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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.

On September 3, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court issued a landmark ruling striking down the preventive detention order against 30-something Kashmiri research scholar Shafat Maqbool Wani, establishing a critical legal precedent that mere ownership of texts with politically charged or controversial titles cannot be classified as a criminal act, nor can it justify extrajudicial detention. Presiding Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi explicitly stated in her written judgment that “owning books with grim, provocative titles does not make their owner a criminal by default”, concluding that local administrative authorities had failed to produce any verifiable evidence of specific subversive activity that would legally warrant Wani’s detention under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) – a sweeping regional statute that permits administrative bodies to hold individuals without formal trial for up to two years in the name of state security.

The sequence of events leading to Wani’s detention stretches back months: Wani, a resident of the northern Kupwara district of Kashmir, was first arrested under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), India’s flagship anti-terrorism legislation. A special National Investigation Agency court based in Jammu eventually granted him formal bail in that UAPA case, but on September 13, 2025 – the exact day he was set to be released – the Kupwara district magistrate issued a new detention order under the PSA, claiming Wani’s unspecified activities posed a threat “detrimental to state security”. The four formal grounds cited for the PSA detention included tangential references to his father’s alleged past association with a 1990s militant outfit before his formal surrender, invitations Wani had received to present original academic research at Columbia University in the U.S. and Dublin City University in Ireland, the pending UAPA case against him, and a cache of printed materials seized from his family home that authorities labelled “anti-national”. Among the seized texts were two volumes: *Construction of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination* and *The Saffronisation of Occupied Kashmir: Demystifying Hindutva Settlers, Colonial Designers*, which police had incorrectly attributed to Wani as his own authorship – a factual error the High Court explicitly noted in its ruling.

The judicial intervention in Wani’s case unfolds against a rapidly shifting political backdrop in Indian-administered Kashmir, dating back to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s 2019 unilateral abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian constitution, the legal provision that previously granted the region semi-autonomous special status. In the years following that move, the region has undergone sweeping administrative overhauls, including the implementation of new domicile laws that widespread critics across the region and global human rights groups decry as a deliberate “settler-colonial project” engineered to dismantle the region’s longstanding Muslim demographic majority. For local residents, the post-2019 era has brought steadily eroded civil liberties, with routine criminalisation of even peaceful dissent: journalists, academics and independent activists face waves of arbitrary detentions, sweeping blanket book bans, widespread withholding of passports for ordinary citizens, and a pervasive architecture of continuous state surveillance that permeates nearly every sphere of public life. Most recently, the BJP-appointed leadership of the Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board – the state body tasked with overseeing the region’s Islamic shrines and mosques – issued a controversial directive mandating identical, uniform Friday sermon scripts for every mosque across the territory, a move that sparked widespread public outcry from religious leaders and worshippers alike.

Wani’s successful court challenge arrives at a moment of deepening alarm among regional academics, legal practitioners and human rights organisations over the accelerating erosion of intellectual life across Kashmir, as state security frameworks increasingly frame critical thinking and independent scholarly inquiry as inherent national security threats. Dozens of members of the region’s small, tight-knit academic community warn that years of arbitrary detentions targeting writers and researchers have already created a pervasive chilling effect, reshaping what topics scholars dare to explore, what texts they choose to publish, and even what ideas they discuss in public spaces. A 40-something Kashmiri fiction writer based in Srinagar, who requested full anonymity to avoid state reprisals, explained the stifling atmosphere: “When books are banned en masse, and people are locked up just on the unproven assumption that they hold anti-national views, you can imagine the pressure on every writer. Many of us are struggling to produce work at all, some have stopped writing entirely, and the rest only produce content that we know will not upset the authorities. You will not find a single critical, unflinching story in local media anymore – only content that the state deems acceptable. There is no remaining space for independent critical thought.”

This crackdown on intellectual output has escalated sharply over the past 18 months. In 2024, regional authorities issued a formal blanket ban on the publication, sale and circulation of 25 prominent titles focused on Kashmir, alleging the works propagated “false narratives” and advocated for secession from India. The banned list included titles from globally celebrated scholars and award-winning journalists, including Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani, Victoria Schofield, Hafsa Kanjwal, Ather Zia and Anuradha Bhasin, with some of the suppressed volumes published by internationally respected academic presses including Cambridge University Press. The accompanying official directive ordered every school, college, university and public library in the region to conduct full audits of their collections to remove any material deemed to contain “objectionable content”.

The book screening drive intensified in July 2025, when authorities launched a territory-wide mass filtering of holdings across Kashmir’s most prominent libraries and higher education institutions, claiming stored texts included content that glorified leaders associated with the Kashmiri self-determination movement. All educational institutions received formal orders to conduct line-by-line vetting of every book, peer-reviewed journal, student dissertation, doctoral thesis and even digital educational resources on their servers, to “prevent any activity prejudicial to the sovereignty and security of the nation”. Current university students confirmed to independent outlet Middle East Eye that institutions now enforce strict mandates requiring all seminar topics to be pre-approved by administrations, all guest speakers to be vetted by state security officials, and syllabi to be systematically scrubbed of critical political science and literature content that addresses the region’s decades-long conflict or its unvarnished modern history.

In a September address to the local legislative assembly, Jammu and Kashmir’s education minister Sakina Itoo confirmed that authorities had already removed 4,249 books from public, school and college library shelves, and sent an additional 1,752 titles for formal “expert review” after completing initial screenings of more than 2.18 million total books across the region. Independent legislator Sheikh Khurshid, who first raised questions about the mass book removals in the assembly, told reporters in Srinagar that the untransparent removal of titles amounts to a deliberate effort to erase the region’s distinct collective history. “We have never been given a full, public list of exactly which books have been pulled from circulation, and that irony is impossible to miss,” Khurshid noted. “Banning books runs directly contrary to the government’s repeated public claims that full freedom of expression is enjoyed by every resident in Jammu and Kashmir.”

Leading global scholars of Kashmiri studies have framed the broader crackdown as a direct threat to the foundational values of open, democratic societies. Mohamad Junaid, an assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, emphasised that academic freedom is inextricably tied to freedom of conscience, the core pillar of all modern liberal, tolerant societies. “The absence of that freedom signals that a society has drifted sharply in the opposite, illiberal direction,” Junaid explained. “The right to pursue unfiltered academic inquiry benefits every member of society, even when the sitting government finds its conclusions inconvenient. Blocking critical academic work blinds an entire population to its own flaws and systemic injustices. In these recent high-profile cases, what is at stake is not just the right to conduct independent research – it is the fundamental question of whether Kashmiris are even permitted to produce their own knowledge about their communities and their lived realities.”

Ather Zia, an associate professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado whose own work appears on the 2024 banned book list, noted that nearly every dimension of daily life for Kashmiri residents has grown exponentially more restrictive in recent years. “When books are reclassified as contraband, especially for researchers whose entire work depends on broad, unimpeded access to diverse ideas and critical inquiry, that tells you far more about the nature of the state itself than it does about the content of the texts,” Zia argued.

Even the region’s elected chief minister Omar Abdullah has publicly acknowledged his own powerlessness to intervene in the book ban policies, noting that the elected local government’s formal governing powers have been drastically curtailed under current administrative rules. “I hold my own personal views on whether banning books is ever justified, but unfortunately under the current system, the elected local government has no authority to make decisions on these matters,” Abdullah told reporters in September, adding that his administration would “take a fresh look at what is happening” to pursue potential future reforms.

Goldie Osuri, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, argued that Wani’s detention case is irrefutable evidence that no meaningful academic freedom remains in Indian-administered Kashmir. “When mere possession of academic or literary material is cited as a legitimate justification for detention, it is undeniable that a state willing to use preventive detention to punish people on that basis is engaging in textbook fascism,” Osuri stated. “We already know 25 landmark books on Kashmir were banned on August 5, 2025. Even though the Jammu and Kashmir High Court ultimately quashed Wani’s detention, the fact that state authorities described his academic materials as holding ‘dispiriting titles’ reveals the deeply hostile attitude both the state and local legal system hold toward independent critical research. Laws like UAPA and PSA are not counter-terror tools – they are designed to intimidate academics, journalists and ordinary citizens into silence. Wani was held for more than a year under the PSA, a deliberate signal to every other resident that any independent research, journalism or creative writing that deviates from official state narratives will be met with severe punitive consequences. Preventive detention in Kashmir no longer bears any connection to conventional justice – it is a political weapon, deployed explicitly to silence even the faintest hint of criticism or dissent against the state. In Wani’s case, nothing more than the possession of academic reading material was treated as sufficient grounds to lock him away without trial.”