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In a development that has cast new light on systemic illicit trafficking into the blockaded Gaza Strip, Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet has taken into custody Jamal al-Sheikh, the nephew of newly appointed Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh, according to an exclusive report from Israeli outlet i24News published Monday.

The arrest, which occurred in February of this year, stems from allegations that Jamal al-Sheikh, a West Bank resident, orchestrated a cross-border smuggling ring between February 2025 and February 2026, with direct assistance from active-duty Israeli soldiers, a Egyptian national, and Gaza-based merchant partners. Over the course of 12 months, the network successfully moved five separate shipments of contraband into the Palestinian enclave, before a failed sixth attempt in February led to the operation being unraveled and Jamal’s detention.

Court documents and security briefings cited in the report outline that the first shipment consisted of 10 pallets of confectionery, but subsequent shipments included items classified by Israel as “dual-use” goods—materials that can serve both civilian and military purposes, which are subject to a total ban on entry into Gaza. Other illicit goods trafficked included solar panels, vehicle batteries, tobacco products, electric bicycles, and mobile phones, all of which command exorbitant black market premiums in Gaza amid the long-standing Israeli blockade that has restricted the flow of most basic and commercial goods.

The final intercepted shipment, which was seized by Shin Bet before it could cross into Gaza, was the network’s largest to date: a single truck carrying more than 500 pallets of cigarettes and 500 iPhone devices, with a total estimated black market value of 200 million Israeli shekels, or roughly $66 million. The report notes that Jamal al-Sheikh expressed hesitation about moving the high-value final shipment over fears of being caught, but a Gaza-based partner in the ring reassured him that Israeli military connections would guarantee safe passage. The merchant claimed his own son, an active Israeli soldier, would facilitate the smuggling. The identities of all Israeli soldiers implicated in the ring remain sealed under a court gag order, per i24News.

This arrest is far from an isolated incident. It is the latest in a string of high-profile revelations over recent months exposing widespread complicity by Israeli security and commercial actors in illicit profiteering from Gaza’s restricted economy. Just one month prior to Jamal al-Sheikh’s arrest, Bezalel Zini, brother of current Shin Bet chief David Zini, was formally indicted on charges of aiding unauthorized smuggling after being accused of moving millions of shekels worth of contraband cigarettes and other goods into the enclave.

Beyond shadowy smuggling rings, official commercial activity has also drawn scrutiny for exploiting Israel’s monopoly on entry into Gaza. In June, Israeli news outlet Ynet reported that one major Israeli supermarket chain saw a more than 25% jump in first-quarter 2026 sales, driven almost entirely by sales of goods to Gaza. The chain recorded 152 million shekels ($50 million) in additional profits over the period, 99 million shekels ($33 million) of which came directly from Gaza sales. Israel currently grants exclusive commercial entry approval to just a small handful of Israeli companies, creating a state-sanctioned monopoly that allows for inflated pricing.

Israel’s strict control over all goods entering and exiting Gaza forms the core of its decades-long siege campaign, a policy that humanitarian organizations worldwide have repeatedly condemned as using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the enclave’s 2.2 million residents. While a ceasefire agreement reached last October allowed for a temporary increase in humanitarian aid entering the territory, new UN data shows that aid flows have actually declined sharply in recent months. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that just 41,800 pallets of aid were delivered across Gaza last month, down from 58,600 pallets delivered in January 2026.

The ongoing restrictions have pushed Gaza’s population into an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. OCHA data confirms that the vast majority of Gaza residents now survive on just two meals per day, with 70% of infants and young children suffering from moderate to severe food insecurity. Projections from UN agencies estimate that roughly 246,000 children under the age of 17 will suffer from acute malnutrition in 2026, with more than 31,000 of those children facing life-threatening severe acute malnutrition.

For context, Hussein al-Sheikh, Jamal’s uncle and the PA’s recently appointed vice president, has been a leading figure in Palestinian politics for more than 20 years, and is widely tipped as the leading candidate to succeed 90-year-old PA President Mahmoud Abbas when he steps down. For decades, al-Sheikh led the PA’s Civil Affairs Commission, the body tasked with coordinating all civilian administrative matters with COGAT, the Israeli military unit that manages all Israeli government policy in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Amid growing global outcry over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, widely condemned by critics as genocide, most Western governments in Europe and the Americas have remained conspicuously silent on the issue. Spain has emerged as a rare exception, positioning itself as one of the most outspoken Western critics of Israel’s actions, positioning itself as an outlier among Western nations.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has pushed for multilateral action to halt global arms trade with Israel, including a high-profile campaign to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. Spain was also the first and only European Union member state to formally recall its ambassador to Israel, and announced a halt to new arms sales to Israel as early as October 2023.

However, a 2025 investigation from Barcelona’s Delas Centre for Peace Studies reveals a stark gap between this rhetoric and actual trade data. The report finds that military imports from Israel actually increased dramatically after October 2023, totaling €36.7 million ($41.9 million) by February 2025 alone. This included arms, ammunition, tanks, and armored fighting vehicles categorized under standard international trade codes. The report explicitly notes that Spain never imported more Israeli military equipment than it did in the 16 months following the 7 October 2023 attacks.

This pattern shifted only in September 2025, when Sanchez signed into law a formal full arms embargo against Israel, alongside a ban on imports of goods from Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Unlike the earlier partial pause on new sales licenses, this legislation establishes a formal, blanket legal prohibition on arms trade with Israel.

Eirene de Prada, an international law professor and member of Juristas por Palestina (Lawyers for Palestine), explained that the new legislation marks a formal shift from administrative restraint to binding legal rule. But she warns that broad loopholes, exceptions for pre-existing contracts, and ambiguous regulatory gaps leave the embargo far weaker than its public framing suggests. In comments to Middle East Eye, De Prada accused the Spanish government of deliberate doublespeak: while the embargo sends a strong symbolic statement condemning Israeli actions, regulatory loopholes embedded in the Royal Decree-Law allow trade with Israeli defense firms to continue largely uninterrupted.

Under Spanish legislative rules, a Royal Decree-Law is classified as an emergency measure for extraordinary and urgent need, requiring parliamentary approval within 30 days of enactment. Royal Decree-Law 10/2025, passed in October 2025, justifies the embargo by noting that the extreme humanitarian crisis in Gaza creates an urgent need to block the transfer of defense and dual-use materials that Israel uses against civilian populations.

Alejandro Pozo, an investigator at the Delas Centre, argues that even with its flaws, the legislation represents a meaningful step forward. He notes that the embargo sets a critical global precedent, proving that a full arms embargo on Israel is a politically feasible policy for Western nations. Even so, Pozo confirms that the law leaves all pre-existing military contracts intact and grants Spanish authorities broad discretion to approve exceptions when deemed justified.

Just three months after the law’s passage, the Spanish government exercised one of these exceptions to authorize transfers of defense and dual-use materials for four Airbus-led aeronautical projects, citing the projects’ significant industrial and export potential. The approved transfer included an anti-missile defense system produced by Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense manufacturer widely documented as complicit in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

Pozo explains that Israel’s core interest in trade with Spain is not selling finished weapons to Spanish buyers, but gaining access to Western markets that lower the cost of Israel’s domestic military production and sustain its long-term occupation of Palestinian territories. He added that Israeli defense firms also exploit loopholes in EU trade rules, which allow Spain to trade defense equipment via other EU member states and purchase Israeli weapons manufactured by EU-based Israeli subsidiaries. These transactions are not covered by the current embargo, and account for a large share of Israeli military-related activity in Spain. Many Israeli-designed weapons are produced in Spain by local subsidiaries of Israeli firms or by domestic Spanish manufacturers operating under Israeli production licenses.

To close these gaps, Pozo argues that policymakers must target the financial flows that directly or indirectly fund Israel’s war machine, rather than only regulating direct arms transfers. He calls for sanctions modeled after the sweeping comprehensive sanctions the EU imposed on Russia, which target all core Israeli economic and political interests.

Spain is far from alone in facing this contradiction between anti-Israel rhetoric and continued complicity in what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has termed the “economy of genocide.” Colombia, another leading critic of Israel’s actions, implemented a national ban on coal exports to Israel that took effect in August 2025. But after the ban went into effect, South Africa – which brought Israel’s case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and co-founded the Hague Group supporting Palestinian legal claims – stepped in to become Israel’s largest coal supplier.

South African Trade Minister Parks Tau has argued that imposing unilateral sanctions on Israel without formal multilateral UN backing violates World Trade Organization non-discrimination rules and exposes South Africa to costly international legal challenges. But Patrick Bond, director of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg, rejects this claim. He points to a July 2024 ICJ ruling, later upheld by the UN General Assembly, that explicitly requires all nations to end any form of complicity with Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. Bond argues this ruling creates a binding international legal obligation to restrict trade with Israel, and that South African authorities already have the legal authority to ban such exports under existing “dangerous exports” regulations – no new legislation is required. “The coal export ban could be implemented immediately,” Bond confirmed.

Even in Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro has spearheaded a regional push for sanctions against Israel, untangling long-standing military ties has proven far more complex than banning coal exports. In February 2024, Petro announced his government would end all new arms purchases from Israel and reduce bilateral military cooperation, but Colombian Defence Minister Ivan Velasquez later confirmed that all existing contracts would be honored, including maintenance for Colombia’s fleet of Israeli-built Kfir fighter jets. The Colombian Armed Forces also still rely heavily on the Israeli-made Galil rifle, which was used extensively by Israeli forces in Palestine and Lebanon, and was deployed to suppress left-wing insurgent groups during Colombia’s decades-long civil war.

To break these long-standing ties, Colombia signed a €3.1 billion contract with Swedish defense firm Saab in November 2025 to purchase 17 Gripen E/F fighter jets, which will replace the aging Kfir fleet by 2032. In May 2026, Petro also unveiled a domestically produced rifle to gradually replace the Galil, but the transition is expected to take five years to complete.

A shared vulnerability of both Spain and Colombia’s embargo policies is their vulnerability to reversal by future administrations. In Colombia, President-Elect Abelardo de la Espriella, who takes office in August 2026, has already publicly proposed expanding collaboration with Israeli defense industries. His commitment to expanding extractive mining also threatens to roll back Petro’s coal export ban, which was implemented via presidential decree and has not been enshrined in permanent national legislation.

In Spain, the embargo has greater formal legal standing as a properly enacted law, but it is still not immune to rollback. De Prada explains that a future administration with a parliamentary majority could substantially amend or fully repeal the embargo. It could also weaken the embargo in practice through broad interpretation of the “general national interests” clause that allows for frequent exceptions, or by simply reducing the rigor of regulatory enforcement.

Pozo confirms that if the center-right Partido Popular or far-right Vox win the 2027 national elections, they could easily eliminate the embargo entirely. This would likely be a symbolic political act rather than a response to domestic defense needs, as both parties have openly condemned Sanchez’s Gaza policy. Both parties voted against the embargo in October 2025, with Vox reiterating Israel’s claimed right to self-defense and accusing the Sanchez government of using the embargo as a smokescreen to distract from domestic corruption allegations.

Experts say Colombia’s incoming right-wing administration’s plan to rapidly reset ties with Israel serves as a clear warning to Spain’s current government. De Prada argues that sustained, long-term policy of holding Israel accountable requires far more robust regulatory measures than the current limited embargo. She told Middle East Eye: “Ultimately, the next step must be moving from a limited, reversible embargo to a comprehensive, permanent policy of non-cooperation, non-assistance, and non-recognition, supported by effective parliamentary oversight, administrative transparency, and full supply chain traceability.”

Until that shift occurs, the gap between symbolic political gestures and concrete action, and between public rhetoric and policy practice, remains unmistakeable.

In the final stretch of joyful wedding preparations for his daughter, 43-year-old Khalil al-Masri had every reason to smile. Less than two weeks before the ceremony, he traveled with his eldest son to Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood to finalize payment and confirm the reservation for his daughter’s dream wedding dress. With that task complete, the pair stopped at a nearby confectionery to mark the happy occasion, joining two friends for a seat at an outdoor table. What came next was a senseless, sudden tragedy: a live bullet tore through Masri’s skull, leaving him unconscious as his son and friends stared on in terror.

Rushed to Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for emergency care, Masri, a father of seven, succumbed to his fatal wound on June 14. His brother Mahmoud al-Masri described the jarring turn of fate in an interview with Middle East Eye. “It was a complete shock. He was very happy and laughing with his friends. He ordered a dessert, but the bullet penetrated his head before the order was served,” Mahmoud said. “The wedding was turned into a funeral.”

Captured on the sweet shop’s entrance surveillance footage, Masri’s killing is far from an isolated incident. The deadly shooting unfolded against a backdrop of steadily escalating Israeli fire targeting Palestinian civilians across multiple regions of the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, even as the event is framed as occurring under a ceasefire agreement. While the exact source of the bullet has not been officially confirmed, Mahmoud says the gunfire originated from the east, pointing to two likely sources: an Israeli surveillance quadcopter operating in the area minutes before the shooting, or an Israeli military “lifter” – a fortified watchtower fitted with heavy machine guns – positioned roughly 1.7 kilometers away in the contested Yellow Zone.

The Yellow Zone is an area Israel was required to withdraw from as part of the second phase of an earlier ceasefire deal, after occupying it in the agreement’s first stage. To date, Israel has refused to cede control of the territory, and now holds more than 60 percent of the entire Gaza Strip. Deployed at 23 separate locations across the eastern Gaza Yellow Zone, per data from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, these military lifters elevate weapons and surveillance hardware to extend visual range and enable open fire across large civilian-populated areas.

The same day Masri was killed, at least five more Palestinians were hit by Israeli fire in another central Gaza City neighborhood. Among them was 19-year-old university student Muhammed Abu Hassira, who was walking home from the gym along al-Wehda Street when Israeli forces opened fire. Just like Masri’s case, witnesses could not confirm whether the fatal shot came from a quadcopter or a military watchtower.

Khaled al-Tarshawi, Abu Hassira’s uncle, recounted the teen’s final moments to Middle East Eye. “Muhammed was on his way home from the gym at around 7pm, he was on al-Wehda Street when the Israeli occupation suddenly opened fire, hitting him and other pedestrians. He and four or five others collapsed to the ground,” al-Tarshawi said. “He was shot in the abdomen. People rushed to carry him and the other wounded to the hospital. He was transported on the seat of a wheelchair because there were no vehicles. Doctors tried to save him, but by the time he arrived, he had already lost a significant amount of blood.”

Abu Hassira had just wrapped up his second semester studying engineering at a Gaza university, having earned his high school diploma and enrolled despite the ongoing conflict. “He was intelligent, patient, and always devoted to his parents. His mother was devastated when she received the news, but his father was even more heartbroken. Muhammed was his eldest and most beloved son,” al-Tarshawi said. “Muhammed survived the devastating Israeli attacks throughout the two and a half years of the genocide and refused to leave Gaza City. He refused to evacuate to the south and managed to stay alive during the worst periods of the genocide. But he was killed during the ceasefire by a quadcopter or a lifter.”

Fatal Israeli fire has continued through all avenues of daily life in Gaza in the months following the October 2023 ceasefire agreement. In addition to watchtower sniper fire and quadcopter strikes, Israeli tanks and ground snipers deployed within the Yellow Zone have repeatedly opened fire on pedestrians and displaced families’ makeshift shelters in areas formally labeled “safe zones,” leaving dozens dead and injured over the past eight months.

Just 24 hours after the killings of Masri and Abu Hassira, 13-year-old Amir al-Bashiti was killed by an Israeli bullet inside his family’s displaced person tent in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. His father Emad al-Bashiti said the bullet, which likely came from an Israeli tank, struck the boy just moments after he came inside for the night. “It was around midnight and he was playing with his cousins and friends outside the tent. I called on him to come in and sleep and I wish I didn’t,” Emad said. “He came in carrying his blanket and told me ‘I want to tell you what happened’. At the time, there were sounds of Israeli tanks moving and some gunfire close to the camp. I told him to sit down and go to sleep because there were shootings. He insisted on telling me the story before he went to sleep.”

Before Amir could finish sharing his story, the explosive bullet tore through his head and exited his neck, killing him instantly in front of his entire family. “It wasn’t a normal bullet, it was an explosive one. I heard it explode after it penetrated his head,” Emad recalled. “He fell on the ground and vomited blood. I held his hand but he was unconscious. By the time I carried him and rushed outside to reach the hospital, he was already dead.” Amir and his family had been displaced from Rafah and had sought shelter in Khan Younis’ Batn al-Samin, a zone designated as safe for displaced people that now hosts tens of thousands of fleeing Palestinians.

In recent weeks, the targeting of Palestinian civilians has expanded far beyond the contested Yellow Zone, with deadly strikes hitting even areas marked as safe under the ceasefire framework. On a single Friday in June, one Palestinian child was killed and two members of the Totah family wounded when an Israeli quadcopter dropped an explosive on the group as they collected water east of Gaza City. Another Palestinian was killed by Israeli fire the same day east of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.

Official data confirms the scope of the ongoing bloodshed: since the ceasefire agreement took effect in October 2024, at least 1,072 Palestinians have been killed and 3,463 more injured across the Gaza Strip. Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed at least 73,098 people in Gaza, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

For families like the al-Bashitis, the term “ceasefire” bears no relation to the reality on the ground. “Whoever calls this a ceasefire is overlooking what is actually happening on the ground. It is not a ceasefire, it is continued fire,” Emad al-Bashiti said.

A cross-party coalition of more than 70 British members of Parliament and House of Lords peers has launched a formal call for the UK government to impose targeted sanctions on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Israeli justice official Yariv Levin, citing documented systemic abuse of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli government.

According to reporting from Sky News, the open letter dated last week, addressed to newly appointed UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, bears the signatures of 71 legislators from across the UK’s political spectrum. The campaign is led by sitting Labour MP Neil Duncan-Jordan, and already includes backing from 30 Labour MPs and seven Labour peers — a notable showing of dissent within the ruling party.

In the text of the letter, parliamentarians argue that direct responsibility for the widespread, systematically documented torture of Palestinian civilians rests at the highest level of the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Netanyahu personally implicated. The group is calling on Cooper to take immediate action to end what they describe as enduring impunity for senior Israeli leaders by imposing sanctions on both Netanyahu and Levin, who holds multiple senior government roles including deputy prime minister, justice minister and interior minister.

The letter notes that UK sanctions imposed last year on far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, while a welcome step, have failed to shift the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinian detainees. Lawmakers add that the situation has since escalated dramatically, with perpetrators of abuse acting with near-total immunity from accountability.

To back their claims, the letter cites a February 2024 United Nations report that concluded torture has become a core, institutionalized component of Israel’s occupation, inflicted systematically on Palestinian men, women and children through both in-custody abuse and a broader campaign of forced displacement, mass killing, systemic deprivation and destruction of critical infrastructure needed for daily life. It also highlights a recent controversial incident in which Netanyahu publicly praised the decision to dismiss military rape charges against Israeli soldiers accused of assaulting a Palestinian detainee.

Additionally, legislators point to the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla bound for Gaza by Israeli forces two months prior, during which multiple British citizens were detained while operating in international waters. Along with Labour signatories, the letter draws support from members of the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party, and one Conservative Member of Parliament, demonstrating rare cross-party consensus on the need for tougher action against Israeli leaders.

In response to the letter, a spokesperson for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office acknowledged the severity of the allegations, telling Sky News that “the reports of mistreatment of detainees by Israeli forces are disgraceful and we have raised this issue with the Israeli government.” The spokesperson added that all detainees are required to be treated humanely in line with the requirements of international law, and that all credible allegations of torture and abuse must be subject to full, impartial investigation. The UK, they confirmed, continues to pressure the Israeli government to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross immediate and unfettered access to all Israeli detention facilities, and called the prolonged detention of hundreds of Palestinian children without charge “completely unacceptable.”

The latest call for accountability aligns with mounting international scrutiny of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian detainees. In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, presented a report to the UN Human Rights Council describing Israel’s prison system as “a laboratory of calculated cruelty,” documenting extreme abuses including the sexual assault of Palestinian detainees with bottles, metal rods and knives.

Since Israel launched its large-scale military operation in Gaza in October 2023, more than 100 Palestinian detainees have been confirmed dead in Israeli custody, independent monitors report. Analysts widely view this number as a significant undercount, with the actual death toll believed to be far higher. This pressure comes after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, charging both with war crimes and crimes against humanity stemming from actions in Gaza since the start of the current conflict.

Twenty-five-year-old Inam Ahmad’s strained, flickering gaze behind thick glasses is a permanent, visible marker of the irreversible harm pellet guns have inflicted on countless civilian lives in Indian-administered Kashmir. In 2017, at just 16 years old, not long after passing his matriculation exams, Ahmad was struck by dozens of pellets fired by Indian armed forces outside his Srinagar home. The shrapnel became embedded in his skull, neck, and behind his eyes, robbing him of 80 percent of his vision. “Every day I live with pain when the pellets shift or heat up,” he explained. “They never let me forget I will never be normal again.”

Ahmad’s mother Fahmeeda Jan holds a faded childhood photo of her son: a grinning three-year-old in a green tracksuit, clinging to his younger sister’s hand, bright eyes looking up toward the camera. Full of energy before the shooting, her son’s life and the entire family’s future was upended by the injury. After multiple rounds of surgery, crippling medical debt that drained their savings, and the abrupt end to Ahmad’s education, the constant unrelenting pain often pushes Ahmad to breaking point. “He gets so fed up that he pulls his hair in frustration, becomes aggressive, and says he wants to end his life,” Jan shared. Desperate to restore her son’s sight, she once offered to donate one of her own eyes during a trip for treatment outside Kashmir, but doctors told her such a transplant was medically impossible. “Only those who this weapon has hit truly know what it is,” she says.

Originally designed for bird hunting, pellet shotguns fire hundreds of small metal fragments over a wide, scattered area, making precise targeting impossible. Indian authorities introduced the weapons to Kashmir in 2010 as a so-called “non-lethal crowd control tool” following widespread anti-India protests. But this official classification has been repeatedly challenged by global human rights and medical bodies. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has labeled pellet guns “one of the most dangerous weapons used in Kashmir”, and a 2020 UN guideline on less-lethal law enforcement weapons explicitly states: “Metal pellets, including those discharged by shotguns, should never be used.” Amnesty International has similarly condemned the weapon, noting that “injuries and deaths caused by this cruel weapon bear testimony to how dangerous, inaccurate and indiscriminate it is.” While the weapon is banned for hunting in many countries, official Indian data from 2018 recorded 6,221 people wounded by pellets between July 2016 and March 2017 alone, and no comprehensive full count of casualties has ever been released.

Ahmad’s story is far from unique. In 2016, 14-year-old Insha Mushtaq was struck by pellets while standing by the window of her family home in Shopian district, resulting in permanent blindness and lifelong facial disfigurement. Just two years later in the same district, 18-month-old Hiba Nisar – the youngest recorded pellet victim – was hit while sitting in her mother’s lap. For thousands of survivors like these, the harm is permanent: pellets remain lodged in soft tissue and bone, causing chronic pain and permanent disability for decades.

It is against this backdrop of ongoing collective trauma that a 144-second teaser for the upcoming Bollywood film *Chauhaan* has ignited widespread anger and condemnation across Kashmir and among human rights observers. The film, starring A-list actor Ajay Devgn and backed by major production houses Colour Yellow Productions and Jio Studios – owned by Reliance Industries, a conglomerate led by billionaire Mukesh Ambani long tied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its right-wing Hindutva agenda – claims in its promotional material that pellet guns inflict only “limited damage” on protesters. In the teaser, Devgn’s voiceover argues that India’s current pellet gun use for crowd control is actually too restrained, calling for harsher measures against unrest in the region. Scheduled for a October 2025 theatrical release, the film is set against the backdrop of the decades-long Kashmir conflict, split between India, Pakistan and China, with early footage showing stone-pelting protests, pellet injuries, and paramilitary operations, pointing to a politically charged narrative aligned with the ruling party’s position.

Critics say the teaser’s claim of “limited damage” is a grotesque trivialization of a humanitarian crisis that has left thousands permanently blinded or maimed across the region. *Chauhaan* is not an isolated case: for years, activists and locals have decried a pattern of Bollywood films set in Kashmir that advance Hindutva ideology, whitewash civilian suffering, and misrepresent the region’s history. Recent high-profile releases including *Uri: The Surgical Strike*, *Shikara*, *The Kashmir Files*, and *Article 370* all drew massive backlash for framing Kashmiri Muslims as terrorists, altering historical events to align with the ruling party’s narrative, and celebrating the 2019 unilateral revocation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, a move endorsed personally by Modi. Author and Kashmir scholar Mirza Waheed argues that the *Chauhaan* trailer reflects a dangerous shift in Indian public life. “Instead of asking what life is really like for a young person permanently blinded by these weapons, what happens to their dreams and their families, the film explicitly calls for even more severe and lethal tactics,” Waheed explained. He calls this trend a symptom of India’s “post-truth, anti-history” political environment, where “such mendacious narratives seek to subvert Kashmir’s recent history, painting the victims in a completely dehumanized light and the perpetrators as virtuous, heroic.”

Aga Ruhullah Mehdi, a Kashmiri parliamentarian with the opposition National Conference, described the teaser as deeply disturbing for anyone who has lived through pellet gun violence in the region. “What they call ‘ineffective’ left behind thousands of shattered lives,” he wrote. “For those who lost their eyesight, those who still live with pellets lodged in their bodies, and the families who continue to bear those scars, this is not an action sequence or a cinematic backdrop. It is a lived trauma.” Mehdi added that mainstream Indian cinema has repeatedly reduced Kashmir to a setting for conflict-framed narratives that reinforce harmful stereotypes, noting that “Kashmir deserves empathy, honesty and dignity – not the commercialization of its pain.”

Scholar and author Dr. Niharika Pandit, whose work examines the impact of widespread militarization in Kashmir, says that since 2014, when Modi’s BJP first took national power, Bollywood has increasingly functioned as a public relations arm for the ruling party. “Earlier Hindi cinema used to project Kashmiris as ethereal, but without any agency; the latest batch of movies has turned far more explicitly propagandist,” Pandit explained. “They peddle the narrative that everything is normal in Kashmir, justify the government’s decisions like the abrogation of Article 370, and further erase Kashmiri histories and lived realities. This is epistemic violence: first you inflict widespread bodily harm that cripples young Kashmiris, then you pretend it never happened or frame it as necessary for national security.” Kashmiri academic Dr. Mohamad Junaid, who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, adds that Hindi cinema has long followed a pattern of exoticizing Kashmir’s landscape while demonizing its people. “The violence we see on screen is a natural outcome of that dynamic. Hindi cinema is just reflecting what the Hindu right-wing has done to India’s public sphere,” he noted.

For survivors like Inam Ahmad, the controversy over the teaser is not just an abstract political debate – it is a fresh reopening of a wound that never heals. The damage from that 2017 shooting was never limited. It is a daily reality he and thousands of other Kashmiris will live with for the rest of their lives.