complete its nuclear project” without facing further pressure or attacks.

“Trump’s grandiose statements should be interpreted within the logic of American domestic politics,” said Armaki. “An American president cannot admit failure, especially if he made a unilateral decision without the approval of Congress. Admitting failure would inevitably end his political career.”

Hadi Dalloul, an Iran-based analyst who frequently speaks on behalf of the government on issues related to its nuclear activities likewise denounced the claim that the Iranian nuclear program had been critically damaged by the attacks. “This is inaccurate because Iran possesses sufficient knowledge to manage its nuclear project independently, without needing external support, neither in equipment nor technology,” said Dalloul. “The real loss is the loss of Iranian nuclear scientists. Even though this poses a real challenge, the structure of the Iranian scientific team emphasizes knowledge transfer so the loss of one scientist does not lead to collapse or disruption.”

He added, “A military strike will remain limited in impact no matter how severe.”

This story was published in collaboration with Egab.

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On Saturday night, U.S. warplanes attacked three Iranian nuclear sites, marking the first time the U.S. has attacked on Iranian soil in the decades-long cold war between the two countries. President Trump’s announcement, posted on Truth Social, stated that the U.S. had attacked the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan in a bombardment dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer.” The escalation was met with jubilation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had relentlessly pushed for the operation. Likewise, Trump’s hardline supporters praised the act of war, while across the spectrum in the U.S., many officials and segments of the public have expressed condemnation—whether on constitutional grounds, or because of opposition to the US entering a potential forever war with a country of 90 million people.

Watch and subscribe: Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain discuss the U.S. attacks on Saturday night.

Although the attacks have been sold by the Trump administration to a war-weary U.S. public as a one-off solution to the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, the maneuver is more likely to inflame the conflict. The facilities attacked were already known to the international community and subject to oversight. Iran had agreed to controls on uranium enrichment in the context of a diplomatic deal to settle the conflict. Yet the prospects of such a deal look uncertain in the immediate aftermath of this attack.

Initial satellite photos show crater impacts at the site of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. As yet, it is unclear how much damage has been done, including at Fordow, which is the most heavily fortified of the Iranian nuclear sites and designed for the purpose of resisting aerial bombardment. In a press briefing, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Dan Caine said that “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage,” but he stated that a final assessment would take more time. Israeli officials, according to the New York Times, have said that Fordow had sustained serious damage but had “not been completely destroyed in the American attack.” On Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance indicated to ABC News that Iran’s stockpiles have remained intact despite the U.S. operation.

Iran has not given detailed indication of their own assessment of the damage and, instead, downplayed the severity of the impacts. Prior to the attack, expecting to be bombed, Iranian officials claimed on several occasions that sensitive equipment and materials had been moved out of the targeted sites. On the night of the attack, Mehdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to the speaker of Iran’s parliament, responded by stating: “From Iran’s perspective, nothing particularly surprising has happened. Iran has been expecting an attack on Fordow for several nights. The site was evacuated long ago and has not sustained any irreversible damage in the strike.”

Mohammadi added, “Two things are certain: First, knowledge cannot be bombed. Second, this time, the gambler will lose.”

A day prior to Israel’s attacks on Iran, Iranian officials stated they had already built and prepared another secure nuclear facility for enriching uranium inside the country. Top International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials said previously that they are “not so sure” about the location of Iran’s existing enriched uranium stockpiles, and whether they had been moved out of the targeted locations before the attacks took place. “At a time of war, all nuclear sites are closed,” IAEA director Rafael Grossi said, adding that “all our inspectors who are still in Iran… are not inspecting—no normal activity can take place.”

In the wake of the attack, Trump has said that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. But that certainty is not shared by former senior defense officials.

“The extent of damage to the targeted facilities is totally unknown. There is no real way to tell without boots on the ground. It's not clear if Trump himself understands this, but everyone else around him knows that they did not verifiably destroy the nuclear program last night,” said Harrison Mann, a former U.S. army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for the Middle East/Africa Regional Center. “You can look at this event and say that Trump did something in order to say that he did something. But we did not touch Iran’s conventional military capabilities, and we don’t know if we’ve destroyed their ability to enrich uranium, or build a nuclear weapon if they choose.”

What Trump has verifiably accomplished, however, is putting the U.S. into direct conflict with Iran, escalating a confrontation that had previously taken place via proxies and economic warfare.

“In terms of actually impacting Iran’s capabilities, the strike was largely symbolic. But in terms of starting an undeclared war, it’s anything but symbolic,” Mann continued. “This is a new line crossed—it's the first time we're bombing a state that has the capacity to inflict serious harm on Americans in the region.”

The Aftermath

Following the U.S. attack, U.S. officials have threatened further escalation and demanded that Iran return to dialogue about their nuclear program. "The Iranians can go down the path of peace, or they can go down the path of this ridiculous brinkmanship,” Vice President JD Vance said on Sunday morning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made similar comments, saying that "If they choose the path of diplomacy, we're ready. We can do a deal that's good for them, the Iranian people, and good for the world. If they choose another route, then there will be consequences for that."

Though U.S. officials have sought to reassure the public that the attacks are not a prelude to a larger war, they have signaled that more extreme plans may be in store. When pressed on the subject of how Iran may respond to being attacked, Rubio seemed to endorse the possibility of regime change to prevent Iran from now developing a nuclear weapon. “Look, at the end of the day, if Iran is committed to becoming a nuclear weapons power, I do think it puts the regime at risk. I really do. I think it would be the end of the regime if they tried to do that,” Rubio told Fox News.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump himself seemed to warm up to the idea of a broader war, posting, “It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

The Iranian government now faces a choice between potentially accepting the “unconditional surrender” demanded by Trump, or resisting U.S. and Israeli attempts at disarming the country and potentially destroying its government. In response to the attacks and threats, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Aragchi responded on X, “Last week, we were in negotiations with the US when Israel decided to blow up that diplomacy. This week, we held talks with the E3/EU when the US decided to blow up that diplomacy. What conclusion would you draw?”

Later, in a speech at an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, Aragchi said, “I don’t know how much space is left for diplomacy. We are now assessing the damage but my country has been attacked—and we will respond.”

The Iranian government has already retaliated against the U.S.’s primary ally: Israel. Immediately following the attacks, Iran fired a massive ballistic missile salvo at targets in the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa. In keeping with Iran’s typical method of retaliation since Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, several of the missiles made impact on Israel’s densely populated urban areas.

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So far, the Iranians have not retaliated directly against U.S. bases in the region that are in range of Iranian missiles, nor have they closed the Strait of Hormuz—a naval choke point critical to global energy flows, as well as Iran’s own oil and gas exports. Reports in the Israeli press have indicated that Israeli officials are now seeking an end to the current conflict with Iran following the U.S. attacks against its nuclear sites.

For now, the attacks appear to have completely sabotaged the global nuclear non-proliferation agreement, while setting the stage for a larger and more dangerous confrontation between Iran and the U.S. In response to the attack, Russian ex-president Dmitriy Medvedev claimed that a “number of countries” are ready to provide Iran with nuclear warheads after the attack, adding that “enrichment of nuclear material—and, now we can say it outright, the future production of nuclear weapons—will continue.”

It is unclear how much Medvedev speaks for Russia’s official stance, but his statements echo comments made by other prominent Russian ultranationalists in the wake of the attack, and Aragchi is expected in Moscow for a previously expected meeting with Putin today. Depending on how Iran now chooses to react, a new phase of the war between Iran and Israel—and its allies—may have officially commenced. The diplomatic path is now viewed by the Iranian side as untrustworthy given repeated attacks that have already taken place in the midst of talks. The likelihood that the Trump administration will engage in escalated violence and military attacks in an effort to achieve its stated goals—even if that means a major long-term war with Iran aiming at regime change—now looks very strong.

“If I was in Iran’s position, I would be maintaining a pretense of negotiation, but trying to build a nuclear weapon. If Iran can credibly threaten that it can use a nuclear weapon against Israel, the U.S. will either have to launch a massive invasion of Iran, or hold off and negotiate out of fear that they will use such a weapon against Israel,” said Mann. “Another administration would probably be deterred by an Iranian nuclear weapon, but we cannot say the same with confidence about Trump.”

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Almost a week after Israel launched an unprovoked military offensive against Iran, the Trump administration is on the verge of sending U.S. aircraft to join the fight directly. Speaking on Wednesday morning to reporters at the White House, in response to a question about whether the U.S. was preparing its own strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israel, President Trump replied, “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Trump repeated to reporters in the Oval Office that he hadn’t made a decision on striking Iran—repeating the claim, contradicted by U.S. intelligence assessments, that Iran is weeks away from a nuclear weapon.

The Israeli government has demanded U.S. assistance in destroying Iran’s fortified nuclear facility at Fordow. On Friday, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter told Fox News that "the entire operation... really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow.” Israeli officials have argued that only the U.S. military has munitions capable of targeting effectively, particularly the 30,000 lb. Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) bomb. The Iranians also maintain another major nuclear facility at Natanz which has already been hit by Israeli strikes, but which is less fortified than Fordow. The MOP bunker buster bombs are even larger than MOABs—which Trump bragged about using in Afghanistan in 2017 to target a tunnel complex allegedly used by ISIS.

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Israel has framed the U.S. entering the fray as a way to bring its conflict with Iran to a quick conclusion. But, absent an immediate Iranian diplomatic capitulation, a U.S. attack would likely only be a prelude to a much longer and drawn-out military engagement with Iran. A U.S. war with Iran focused on stopping Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, rather than beginning and ending with the destruction of Fordow, would need to extend to a much broader campaign of searching for and destroying new and undisclosed nuclear sites across the country, particularly as Iran is likely to respond to an attack by diverting nuclear equipment to other sites across its vast territory.

Iran has built a sprawling civilian nuclear program with thousands of scientists and a large number of critical sites. A war aimed at stopping a nuclear weapon would need to be long and expansive, potentially even including a ground component to search for undisclosed sites and verify the level of damage from air attacks. In addition to internal pressure from Iranian elites to rework the program to develop a bomb following the Israeli assault, the country is also now facing public pressure to do the same in response to attacks believed to have killed hundreds of civilians.

Despite their statements about the nuclear program and desire for U.S. help in addressing it, Israeli officials have been open that their own objectives are much broader. In recent days, Israeli officials have suggested that their real aim is U.S.-supported “regime change” in Iran, or even the wholesale partition and destruction of the country itself, for which Tel Aviv would require U.S. military assistance over an extended period. The campaign is the culmination of a decades-long effort by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the neoconservative movement and would succeed in pinning the U.S. into a conflict with Iran that is opposed by the non-interventionist faction of Trump’s MAGA base.

“There are many people who claim a U.S. attack against Iran’s nuclear program would be quick and easy, but a lot of this is Israeli propaganda, as they would love to see America stay in the region in a forever war that helps underwrite their expansionism,” said Sina Toosi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy focused on Iran. “Even if the U.S. carries out a round of strikes and Natanz is destroyed, and Fordow is heavily damaged, Iran already has stockpiles of uranium and centrifuges elsewhere, as well as a massive nuclear program consisting of thousands of people. You would need to verify that they do not have a covert program, and other facilities where they can dash for a bomb. This would become a forever war.”

In the days and weeks prior to Israel’s attacks, senior Iranian officials stated publicly that threats against their program could result in Iran withdrawing from international monitoring agreements and moving their enriched uranium to undisclosed sites. On June 12, a day before the current war began, Iran also announced that it had already prepared to activate a new nuclear enrichment facility, which they said was “already built, prepared, and located in a secure and invulnerable place.”

In his statements on Wednesday, Trump claimed that the Iranians had reached out to negotiate since the war began, including by potentially sending officials to the White House, a claim that Iranian officials furiously denied on social media, stating that, “no Iranian official has ever asked to grovel at the gates of the White House.” Instead, Iran’s Supreme Leader said this morning, Iran would inflict “irreparable destruction” in response to a U.S. attack on Iran—a possible reference to expected Iranian retaliation against U.S. naval assets and military bases in nearby Middle Eastern countries.

The current war has already been highly destructive, even before the U.S. may become a direct party to the fighting. Damage from Iranian attacks is subject to suppression by Israel’s military censor, and the Israeli government has launched a wide crackdown on reporting of the attacks. But images on Israeli Telegram channels have shown damage to some critical military and intelligence sites, as well as infrastructure like refineries and potentially anti-missile air defense batteries.

The Israeli government has so far confirmed at least 24 deaths from Iranian attacks. Inside Iran, the toll has been far more severe. Death toll estimates range from 224 to over 600 according to human rights groups, with the Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education also reporting 1,481 wounded.

In a particularly shocking incident, on Monday the Iranian state broadcaster was hit while live on air in an attack that killed two people. The attack forced television anchors to flee mid-broadcast though they returned later in the day to continue their program. The Israeli government claimed responsibility for the attack, with Israeli defense minister Israel Katz saying that they had hit the "propaganda and incitement broadcasting authority of the Iranian regime."

Israeli attacks have also hit Iranian military positions outside of major cities, including ballistic missile bases and airfields. But most of the dead in Tehran are reported to be civilians.

Zahra Masoudi, a 40-year-old public relations officer at the University of Tehran, was among those who lost her loved ones in the first wave of Israeli strikes. Masoudi lived in a 14-story residential building near Nobonyad Square in northeast Tehran with her elderly parents. Around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, while she was out with friends, she got news on her phone that an Israeli airstrike had hit her apartment building.

"Even in war, I never thought the bombing would reach my home... my mother, my father," she said in a phone interview, her voice choked with sobs, recounting her arrival at the scene after the attacks.

The bodies of her parents were not recovered from the wreckage of their home until 9:00 a.m. the following morning.

After moving in with her aunt in eastern Tehran, Masoudi, like many Tehran residents, is now considering moving to the relative safety of the northern Iranian city of Gilan. Grief and shock over the attacks has already thrown her future into question. “How does one go about this?,” she said. “How do I go about my day without my mother’s presence or my father's voice?”

“Unconditional Surrender”

In recent days, U.S. officials, including President Trump, have suggested that they may kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, or otherwise target ruling officials of the country in a manner aiming to force a change in Iran’s government, or simply ungoverned chaos inside Iran.

After weeks of conflicted messaging about the topic, Trump himself has embraced a consistently aggressive message towards Tehran in recent days, demanding “unconditional surrender” from Iran on repeated occasions.

Trump has also pushed back against the conclusions of his own officials who have stated that no imminent risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon exists. Asked this week by reporters aboard Air Force One about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, Trump replied, "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close.”

Iranians living inside the country have responded to the attacks and Trump’s threats with a mixture of defiance and uncertainty over what the future may hold for their country as it stares down the possibility of a full-blown war led by the U.S. in the days and weeks ahead.

“There is a lot of fear and tension, but people have also come together and are supporting each other. This includes the many liberal people who were involved in anti-government protests two years ago, as well as more religious people,” said Ali Ahmadi, an economist living in Tehran, who says that he had also taken part in demonstrations two years ago sparked by the death of a young Iranian woman who died in custody after being arrested on charges of improperly wearing her hijab. “People are seeing images on social media of the victims of these attacks, including children and young women. They are seeing photos on social media of three-year-old, and even two-month-old children who have been killed.”

The onset of the war, and the shock of the initial attacks on densely populated residential areas of Tehran, triggered small public demonstrations in Tehran by some protestors who demanded that the government actually develop a nuclear weapon to defend the country from future attacks.

While it is unclear how popular such sentiments may be at the moment, Ahmadi says that it reflects a broader perception among Iranians that the government had done too little to defend them against foreign threats, whether through ineptitude or indecision, and that more drastic measures need to be taken in future to defend their country.

“If Iran builds an ICBM after this war I would not be surprised if they name it the ‘Rayyan’ after the name of a boy named Rayyan Qassem who was killed in these attacks,” said Ahmadi.

Initial hopes that the conflict would remain limited to military targets, as it had largely been in previous exchanges of fire between the two countries, has given way to a widespread belief that Israel along with the U.S. is potentially aiming for the wholesale destruction of the country. In recent days, in addition to attacks against police stations, refineries, and factories, reports have emerged of hacking attacks against banking institutions and internet providers, alongside other measures aimed at potentially dissolving Iran’s critical infrastructure.

Iran has promised that it will continue to retaliate to Israeli attacks, and has fired salvos of ballistic missiles each night in barrages that have decreased in size since the start of the fighting. The decreases may be attributable to increased difficulty for Iranians to fire back while under attack by Israeli aircraft, or an attempt to conserve resources for what they may expect to become a long war of attrition with Tel Aviv and its allies. Israel is also reportedly running low on missile interceptors, a factor that may constrain their ability to continue fighting Iran without direct U.S. assistance.

A looming intervention by the U.S. would change the face of the conflict. The U.S. military has bases across the Persian Gulf, many of which U.S. military planners believe that Iran may target in the event of a full-blown conflict. Iran’s missile forces include a large number of shorter-range ballistic missiles specifically intended to strike at Gulf Arab states, as well as U.S. bases located nearby, and these missiles are believed to have higher accuracy than the long-range models being fired at Israel.

Despite the loss of numerous senior IRGC officials in Israeli attacks, alongside widespread destruction targeting military facilities, and even core areas of the capital, Iranian officials have remained defiant in the face of escalating threats and vowed to resist a further U.S. onslaught. “Our enemies should know that they cannot reach a solution with military attacks on us and will not be able to force their will on the Iranian people,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said in a statement issued Monday.

“The War Came and Stole Everything”

Despite the escalating war with a major state power in the region and the prospect of another protracted and bloody conflict, the U.S. and several European Union countries have signaled that they are solidly behind Israel in its assault on Iran. During an interview at the G7 summit in Canada this week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told German radio that Israel was doing the “dirty work,” of the international community by attacking Iran. "I can only say I have the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army and the Israeli government had the courage to do this," Merz said.

Though France has publicly supported the Israeli attack, on the sidelines of the same summit French President Emmanuel Macron expressed some worry about the possibility of another war in the Middle East aimed at toppling a government, stating that "the biggest mistake today would be to try to do a regime change in Iran through military means because that would lead to chaos. Macron added, "no one can say what comes next."

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has begun pushing for legislation to block the U.S. from becoming directly involved in the fighting. Republican Senator Josh Hawley also offered a word of caution, telling a reporter, “I don’t want us fighting a war. I don’t want another Mideast war.... I’m a little concerned about our sudden military buildup in the region.”

Despite these misgivings, at present there is no sign of an off-ramp to a war that may only be in its early stages.

While leaders trade reciprocal threats and gear up for further escalation, for ordinary Iranians like Ali Masoud, the cost of the war has already become deeply personal. Masoud lost his fiancée, the Arabic language professor at the University of Tehran, in the same building where Zahra Masoudi lived. She had been living in one of the upper-floor apartments, preparing for their wedding.

"I was counting down the days until we could start our life together. Now... I don’t know what’s left," he said. Ali had just finished furnishing a small apartment for them. Every evening, she would call to share details of her day. On the night of the attack, the phone never rang.

After the Israeli attacks hit, he reached the site and stood frozen before the mangled wreckage of what had once been a large apartment complex. Smoke rose from the rubble, thick with dust and the smell of concrete and fire.

"I was dreaming of children, of ordinary mornings," he said. "But the war came and stole everything."

Mahmoud Shaban contributed reporting from Tehran. This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

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Israel attacked Iran early on Friday morning, targeting the capital Tehran and other parts of the country with multiple airstrikes in a dramatic escalation of its regional war. Explosions were reported in cities home to major sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program. Initial reports indicate that Israel may have targeted the homes of Iranian political and military officials, as well as figures related to its nuclear program. Iranian state TV reported that a number of senior officials were killed, including the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Salami.

The attacks targeted at least six military bases around Tehran, including the Iranian military complex Parchin, according to the New York Times. Broadcasting the aftermath of the attacks in Tehran, Iranian state television showed that two residential buildings had collapsed, killing and injuring many, including at least one child.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized the attack, named Operation Rising Lion, as a “pre-emptive strike,” before declaring a state of general emergency inside Israel in anticipation of a likely Iranian retaliation. In a speech delivered Thursday night, Netanyahu detailed a full-scale military operation targeting Iranian nuclear and missile infrastructure, claiming it was necessary to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons and vowing that the strikes would continue “for as many days as it takes.” Netanyahu claimed that the attacks managed to strike Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, Iranian nuclear scientists involved in weapons development, and Iran’s ballistic missile program.

"Following the preemptive strike by the State of Israel against Iran, a missile and UAV (drone) attack against the State of Israel and its civilian population is expected in the immediate time frame," Katz also said in a statement. Israeli officials have indicated that the country could experience “a significant attack from the east,” in the coming hours, likely in the form of a retaliatory Iranian missile barrage. Israel has closed its airspace, and Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport has stopped flights from coming in or out. The Tasnim news agency in Iran has reported that authorities suspended flights at the Imam Khomeini International Airport, which has not been struck or affected by the attacks.

The attacks come after the U.S. announced withdrawals of personnel from embassies and consulates in the Middle East and President Donald Trump hinted that an Israeli attack on Iran may be coming in the near future. Despite those preparations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday that, “the United States was not involved in the strikes.” Yet, according to the Times of Israel, the Israeli military says it is coordinating its actions with the U.S. In his statement, Rubio had said that “Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defense,” adding a warning to Iran that they “should not target U.S. interests or personnel.”

Israel’s assault comes after talks between the U.S. and Iran stalled over new demands from the U.S. for a total dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear program. Though U.S. officials have denied that they were involved in the current strikes, the operation now risks entangling the U.S. into a broader war, as Israel braces for likely Iranian retaliation while expanding its own campaign of attacks across Iran.

Although the stated goal of Israel’s operation is to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts, there are reasons to be skeptical about this objective. Long before the current wave of strikes, U.S. intelligence officials and other analysts had pointed to the limited ability of Israeli strikes to destroy or meaningfully set back Iran’s nuclear program. Unlike nuclear facilities that Israel has struck in the past in Iraq and Syria, the Iranian program is more advanced, fortified, and distributed across a far greater territory. Key Iranian nuclear facilities like Natanz and Fordow are also built under layers of fortified concrete and granite—in some cases literally built into mountains—rendering them impossible to destroy by any known conventional Israeli military capacity.

The likely inability of Israel to fully destroy the program, despite being able to strike at various targets inside Iran, has led some military experts to conclude that the real goal of any attack is simply to fire the starting gun for a larger regional war with no determined endpoint. Such a war would potentially drag the U.S. in as a participant, including to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, even at a time when segments of the Trump administration and its domestic political base are expressing intense frustration over fighting continued conflicts in the Middle East.

“Both the Israeli and U.S. government, as well as our respective military and intelligence services, are fully aware that Israeli airstrikes on Iran are not going to successfully destroy the Iranian nuclear program. We are dealing with underground facilities dispersed over a large country, and human capital that knows how to rebuild things. At most, such attacks would set back progress for a period of months, or less than a year,” said Harrison Mann, a former U.S. army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for the Middle East/Africa Regional Center. “The only thing that you can really achieve by trying to bomb Iranian nuclear sites is to provoke a reprisal by Iran that helps escalate the situation into a larger war and draws in the United States. That’s what any purported effort to bomb away the Iranian nuclear program is actually aiming at.”

Mann, who resigned from his post at the DIA last year in protest over U.S. policy in Gaza, added that an aerial campaign aimed at Iran’s nuclear program would also likely require ground troops to come and do the work of verifying whether the program had actually been destroyed. It would also push Iran to withdraw from its present commitment to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and develop a bomb, a step that Iranian officials have said in recent days is on the table in the event that they are attacked.

“Iran has never built a nuclear weapon. That is a choice that successive leadership in that country has made,” Mann said. “But the way to ensure that they do try to sprint to a nuclear weapon is to make them feel that they have no other choice.”

Forever War

The current war began after nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran began stalling over the issue of permitting Iran to maintain nuclear enrichment for civilian energy purposes. In April, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff indicated publicly that such an arrangement may be acceptable to the U.S., as long as Trump’s requirement that Iran not develop a nuclear weapon was met. After the Iranians expressed their agreement with these terms in public statements, the U.S. position began rapidly shifting. In recent days, Witkoff and others in the neoconservative faction of the DC foreign policy establishment have begun demanding instead a Libya-style dismantling of Iran’s entire nuclear program – an issue that Tehran had already indicated was a red-line that would destroy the possibility of a diplomatic agreement.

“The U.S. is reaping what it sowed in 2018. We had a deal—not a perfect deal, but a good deal that the Iranians were fully implementing,” said Sina Azodi, a specialist in international relations and Middle East politics at George Washington University. “But Donald Trump came in, he withdrew from it, and he mistakenly calculated that Iran would come back and beg for a better deal. Everything he thought has proven wrong.”

Depending on how the cycle of attacks and retaliation plays out, a conflict with Iran may come to dominate the policy agenda of the second Trump administration. The Israeli security establishment had been divided over whether to proceed with an attack absent U.S. support, but there has been a longstanding expectation inside Israel that a prolonged military confrontation with Iran would need significant U.S. assistance, either in the form of direct military operations, intelligence support, logistics, or help in defending and deterring against counter attacks by Iran and its allies.

The current strikes, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said will continue “as long as necessary,” may well trigger that process of starting a larger war. A report this year by the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) acknowledged that airstrikes would be only the first phase of a much larger conflict, stating that, “follow-on covert action and military strikes to disrupt and delay efforts to rebuild may be necessary in the months and years following an initial attack.”

Retaliatory Effects

Last year, Iran launched two missile barrages against Israel following other Israeli attacks. But security analysts say that those attacks were carefully calibrated and telegraphed in advance to manage the level of escalation and prevent a full-blown war from breaking out.

Following serious Israeli attacks on its nuclear program, Iran is now faced with a choice between capitulating, retaliating, or withdrawing from the NPT and dashing towards a nuclear weapon. Given the nature of Iran’s military capabilities, which are based on a mix of sponsorship of non-state militia groups who wage sub-conventional warfare one one hand, and a massive fleet of ballistic and hypersonic missiles on the other, Iran’s ability to retaliate in a measured way that creates a deterrent without escalating the situation to a major war is limited.

"Iran’s strike capabilities are heavily optimized for two scenarios: low-key operations below the threshold of major military campaigns, or an all-in confrontation. Last April, its attack was very performative, whereas in October they decided to showcase some of their higher-end capabilities,” said Shahryar Pasandideh, a security analyst focused on defense issues. “But this time if Israel attacks Iran, the Iranians may retaliate by going for a qualitatively different set of targets.”

Iran may also choose not to retaliate in a sustained manner to Israel’s attacks if it decides instead that a better retaliation would be withdrawing from the NPT, expelling nuclear inspectors, and pursuing a nuclear weapon. That would mean that Iran’s immediate kinetic reaction may be limited, while the country prepares instead to develop a bomb outside of international monitoring.

“If there are far-reaching and non-symbolic attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, and the Iranians decide to go for nuclear breakout in response, it doesn’t make much sense to do sustained retaliatory missile attacks,” added Pasandideh. “It comes back to strike capabilities. If you are going to pursue a nuclear weapon in response to being attacked, it would be better to limit your retaliation to a one or two day campaign of missile strikes, and then husband the rest of your forces for a period of months or a year until you have rebuilt what you lost and are in a position to break out with a nuclear weapon.”

Depending on its duration, the war may wind up triggering splits inside Trump’s coalition, divided between America First figures averse to more wars in the Middle East, and neoconservatives, for whom attacking Iran has been a long-cherished goal. If the war continues for an extended period of time, the ability of the U.S. to avoid a larger conflict will diminish, and Israel’s own pressure on the U.S. to intervene and help continue its campaign will only increase.

“There’s no viable Israeli option without close American coordination. Any extended Israeli campaign has to have a central American role in it,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The Israelis are not just selling war to America, they’re selling endless war to America.”

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Meanwhile, closer to home, a state-led crackdown targeting student protestors against the genocide in Gaza may be expanding to include controls on who can exit the country. In addition to its crackdown on major universities like Harvard, which may now be effectively banned from admitting foreign students, the administration has vowed that the deportations and visa revocations we have seen so far are only the beginning. Reports are now emerging of new checkpoints at land-to-land border crossings equipped with photographic surveillance. In addition to a possible impact on undocumented people, lawyers believe that these measures may soon be used to target students who have attempted to flee the U.S. government dragnet.

—Murtaza Hussain

The U.S. government-led crackdown on student protestors against the genocide in the Gaza Strip may be extending to checkpoints with exit controls at land-to-land border crossings. In recent weeks, reports have emerged of plans for new checkpoints near land exits from the U.S., as well as the implementation of programs that use photography and facial recognition technology to identify people attempting to leave the country.

The U.S.-Canada land border has been the point of exit for a large number of students who have had their immigration status revoked after their participation in pro-Palestinian protests on campus, according to lawyers who have worked on their cases. These lawyers told Drop Site that they believe the new measures may be aimed at targeting students who attempt to leave via that route in the future. U.S. officials have stated that hundreds of students have already had their legal status in the country revoked for their involvement in demonstrations, writing articles, or posting on social media in protest against the war.

Lawyers who have advised students say that so far none have faced detention at the Canadian border when exiting the U.S. But the new measures have raised serious alarms at a time when the government is promising to escalate its crackdown, while threatening the use of material support for terrorism provisions to level criminal charges against student protestors.

“There is a U.S. law that actually requires DHS to match entries and exits, so tracking the departure of the person from the US who is not a citizen is consistent with that statutory obligation. But using the border as a checkpoint for the detention of people based on their political opinions is an entirely different level of concern,” said Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel and Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “I don’t think we have seen that yet, but I do think that it is a possibility given the aggressive nature of immigration enforcement under this administration, as well as its broad view of its own ability to remove people from the US based on nebulous foreign policy concerns.”

Legal experts who also spoke to Drop Site said that voluntarily exiting the country by land to Canada has been a common means of safely self-deporting for affected students, who may be subject to other legal measures or targeted for detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since the Department of Homeland Security has access to flight logs, leaving the country through a land border typically entails less surveillance and allows people to exit without foreknowledge of the U.S. government.

The checkpoints currently reported by travelers to Canada have popped up near the border between Washington state and British Columbia, but lawyers have expressed concern that the measures could soon expand to other crossings. The government has also ramped up enforcement measures as part of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants across the country.

“In their heads, many students are thinking that they can at least drive out of the country if needed—especially those based at schools in New York, Boston, Michigan, or other northeastern states. If the government is going to be checking people as they are leaving, using facial recognition, ID technology to track that is something that would alarm many people,” a lawyer told Drop Site.

The lawyer. who has represented students who left the country through Canada, elaborated that “DHS has the ability to access flight logs. They don't have the ability—barring some kind of partnership we don't know about with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—to know when people are leaving. If the government wants to know who is leaving the country, that can only mean that they are considering other alternatives for suppressing their speech.”

An Expanding Dragnet

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government was implementing an AI-assisted “catch and revoke” program to comb through the social media accounts of foreign students deemed to be supportive of Hamas and revoke their immigration status. The government is also believed to have relied on submissions of student names by private sector activist groups like Canary Mission and Beitar, that have collected data on students to target for both immigration and criminal punishment. U.S. officials and private-sector organizations involved in the crackdown have promised to use material support of terrorism charges as a means to further suppress speech over Gaza.

In addition to the promised use of artificial intelligence, including facial recognition technology allowing for rapid verification of identities, exit controls would be another major step in helping to track down and charge students whom the government wants to punish over its involvement in protests.

The U.S. government has not acknowledged whether its new border measures are aimed at stopping pro-Palestinian students from leaving the country. The use of checkpoints to halt or inspect outbound traffic from the country is rare, but it is occasionally employed when searching for wanted individuals or contraband. The reported plans to use photographic verification and artificial intelligence on people attempting to leave the country would be another major escalation in the ability of the government to find and potentially detain people.

In a heated exchange this week with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen over the detention of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who had been taken into ICE custody after co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel, Rubio vowed that the visa revocations and deportations of student critics of the war would continue. “We are going to do more. There are more coming. We are going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests, and who are disrupting our higher education facilities,” Rubio declared. “I want to do more. I hope we can find more of these people.”

The U.S. government has faced some setbacks in its crackdown, including the court-ordered release of Ozturk, as well as Palestinian student Mohsen Mahdawi, both of whom had been detained by ICE over their political activities on campus. In a ruling ordering the release of Mahdawi while his deportation hearings proceed, U.S. District Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford rebuked the Trump administration while comparing its policies to the abuses of the McCarthy era. “Legal residents—not charged with crimes or misconduct—are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day,” Crawford wrote in his judgement. “The wheel of history has come around again, but as before, these times of excess will pass.”

In addition to these legal challenges, the crackdown shows signs that the measures are not shoring up support for Israel., Students continue to express public anger at the detention of their classmates and in defense of their First Amendment protected activity.

At a graduation ceremony at Columbia University on Tuesday, students booed the university’s acting president as she introduced the ceremony, chanting “Free Mahmoud” in protest over the detention of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in ICE detention in Louisiana for his involvement in the protests. “I know that many of you feel some amount of frustration with me, and I know you feel it with the administration,” Shipman said to the crowd over the chorus of boos. “And I know that we have a strong, strong tradition of free speech at this university. And I am always open to feedback, which I am getting right now.”

The Columbia protests were far from the only expression of discontent. A student at New York University named Logan Rozo drew standing applause for stating that "the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months,” during their graduation speech, after which the school reportedly announced that it had suspended his diploma. Another George Washington University student named Cecilia Culver was also reportedly censured by the school this week after calling for divestment from Israel over they genocide in Gaza.

In the face of this persistent backlash, the U.S. government has continued to vow that it will escalate its measures at suppressing speech—up to and potentially including criminal charges against student protestors. The possibility that exit controls are being tightened at the border is only the latest sign that the crackdown may just be in its early phases.

“I think that the U.S. government is moving in a very troubling direction when you put together all the different programs that have been launched to remove non-citizens from the U.S. It is monitoring everything that people say online, which of course means the monitoring of those with whom they interact on social media, including U.S. citizens, and it is asserting the authority to remove people who disagree with U.S. policy,” said Nojeim. “This is sowing fear in immigrant communities, and particularly among international students, so much so that we may be losing a lot of foreign talent to other countries. This is a troubling direction for the U.S.”

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Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group.

Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli military and government amid the ongoing assault on Gaza. The company has faced disruptions to its events, including protests from employees over its provision of cloud services and other critical infrastructure used by the Israeli military.

Now, the company appears to be tightening its grip on internal discourse. The terms “Israel” and “P4lestine” do not trigger a block, the group said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last week, Microsoft attempted to do damage control over its alleged involvement in the genocide. Ahead of the annual Build event, which is aimed at developers and tech enthusiasts from all over the world, the company issued a report claiming that an internal investigation found that Microsoft’s operations did not cause harm to civilians in Gaza.

Microsoft’s provision of technology to the Israeli Ministry of Defense (MOD) was first reported by Drop Site News, alongside The Guardian and the magazine +972, based on a trove of internal documents. The reports revealed that Microsoft actively pursued contracts with the Israeli defense ministry, offering them tailored proposals and significant discounts on cloud and AI services. These deals, negotiated and escalated over months, positioned Microsoft as a key technology provider during Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Microsoft did not dispute the authenticity of the documents or the reporting, but days before its major annual events released a statement saying that it conducted an internal review and “found no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people.”

According to internal documents and emails reviewed by Drop Site, however, just days after the October 7, 2023 attack and the start of Israeli offensive in Gaza, Microsoft started pitching to the Israeli military, anticipating major military spending. Over the next few months, Israeli military became one of Microsoft’s top 500 global customers.

On Monday, No Azure for Apartheid said, an employee who disrupted CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote at the flagship Build conference was fired. On Tuesday, during a speech by Jay Parikh, head of CoreAI, a worker shouted, “Jay! My people are suffering! Cut ties with Israel! No Azure for apartheid! Free, free Palestine!” before being swiftly removed by security.

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Amid relentless bombardment and a nearly two-month long total siege, Palestinians in Gaza are struggling to survive under impossible conditions. When asked by a colleague what they could do for Gaza now, retired director of Al Shifa Hospital, Dr. Medhat Abbas, wrote back:

Food
Food
Food
Medicine
Shelter
Water
Electricity
Fuel
I have no comment..Two Million people are succumbing to their destiny..

Gaza City-based journalist Rasha Abu Jalal reported Monday on how Palestinians are inventing new techniques to cope with their circumstances in a world that has abandoned them.

On Monday, Drop Site South Asia correspondents Siddharthya Roy and Waqas Ahmed joined Ryan Grim and Krystal Ball on Breaking Points. Sid appeared from New Delhi and Waqas from New York, discussing the latest on the India-Pakistan crisis.

In today’s story, we take a look at the way that immigration officials have been abusing their power for years, designating people terrorists with no credible evidence in effectively un-reviewable ways. A new lawsuit is aimed at bringing due process into the conversation.

If you haven’t already, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. We aim to keep our journalism free from paywalls and can only do that thanks to the generosity of readers. If you’re already a subscriber, consider a one-time contribution.

In late 2022, Daisy Rodriguez, a U.S. citizen and owner of a small restaurant in the town of Sweetwater, Tennessee, said goodbye to her husband for what she thought would be a short stay in Guatemala. He had recently received approval to attend an immigration interview that would grant him a green card to live in the United States. Little did Rodriguez know her husband would not be returning to the U.S. Upon arriving at the consulate in Guatemala, her husband, Santos Maudilio Saucedo Rivas, was accused by U.S. consular officials of membership in a gang based on a tattooed set of initials on his body.

The officials denied Rivas a green card, separating him from his American wife and the restaurant they ran together, while cutting him off from the U.S., the country where he had spent nearly his entire adult life.

Rivas’s case is now the subject of a lawsuit filed today by the American Immigration Council and Consular Accountability Project, which is suing the U.S. State Department in the Eastern District of Tennessee. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. officials failed to review evidence showing that Rivas was never part of the “Barrio Azteca” gang and that the government violated the U.S. Constitution by denying him a green card after having him travel to Guatemala for the interview.

Rivas complaint - 4.29.25

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The case is a potentially landmark legal challenge, as the Trump administration has expanded use of tattoo evaluations and other flimsy evidentiary claims as a means to ramp up its deportation machine. Rivas’s green card was initially denied in 2023, under the Biden administration. Cases like his, his lawyer argues, where consular officials are granted leeway to use their view of his tattoos to deny him the ability to return to the U.S., helped set the precedent for the broader immigration crackdown now taking place under Donald Trump.

“He was eligible for his green card—the only reason he left home and went back there was to get the card—but he was prejudged by consular officials, who said that he looked like a criminal, and was denied,” said Eric Lee, legal counsel on Rivas’s case. “The government has a de facto policy that they don't listen to any evidence that you’re innocent if they accuse you of being a gang member. They never listened to the evidence that he submitted, and now he has been there since 2022, just spinning his wheels.”

Lee shared a lengthy dossier of potentially exculpatory evidence about Rivas. Rivas, who had never been to prison, was accused by consular officials of membership in the gang based on what is alleged by he and his lawyers to be a misinterpretation of the initials “B.A.” on his body, initials that they say refer to a personal nickname, “Bau.” The dossier includes sworn testimony from experts on the organization who stated that his membership would have been impossible, because the Barrio Azteca gang exclusively recruited people of Mexican heritage—and then only from prisons. The file has never been reviewed by government officials who made a determination on his case, according to Lee, nor have any of the experts on the gang who provided testimony about his innocence been contacted.

Rivas had been living in the U.S. since 2006, after coming to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant fleeing gang violence in Guatemala. He and Rodriguez have been together since 2011, and married since 2017. His initial entry to the country as an undocumented immigrant did not preclude him from subsequently legalizing his status after he married an American. But, according to immigration regulations, Rivas needed to return to his home country to have his green card interview and adjust his status.

During a series of interviews after returning to Guatemala in 2022, Rivas was accused by U.S. consular officials of membership in the gang due to his tattoo. In one such session, the lawsuit alleges, a U.S. official accused him of lying, and then insulting the intelligence of consular officials by denying his membership in the gang.

In 2023, Rivas was informed that he had officially been denied his green card and would not be allowed to return to his wife and home in Tennessee. Since then, he has been stranded in Guatemala, with little means of supporting himself and no clarity about when or whether they will be able to reunite. Even the ability to speak on a regular basis as a married couple is constricted due to limited access to communications in the region of Guatemala he is based.

“We are going on three years since he left and wasn't able to come back, and it's been very tough. He is not doing so well, we are just waiting for something to happen, and for him to be able to come back,” said Rodriguez. “In the meantime he has tried to make a living out there, he opened a small food shack, but it didn't work. Now he has some debt, and he's been trying, but it's just very different out there.”

Although the 2023 denial decision on Rivas’s case was made under the Biden administration, the tactic of using tattoos as a determining factor in immigration decisions has now escalated further under Trump. In recent months, numerous individuals have now been deported from the U.S. on accusations that their tattoos were evidence of membership in Tren de Aragua or other criminal organizations, including in cases where experts have stated that the tattoos in question point do not prove any affiliation with the organization. In March, Drop Site reported on a goalkeeper who was sent to the notorious CECOT detention facility in El Salvador, under an agreement between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments.

“This is a policy that Democrats helped prepare over multiple administrations, though what Trump is doing is of a qualitatively different character. The use of tattoos to remove people under the Alien Enemies Act is certainly new,” said Lee. “I don’t draw attention to the role of Obama and Biden to diminish what Trump is doing, but at same time Trump didn't fall out of the sky. These policies have had a bipartisan character.”

With their fate determined by a seemingly arbitrary and unchallengeable decision by U.S. consular officials, Rivas’s lawsuit is a final attempt to fix what they say is a terrible mistake that has derailed their life.

“I just want my husband to come back. The American people want legal migration, and we tried, but it seemed like it just didn't work,” Rodriguez said. “There was a mistake, we tried to submit evidence to try and clarify and get the government to change their decision, but they didn't review it or they didn't care. So what else can we do, how do we show them that they made a mistake?”

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Grassroots Resistance Builds Against Israeli Occupation of Southern Syria

By Murtaza Hussain

On April 3, thousands of Syrians took to the streets of the southern city of Daraa for a massive public funeral to mourn ten Syrians who had been killed in Israeli attacks the previous day. Daraa, where the earliest demonstrations in opposition to the former government of Bashar al-Assad took place in 2011, is now among the regions facing the brunt of an Israeli military offensive that began shortly after the collapse of the regime.

The public mourning gave way to demonstration, as the crowd raised chants lionizing the “martyrs of freedom” and “the martyrs of Gaza,” in reference to ongoing killings by the Israeli military in the besieged coastal enclave. Amid Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinians of Gaza, and its military assault in Lebanon, Syria has rapidly become a new front, with airstrikes and ground attacks escalating in recent weeks. The Israeli military has now established bases on Syrian soil that it has vowed to not vacate, while conducting increasingly aggressive raids and incursions beyond a self-defined buffer zone on the border that the Israeli government has unilaterally created.

Israeli leaders have demanded that the new Syrian government completely demilitarize the south of the country, even vowing to take escalated military action as far north as the Damascus suburbs and directly threatening the rule of the new government. In a statement at a military ceremony in February, Netanyahu stated, "We demand the complete demilitarization of southern Syria, including the Quneitra, Daraa and Suwayda provinces.”

In response to these threats, the new Syrian government, led by former members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has tried to strike a conciliatory tone and de-escalate tensions with Israel. "We do not want any conflict with Israel or any other party, and we will not allow Syria to become a platform for attacks,” Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa said in December, following the first wave of Israeli attacks on Syria. “The Syrian people need a period of stability. Therefore, the strikes must stop, and they should withdraw."

From Jubilation to Fear

In the months since, Sharaa has continued attempting to de-escalate tensions with Tel Aviv, while calling on it to withdraw its forces from Syrian territory. Despite these efforts, the Israeli presence has only become more aggressive.

Speaking to Drop Site, locals from the communities of Daraa, Quneitra, and areas outside Israel’s formally declared occupation zone described an Israeli military presence that has harassed locals and made living conditions intolerable for many, including through home raids, detentions, abuse at military checkpoints, and theft.

“When the incursions began, the army communicated with village elders and demanded the surrender of weapons. This led to the displacement of residents from the towns of Al-Hurriya and Al-Ruwadi in rural Quneitra,” said Mohammad al-Fahad, a local from Quneitra who witnessed the Israeli incursions and subsequent local mobilization. “There were instances of civilians being insulted, homes searched, random gunfire, intimidation of locals, and threats made to civilians warning them not to speak with local or international media.”

Left mostly on their own by a weak and distant central government seeking to avoid conflict with the far more powerful Israeli military, locals say that groups of lightly armed young men have started to organize on their own to defend their homes—only to be targeted by Israeli drone strikes and heavy weapons in response, including in deadly strikes on April 2 that killed an estimated ten people while injuring two dozen more.

“The occupying army recently attempted to storm the village of Susiyah in the Quneitra countryside. The villagers confronted the occupying forces using their personal weapons. They were immediately targeted, resulting in seven injuries,” al-Fahad said. “On an almost daily basis, shepherds in Quneitra are being targeted, and their livestock is confiscated and taken into Israel. These are organized theft operations of sheep herds.”

The April 2 attacks were the deadliest since Assad fell, but they were not the first. Since December, Israeli attacks in southern Syria have killed 23 people—including 21 civilians, as well as two members of the government security forces. In addition to the deaths from these attacks, over sixty Syrians have been wounded by gunfire, artillery attacks, and drone strikes carried out by the Israeli military on towns and villages in the area, as it seeks to establish a long-term presence and snuff out local resistance. This new occupation of Syria builds on Israel’s existing occupation of the Golan Heights region, which was controversially recognized by the Trump administration during its first term.

“The occupation’s attacks have not stopped for years across Syria in general, and particularly in the south,” said Muawiyah Al-Zoubi, a native of Daraa and deputy head of the local media syndicate. “After the fall of the former regime, the hostile attacks intensified and took on a more aggressive and violent nature, accompanied by ground incursions and the occupation of new territory under the pretext of eliminating weapons that threaten the occupying state.”

In an attack on March 18, Israeli airstrikes hit near Daraa and the nearby town of Izraa, killing at least three people. In another attack on March 25, Israeli forces advanced into the village of Koya, expelling residents and confiscating local farmland. In response, a group of young men from the area attempted to resist the expulsion, before being targeted by Israeli drone and artillery attacks that killed six, according to local Syrian news reports.

The climate in southern Syria has turned from jubilation over the fall of Assad to fear and anger after the relentless Israeli attacks. “The atmosphere is extremely tense—there is significant fear, displacement, and panic throughout the western countryside of the province,” said Al-Zoubi. “The individuals who were killed in the attacks were Syrian citizens from the local area who went out to defend their land. All of them were civilians.”

“A Heavy Price”

Israel’s expanding military presence on the ground in southern Syria comes amid a broader air campaign carried out against targets across the country. These bombing attacks, which have decimated Syria’s military capability, have killed an undisclosed number of Syrians, while drawing the denunciation of the Syrian government, as well as neighboring Turkey.

Since the fall of Assad, Turkey has publicly signaled its intention to pursue a defense pact with the new government in Damascus. Those plans have alarmed Israel. Speaking to the Israeli media this month, a senior Israeli official stated that, “Establishing military bases, naval and air bases under Turkish protection is something we want to prevent,” adding, “There are red lines.”

In early April, Israel carried out a series of major strikes against military airfields inside Syria. The strikes came shortly after visits from Turkish military teams seeking to evaluate them as possible basing grounds for Turkish military personnel, anti-aircraft weaponry, drones, and warplanes.

The Israeli attacks, which struck the T4 and Palmyra airbases in Syria’s Homs province, destroyed runways, air traffic control towers, hangars, and parked aircraft, rendering the T4 base in particular “completely unusable,” according to Syrian government sources who described the attacks to Reuters. Another regional intelligence official described the attacks as, “a tough message that Israel won't accept the expanded Turkish presence.”

Extolling his close ties with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump has offered to act as an intermediary between Israel and the Turkish government. "I told the prime minister, 'Bibi, if you have a problem with Turkey, I really think I'm going to be able to work it out,’” Trump said at a joint press briefing with Netanyahu on Monday. "Any problem that you have with Turkey, I think we can solve, as long as you are reasonable, you have to be reasonable."

While Syria’s government has condemned Israel’s attacks on its territory, it has refrained from confronting them directly. Instead, Syrian officials are trying to court the international community into intervening on its behalf and lifting sanctions. Israel has escalated its threats against Syria’s new leadership, with a senior Israeli official warning against Syrian cooperation with Turkey and stating this week that, “Any activity that endangers Israel will threaten the rule of [Syrian President Ahmed] al-Sharaa.”

Israel’s incursions into Syria have made life increasingly intolerable for locals, who have little recourse to defend themselves. On numerous occasions, Israeli troops have been accused of killing entire flocks of sheep and goats owned by local shepherds—a particularly devastating assault on the livelihoods of people in the region still suffering from the economic impact of the war and economic sanctions. Emboldened, the IDF has recently begun collaborating with Israeli companies to offer private tours of occupied Syrian territory for Israeli tourists over Passover.

The increasingly aggressive nature of Israeli incursions—including a ground occupation that has separated communities in rural villages from their farmland and grazing areas—has not been met with action by the Syrian government. This has led some locals to take up arms on their own to try and halt the advance. The resistance has been organized as a series of spontaneous mobilizations referred to by locals as “faz’a.” The small arms and pistols they use to defend their homes have, in turn, been used as justification by Israeli troops to conduct raids deeper into Syria.

“The defense is certainly entirely local and grassroots-based; the government has no role in it at all. Further incursions are expected, but no one knows exactly where the Israeli forces might head next,” Abu Al-Tayyib, a spokesperson for Daraa-based monitoring group Ahrar Houran Gathering, which documents Israeli incursions and bombardments in the region. “The local population remains in a state of anticipation and fear of any new operation by the occupiers. Some young men, motivated by their own sense of duty, carry out daily patrols of the points where the occupiers are expected to enter.”

Following its airstrikes in early April on Syrian military bases, the Israeli government has vowed to continue its incursions into Syria, threatening the new government that it will “pay a very heavy price” if it takes steps to limit Israel’s freedom of operation on their territory. Major public rallies in Damascus and other cities in solidarity with Daraa and Gaza have been held in recent days, with protestors demanding that the government provide support to those confronting the Israeli military.

Despite this backlash, Israel appears set to press on with its campaign inside Syrian territory. Israeli leaders have signaled that they intend to expand their occupation of the country, taking more land and enforcing a permanent military presence in areas of southern Syria not far from major population centers.

“The IDF is prepared to stay in Syria for an unlimited amount of time,” said Israeli defense minister Israel Katz in a visit to an Israeli military position on Mount Hermon inside Syria in late February. “We will hold the security area in Hermon and make sure that all the security zone in southern Syria is demilitarized and clear of weapons and threats.”

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—Drop Site News

In mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm.

“Organizations of all sizes—from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations—can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud,” Google said in a statement announcing the acquisition. The statement added that Wiz would join Google Cloud, but that the Tel Aviv-based company’s security services would still be available across other cloud platforms used by major firms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Unit 8200 is an elite unit in the Israeli military tasked with intelligence gathering, surveillance, codebreaking, as well as cybersecurity operations and hacking. In addition to its role collecting information for intelligence reports, the unit has also been accused by former veterans of carrying out mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for the purpose of “political persecution,” as well as providing information used for targeted killings, sometimes based on over-broad interpretations of surveillance data.

In addition to being a vital component of the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, Unit 8200 has become a pipeline for recruitment by Silicon Valley firms. Many prominent tech startups have been created by Unit 8200 veterans, including NSO group, the creator of the Pegasus spyware program implicated in hacking attacks on dissidents and journalists globally.

“While Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their startups,” noted a Wall Street Journal story, from last year, on the growing relationship between the Israeli military unit and the U.S. tech industry.

In addition to founding their own startups, acquisitions by existing Silicon Valley firms have been a means for Unit 8200 veterans to get a foothold in the U.S. Since the start of the war in Gaza, Silicon Valley has acquired a handful of Israeli tech firms, including a nearly $1 billion purchase by Palo Alto Networks of Dig Security and Talon CyberSecurity—executed just weeks after the war began. Like Wiz, both those firms were also founded by former Unit 8200 members.

The increasingly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military has alarmed observers of the industry who have been critical of the role of tech firms in facilitating Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Basically the entire Israeli tech industry is funded by U.S. venture capitalists. It’s a very common situation that you see acquisitions of Israeli firms by Silicon Valley, where the senior people in these firms have formerly served in Unit 8200. It gets them a voice internally,” said Paul Biggar, a software engineer and founder of the activist group Tech for Palestine. Commenting on Google’s huge new acquisition he said, “Wiz should not be trusted, because it takes all user data and runs it through an Israeli company run by former intelligence officials.”

A researcher who works on connections between Silicon Valley and the intelligence world told Drop Site that the Israeli intelligence establishment has built deep and expanding ties with U.S. tech companies, adding that they had documented over 1,400 current and former members of Unit 8200, Israeli Military Intelligence, and the Israeli Defense Forces Cyber Defense Directorate now working for major Silicon Valley companies. The researcher compiled the list from open source information about individuals, some of whom remain reservists in these units in addition their tech jobs, working in both senior and mid-level engineering and leadership roles at major firms like Cisco, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and many other companies in the U.S. tech sector, with offices based in Israel, the U.S., and Europe.

“If you’re standing in the middle of Silicon Valley and throw a rock you’re going to hit current or former members of Unit 8200,” said the researcher who compiled and analyzed the data, and who asked for anonymity to discuss it safely. “That is not to say that all these people are involved in a giant cabal to influence American companies and steal our secrets—many of them are just people trying to get a career in tech.” But, they added, this could create “situations where there is temptation or pressure to do something that violates the law.”

In recent years, the influence of foreign powers in critical industries like tech has been identified as a national security risk by U.S. security agencies. A 2018 article in Politico highlighted the increasing alarm of FBI officials over counterintelligence and espionage threats in Silicon Valley. The risks include individuals either directly acting as spies for foreign powers, or being pressured by them to cooperate based on personal ties or political allegiances. Cybersecurity experts warn that such relationships create a form of leverage that foreign governments could draw upon when required, and which is heightened when the tech workers themselves are reservists or former intelligence operatives.

“We go on about the dangers of Chinese infiltration of tech firms, but not Israel—even though U.S. intelligence agencies rank Israel as one of their top counterintelligence threats after countries like China, Russia and Iran,” the researcher said. They also highlighted, in the case of Wiz, the risk of a “former member of an intelligence agency working in a sensitive area of U.S. tech, especially something like cloud storage, that has access to a lot of data that is very easy to scrape or download or transfer.”

Cash Bailout

The acquisition of Wiz by Google is a huge cash injection for the Israeli economy as a whole, which has been battered over the past year and a half amid ongoing wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. The company’s 1,800 employees, many of whom are based in Israel, will also receive $1.5 billion in the arrangement. According to Times of Israel, as a result of the purchase, the collective tax benefits paid to the Israeli government by the founders, investors, and employees of Wiz is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $4 billion.

“The estimated tax revenue Israel could earn from the transaction is equal to about 0.6 percent of the GDP,” the article noted, adding that Google’s decision would actually aid the government in continuing its ongoing wars by helping to “relieve government pressure to introduce measures to fund the war’s defense and civilian expenditures and bring down the budget deficit and high debt levels.”

Moody’s, a financial service that forecasts economic stability, had previously reduced Israel’s credit rating twice due to geopolitical uncertainty and economic disruptions related to the war. In late March, the rating agency pointed specifically to the country’s weakening tech sector as a risk to maintaining its tax base.

“Uncertainty over Israel’s longer-term security and economic growth prospects are much higher than is typical, with risks to the high-tech sector particularly relevant, given its important role as a driver of economic growth and significant contributor to the government’s tax take,” the agency said in a report warning of further risks ahad.

Google’s decision to pay massively for Wiz thus amounts to a de facto bailout of the Israeli economy, coming at a time that the company is also attempting to build closer ties with Trump administration regulators. While the Israeli economy, and, in particular, its tech sector have been battered by the war, Google has recently announced plans to rent over 60,000 square meters of office space in Tel Aviv, paying over $300 million over a decade to lease a massive corporate office in the city’s ToHa2 Tower. These investment decisions have aided of Israel even as it has come under increasing scrutiny over its conduct during the war.

Well before the current war, employees of Google had been rallying to demand that the company cancel a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military known as Project Nimbus. The project, signed as a joint project with Google and Amazon, offered advanced cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technology services to the Israeli government. Among the capabilities that the Israeli government would eventually receive as part of the ongoing deal are access to facial detection, image recognition, and sentiment analysis tools useful to conducting reconnaissance and surveillance. Following internal protests over Project Nimbus, including sit-ins at multiple offices, Google fired dozens of employees who were part of the group “No Tech for Apartheid.”

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AI-based platforms reliant on cloud technology, which Google rushed to provide to Israel after October 7, have been integral to the Israeli military’s assault on the Gaza Strip. AI programs like Lavender and Where’s Daddy, first revealed by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, have been used to automatically generate targets for assassination, marking over 37,000 Palestinians and their homes in Gaza as targets. With assistance from the program, officers in the military granted “sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

The use of Google and Amazon technology by the Israeli military, including cloud-services like those now likely to be augmented by Wiz, has drawn the scrutiny of tech-centric civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which criticized last year the reported use of such technologies to assist with, “detentions, killings, and the systematic oppression of journalists, healthcare workers, aid workers, and ordinary families.”

The acquisition of Wiz by Google is likely to strengthen the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, with veterans of Unit 8200 playing a key role.

“For the biggest acquisition of an Israeli cybersecurity company to come at this moment is a big ‘mask-off’ moment for Google and Big Tech,” said Hossam Nasr, an organizer in a campaign called No Azure for Apartheid, and a former Microsoft employee who was dismissed for participating in a vigil at the company. “You are going to have former Unit 8200 agents getting access to Google technology and data. And I do not trust Google to not allow it to be used for nefarious purposes.”

Nick Rodelo contributed research for this article.

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Story by Amer Marei with Murtaza Hussein

LATAKIA, Syria—Samar Yazbek, an award-winning novelist whose family hails from the coastal village of Besisin, Syria, was terrified when camouflaged gunmen stormed into her family home on Friday, assaulting her brothers and stealing their cars, only to return the following day to demand money and gold. “They ransacked our home,” Yazbek, who was a vocal opponent of the former regime, told Drop Site News. But it was only when Yazbek went outside that she began to comprehend the scale of the horror. “When we went out into the street, we saw uniformed fighters executing civilians, leaving the streets strewn with bodies.”

Between March 6 and March 11, cities and villages along Syria’s Mediterranean coast witnessed a wave of mass violence targeting civilians from the minority Alawite sect—the worst violence in Syria since the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad in mid-December led to a coalition of militia groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) taking power. Graphic videos showing the aftermath of mass executions, as well as accounts from survivors, point to a staggering death toll.

After several days of fighting against what it described as “regime remnants,” the Syrian government declared an end to military operations on the coast on Monday, announcing that it had reasserted control over the area. As reports emerged from the province, it became clear that militants aligned with the government had carried out wholesale massacres of Alawite villages, with survivors forced to flee into the mountains for safety, or to the nearby Russian military base of Khmeimim.

The massacres of civilians came after a series of attacks reportedly carried out by armed paramilitary forces led by former officers from the Assad-era military, that killed 231 members of the security forces affiliated with the HTS-led government, according to the new government’s Military Operations Command. The violence had a clear sectarian component. The Assad family — which ruled over Syria for over half a century—are Alawites, and many of the senior military figures in the regime also drew from the sect, which makes up a small minority of Syria’s largely Sunni population. Minority groups, including Alawite civilians, were targeted by sectarian militias during the country’s decade-plus civil war.

The interim government responded to the initial attacks against its forces with a large-scale military operation across the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartous, while sending out a general mobilization call to allied militias and irregular fighters across the country. According to a report on the killings by Human Rights Watch, after a full security mobilization issued by Latakia’s public security director on March 6, the following day al-Sharaa issued a statement declaring that “the time for forgiveness had passed,” and calling for “‘‘liberation’ and ‘purification’ of the region while urging security forces to protect civilians.”

Convoys of armed fighters arriving from Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, and Homs, descended upon the region over the course of several days, launching attacks on Alawite communities throughout the coast. Videos showing mass executions, abuse and humiliation of civilians, and looting quickly flooded social media.

The scale of the killing is still being tabulated by international monitors. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has estimated that over 1,300 people have been killed since March 6 in Syria’s coastal communities. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a separate monitoring organization, has so far assessed that 432 interim government security forces and civilians were killed by former Assad army fighters, while at least 529 people, “including civilians and disarmed members of the remnants of the Assad regime,” were killed by government-aligned militias, leading to a total of over 900 dead and counting. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights also said that it had “so far documented the killing of 111 civilians,” adding that its investigation is ongoing and that, “the actual number of people killed is believed to be significantly higher.”

The HTS-led government has said that its attacks targeted former regime elements who were believed to be attempting a coup, and attributed attacks against civilians to individual violations by fighters. But many witnesses to the attacks have disputed this characterization, describing what appeared to be general sectarian massacres targeting Alawite communities uninvolved in the uprising.

HTS is still designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.-government and other Western powers. Last December, the Biden administration lifted the $10 million bounty the U.S. placed on HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa—then known by his nom de guerre Mohammad al-Jolani—in 2013, which asserted that he embraced a “violent, sectarian vision” and noted that forces he led “carried out multiple suicide attacks throughout Syria.” Al-Sharaa, a former leader in both Al Qaeda and ISIS, has publicly renounced his past affiliations and sought to rebrand himself in the years leading up to the overthrow of Assad’s government. The murderous attacks of the past week against Alawite villages have intensified fears about the fate of Syrian minorities under the new regime, and the possibility of more sectarian killings in future.

Social media videos from the massacres point to the involvement of fighters from factions of the Syrian National Army (SNA), a Turkish-backed group that aided HTS in its campaign to overthrow Assad. In some gruesome videos shared on social media, armed men openly referenced their brigade names in the SNA while standing in front of rows of bodies of executed people. The SNA has already been sanctioned by the U.S. government for its involvement in crimes against humanity against Kurdish civilians in northern Syria. An SNA official who spoke to Drop Site acknowledged that its troops had been involved in killings, but referred to them as “individual acts that were not condoned or encouraged by the leadership.”

“No One Made It Out Alive”

Sawsan Khalil, a woman from a village near Jableh, fled, like many others, from her home into the hills and forests of the region, after hearing stories of the murder of friends and colleagues in nearby communities.

“When the factions reached my colleague’s house—he’s a physics teacher—he lived with his mother, sister, and his 3-year-old son, they asked him if he was Sunni or Alawite,” she told Drop Site. “Then they took his car keys, gold, and money, and executed him in front of his family. His body remained there for three days before they could bury him. Our neighbor, Majd Barhoum, met the same fate. They took his car and gold, then killed him in front of his wife and three children.”

Forced to flee from her home, Khalil said that she and others escaped into the countryside near their village and spent days hiding from militants. “We spent four days with barely enough food and no electricity,” she said. “If we found a house with solar power, we’d charge our phones there.”

According to local news reports, the initial attacks by armed insurgents tied to the former regime targeted military positions, hospitals, and other critical infrastructure in the region—threatening the HTS-led government’s hold on the region. Images of dead HTS government forces were broadcast widely on Telegram earlier this week, also showing apparent field executions. Lacking in manpower to control the entirety of the country or suppress the uprising on its own, the HTS-led government responded to the uprising with a general call to arms across Syria. Calls for armed jihad were issued from mosques in major cities, imploring both organized militias and irregular fighters from the Sunni majority population to join the fight.

The result was a deluge of militants arriving on the coast, many of whom were bent on unleashing collective punishment against the Alawite population. Summary executions in Alawite villages were often preceded by both verbal and physical acts of humiliation, according to several eyewitnesses who spoke to Drop Site. In at least one village, men were forced to crawl on the ground and bark like dogs, before being dragged away by militants and executed. Survivors and witnesses to the attacks told Drop Site that some of the worst abuses were carried out after HTS forces had already passed through an area, only to be followed by other militants whose affiliation was unknown, and who engaged in mass killings targeting the population.

“The village of Brabshbo sought refuge in the forests. When the security forces entered, they announced over loudspeakers that they guaranteed safety. The residents were convinced and returned to their homes,” said Ahmad Ibrahim, who witnessed the aftermath of the killings. “However, as soon as the security forces withdrew, one of the factions entered and massacred everyone in the village. No one made it out alive.” Videos on social media reported to be from Brabshbo appear to corroborate his account of a massacre, showing rows of corpses and mourners arrayed on the streets of the village.

Fadi Moussa, a long-time resident of Ain al-Arous in Latakia, recalled the persistent crackle of gunfire as he raced through the streets in search of safety. He said homes were systematically looted and set alight, as many residents fled to the nearby the Russian-operated Hmeimim Air Base in Jableh. “The Russians set up temporary tents for the growing number of displaced,” he told Drop Site, adding that he had no plans to return home anytime soon after the violence he witnessed. Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians have also fled to neighboring Lebanon, according to the UN.

Several eyewitnesses reported entire villages set ablaze, with residents forcibly displaced. In the village of Sanobar alone, roughly 100 civilians were said to have been killed in a matter of hours. A survivor, who spoke to Drop Site last week on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety, managed to escape from Sanobar to the city of Latakia. “The bodies are still lying in the streets,” he said. “And new factions have arrived to finish off those who survived the first wave."

The UN commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, on Sunday called for investigations into the massacres. “The killing of civilians in coastal areas in northwest Syria must cease, immediately,” Türk said in a statement. “We are receiving extremely disturbing reports of entire families, including women, children and hors de combat fighters, being killed. There are reports of summary executions on a sectarian basis by unidentified perpetrators, by members of the caretaker authorities’ security forces, as well as by elements associated with the former government.”

Al-Sharaa vowed to hold anyone involved in harming or killing civilians accountable in a nationally televised speech on Sunday. He also promised to hunt down Assad loyalists. "Today, as we stand at this critical moment, we find ourselves facing a new danger — attempts by remnants of the former regime and their foreign backers to incite new strife and drag our country into a civil war, aiming to divide it and destroy its unity and stability,” he said. "We affirm that we will hold accountable, firmly and without leniency, anyone who is involved in the bloodshed of civilians or harming our people, who overstepped the powers of the state or exploits authority to achieve his own ends.”

The interim president announced a decision to form an “independent committee” to investigate violence against civilians. This was cold comfort, however, for survivors. "We don’t trust them," said one resident who had fled from an Alawite village, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. "There will be no real investigation, no real justice. What’s happening here is systematic extermination."

“All I Want Now is To Flee”

The international community has long expressed concerns about the fate of the Alawites and other minorities in Syria under a government led by former Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants. After the fall of Assad, the new government declared a general amnesty for all military personnel associated with the former regime, provided there was no evidence that they had personally taken part in massacres or crimes against humanity.

Yet while the attacks this week were the worst since the fall of Assad, they were not the first. A spate of other killings had taken place in recent months, carried out by irregular militias against Alawite communities in the city of Homs and its surrounding countryside. Many groups in Syria are now seeking revenge for crimes committed by the Assad regime during the war, and the HTS-led government has been accused of turning a blind eye to these sectarian attacks.

Locals in the town of Baniyas, where numerous residents were massacred this week, told reporters that that the perpetrators were “Syrians from surrounding villages seeking vengeance over a 2013 massacre in the nearby town of Beyda, where paramilitaries killed several hundred Sunnis.”

But amid the general mayhem of the fighting and massacres this week, Alawites in other parts of the coast told stories of their Sunni neighbors intervening to save their friends and family.

“A group of armed men confronted my friend Abid – when I say ‘armed men’ I don’t even know if they were part of a faction, brigade or something else entirely. They demanded to know if he was Alawite or Sunni and to show his ID,” said an Alawite woman from Jableh who spoke to Drop Site. “They kept shouting at him, pressuring him to prove his identity. But then, his neighbors from Idlib stepped in. A woman opened her door and said to them, ‘He’s my brother. He’s my brother,’ and she pulled him inside her home.”

In a statement this week on the attacks, Kurdish militant leader Mazlum Abdi appeared to place the blame squarely on the Turkish-backed SNA, claiming that its forces were “primarily behind the killings,” while calling on the new government to “reconsider the method of forming the new Syrian army and the behavior of the armed factions,” to stop sectarian conflicts and the settling of internal scores. Abdi’s group, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is a bitter rival of the SNA, signed a reconciliation agreement with the Syrian government on Monday that will likely entail power sharing and integration of their forces.

Despite issuing condemnations of the violence—including official statements that demurred on whether the interim government or former Assad era elements had been responsible for the majority of the killings—the European Union looks set to continue tightening its relationship with the new Syrian government. Sharaa is expected to visit Paris this month on the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron, as Europe bolsters the new government in Syria, in part to prevent a recurrence of the 2015 refugee crisis that followed the collapse of the country under Assad.

Despite these offerings of international concern, the massacres have shattered the optimism that some Alawites felt about their future after the fall of Assad. “I wanted to leave during the days of Assad, but I stayed, hoping for his downfall. Today, I am certain that this land is bloody and cursed, breeding at night only to devour its children in the morning,” said one man who spoke with Drop Site. “All I want now is to flee to any land far from this hell.”

Amer Marei is a reporter based in Syria. Another reporter in Syria contributed reporting anonymously because of safety concerns.

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

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This morning, Mahmoud Khalil—a Palestinian with Algerian citizenship who holds a green card—made a phone call to his eight-month pregnant wife from ICE custody. It was Khalil’s first contact with his family since he was detained on Saturday by ICE agents who raided his student housing facility at Columbia. The next steps in his case are as yet unknown, but protests and legal measures are reportedly planned to try and stop the Trump administration from deporting Khalil.

The war in the Gaza Strip, now under investigation as a genocide by the International Court of Justice, has galvanized the conscience of young people around the world – notwithstanding attempts to suppress free speech on the subject. The below story about the death of a young creator in Gaza, who became famous for their TikTok videos about daily life in the territory before being killed in the Israeli military assault, is just one of many that have helped drive a groundswell of moral outrage in campuses and communities across the world.

—Murtaza Hussain

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Last year, Mohammad “Medo” Halimy, a 19-year old Palestinian born and raised in Gaza, briefly became a star on social media for his TikTok page showing his day-to-day life during Israel’s war. “I kept watching videos about Gaza online, and they were all very sad and depressing. Since I am a positive person, I didn’t like any of those videos. So, I decided to create a page on TikTok and start posting my daily life on both TikTok and Instagram, focusing only on the positive aspects,” Halimy said in an interview last summer.

His TikTok page, which showed Halimy cooking, gardening, waiting for water, and spending time with friends, rapidly amassed a large following, growing to nearly 190,000 followers. But Halimy’s online celebrity was cut short last summer, when he was killed by what was reported to be shrapnel from an Israeli airstrike.

Halimy’s death prompted an outpouring of grief from his followers across the world. Initial reports framed his death as collateral damage from an airstrike carried out by the Israeli military, and interviews given by friends of Halimy to the international press also stated that an explosion targeting a nearby car had preceded his death. But an American doctor who treated Halimy in Gaza, attempting to save his life after he was brought into the intensive care unit of Nasser Hospital, said that his wounds were not consistent with shrapnel from an airstrike. Instead, there was a single entry and exit point from his skull.

@medohalimyBack on the “tent life” videos!

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“He was brought in after an airstrike on the Mawasi tent encampment on a day when there were multiple mass casualty incidents. Some young people had been sitting at a makeshift internet cafe, including students studying for tests. Lots of patients had shrapnel injuries, but he had only two wounds, and both were in his head,” said Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency medicine physician who has completed two medical missions to Gaza. “There was one entry and exit point, and on the CT scan it looks like a clear path. Usually with shrapnel, you’d have pieces of shrapnel still lodged inside the brain, or multiple injuries to the face. He had no other internal injuries, or injuries to other parts of the body that are common with shrapnel.”

Drop Site reviewed CT scans taken from Halimy’s injury as well as video taken of Halimy, unconscious, being intubated and treated by emergency medical personnel at Nasser Hospital. While not conclusive, the information provided suggested a gunshot wound to the head as a possible cause of death. The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.

While quadcopter drones and military aircraft were active in the area, and Halimy was brought to Nasser Hospital along with many other individuals who had been injured in an airstrike, the hospital also saw injuries come in from gunshot wounds. Syed, who has been active on multiple medical relief missions during the war, says the injury he suffered suggested strongly that Halimy had been killed by a gunshot.

“I was the one who intubated him. I tried to save his life but I couldn't,” added Syed. “I have treated many gunshot wounds to the head in my career, and they present this way. The path that the object took was very indicative.”

Drop Site shared the scans and video with two medical experts to get secondary assessments.

“If there were no other injuries involved, it would be incredibly rare for a shrapnel injury to have such an isolated trajectory or injury. There should've been some other debris embedded in his body elsewhere which they likely would have seen on any x-rays that they did,” said Zain Qazi, a doctor and board certified diagnostic radiologist. “I've seen a lot of gunshot wounds to the head that look very similar. Sometimes the bullet is still embedded in the soft tissues or the skull, and shrapnel very likely would also have embedded itself somewhere in the bony structure or soft tissues. Oftentimes with smaller caliber bullets the bullet will fragment and have small metallic debris in the head, which we don't see here.”

“These scans are highly suspicious of a gunshot wound to the head,” he added.

“The trajectory is really suspicious to be that precise,” added Nabeel Rana, another American doctor who had participated on past medical missions to Gaza. “Having said that, the typical sniper bullets we would see in these isolated gunshots would use larger calibre bullets so the exit wounds were usually pretty large.” The video, he said, did not show a clear enough view of the exit wound on Halimy’s head to make a conclusive determination, and that some small single shrapnel wounds had killed people in Gaza in his experience.

“My Tent Life”

For months after the start of the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip, Halimy broadcast videos showing what he described as “my tent life,” during the war. Halimy gathered over 100,000 followers on TikTok for his videos, which showed him cooking meals, having tea with friends, growing plants, and showing the ways in which young Gazans of his generation were attempting to create a sense of normalcy amid the chaos of the war.

In a video from August 10, 2024, Halimy showed the plants he was growing near his tent “A lot of you ask me why I plant,” he said to the camera. “Planting for me is a form of resistance, I bring life to earth. They’re taking away life, but I’m bringing it to earth.”

That video was one of the last Halimy made. On August 26, Halimy was brought to Nasser Hospital, where he died several hours later.

Born and raised in Gaza City as one of six siblings, Halimy, who spoke fluent English, also had connections to the United States. In 2021, he participated in the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study program, which brought him to study for a year at Harker Heights High School in Texas. After Israel’s siege began, Halimy and his family were displaced to the Mawasi tent encampment after their home was destroyed and they were instructed to evacuate to the area, officially deemed a “safe zone” by the Israeli military.

The Mawasi encampment has been repeatedly targeted for attacks by the Israeli military, despite being one of the last designated refuges for the Palestinian population in the territory. Following Halimy’s death, Israeli officials told media outlets that they could not confirm that they had carried out an attack in the area, but that they remained focused on “countering threats while persisting to mitigate harm to civilians.”

After he was killed, friends of Halimy from his time in Texas spoke publicly to express sadness over his death, describing him as “warm” and full of “positive energy.” An Instagram page for alumni of the Kennedy-Lugar exchange program, which is administered by the U.S. State Department, also shared a post expressing “profound sorrow at the tragic passing of Mohammad ‘Medo’ Halimy.” That post did not indicate how Halimy had died, and, unlike other posts on its accounts, closed it off from comments.

@medohalimyGotta enjoy life no matter what

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Two months before he was killed, Halimy was featured in an NBC News story highlighting the stories of influencers in Gaza during the war. In his comments for the story, Halimy mentioned that behind the generally upbeat content that he and others produced on their pages, their attempts at broadcasting a slice of life in Gaza to the world came with great difficulty.

“I think people misunderstand the fact that we’re actually struggling,” Halimy said, in response to questions on his page from viewers asking about the tone of his posts. “They see me having fun in a 50-second video, a minute-long video, and they forget the whole day of struggles that I don’t show to them.”

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