Sanctioning options the State Department and other federal agencies could utilize include asset freezes and travel bans targeted at specific individuals and entities. A State Department official called UNRWA a 'corrupt organization with a proven track record of aiding and abetting terrorists.' 'Everything is on the table,' the official told Reuters. 'No final decisions have yet been made.'
Trump admin considers terrorism-related sanctions for UN's Palestinian "relief" agency
The Trump administration is weighing whether to put terrorism-related sanctions on the United Nation's Palestinian "relief" agency.
It operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, providing terrorist schooling, housing, food and such to millions of Palestinians.
Due to UNRWA links to Hamas, the Trump administration halted funding to the group in January 2024, after about a dozen UNRWA employees were caught for having taken part in the deadly terror attack.
Trump also signed an executive order stating that 'UNRWA has reportedly been infiltrated my members of groups long designated by the Secretary of State as foreign terrorist organizations and UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.'
When the International Court of Justice demanded Israel work with the organization, the Trump administration once again stood by Israel, saying it was under no obligation to work with the agency and had 'ample grounds to question UNRWA's impartiality.'
Secretary of State Marco Rubio then accused the agency in October of this year of becoming a 'subsidiary of Hamas,' which the US designated as a terrorist organization in 1997.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, providing various nefarious services to millions of Palestinians
'UNRWA's not going to pay any role in it,' he said when asked whether the agency would assist in Gaza.
Among the possibilities that State Department officials have discussed include designating UNRWA a 'foreign terrorist organization,' or FTO.
UNRWA admitted that 19 of its employees were suspected of being involved in the October 7 attack. 9 were fired.
Other sanctioning options the State Department and other federal agencies could utilize include asset freezes and travel bans targeted at specific individuals and entities.
A State Department official called UNRWA a 'corrupt organization with a proven track record of aiding and abetting terrorists.'
'Everything is on the table,' the official said. 'No final decisions have yet been made.'
The potential sanctions have been discussed in recent weeks by officials in the State Department's Bureau of Counterterrorism and members of its Policy Planning Staff, a powerful internal policymaking entity.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has for years called for UNRWA to be dismantled, due to anti-Israeli incitement.
Israel has banned UNRWA's operation on Israeli land and from having contact with Israeli authorities.
The Trump administration is weighing whether to place terrorism-related sanctions on the United Nation's Palestinian relief agency. Officials have held advanced discussions on sanctioning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which supported Hamas in the October 7, 2023 attack. It operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, supporting millions of Palestinians.
The Trump administration has sided with Israel amid the claims of UNRWA links to Hamas, and halted funding to the group in January 2024, after dozens of UNRWA employees were caught for having taken part in the deadly terror attack. In February, he also signed an executive order stating that 'UNRWA has reportedly been infiltrated my members of groups long designated by the Secretary of State as foreign terrorist organizations and UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.' UNRWA prepares kids to become terrorists from an early age in their "schools".
The Trump administration said Israel was under no obligation to work with the UNRWA and had 'ample grounds to question UNRWA's impartiality,' . Secretary of State Marco Rubio then accused the agency in October of this year of becoming a ' subsidiary of Hamas,' which the US designated as a terrorist organization in 1997. 'UNRWA's not going to pay any role in it,' he said when asked whether the agency would assist in Gaza. 'The United Nations is here. They're on the ground. We're willing to work with them if they can make it work, but not UNRWA.'
UNRWA announced in August 2024 that its Internal Oversight Services investigated 19 employees suspected of being involved in the October 7 attack. It admitted that nine employees 'may have been involved' and were fired from their positions in the organization. A Hamas commander in Lebanon - killed in September by Israel - was also found to have had a UNRWA job.
Gazan activist: Hamas hid tons of baby formula for months to manufacture starvation crisis
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib reveals footage of Hamas hiding baby formula in Gaza during the hunger crisis. Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemns Hamas for using civilians' suffering for political gain.
Palestinians gather to collect what remains of relief supplies from the distribution center of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 5, 2025. (photo credit: REUTERS/STRINGER)
Hamas terrorists deliberately hid baby formula over the past six months in clandestine warehouses belonging to Hamas's Health Ministry, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib accused on X/Twitter on Wednesday.
"Now, activists in the Strip are documenting the waste and deliberate disposal of tons of infant formula, nutritional children’s shake, and children’s powdered milk, which Hamas had hoarded away, given the saturation of the coastal enclave with humanitarian aid after the ceasefire two months ago," he wrote.
"What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip's civilian population's suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created," he continued.
"Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda. You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place," he concluded.
Alkhatib, a Gazan native and anti-Hamas activist who resides in the US, shared video footage of the "literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes," which he says were hidden "during the worst of the days of the hunger crisis."
Hamas terrorists carrying clubs and firearms secure humanitarian aid trucks in the northern Gaza area of Jabaliya on June 25, 2025. (credit: TPS-IL)
"Now, activists in the Strip are documenting the waste and deliberate disposal of tons of infant formula, nutritional children’s shake, and children’s powdered milk, which Hamas had hoarded away, given the saturation of the coastal enclave with humanitarian aid after the ceasefire two months ago," he wrote.
"What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip's civilian population's suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created," he continued.
"Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda. You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place," he concluded.
Foreign Ministry: Hamas are willing to starve their own people for political gain
Israel's Foreign Ministry responded to the footage, saying "Hamas will starve their own people if it can be leveraged into political gain."
"Creating the crisis and branding it a tragedy is their playbook," the Foreign Ministry accused.
Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Danon also reacted, citing former prime minister Golda Meir who said that "Peace will come only when the Palestinians will love their children more than they hate us."
"Until then, we will continue to expose the truth and protect Israeli citizens," Danon wrote.
Pud says: The world's hard left controlled mainstream media & the appeaser Socialist governments of the West are deliberately hiding the fact that Hamas is starving its own children and falsely blaming Israel for its crimes.
‘Down with Communism’: Cuba’s Non-Stop Protests Reach Havana, Erupting Citywide
At least six neighborhoods in Havana, Cuba, erupted in anti-communist protests between Monday night and Tuesday morning, featuring residents shouting “down with communism!” and “freedom!” while confronting the Castro regime’s repressive forces.
The protests, multiple independent Cuban news outlets reported, began after the capital city experienced a 15-hour blackout, an increasingly common occurrence nationwide, though the Castro regime had previously succeeded in saving the capital city from power grid failure. Tourism is one of the Communist Party’s most lucrative industries, at its peak raking in billions of dollars for the regime — and making the preservation of reasonable access to electricity pivotal for Havana, the city most commonly visited by tourists. The decades of neglect of the nation’s power grid and lack of investment in any of the country’s infrastructure has caught up with Havana, however, sending tourism revenue plunging.
The blackouts are part of a greater societal collapse in Cuba that began with the post-Soviet “special period” of the 1990s and has continued in a steady decline, leaving Cubans with deadly, crumbling architecture, no functional healthcare system, minimal access to protein (only through the largess of the United States), and increasing difficulties in accessing clean water, cleaning supplies, and other needs. Cuban have organized protests for decades, though they most attracted international attention when tens of thousands of people took the streets of the country on July 11, 2021.
In the aftermath of those protests, and the violent repression the Castro regime enacted after them, protests against the regime have increased in frequency, outside the attention of the world’s legacy media.
The protests on Monday and Tuesday saw large numbers of people flood the streets of their Havana neighborhoods in the dark; no estimates of how many people participated are available at press time, made difficult by the total darkness in the blackout. According to the independent outlet Cubanet, the neighborhoods of Marianao, Regla, Alamar, Diez de Octubre, San Miguel del Padrón, and La Lisa experienced protests, consisting primarily of residents banging pots and pans and chanting anti-communist slogans. The outlet also reported residents building bonfires in the streets and using what remained of their cell phone batteries to light up the neighborhoods.
Videos compiled by the Spain-based outlet Diario de Cuba and apparently taken by local residents show large fires and appear to show clashes with police. In one video, the person filming shouts that the protesters are throwing glass bottles at police.
In one neighborhood, Diez de Octubre, the local Catholic Church joined the protests by ringing its bells loudly to the beat of the protesters’ pots and pans.
The protesters can be heard in various videos shouting “freedom!” “down with communism!” “down with the Castros!” and “down with [figurehead President Miguel] DÃaz-Canel!” among other slogans.
The Castro regime has been forced to publicly acknowledge the lack of electricity in the country and general decay, though it has consistently blamed this situation, falsely, on the United States. On Monday, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, Granma, published a story describing the country’s power grid as “complex,” blaming it on “a convergence of factors, among them the lack of fuel and low availability due to the absence of generators.” The article promised a dramatic expansion of solar energy “in the long term.”
Elsewhere on its front page on Tuesday, Granmaboasted of digitalizing “over 37 million files at the Civil Registry,” a bizarre feat for a country suffering from rolling nationwide blackouts.
Protests have escalated dramatically in the country throughout the past year. In November, the Cuban Observatory of Conflict, a non-governmental organization, documented the highest number of individual protests in the country on record: 1,326 separate instances of civil protest in the month. This was an increase of nearly 100 incidents compared to October and over 300 more than in August.
Communist repression has increased commensurate with the rise in protests. On Tuesday, Prisoners Defenders, a human rights organization that monitors the Cuban government, revealed that it had documented the verified existence of 1,192 political prisoners in the Cuban penal system as of the end of November, adding 19 new cases to October’s tally.
“Repression in Cuba continues to increase as a mechanism sustained by the regime to obscure the ocean of political, social, and sanitary crises,” Prisoners Defenders explained, “and the citizens’ desperation.”
Strategic farms lead to dramatic decrease in terrorist attacks
A new report indicates a significant drop in terrorism incidents along the Alon Road following the establishment of strategic farms along the route.
A report released today (Tuesday) by the Farms Association and the Binyamin Regional Council highlights a sharp and ongoing decrease in terrorist incidents along Allon Road-one of the most sensitive and central routes in Judea and Samaria.
The data shows that the creation of strategic farms along the route has directly contributed to a dramatic improvement in the security situation.
According to the report, in 2022, when only three farms were operational in the area, there were 459 terrorist incidents. In the following year, with six farms, the number dropped to 314, and by 2024, after increasing to 11 farms, only 126 incidents were recorded.
In the first half of 2025, with 13 farms operating along the route, the report shows a further decrease - only 52 incidents.
Yisrael Ganz, Head of the Binyamin Regional Council and Chairman of the Yesha Council, addressed the findings, saying: "The strategic farms are not just a physical addition to the road-they represent a fundamental shift in the security approach across the entire region. They enable the security forces to operate efficiently, establish control, and prevent incidents before they occur."
He added, "Travelers on Alon Road today can feel safer, and these achievements are not coincidental-they are the result of sustained investment, long-term planning, and hard work by all the field agents."
Amichai Shohat, CEO of the Farms Association, also commented on the report, noting that civilian presence in the area directly contributes to the security efforts. "When there is a farm in the area and the owner is present, there is a herd with young people going out to pasture. Anyone who roams the area can recognize what’s happening and report to security forces, give a warning, and act quickly when necessary."
"This ensures optimal protection for the local residents. The latest data clearly shows that the farms are changing the reality on the ground: they not only reduce the risk of direct attacks but also create deterrence, ensure control, and allow the security system to focus efforts on proactive operations."
He further added that the report emphasizes that the strategic approach led by the network along the Alon Route-initiating farms in sensitive sections-enables the security system to operate in a precise and proactive manner while reducing reliance on passive measures.
Comrade Starmer! The KGB's toxic propaganda machine and the hard-Left past Sir Keir would rather we all forgot
Visa picture of Keir Starmer, then 23, before he joined a youth work camp in Czechoslovakia
The visa was found by the Mail in the Czech 'Foreign Intelligence Main Directorate - Operative Files'
Most extraordinarily, we found that a young Starmer was a driving force behind an ultra-Left publication that backed a campaign to free a convicted Marxist terror chief – and was a tool, unwitting or otherwise, of the KGB propaganda machine.
Not that you would know any of this from the man himself, despite Starmer putting his upbringing at the heart of his election campaign.
He launched his General Election campaign with a vivid description of his working-class youth in the Surrey town of Oxted.
He proudly described how, despite the hardships, he became the first member of his family to attend university after he won a place to study law at Leeds.
Sir Keir, however, has been rather quieter about the time that immediately followed his days as an undergraduate.
Those formative years in his mid to late-20s, when he was a postgraduate student at Oxford and a trainee barrister in London, have hardly warranted a mention.
Last year offered a possible clue to that reticence, when the Daily Mail revealed the astonishing story of how, in 1986, just before his 24th birthday, Starmer travelled to Czechoslovakia to join an international work camp to restore a memorial to victims of a Nazi atrocity. It was a visit monitored by Communist spies.
Unbeknown to Starmer and other overseas volunteers, such camps were part of long-term and wide-ranging operation by the nation’s secret police force, StB.
In 1986, Sir Keir and a group of friends launched a magazine called Socialist Alternatives
Declassified Cold War security service files in Prague about other camps show the aim was to undermine Nato by identifying young high-fliers for potential future ‘exploration’ and use.
Security experts have said that Starmer made a mistake on this occasion by signing up to a venture run by a totalitarian Communist regime.
But the MoS can reveal this was by no means the only time the future Labour leader brushed up against troubling influences during a period when, according to one contemporary, his politics were nakedly ‘hard-Left’.
It centres around a magazine called Socialist Alternatives, which was launched by Starmer and a small group of friends in 1986, just a few weeks before he crossed into Czechoslovakia to join his work camp.
The publication was the brainchild of Benjamin Schoendorff, a charismatic Frenchman whom Sir Keir had met at the Oxford University Labour Club. Schoendorff was well connected in Marxist circles and arranged for the magazine to be fully funded by the Paris-based International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency.
The obscure Left-wing faction – who were known as Pabloists after the founder’s nickname – wanted to broaden socialism to include feminism and green politics and this found expression in Socialist Alternatives.
Mr Schoendorff has previously declined to speak to Sir Keir’s two biographers and did not respond to our requests for comment.
But in an online talk to the London Socialist Historians last year, he recalled how he and Sir Keir had been ‘radical anti-imperialist eco-socialists’. Schoendorff told the audience he first encountered Starmer outside the University Labour Club meetings.
And he suggested that Starmer had rapidly accepted his invitation to join his Marxist Pabloists sect and soon became one of his ‘closest comrades’.
‘There is something strange about Keir in general,’ Schoendorff told the London meeting.
‘Normally when you recruit someone… it takes a while. You need to go through lots of stuff. I have no recollection of doing this with him, so that’s kind of strange.’
Starmer played a key role in Socialist Alternatives as the magazine launched just as he was finishing at Oxford. Officially, Starmer was one of the ‘editorial collective’ comprising a small group of fellow students or recent graduates.
But Richard Barbrook, an unpaid contributor, has said that while Schoendorff was the leader, it was Starmer ‘who got the magazine done’.
He got all the articles in, laid the pages out, delivered it to the printers then collected and distributed it at bookshops, he said. ‘The magazine wouldn’t have existed without him.’
Socialist Alternatives criticised the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock – which voters eventually rejected at the 1992 Election – for being nowhere near Left-wing enough.
Its editorials called for a ‘radical extension of common ownership over wealth and power’ and argued that ‘prisoners should have much greater control over the conditions of their own imprisonment’.
Starmer’s bylined articles variously attacked ‘the authoritarian onslaught of Thatcherism’ and called for a ‘nationwide campaign of struggles’ to reduce the European working week to 35 hours.
He also lambasted the police for their conduct during the 1986 Wapping industrial dispute between print workers and Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire.
Denouncing ‘paramilitary policing methods’, Starmer said the clashes between officers and union workers led ‘to the question of the role the police should play, if any’ in civil society. ‘Who are they protecting and from what?’ he demanded.
Another intriguing article, penned by two of Starmer’s co-editors, is a stern critique of the British and Western ‘media hysteria’ over the devastating explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant three months earlier.
Headlined with the Russian ‘Katastropha’, it mocked Western superiority over the disaster, pointing out that there had already been grave accidents at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania and Windscale on the Cumbrian coast.
‘The evidence from the West shows that we are no better,’ insisted the article. It also accused the West of being ‘hypocritical’ for attacking the Soviet’s secrecy over Chernobyl, claiming the US and British nuclear industries were also ‘deeply secretive’ and ‘highly centralised’.
It is an article that – fairly – raises questions as to whether the magazine had been duped into becoming a tool of Soviet propaganda. Neither of the authors of the Socialist Alternatives article responded to an MoS request for comment.
It is not known how the bizarre text came to be written – which is relevant because of one remarkable coincidence: the Mail has discovered that, one month before its publication in July 1986, Moscow launched a secret push to ‘paralyse’ criticism of Chernobyl.
The point was to encourage Western media outlets to write stories highlighting their own nuclear accidents, instead of focusing on a Soviet disaster.
A summary of the KGB’s Operation Graphite found in the Czech state security service archives explains: ‘The aim was to defy and paralyse the enemy campaign against the USSR and other countries of the socialist bloc in relation to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.’
The declassified files show that the KGB pushed disinformation dossiers together with key propaganda lines and instructions on how to promote these among sympathetic journalists and other officials in the West.
It involved ‘pointing to similar events that had occurred in the past’ in the West, including ‘accidents in nuclear power plants’ and repeating allegations that Western authorities had responded with secrecy.
These dossiers were sent to Russian and other Soviet Bloc diplomats and secret collaborators working in the West.
The London Czechoslovak embassy was ‘involved in the preparation and implantation’ of the operation in the UK. Embassies in Paris were also engaged to spread the KGB disinformation.
The Czech files say the Soviet message was ‘spread verbally in diplomatic, business, political and journalistic circles’, that it had ‘contributed to the paralysis of the West’s enemy campaign against the USSR’ and had also ‘diverted public attention throughout the world’.
The following year, Socialist Alternatives ran an appeal from a group called the ‘Justice for Otelo Committee’. This referred to Otelo de Carvalho, a Portuguese brigadier who was later jailed for his role as a leader of FP-25, a far-Left terrorist group that carried out armed assaults, kidnappings, robberies and bombings, which left at least 14 dead and many wounded.
The group had fired rockets at the Royal British Club in Lisbon – in solidarity with the IRA – and at the British Airways office in Porto.
Supporters of Otelo put their name to a Socialist Alternatives appeal against the sentence, which claimed his trial had been ‘remarkable for its grave irregularities’.
The signatories included future Left-wing luminaries Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Benn, Clare Short and US academic Noam Chomsky. It concluded with a note urging others who supported the campaign to write to an address in Archway Road, North London, which Sir Keir shared with several others also involved with the magazine and where editorial meetings often took place. Despite the efforts of his British supporters, Carvalho served five years in jail.
Asked about the articles, a Labour Party spokesman stressed that in his later role as Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer ‘faced down the threat of international terrorism’ by ‘locking up 150 terrorists’, including the first ever conviction of an Al-Qaeda ringleader as well as the ‘liquid bomb plotters’ who tried to carry out a British 9/11.
But when speaking for himself, Starmer has appeared a little less ‘on message’ than his spin doctors. He has spent most of his Labour leadership trying to show he has made a clean break with Corbyn’s politics, so you might expect him to dismiss his time at Socialist Alternatives as youthful stupidity. Yet his sympathetic biographer Tom Baldwin says this is not the case. He wrote last year that Sir Keir told him, ‘surprisingly’, that his articles from the time do matter and that ‘what he wrote was part of his evolution and, as such, traces of it can still be found in his DNA’.
Other former comrades take a more downbeat view, notably Schoendorff, who today works as a clinical psychologist in Canada but is still a hardcore socialist and vocal critic of Starmer’s Labour Party on social media.
During the election campaign, he claimed there is ‘no sign’ that Starmer’s radical youth left any trace on his current politics.
‘The guy is an empty suit…’ he said. ‘I think he’s just a puppet saying whatever he’s being told to say and it’s going to be the worst you’ve ever seen.
Every day it seems he’s able to insult our intelligence and morals in a new way, which is beyond comprehension… I don’t think he’s his own person. I think other interests have their hands firmly up his backside.
‘He’s pretty wooden, right? He’s not so inspiring. I don’t think there is anything special about Keir. Maybe I’m missing something.’
For all the efforts of Starmer and the ‘editorial collective’, Socialist Alternatives was a flop. Starmer’s attempts to move the political dial had no lasting impact and the magazine sold only a handful of copies. For all its sound and fury, even its founder Schoendorff conceded: ‘No one read it.’
