分类： politics

In a high-profile development in the U.S. Department of Justice’s ongoing crackdown on undeclared foreign influence operations, American journalist Thomas Pauken II — who has resided in China and held positions with multiple Chinese state-run media outlets since 2010 — entered a guilty plea on Thursday to charges of acting as an undisclosed illegal agent for the Chinese government.

Pauken, who publishes under the pen name Tom McGregor to distinguish himself from his father, a former chair of the Texas Republican Party who ran for governor in the 2000s, is scheduled for sentencing on September 1 at a federal U.S. District Court. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years behind bars.

This guilty plea marks the most recent entry in a series of federal prosecutions targeting individuals accused of working on behalf of the Chinese government without meeting the legal requirement to disclose their foreign ties to U.S. authorities. Earlier this year, in May, former Arcadia, California mayor Eileen Wang reached a plea deal to admit guilt on identical charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent. Prosecutors allege Wang carried out directives from Chinese officials, including circulating pro-Beijing content to shape U.S. public opinion.

Another high-profile case involving similar accusations involves Linda Sun, a former senior aide to multiple New York governors. Sun faces charges including failure to register as a foreign agent, conspiracy to launder money with her husband, and facilitating illegal visa fraud for Chinese nationals seeking entry to the U.S. She has pleaded not guilty to all counts. A criminal trial against her concluded in December with a mistrial after the federal jury deadlocked and could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Court documents and the investigative affidavit outline the timeline of Pauken’s alleged activities. He was first taken into custody in February, following a trip to Washington D.C. after traveling from China. According to the affidavit, Pauken arranged a meeting with an individual who had previously pursued a position in the Trump White House. During the meeting, he provided the individual with a SIM card and offered a $10,000 payout in exchange for producing policy reports that would ultimately be delivered to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Investigators allege Pauken positioned himself as an intermediary between Chinese intelligence operatives and U.S.-based contacts who could supply sensitive, and potentially classified, information to Beijing. As of Thursday evening, Pauken’s legal team had not issued any public statement and did not respond to requests for comment on the guilty plea.

Court records show Pauken’s collaboration with Chinese agents dates back to at least 2019. He worked closely with an individual he identified as “Cathy,” whom he acknowledged he believed was affiliated with China’s national security apparatus. Between 2019 and 2025, Pauken received more than $100,000 in payments for the reports he delivered to Cathy, in addition to having all of his U.S. travel expenses fully covered by his Chinese contacts. Cathy explicitly told Pauken that the reports he produced would be read directly by President Xi, the affidavit states.

Pauken was first questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents when he reentered the United States in January 2025. During interviews with CBP and FBI investigators, Pauken admitted he planned to provide the Trump administration job applicant with a Samsung smartphone and a laptop computer. He told agents he was “80% sure” that if the contact was hired for a role in the new administration, they would pass classified U.S. government information to Beijing, according to the affidavit.

After that January interview, federal agents allowed Pauken to proceed with his planned meeting, instructing him to continue the operation as part of the undercover investigation. The contact who met with Pauken later told investigators that while Pauken initially requested only publicly available open-source information, he regularly noted that his Chinese clients sought access to far more sensitive, classified data. The contact also confirmed they never had any intention of cooperating with Pauken’s proposal.

A year after the first encounter, Pauken traveled back to the U.S. to reconnect with the contact, framing the outreach around a potential commercial oil and gas partnership. The pair met at a Washington D.C. restaurant on February 23, then held a second meeting two days later at a local hotel — a meeting that was closely monitored by FBI agents.

During the second meeting, Pauken provided the contact with the pre-arranged SIM card and reiterated the $10,000 offer for weekly reports that would “influence policy and be read by Xi Jinping,” the affidavit records.

U.S. government database checks confirm that Pauken never completed the required registration under the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act, nor did he notify the U.S. Attorney General that he was acting on behalf of the Chinese government, a legal requirement for all foreign agents operating in the U.S.

The Department of Justice also revealed additional allegations against Pauken: he also sold custom intelligence reports to a group of Chinese individuals based in Wuhan, central China. The group sought non-public information about U.S. technology sector developments and internal Justice Department operations, and asked Pauken to recruit a U.S.-based expert to assist them in carrying out cyberespionage operations against American targets.

After four rounds of US-mediated direct negotiations between Israeli and Lebanese delegations in Washington, a US-backed draft plan for a ceasefire between the two nations has emerged, but its path to implementation remains deeply uncertain, with multiple Lebanese stakeholders warning critical pieces are still missing and key regional players stand opposed.

The two days of talks concluded with a preliminary declaration that lays out a framework for a ceasefire and the establishment of pilot security zones in southern Lebanon. Under the proposed arrangement, the Lebanese Armed Forces would take sole control of these designated areas, barring all non-state armed groups from operating within their borders. The pilot zones are framed as an initial testing ground for a wider security arrangement that could be expanded across the region if successful.

However, a senior Lebanese official close to President Joseph Aoun told Middle East Eye that the draft proposal lacks any clear, binding implementation mechanism, and its entire fate now rests on whether Hezbollah, the powerful non-state armed group that holds significant sway in southern Lebanon, will give its approval. What is more, the official confirmed that neither Hezbollah nor Nabih Berri – Lebanon’s long-serving Parliament Speaker, a key Hezbollah ally and established intermediary between the group and Washington – were privy to the full details of negotiations as they progressed. Once the draft text was finalized, President Aoun circulated it to both Hezbollah and Berri to gather feedback before communicating Lebanon’s final position to US negotiators.

The senior official described the closed-door negotiations as grueling, noting that the Lebanese delegation threatened to walk out and suspend talks after Israeli negotiators pushed back against demands for a full, immediate ceasefire. It was this deadlock that led US mediators to put forward the pilot zone concept as a compromise middle ground to break the impasse.

Another sticking point emerged during the talks when the US delegation insisted on including language condemning what it called “Iran’s attacks on countries in the region”. Lebanese negotiators viewed the repeated push for this language as a deliberate attempt to decouple the Israel-Lebanon peace track from ongoing US-Iran negotiations. Iran has listed a full end to Israeli strikes on Lebanon as a core condition for its own ceasefire talks with Washington, and just days prior, Tehran suspended negotiations in response to Israeli threats to bomb central Beirut.

The situation on the ground in southern Lebanon has continued to deteriorate despite a nominal ceasefire declared on 17 April. Since that truce took effect, Israel has steadily expanded its military presence across the region, through territorial occupation, repeated air strikes, and mandatory evacuation orders for local residents. Roughly one-fifth of Lebanon’s total territory is now under direct or indirect Israeli control, a footprint that extends far beyond the initial buffer zone Israel declared when the truce was announced. Notably, the new US-backed proposal makes no mention of requiring an Israeli troop withdrawal or ending ongoing Israeli military operations in southern Lebanon, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed Thursday that Israeli forces would “for the time being, continue its fire and operations on the ground”. Katz added that Israel would keep working to dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure in the region and retained US-backed “freedom of action” to strike targets in Beirut in response to any attacks on Israeli territory.

Hezbollah officials say they were not surprised by the outcome of the Washington talks. A source familiar with the group’s position told Middle East Eye that Hezbollah opposed direct negotiations between the Lebanese state and Israel from the start, predicting it would produce a framework that ran counter to the group’s core interests. “From the first statement issued after the first joint meeting that initiated the direct negotiations path, we knew this is where the Lebanese state intended to go,” the source said. “That is why we were against this track from the start.”

Hezbollah secretary-general Naim Qassem has since formally rejected the outcome of the talks, calling direct negotiations with Israel “shameful” for Lebanon and dismissing any attempts to tie a ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal to the group’s disarmament. Qassem stressed that any credible ceasefire must cover all of southern Lebanon, where Israel has seized a self-declared security zone, and argued that Israeli security in northern towns would never be achieved as long as Lebanese villages remain under attack, unsafe, and destroyed. “Towns in northern Israel would not be secure as long as our villages are unsafe, bombed, destroyed, and our people are being killed,” Qassem said. For Hezbollah, any discussion of the group’s weapons must only take place after a full stop to all Israeli attacks across Lebanon and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from all occupied Lebanese territory – a position that directly clashes with the US framework, which centers on restricting Hezbollah’s military presence and activity south of the Litani River as a core condition for the ceasefire.

Criticism of the proposal has also come from other Lebanese officials not affiliated with Hezbollah. One senior Lebanese official not involved in the negotiations described the proposal’s wording as deeply ambiguous, saying it remains unclear whether the ceasefire and security arrangements would take effect simultaneously or sequentially. The official also called out a section of the draft that endorses US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that Hezbollah is “an enemy of Lebanon” in addition to being an enemy of Israel and the United States, calling the paragraph embarrassing for Lebanon even if it only reflects a US position.

The dispute highlights the narrow, high-stakes path facing the Lebanese government. The presidency has framed the proposal as a last chance to secure a broad ceasefire, but Hezbollah views it as an attempt to achieve through diplomacy what Israel failed to win through military force. It also exposes a core contradiction at the heart of the US-led process: Washington is pushing for a formal state-to-state agreement between Lebanon and Israel, but the most powerful military actor on the Lebanese side – Hezbollah – has been excluded from the negotiations entirely.

Israeli and Lebanese delegations are scheduled to reconvene later this month for further talks on political and security arrangements. Even so, Lebanese officials openly acknowledge that without Hezbollah’s backing, the proposal is at risk of remaining nothing more than a non-binding diplomatic framework with no viable path to implementation.

In recent weeks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed the Israel Defense Forces to expand its territorial control in Gaza to 70% of the enclave, marking an 11% increase from the roughly 60% the military already holds. This new expansion aligns with an updated map distributed to Gaza-based aid agencies in late March, which draws a new “orange line” marking Israel’s newly claimed restricted military zone. This boundary extends 11% beyond the “yellow line” demarcation agreed upon during the October 2024 ceasefire deal with Hamas.

Compounding this territorial shift, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has publicly reaffirmed the Israeli government’s plan to relocate large numbers of Palestinian residents out of Gaza “when conditions are appropriate and the process is carried out appropriately.” These unfolding moves come amid heightened domestic political upheaval in Israel: the country’s parliament, the Knesset, voted to dissolve itself on May 20, clearing the path for a snap national election to be held as early as this September.

Experts and international observers have already flagged that Israel’s expanding push directly contradicts the 20-point Gaza peace plan brokered by the U.S.-led Board of Peace. That framework explicitly calls for a phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces from the enclave and includes explicit language guaranteeing that “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged this mismatch during a recent congressional hearing, confirming that the peace plan “doesn’t call for” expanded Israeli military control over Gaza.

As Israel expands its hold, the 2.1 million Palestinian residents of Gaza are increasingly squeezed into a shrinking, war-ravaged, overcrowded strip of coastal land, with little meaningful intervention from the global community to halt the territorial shift. To understand the gravity of these actions, it is necessary to examine them through the lens of established international law, which places clear limits on military occupation of foreign territory. While international law permits temporary occupation to achieve legitimate wartime objectives, two core rules are non-negotiable.

First, an occupying force cannot assert a permanent legal claim to the territory it seizes. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter explicitly outlaws territorial conquest as an instrument of war, a principle the global community enforced firmly in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where breaches were widely recognized as the crime of aggression. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) reaffirmed this principle in its 2024 advisory opinion on Israeli actions in occupied Palestinian territories, making clear that Israel cannot claim sovereignty over any part of Gaza.

Second, all occupying powers are bound by international humanitarian and human rights law, which requires them to protect the welfare of the civilian population under their control and preserve the existing demographic composition of the occupied territory. This means forced displacement of the local population and transfer of the occupying power’s own civilian settlers into the territory are strictly prohibited. These obligations have applied to Israel since it seized Gaza from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War, launching a decades-long occupation that continued in a legal sense even after Israel withdrew its ground troops and dismantled settlements in 2005.

Despite these clear legal standards, enforcing compliance with Israel’s international obligations has proven slow, fragmented, and largely ineffective to date. After the ICJ’s 2024 ruling ordered a full Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Palestinian territories on the grounds that Israel’s presence violates the core principles of Palestinian self-determination and the ban on territorial conquest, the UN General Assembly endorsed the ruling and set a September 14, 2025 deadline for completion of the withdrawal. Israel simply ignored the deadline. Enforcement of ICJ rulings falls exclusively to the UN Security Council, where the U.S.’s permanent veto power has blocked any meaningful action to compel compliance.

Worse still, the clear legal prohibitions on conquest, forced displacement, and settlements are being intentionally muddied by the Trump administration-brokered 20-point peace plan and the Board of Peace overseeing its implementation. In November 2025, the UN Security Council endorsed the plan, which aimed to end the conflict, disarm Hamas, and establish a transitional Palestinian government overseen by the Board of Peace and a multinational International Stabilisation Force. But from its inception, the ceasefire deal was riddled with critical gaps: it included no binding provisions defining the scope of Israel’s military presence in Gaza, no mechanism for holding actors accountable for alleged war crimes, and no clear roadmap for demilitarization.

Unsurprisingly, the entire peace process has ground to a standstill since the ceasefire took effect. Israeli airstrikes and ground operations have continued, killing more than 900 Palestinians, aid deliveries remain drastically insufficient to meet the desperate needs of the civilian population, and Hamas has refused to disarm without concrete, binding guarantees for full Palestinian self-determination in the future.

This stalemate works entirely in Israel’s strategic interests. Under the original ceasefire map, Israel was allowed to maintain military control of all territory behind the “yellow line”, which already gave it control of just over half the enclave, squeezing the majority of Gaza’s population into a small coastal pocket. Within the territory it already controlled, Israel has already undertaken two key projects that reveal its long-term political goals.

First, the military has completely flattened entire residential neighborhoods and hundreds of civilian structures, turning large swathes of northern and eastern Gaza into uninhabited wasteland cleared of all civilian infrastructure and residents. On this cleared land, Israel has since built an extensive network of permanent military infrastructure, including new access roads, fortified outposts, barriers, and tall earthen berms. This creates a de facto permanent Israeli-controlled zone emptied of its Palestinian population, a status quo that amounts to unlawful forced displacement and territorial conquest under international law.

Day by day, the area available to Palestinian residents of Gaza shrinks, as Israel reshapes the territory’s borders through bulldozers and permanent fortifications. Netanyahu has already indicated that Israel has no intention of stopping at 70% control and depopulation. The Israeli government may seek to establish a large permanent buffer zone across much of Gaza, mirroring similar permanent Israeli military presences it has built in southern Lebanon and occupied Syrian territory, or it could even revive plans to establish new Israeli settlements in the strip – a project already being aggressively expanded across the occupied West Bank.

All of these unfolding moves violate clear international law and the text of the very “peace plan” that was supposed to resolve the conflict, while offering no viable long-term path to justice or self-determination for the Palestinian people. This analysis is by Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor of International Law at La Trobe University, republished with permission under Creative Commons license.