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Closed-door diplomatic negotiations between senior Lebanese and Israeli representatives, convened this week at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, wrapped up without any substantive progress on core outstanding disputes, independent regional news outlet The New Arab confirmed Thursday via anonymous sources close to the talks.
Held under U.S. auspices, the latest round of discussions unfolded against a backdrop of sustained Israeli military operations across Lebanese territory throughout the current month, including targeted airstrikes and deliberate home demolitions in the southern districts of Nabatieh, Bint Jbeil, and Sidon. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the proceedings reported that Israeli negotiating teams took uncompromising, rigid stances across all agenda items, while Lebanese delegates maintained a firm, non-negotiable position that all security and de-escalation measures between the two nations must follow a fully reciprocal framework.
Notably, the U.S.-funded Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has formally rejected any proposal for direct military-to-military coordination with Israeli counterparts, pushing instead for a neutral third-party verification system administered jointly by the United Nations and key international partners including France.
The current cross-border conflict traces its origins to October 2023, when Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel triggered widespread regional unrest, prompting near-continuous Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese territory. A November 2024 ceasefire negotiated by the outgoing Biden administration failed to meaningfully reduce Israeli military activity, as Israeli officials insisted their operations were necessary to target Hezbollah leadership and alleged weapons stockpiles across Lebanon, including sites located in the capital Beirut.
A dramatic escalation of Israeli military actions materialized earlier this year, when Israel launched a full-scale ground invasion and seized control of large swathes of southern and eastern Lebanese territory. The pace of violence accelerated further after the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated military operations against Iran on February 28, a move that prompted Hezbollah to launch defensive strikes on Israeli targets in support of its Iranian ally. Since that date, Israeli military actions in Lebanon have killed over 4,300 Lebanese civilians and combatants alike, and displaced more than 1 million people across the country.
A core top priority for Lebanese negotiating teams throughout all recent talks has been securing a binding, clear timeline for the safe return of all internally displaced Lebanese people to their homes, a demand that has seen zero actionable progress since the U.S.-brokered trilateral framework was formally agreed to by Lebanese, Israeli, and U.S. representatives in June of this year. That landmark framework followed five prior rounds of talks hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington, culminating in a widely publicized, billed-as-historic signing ceremony on June 26. At the event, Rubio characterized the agreement as merely “the beginning of the beginning” of a longer peace process, and announced two separate U.S. funding commitments: $100 million in humanitarian assistance to be distributed in coordination with the United Nations for conflict-affected communities, with no explicit clarification on whether the funds would serve only Lebanese populations or also cover northern Israeli border towns, plus an additional $30 million in reimbursements for the Lebanese Armed Forces earmarked by the Trump administration.
The 26 June framework established a U.S.-facilitated Military Coordination Group for Lebanon, but the so-called “pilot zones” from which Israel had pledged to withdraw its troops to allow the LAF to assume full security control have not been expanded in any capacity since July. Israeli officials have justified the frozen withdrawal process by claiming the LAF lacks the operational capacity to disarm Hezbollah fighters operating in the region.
Critically, Hezbollah — the U.S.-designated terrorist group that serves as the most powerful armed faction in Lebanon, with military capabilities vastly exceeding those of the U.S.-backed LAF — was excluded entirely from the formal negotiation track. Formed in the 1980s to resist Israel’s longstanding illegal occupation of Lebanese territory, Hezbollah has refused to engage in direct bilateral talks with Israel, though unconfirmed reports indicate the group has maintained discrete backchannel communications with the Trump administration. Hezbollah leadership has repeatedly stated it will not agree to any disarmament measures as long as Israel continues to pose an active military threat to Lebanese sovereignty, especially amid growing public rhetoric from Israeli policymakers openly discussing plans to formally expand Israel’s national borders northward into Lebanese territory.

Following a deadly Friday gun skirmish in the illegally occupied West Bank that left two Palestinians dead and at least five Israeli soldiers wounded, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued immediate directives to the Israel Defense Forces to enforce a full lockdown on the city of Hebron, and to mobilize forces in preparation for a territory-wide full lockdown across the occupied West Bank. The announcement came shortly after Netanyahu convened an emergency security cabinet session alongside his senior military advisory team, after which he released a public social media statement blaming the Palestinian political and military faction Hamas for orchestrating the deadly exchange, claiming the group was plotting a large-scale offensive targeting innocent civilian populations. While Netanyahu asserted that security forces had uncovered substantial caches of weapons and ammunition in the aftermath of the clash, he declined to share specific details corroborating the alleged planned major attack. Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who arrived at the scene of the shooting shortly after the violence unfolded, issued even more aggressive public remarks, stating that a sweeping full-scale military operation modeled after past campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon would soon be launched across the occupied West Bank, which he referred to by the settler-facing nomenclature “Judea and Samaria” to target individuals he labeled as terrorists. Smotrich went further to publicly call for the full dismantling of the Palestinian Authority, the semi-autonomous governing body for parts of the occupied territories, and announced that orders to demolish Palestinian residential structures in the vicinity of Friday’s clash would be executed within one hour, with additional demolition operations set to continue through the rest of the day. In response to the Israeli government’s sweeping new punitive measures, Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative, condemned the planned territory-wide West Bank closure as a blatant act of collective punishment that violates longstanding international humanitarian law. Barghouti warned that Netanyahu’s administration was laying the groundwork for ethnic cleansing of entire residential neighborhoods in Hebron, framing the policy shift as a dangerous, unprecedented escalation of Israel’s long-running forced displacement campaigns against Palestinian communities, and urged the global community to intervene immediately to hold Israeli officials accountable and prevent mass displacement. Yariv Oppenheimer, a former director of the anti-settlement group Peace Now and current project director at the Geneva Institute, echoed these concerns in an interview with Al-Jazeera, noting that the already volatile occupied West Bank, which has seen surging settler violence and near-daily Israeli Defense Force incursions into Palestinian communities for months, was on the brink of far greater unrest. Oppenheimer argued that Israeli political leaders were exploiting the fatal gun battle as a public justification to ramp up military control over Palestinian population centers, predicting a wave of punitive actions including widespread home demolitions, extended curfews, mass arbitrary arrests by IDF troops, and revenge attacks by extremist Israeli settler factions that would push the region into far deeper crisis.

As Israel prepares for its upcoming Tuesday parliamentary vote, the race has once again orbited almost entirely around the polarizing figure of long-time premier Benjamin Netanyahu, rather than the widespread societal reckoning many anticipated would follow the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led incursion and the subsequent 18 months of devastating military operations in Gaza. While the two landmark events have undeniably shaped the electoral landscape, their influence is filtered almost exclusively through public scrutiny of Netanyahu’s decision-making: questions over what advance warnings of the October 7 attack he received, his handling of the subsequent conflict, and the fates of remaining Israeli captives still held in Gaza. Observers note that most Israeli voters appear to have already locked in their positions weeks ahead of polling day, with Netanyahu’s base rallying to his side either in spite of the October 7 security failures and Gaza campaign, or explicitly because of his hardline response to the attacks. This pre-determined partisan alignment has created an unusually subdued electoral environment, a stark contrast to the mass street mobilizations that swept the country less than two years prior, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested Netanyahu’s highly contested judicial overhaul that threatened to weaken the country’s supreme court. Further widespread demonstrations erupted in the early months of the Gaza war, as families of hostages and their supporters criticized Netanyahu for prioritizing military objectives over negotiated efforts to secure captive releases. Against that backdrop, many political analysts initially predicted Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc would face a crushing defeat at the polls, and that public tensions would reach a boiling point in the lead-up to voting. Instead, no large-scale protest movements have emerged in recent months, even as Netanyahu’s personal political standing has weakened significantly: projections show his long-ruling Likud party is on track to lose 10 to 15 Knesset seats, roughly one-third of its current parliamentary representation. For all his individual vulnerabilities, however, the broader right-wing ideological current among Israeli voters remains deeply entrenched. Three distinct far-right parties running explicit platforms that call for the mass deportation of Palestinian residents are projected to win a combined 20 seats, equivalent to one-sixth of the total 120-seat Knesset. The country’s fragmented opposition, by contrast, lacks a unified, cohesive governing platform, with the only shared priorities across disparate opposition factions being two narrow demands: that Netanyahu be removed from office, and that the country’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish population be required to serve mandatory military service, a longstanding point of public controversy. Many of the parties running in the nominal opposition camp hold firmly right-wing policy positions themselves, including former Netanyahu allies Naftali Bennett, head of the Together party, and Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Israel Is Our Home faction, both of whom previously served as defence ministers under Netanyahu’s premiership. Even Gabi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defence Forces chief of staff widely framed in international media as the centrist, moderate challenger who can unseat Netanyahu, has run on a noticeably hardline domestic platform: he has publicly pledged to expand existing Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, and his electoral list includes multiple current and former settlers who openly supported Netanyahu’s 2023 judicial reform push. While Eisenkot previously floated the possibility of including Arab-Israeli political parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel in a future governing coalition, he has since walked back that position after facing fierce backlash from key political allies. The dual-faced messaging strategy he has deployed, projecting a relatively liberal, moderate persona for international audiences while positioning himself as a tough security-focused leader for domestic Israeli voters, has left many constituents unclear on his actual governing priorities. Bennett and Lieberman, meanwhile, have sought to court centrist and even left-leaning voters despite their long records of openly anti-Palestinian rhetoric, unwavering support for settlement expansion, and aggressive foreign policy stances. Most strikingly, almost no candidates across the entire electoral spectrum have held substantive public debates about Israel’s long-term strategic trajectory, or proposed clear policies to address the overlapping crises unfolding in Gaza, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank, and with Iran. No major opposition party has laid out a roadmap for a long-term political settlement in Gaza, or outlined plans to advance the second phase of the 2024 temporary ceasefire agreement. None have put forward concrete frameworks to curb the surge of violent settler attacks against Palestinian communities in the West Bank, or to rebuild functional working relations with the Palestinian Authority. Some analysts warn that a narrow Eisenkot election victory could even embolden extremist settler factions, who have spent years building up heavily armed local militias with deep ties to rank-and-file IDF personnel deployed across the West Bank. While Eisenkot has pledged to roll back the controversial annexation-adjacent policies implemented by current far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, and reassert formal military control over settlement zones, even long-time conservative Israeli political commentators have acknowledged that the Israeli army has already effectively lost operational control over large swathes of the West Bank to settler groups. Many security experts fear that settler factions will launch widespread, coordinated acts of civil disobedience and targeted violence against Palestinian communities to undermine any incoming Eisenkot government that attempts to restrict their autonomy, in a scenario widely described as a looming settler rebellion. One potential, though deeply controversial, compromise path for Eisenkot to defuse this far-right pressure would be to form a national unity power-sharing government with Netanyahu, similar to the disastrous 2020 rotating premiership deal Netanyahu struck with former rival Benny Gantz. Such an arrangement would be deeply unpopular with Eisenkot’s core anti-Netanyahu voter base, and Netanyahu would almost certainly refuse any power-sharing deal that did not grant him full governing primacy. Even so, the unusual arrangement could neutralize the most radical elements of the far-right bloc, and exclude hardline leaders like Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir from senior ministerial positions. The final shape of the next Israeli government will ultimately hinge on how close Netanyahu’s existing current coalition can come to the 61-seat Knesset majority threshold. Current aggregate public opinion polls show Netanyahu’s existing allied factions sitting at roughly 51 seats, but if he can narrow that gap to near the 61-seat mark, political analysts warn he stands a strong chance of poaching enough right-wing lawmakers from rival opposition parties to retain the premiership for another term.

A shocking act of gun violence unfolded on Friday inside a church in Jordan’s Karak governorate, where two armed assailants opened fire and fatally shot no fewer than seven people, per verified reports from multiple local Jordanian media outlets. Al-Mamlaka, Jordan’s official public broadcaster, cited an on-the-record source confirming the attack unfolded amid a crowded funeral procession taking place at the Hammoud Church, a gathering that drew a large number of local community members in attendance to mourn a deceased loved one. A civilian eyewitness who was present at the scene recounted to Al-Mamlaka that the two suspects arrived at the church premises via a private vehicle before storming the site and discharging their weapons nonstop for approximately five minutes, before fleeing the location immediately after the rampage. The witness further estimated that between 150 and 200 people were gathered both inside the church building and in its surrounding outdoor areas at the moment the shooting broke out, noting that the vast majority of the deceased victims fell within the 50 to 70 age demographic. In addition to the seven confirmed fatalities, at least 10 other attendees sustained gunshot wounds, with several of those injured listed in critical, life-threatening condition as of initial medical updates. Jordanian national security agencies have formally launched a full-scale investigation into the unprecedented attack, and officials confirmed in an official public statement that they have not yet successfully identified the two gunmen who carried out the assault, as an active manhunt across the Karak region is underway to apprehend the suspects. The incident marks a rare outbreak of targeted violent extremism targeting a religious gathering in the traditionally stable Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which has long maintained tight security protocols to prevent such public mass casualty events.

For three Palestinian siblings in Gaza, a nomadic, unmoored routine now defines every stretch of their young lives: 16-year-old Mariam, 14-year-old Aya, and 12-year-old Jebril Abu Asser rotate between the makeshift tents of their maternal aunts, staying exactly two nights at each relative’s shelter before moving on. This uncertain pattern began just weeks after the October 2025 ceasefire took effect, when an Israeli bomb struck the temporary Deir al-Balah tent where the children had been taking refuge with their mother, Islam, killing her instantly as the three watched. The siblings’ history of loss stretches back far earlier: their father was killed during Israel’s 2014 military offensive on Gaza, and their original Gaza City home was completely destroyed in the large-scale Israeli military campaign that launched in October 2023. Jebril, the youngest, was curled in his mother’s lap when the ordnance hit, sustaining injuries of his own alongside the unshakable trauma of witnessing her death. The three siblings are far from isolated cases. Official data from Gaza’s Ministry of Social Development confirms that since the 2023 military campaign began, a staggering 54,468 Gazan children have lost at least one parent, with thousands more joining that tally in the months following the 2025 ceasefire. The two aunts who share care of the Abu Asser children are already navigating their own crippling hardship: both are widowed, their husbands killed in the same ongoing military campaign, and each is already struggling to feed their own biological children without stable employment or consistent income. Family member Warda al-Muzeini, one of the widowed aunts caring for the orphans, explained to Middle East Eye that the children split their time between their paternal grandmother’s tent and the small shelters of their three maternal aunts, with no permanent, stable home to call their own. The three sisters pool their limited resources to support the five extra children in their care, taking turns purchasing clothing, small essentials, and tiny amounts of pocket money whenever they can scrape together the funds. Official aggregated figures paint a grim picture of widespread bereavement across the Gaza Strip: the territory is now home to a minimum of 64,000 widows and 71,000 orphaned children, a count that includes people who lost loved ones in the 2023 conflict as well as survivors of earlier Israeli military operations in the enclave. Roughly 3,000 of these orphaned children have no registered legal guardian, custodian, or caregiver of any kind, leaving them entirely adrift amid the widespread devastation. Aziza al-Kahlout, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Ministry of Social Development, warned that these cold statistics fail to capture the unrelenting daily trauma facing bereaved children and widowed women. For orphaned children, the loss of a parent is not just an emotional blow: it robs them of safety, access to education, and the very chance to experience a normal childhood, forcing many to take on backbreaking adult responsibilities long before they are emotionally or physically ready. Widowed women, meanwhile, carry a crippling double burden: they must act as their family’s sole breadwinner while also raising their children amid shattered infrastructure, widespread food insecurity, and a total lack of basic public services. Kahlout flagged that worsening economic collapse and the absence of adequate shelter are driving a sharp, deeply worrying spike in child labour, school dropouts, and underage early marriages among vulnerable orphaned populations. For a small subset of these orphaned children, the grief carries an extra, isolating cruelty: they are the sole surviving members of their entire immediate family, left to process the total erasure of their loved ones with no one to share their memories or their pain. Thirteen-year-old Wafaa al-Attar is one of these survivors. In February 2024, when she was just 10 years old, Wafaa stepped out of her family’s Deir al-Balah apartment to charge her father’s dead mobile phone at her uncle’s nearby home, where solar power was still available. Seconds before she stepped through her uncle’s door, a massive Israeli air strike levelled the multi-storey building where her entire family had been sheltering, killing her parents and her four younger siblings – the youngest of whom was only nine months old. Wafaa sustained minor shrapnel wounds in the blast, and spent hours in the local hospital before her uncle broke the devastating news that no member of her immediate family had survived. For months after the attack, Wafaa struggled to process the magnitude of her loss, repeatedly wishing she had stayed inside the home so she could have died alongside her family rather than living on alone. Though she eventually found refuge with her uncle and his growing family, who offered her steady emotional support and encouraged her to stay strong, she says the empty space left by her murdered relatives can never be filled. “No one could ever replace my own family,” she told Middle East Eye, still carrying the quiet, unshakable weight of losing every person she once loved in a single, unthinkable instant.

Following a deadly early-morning shooting attack at a northern Hebron checkpoint on Friday that left five Israeli service members injured, two of them in critical condition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has directed national security teams to finalize contingency plans for a territory-wide full lockdown of the occupied West Bank. The incident unfolded when two Palestinian assailants, later identified by Israeli media as members of the same local Hebron family, opened fire on deployed Israeli troops, triggering a 20-minute intense exchange of gunfire that ended when Israeli forces fatally shot both attackers. Immediately after the security assessment convened in the wake of the assault, Netanyahu formally ordered the immediate full closure of Hebron alongside the accelerated rollout of preparatory measures for a sweeping West Bank-wide movement restriction. The Israeli Defense Forces confirmed they have established a complete military cordon around Hebron, and launched what they describe as proactive counterterrorism operations across the surrounding area. Parallel to these deployments, Palestinian local media reported that Israeli military units conducted incursions into the neighboring city of Dura, south of Hebron, where troops shot and wounded at least one Palestinian civilian and detained multiple other residents during house-to-house raids. Further controversy erupted after the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs confirmed that Israeli forces had sealed off the UNESCO-listed Ibrahimi Mosque, a designated endangered Palestinian World Heritage Site, forcibly evicting all on-site religious staff and custodians. The ministry issued a sharp condemnation of the move, labeling it a blatant, sustained violation of the sanctity of Islamic holy sites and the fundamental right to freedom of worship explicitly enshrined in international humanitarian law and conventions. The mosque, which has faced a steadily tightening array of Israeli restrictions in recent months including periodic bans on Muslim worshipper access, limits on the public call to prayer, and state-enabled incursions by Israeli settlers, has long been a flashpoint for religious and geopolitical friction in the region. Israeli army chief of staff Eyal Zamir characterized Friday’s shooting as a severe security breach, noting that the quick action of responding troops had neutralized the two attackers before they could carry out a far deadlier large-scale assault. Hardline far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet immediately leveraged the attack to push for unprecedented escalations in West Bank policy: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir posted on social platform X that the incident vindicates his four-year long campaign within the Israeli cabinet to fully dismantle the Palestinian Authority, arguing that Palestinian residents’ right to free movement is subordinate to Israeli citizens’ safety and security. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed the demand, referring to the West Bank by its biblical Israeli names “Judea and Samaria” as he called for a full, large-scale military campaign mirroring operations conducted in Gaza and southern Lebanon, with stated goals of dismantling the PA, seizing all unregistered weapons across the territory, and eliminating all suspected armed militant operatives.

For years, rallies hosted by far-right factions across Brazil have been defined by a familiar visual mosaic: the U.S. Stars and Stripes, Israeli blue-and-white flags, and a wide assortment of Donald Trump-themed memorabilia, matching patterns seen at similar far-right gatherings across every corner of the globe. But at a major late-October 2026 campaign rally for Flavio Bolsonaro — the 45-year-old son of Brazil’s imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro — organisers made a striking, uncharacteristic request of attendees: they asked all supporters to stow away flags representing foreign nations, leaving the iconic bright yellow of Brazil’s national Selecao football jersey to flood the eight lanes of Sao Paulo’s iconic Avenida Paulista, turning the entire thoroughfare into a sea of national pride.
This rally served as a high-profile showcase for two rising stars of the Bolsonaro-aligned far-right movement: 29-year-old Nikolas Ferreira and 20-something Lucas Pavanato, two self-described “right-wing Christian” legislators who each secured more than 3 million votes for seats in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies earlier that month, marking the highest individual vote totals for any legislative candidate in Brazilian history. The pair, who together accounted for nearly 30 percent of their party’s total congressional vote share and drove massive legislative gains for the Bolsonarista movement, have built massive, millions-strong social media followings by leaning into deliberate, provocative controversy, with unwavering pro-Israel advocacy as a core pillar of their viral political brand. In May 2025, Pavanato publicly framed Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as fully “justified, warranted and retaliatory violence”, and the following month staged a high-profile confrontation at the University of Sao Paulo where he waved an Israeli flag directly at left-leaning students, generating tens of millions of views across Instagram and YouTube that he later admitted were far more engagement-driving than any detailed discussion of public policy.
Flavio Bolsonaro, who has received a public endorsement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to face 80-year-old incumbent leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the 2026 presidential runoff, and he currently holds a narrow lead in public polling and is the clear favourite in global political betting markets. A win for Bolsonaro would extend a dramatic, region-wide political realignment that has unfolded in just 18 short months: if he defeats Lula, pro-Israel, far-right governments will hold power in every Latin American nation except five: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba and Uruguay.
This sweeping shift represents a total reversal of the political landscape that existed as recently as July 2025, when 30 nations gathered in Bogota, Colombia, as part of the Hague Group — an international coalition formed to coordinate legal and diplomatic solidarity with Palestine. Thirteen of those states signed on to six immediate binding measures that targeted military exports to Israel and cut all forms of state support for Israeli occupation and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Then-Colombian president Gustavo Petro, a prominent leftist leader, declared at the time that the bloc would “end the era of impunity” for Israeli actions, vowing that Colombian coal would never be turned into weapons to kill Palestinian children in Gaza, and warning that without collective regional action, the U.S. would use a divide-and-conquer strategy to reassert total control over Latin American affairs.
Petro’s aspirations for a unified, sovereign Latin American bloc aligned with Palestinian rights never came to fruition. By October 2025, conservative candidate Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia’s national presidential election, immediately restoring full diplomatic ties with Israel and formally withdrawing his country from the Hague Group. A month later, Nasry Asfura — a Trump-backed construction magnate and outspoken Christian Zionist — won a hotly contested presidential race in Honduras, and accepted the Israeli ambassador’s official credentials mere minutes after his inauguration before pulling Honduras out of the Hague Group as well. The dominoes kept falling: in Colombia’s 2026 summer election, Abelardo de la Espriella — a far-right U.S. citizen and registered Republican explicitly favoured by both Trump and Netanyahu — defeated Petro’s chosen successor Ivan Cepeda. De la Espriella’s first actions in office included withdrawing Colombia from the Hague Group, lifting Petro’s ban on coal exports to Israel, formally recognising Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, and moving Colombia’s Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Even Venezuela, in the aftermath of Nicolas Maduro’s forced abduction, saw acting president Delcy Rodriguez implement directives relayed via WhatsApp from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to resume oil exports to Israel, restore full consular ties, and welcome an Israeli military mission to the country in the wake of devastating June 2026 earthquakes. The late Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, had fully severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 to protest its assault on Gaza, but Netanyahu publicly praised a visiting Israeli delegation to Caracas for “rebuilding ruins and rebuilding relations” with the nation.
Across the region, the U.S. and Israel have leveraged the fast-growing political power of evangelical Christian communities, a demographic that is rapidly expanding across Brazil and skews overwhelmingly to the political right, with major Pentecostal churches issuing public endorsements of Flavio Bolsonaro and polling showing massive evangelical support for his campaign, even as a June 2025 Pew Research study found that 52 percent of the general Brazilian public holds a negative view of Israel, compared to just 33 percent with a positive view. Netanyahu’s former ambassador to Brazil Yossi Shelley later recalled that the Israeli prime minister had long told him “the evangelicals are the key” to expanding Israeli influence across Latin America. In Colombia, Raul Rubio — the national representative for the Jewish National Fund — even invoked the biblical Genesis promise that “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” at a campaign rally for de la Espriella, pledging he would fully restore Colombia’s ties to Israel if elected.
This sweeping regional shift has been explicitly enabled by the U.S. government, which formalised the “Trump Corollary” to the historic Monroe Doctrine in its December 2025 National Security Strategy, a policy that has seen Washington seize operational control of Venezuela’s oil reserves, openly intervene in national elections across Argentina, Colombia and Honduras, conduct deadly operations targeting civilians in small boats across the Caribbean and Pacific, impose punitive tariffs on Brazil, and drastically escalate its decades-long economic blockade of Cuba. Trump has openly boasted of these efforts, declaring publicly that “We’re doing very well in South America, Latin America; we’re doing very well” after his administration helped install a string of allied far-right leaders across the region. The U.S. has also deployed a sprawling network of political consultants and tech operations to drive these electoral wins: Argentine strategist Fernando Cerimedo, known as “MAGA’s man in Latin America”, was honoured at a 2026 award ceremony at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he thanked former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale for providing him access to sophisticated voter targeting technology. Cerimedo, who is currently in pre-trial detention in Bolivia over alleged ties to a shooting that injured his former partner Nadia Beller, has an unbroken track record of securing far-right election wins across the region dating back to Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 Brazilian victory, including Javier Milei’s 2023 Argentine win, and he claims to operate a network of more than 50,000 automated social media accounts that have amplified false, widely debunked claims that Lula stole the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. Parscale’s firm Clock Tower X is formally registered under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act for work on behalf of the State of Israel, and has received at least $15 million in public funding to run public communications and digital media operations for Israel, with a disclosed monthly digital advertising budget of $4.5 million.
The U.S.-Israeli influence operation has also been aided by major social media platforms, most notably Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. Days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the platform’s third-party fact-checking program and rolled back a wide range of content moderation restrictions, while publicly pledging to collaborate with the Trump administration to push back against global efforts to regulate big tech. Lula’s 2026 campaign has accused Meta of repeatedly restricting its official communications while granting preferential treatment to Flavio Bolsonaro’s campaign, with a 21-page internal campaign document documenting dozens of incidents: in September 2026, Lula’s main advertising account was suspended 11 days before the first round of voting, and in early October, the campaign was locked out of paying for new Instagram promoted posts for nearly 24 hours, while internal Meta records show that the platform’s algorithms repeatedly recommended Flavio Bolsonaro’s WhatsApp channel to users, and refused to generate AI images featuring the Lula campaign’s official “Lula 13” branding while readily generating equivalent content for Flavio’s “Flavio 22” branding. Meta has attributed all of these incidents to unconnected technical failures, but the platform has earned more than $55 million in Brazilian electoral advertising revenue during the 2026 cycle, making it the single largest recipient of campaign spending. Researchers at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro’s NetLab also uncovered more than 1,600 political advertisements run on Meta’s platforms from July to September 2026 that were purchased from the U.S. by opaque, unaccountable pages, in direct violation of Brazilian electoral laws that ban foreign spending on domestic political campaigns.
As voters head to the polls for the 2026 runoff, Lula has framed the election as a fundamental choice between “sovereignty or submission” for Brazil. While the region’s rapid shift toward pro-U.S., pro-Israel far-right rule has erased most of the 2025 Hague Group’s collective power, Petro’s 2025 declaration in Bogota remains a defining marker of the political stakes: “Today’s barbarism will be defeated if Palestine is free.”

A cascading food crisis is unfolding across the besieged Gaza Strip, where the vast majority of remaining commercial bakeries have ceased operations in recent days after Israeli authorities blocked all incoming wheat flour shipments for 10 consecutive days, Palestinian official sources confirm.
Gaza’s Ministry of Social Development issued an urgent public alert on Thursday, cautioning that sustained blockades on flour and critical bakery operating supplies risk sparking an immediate, large-scale humanitarian catastrophe that would directly impact hundreds of thousands of civilian residents. Abdel Nasser al-Ajrami, who leads Gaza’s Bakery Owners Association, detailed that 10 out of the territory’s 17 previously operational commercial bakeries have already shuttered permanently due to total depletion of commercial flour stockpiles, with the remaining 7 facilities at imminent risk of closure unless emergency supply convoys are granted immediate entry. For days, Gaza residents have been forced to wait in multi-hour outdoor queues just to secure small portions of bread, a staple food that has grown increasingly scarce across the territory.
In its formal public statement, the Ministry of Social Development called for urgent global intervention to end what it characterized as Israel’s deliberate, systematic policy of starvation, framing the deliberate weaponization of food supplies against unarmed, civilian populations as a violation of core international humanitarian law. Officials warned that the ongoing blockade will rapidly trigger widespread famine and the total collapse of food security for the territory’s vast displaced population and lowest-income households, with rates of acute malnutrition already climbing sharply among vulnerable groups including young children, chronically ill patients, and elderly residents. The ministry explicitly implored the broader international community to abandon its longstanding silence on the Gaza crisis and uphold its binding moral and humanitarian obligations to prevent the territory from sliding into a full-blown famine event.
The wave of bakery closures arrives just days after the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced it would be forced to discontinue food assistance for more than 500,000 Palestinian residents in Gaza, a decision driven entirely by catastrophic shortfalls in operational funding. Al-Ajrami noted that the 21 WFP-supported bakeries still operating across the territory only produce enough bread to cover 25% of the Gaza Strip’s total population demand, leaving a massive unmet gap for staple food access.
The latest supply disruptions trace back to October 14, when Israeli authorities announced a total suspension of all commercial shipments entering Gaza, citing an unsubstantiated claim of a tax dispute between local Gaza merchants and the Hamas-led governing authority – a allegation that both Hamas leadership and Palestinian import associations immediately and categorically rejected. Israeli officials initially stated they would lift the full commercial shipment ban just five days after its implementation, but Palestinian administrative records confirm sweeping, arbitrary restrictions on all food and essential supply movements have remained fully in place ever since.
These sustained supply limitations stand in direct violation of the October 2025 ceasefire agreement that was negotiated to end the devastating 2023-2025 war on Gaza, under which Israel formally committed to end all aerial bombardment of the territory and permit a minimum of 600 fully loaded aid trucks to cross into Gaza every 24 hours. Since the ceasefire was signed, Israeli forces have repeatedly breached the terms of the deal via near-daily military strikes that have killed more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians, including 350 children. The total confirmed death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza from Israeli military operations since the conflict began in October 2023 now exceeds 74,500. Israeli authorities have also maintained harsh, sweeping constraints on both aid shipments and commercial goods movements following the ceasefire’s signing, with an average of only 200 trucks granted entry per day – less than a third of the 600-truck daily volume promised under the negotiated agreement.
Joint data compiled by the United Nations and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirms that 1.4 million people, roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s total remaining population, are currently facing acute food insecurity at crisis levels or worse, with an additional 200,000 residents enduring emergency-grade food insecurity that puts them at immediate, life-threatening risk of starvation.