Israel expands its ‘tactics of ruin’ as the world stands by: where is the outrage?
So is the US at war with Iran – or not?
Having cocked its collective snout at the US Constitution which gives Congress the sole power to declare war, the Trump team has insisted the 1973 War Powers Act, requiring troops to be withdrawn from hostilities after 60 days (April 29) unless Congress declares war or extends the conflict, does not apply in this case. Why? Because a ‘ceasefire’ is in place and, in the words of House Speaker Mike Johnson on April 28, “right now, we are trying to broker peace.” On May 1, President Trump had rejected the 14-point proposal described here that Iran submitted to Pakistani mediators the previous day because “they’re asking for things I can’t agree to.”
At a May 5th press conference, Secretary of State Rubio explained that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded” with its objectives achieved. He made no mention of Iran’s nuclear program. Rubio said that Epic Fury should not be confused with the ‘Project Freedom’ effort to ‘guide’ vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump had announced late on May 3. On May 4, Trump told Fox News that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacked the naval vessels and other military assets involved in Project Freedom. On the same day, Iran fired at two US naval destroyers while launching drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at the United Arab Emirates, setting the Fujairah oil facility on fire. According to an Axios scoop, Israel had sent the UAE an Iron Dome air defense system and troops to operate it during the war.
Within hours of Rubio’s May 5th press conference, Project Freedom had been terminated by President Trump. The decision to pull the plug on the operation came shortly after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait denied the US the use of their bases and airspace to implement the operation. During its brief existence, what Trump had called “one of the greatest military maneuvers ever done” had reportedly managed to guide only two US merchant ships out of the Strait of Hormuz. On the same day, amid signs of growing distrust between Netanyahu and Trump, CNN reported that in April Israel and the US had coordinated plans for future strikes on Iran.
Axios journalist Barak Ravid on May 6 claimed that Iran and the US may be close to agreement on a one page, 14-point memorandum of understanding that could include a declaration that the war is over and provide the basis for 30 days of further negotiations to open the Strait of Hormuz, constrain Iran’s nuclear program and end US sanctions. Some commentators, including Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal (here) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (here), have cast a skeptical eye on Ravid’s piece which Blumenthal linked to insider trading in the prediction market. On May 7 and in subsequent days, the countries were again exchanging substantial military strikes which Trump, desperate for a victory he could sell to the public, said were “just a love tap” while insisting that the ceasefire was still in place and hence there was no need to consult with Congress.
While Trump flails, Israel pursues its ‘obliteration doctrine’
Rutgers University’s Middle East History Professor Toby Jones, appearing on the May 5th Democracy Now!, has described “the war on Palestine, Lebanon and Iran” in this way:
“The Israeli tactical approach to its territorial maximalism…and in support of the American empire, is a tactics of ruin, to destroy landscapes, to destroy communities, to evoke an environmental atrocity in order to make the region uninhabitable, or at least precarious, for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.”
The model is the massive destruction of the landscape, including the obliteration of hospitals, schools, universities, homes, religious and cultural sites, and agricultural land inflicted on Gaza, which is suffering what the Gaza Relief Committee’s Eyad Anawi calls “an environmental and biological apocalypse.” The environmental damage has been the subject of several reports, including Environmental Impact on the Escalation of Conflict in the Gaza Strip published in September 2025 by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the joint EU/UN Gaza Strip: Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment released on April 20, 2026.
On April 28, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) published a 39-page report entitled Water as a Weapon: Israel’s Destruction and Deprivation of Water and Sanitation in Gaza which sees the deliberate deprivation of water to which Gaza’s residents are subjected “as an integral part of Gaza’s genocide.” According to the organization’s emergency manager Claire San Filiippo, “Israeli authorities know that without water life ends, yet they have deliberately and systematically obliterated water infrastructure in Gaza — while consistently blocking water-related supplies from entering. Palestinians have been injured and killed simply trying to access water. This deprivation, combined with dire living conditions, extreme overcrowding, and a collapsed health system, create a perfect storm for the spread of diseases.”
MSF is the largest NGO producer of drinking water in the Gaza Strip and has produced (through desalination) and distributed some 4.7 million liters of water every day, meeting the needs of one in six residents. Gaza’s water nightmare may soon get even more drastic since the MSF is one of 37 NGOs barred from working in Gaza at the end of 2025 after refusing to hand over the names of their local staff to Israeli authorities. Subsequently MSF along with 16 other NGOs challenged the ban in Israel’s High Court. They are currently awaiting a final ruling.
‘Obliteration ecocide’ in Lebanon
Even before Israel’s current onslaught against Lebanon the ecological damage it has carried out against its northern neighbor in the last few years has been massive. A recent 106-page report compiled by the National Council for Scientific Research – Lebanon focuses on the destruction to the natural ecosystem in the 2023-2024 phase of its armed confrontation with Hezbollah, which killed some 4,000 Lebanese and displaced more than a million people.
In his May 2 piece entitled “Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond,” Dr. Dan Steinbock, author of The Obliteration Doctrine: Genocide Prevention, Israel, Gaza and the West, defines the doctrine as “the lethal mix of scorched earth policy, collective punishment and civilian victimization, coupled with massive indiscriminate bombardment and systematic use of artificial intelligence (AI).”
He writes: “Ecocide here is not merely destruction of nature, but destruction of life-support systems as purposeful strategy…The object of war is increasingly not just territory or armed forces, but the ecological infrastructure that makes civilian life possible. In this way, destruction of that infrastructure is a prelude to ethnic cleansing and displacement…What happens in Gaza won’t stay in Gaza. What happens in Lebanon won’t stay in Lebanon. The stage is being set for obliteration ecocides wherever they are seen as effective necessities.”
US weapons enable the Gazafication of Lebanon
On May 3, The New York Times published the kind of article that seldom appears in the mainstream press. Headlined “Israel Said It’s Applying the Gaza Model in Lebanon. This is What the Devastation Looks Like,” the interactive piece features images of villages in the south of Lebanon being blown up and “blurred into ash, with the white rubble marking town after town.” Satellite images attest to the massive destruction, and videos depict homes and solar panels that supplied electricity and powered water supplies being systematically wrecked, as entire neighborhoods are destroyed by controlled explosions and rendered uninhabitable.
As in Gaza, Lebanon now has an Israel-imposed ‘yellow line’ demarcating a zone of occupation approximately six miles into Lebanon from the Israeli border. As Beirut-based journalist Lylla Younes stated on Democracy Now!, “They’re calling it a ‘forward defensive zone,’ but I shouldn’t have to tell you that there’s nothing defensive about it. It’s an offensive operation, and they’re using the word ‘cleanse’ to describe what they’re doing there.”
Despite the ‘ceasefire’ between Israel and Lebanon (excluding Hezbollah) which had been extended by three weeks on April 23, Israeli forces are steadily killing civilians, including children, journalists and health workers, in air and artillery strikes. The Ministry of Public Heath reported that 2,679 Lebanese had been killed and 8,229 wounded between March 2 and May 3. During the May 2-3 weekend, Israel killed 60 Lebanese, and extinguished a further 17 lives on May 4. On May 6, it killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike on Beirut and seven others across Lebanon. It also ordered the evacuation of a further dozen towns and villages, some of them north of the Litani River. On May 8, Israeli airstrikes killed 32 more people and ‘peace’ prospects appeared increasingly remote.
Netanyahu has maintained that Israel has the freedom to strike anywhere under a ‘ceasefire’ which is as bogus as that in Gaza, while Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz told the UN special coordinator for Lebanon on April 27 that “if the Lebanese government continues to shelter under the shadow of the Hezbollah terror organization, fire will burn the cedars of Lebanon. The fire will burn Hezbollah and all of Lebanon.”
The arrival in Israel on April 29 of 6,500 tons of military equipment from the US – including munitions, military trucks and combat vehicles – will power the ‘obliteration doctrine’ in Lebanon. Some 115,600 tons of military equipment have arrived in Israel on 402 flights and 10 ships since the Israel-US axis launched its war of choice against Iran. The May 2 New York Times reported that the Trump administration is by-passing Congress to fast-track an ‘emergency’ $8.6 billion in arms sales to the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Israel. In the case of Israel, arms sales are paid for by the US taxpayers.
On April 28, Jules Hurst, the acting Pentagon comptroller, told the House Armed Services Committee that $25 billion had to date been spent during the war, mainly on bombs and missiles. This suggests a significant slowdown from the $11.3 billion spent just in the first six days of the war. The New York Times calculated that $25 billion “amounts to around $190 for every U.S. household. It means that, in two months of war, the Pentagon has spent down more than its annual budget for munitions.”
Trump’s ‘peace plan’ in Gaza continues to unravel
Israel has moved its lethal demarcation boundary steadily westward since the ‘ceasefire’ with Hamas was implemented six months ago. Reuters has found that maps, that were “quietly issued” a month ago but not publicly released, show that in addition to the 53% of the Gaza Strip delineated by the supposedly temporary ‘yellow line’ on Oct. 10, 2025 when the ‘ceasefire’ went into effect, an ‘orange line’ now puts another 11% of the land in Israel’s hands, turning even more of Gaza into a death trap for Palestinians. This brings to nearly two-thirds the amount of territory to which Israel has laid claim within the Gaza Strip, leaving more than two million Palestinians squeezed into little more than a third of what had been known as one of the most crowded places on earth. On May 4, the ‘orange line’ – which is not publicly marked - was rejected by a European Commission official.
Meanwhile, Trump’s 20-point peace plan that the UN Security Council had endorsed in Nov. 2025 when it passed Resolution 2803 appears little more than the “monument of broken promises” described by Amman-based journalist Osama Al-Sharif. Those broken promises include Israel’s more than two thousand ‘ceasefire’ violations that had killed at least 834 residents by May 5, its steadily encroaching ‘yellow line,’ the restriction of food and humanitarian aid to less than a third of that stipulated by the plan and refusal to allow the exit of more than a fraction of those in need of urgent medical care. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, some 20,000 patients are on the evacuation list for medical treatment abroad, and more than 1,500 have died while trapped in Gaza. Israel is also blocking the entry into Gaza of the Palestinian technocrats who are supposed to act as administrators directed by the Board of Peace, and the Civil-Military Coordination Center that was supposed to monitor the ‘ceasefire’ and oversee the entrance of aid has now been dismantled. Neither has the International Stabilization Force been deployed, another sign that the Trump scheme is on the skids.
In an April 29th piece in +972 Magazine, Gaza journalist Muhammad Shehada gave details of the demand for full disarmament within 90 days presented to Hamas by Board of Peace director-general Nickolay Mladenov, which bore little resemblance to that outlined in Trump’s 20 Point Peace Plan. “For Gazans,” he wrote, “Israel and its allies have transformed disarmament into a prerequisite for survival, demanding they hand over their only leverage while Israel’s tanks remain on their soil and its drones hum overhead. This is not a pathway to reconstruction; it is a trap dressed in diplomatic language, a formula for permanent subjugation where Palestinians must prove their absolute, verifiable defenselessness before Israel even pretends to withdraw.”
On May 3, Israeli and US negotiators dismissed the proposal submitted by Hamas and other Palestinian factions that linked disarmament to the granting of political rights to Palestinians and which demanded that Israel stop violating the ceasefire and fulfill the obligations stipulated by the Trump peace plan. The Times of Israel has reported that the Board of Peace told the Gaza technocratic committee that unless Hamas agrees to full disarmament the ‘ceasefire’ will be over.
Meanwhile, Israel is reportedly still seeking a country that would accept the “migration” of Gaza’s residents, having failed to get Somaliland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to do so.
Children face harrowing conditions
Children in Gaza are being both physically and mentally shattered by Israel’s policies. They live in a death trap. One example: on April 28 nine-year-old Adel al-Najjar from Khan Yunis was collecting cardboard to use as fuel 1,300 feet west of the ‘yellow line’ when he was shot dead by Israeli forces who killed four other Palestinians that day. The previous month the army killed Adel’s younger brother while he was collecting firewood.
The brothers are two of about 230 children (out of a total of more than 840 Palestinians) whose lives have been taken by Israeli strikes during nearly seven months of the ‘ceasefire.’ A dozen people were killed on May 6 – 7, when the death toll in the Gaza war reached 72,619, with 172,484 injured. Many children are among the estimated 8,000 bodies decomposing under the rubble, and there is no way of retrieving loved ones beyond the ‘yellow line’ (now the ‘yellow-orange line’) without attracting gunfire. UNICEF estimates that more than 50,000 children have been killed or wounded since Oct. 2023. One in five amputees is a child. And many children have been exposed to so much ‘extreme trauma’ that they are unable to speak.
Add to that, Israel’s resumption under the cover of the war on Iran/Lebanon of what MSF terms “Israel’s manufactured malnutrition crisis,” which is taking an especially heavy toll of babies and pregnant women. According to the Global Report against Food Crises 2026, two places in the world experienced famine in 2025: the Gaza Strip and Sudan. The situation in Gaza was the worst in the world, the report said, with a third of the population facing famine conditions and nearly 55,000 children between the ages of six months and five years acutely malnourished, according to a Lancet study. With Isreal again severely limiting humanitarian aid to Gaza, with Gaza’s health sector on the verge of total collapse and disease spreading as tented encampments suffer a major rat infestation that has led to 70,000 infections this year, and while Israeli forces attack the Gaza Strip on a daily basis, the lives of children are hanging by a thread.
The West Bank is being carved up as the army sees ‘terrorists’ everywhere
“The Arabs understand that if someone comes to kill you, kill them first is the norm…. So we’re killing like we haven’t since 1967.”
Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, the army’s Central Command chief who grew up in a settlement, spoke these words at a closed forum during which he lauded the “precise aggression” being used in the West Bank to prevent an Oct. 7-style attack.
“I’m constantly turning villages into conflict zones,” he said. “We’ve killed 1,500 terrorists in three years. So how come there is no intifada? Why don’t they take to the streets?… Because 96 percent of the 1,500 killed were involved in terrorism, only 4 percent were not.” He went on to label stone-throwers as “terrorists” who should be shot - as long as they weren’t Jews who stone army vehicles. He had some critical things to say about those he called “Jewish terrorists” who “think it’s possible to burn people alive, to burn houses down with their occupants inside, and unfortunately they do this frequently…It’s a disgrace to the Jewish people” - and it could spark another Palestinian uprising. As for those Palestinians desperate to cross the apartheid wall for work in Israel, his new rules of engagement require that they should be shot in the legs to create a “barrier consciousness.” By becoming “limping monuments” others learn that “there is a price being paid.”
On May 3, when the army claimed to be shooting at stone throwers while conducting a raid in the Al-Ain refugee camp adjacent to Nablus, they ended up murdering 26-year-old Naif Firas Ziad Samaro, who was shopping for baby clothes while his wife was in the hospital giving birth. In the first four months of 2026, 57 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers.
The pogroms being carried out by ‘extremist settlers’ and the refusal of the army and government to rein them in were the focus of a major piece in the May 4th New York Times headlined “With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank.” Averaging nearly seven a day, settler attacks have become routine. On May 8-9 there were 20. Anthropologist Idan Yaron, who has spent a long time with ‘extremist settlers,’ says that “their goal is to expel Palestinians from their lands and make them their own.” The article states that the Israeli government “has minimized the surge of violence” without mentioning the extent to which it shares this goal. In an Instagram post David Harel, the President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, reminds viewers that it is not just settlers, but the Israeli government that is systematically driving Palestinians from the northern Jordan Valley and it is the indifferent Israeli public that is enabling this to happen.
The weaponization of water has played a major role in the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley and the West Bank as a whole: see this CNN piece, and this article by Qassam Muaddi in Mondoweiss. Using OCHA figures, Muaddi writes that 350 of the more than 1,000 attacks on Palestinians by settlers “targeted water sources and infrastructure, averaging out to nearly one attack per day” while soldiers “have destroyed 1,986 wells, springs, reservoirs, and water tanks over the past decade.”
While Israeli authorities have fast tracked settlement expansion, the uprooting of thousands of olive trees and the demolition of thousands of Palestinian homes in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem and around the West Bank, Finance Minister Smotrich has earmarked $270 million for the construction of new ‘Israeli only’ by pass roads to connect settlements to Jerusalem without passing through Palestinian towns. Palestinian communities will not just be cut off from the roads, but from each other, and isolated from their natural resources and borders. In the words of Palestinian geographer Khalil Tafakji, Israel “is laying the infrastructure for a full separation from the Palestinians, in case something is eventually imposed by the international community.” On May 6, an open letter signed by 448 former European ambassadors EU diplomats urged EU member states to take action to stop Israel’s E1 settlement plan that would cut the West Bank in half, and impose sanctions on “all those engaged in illegal settlement activity.” Here a former EU ambassador explains why it is so imperative for Europe to act.
While world governments stand silently by a ‘global coalition of conscience’ will not give up
So inert have most world governments become about what is happening in Palestine that it is difficult to imagine any kind of brake being applied to Israel’s actions. But their populations are not giving up.
On the evening of April 29 Israeli forces committed an act of hijacking on the high seas when they interceptedthe 177 solidarity activists on 22 boats that were part of the Global Sumud Flotilla enroute to break the siege of Gaza. The US State Department immediately condemned the flotilla as a “baseless, counterproductive effort to undermine President Trump’s Peace Plan” and accused it of working with terrorist groups.
The passengers were illegally seized from the boats when they were 80 nautical miles from Crete. They were punched, kicked, shot at with rubber bullets and live ammunition, and dozens required medical attention. They were taken to Crete where all but two were made to disembark. The two – Thiago Ávila from Brazil and Saif Abu Keshek from Spain – were taken to Israel where they were severely beaten, held in total isolation and went on hunger strike. The mother of Thiago Ávila died during their imprisonment. On May 10 the Israeli foreign ministry stated it had deported both men.
While most world governments have remained silent about Israel’s high seas piracy, flotilla activists are not giving up. On May 2, four more Freedom Flotilla boats, one appropriately named ‘Perseverance’, left Sicily for Gaza. On board was a “global coalition of conscience” from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, the UK and five from the US. As one participant said: “When governments fail, we sail.”
Palestinians meanwhile displayed their own remarkable perseverance when as many as 13,000 runnersengaged in the 10th Palestine International Marathon on May 8 in Bethlehem and in central Gaza, where some 2,000 ran a shorter distance with a separate race for amputee runners. According to event coordinator Itidal Abdul Ghani, this year’s race sent the message of “the unity of the homeland.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine