Three items for your "must read" : September 14, 2025

Important articles.  Please try and find the time to access the links and read them in their entirety.

 

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/09/12/charlie-kirk-netanyahu-israel-assassination/

Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals

Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil·September 12, 2025

A Trump insider and longtime friend of Charlie Kirk tells The Grayzone how the assassinated conservative leader’s turning point on Israeli influence provoked a private backlash from Netanyahu’s allies that left him angry and afraid.

The source said anxiety spread within the Trump administration after an apparent Israeli spying operation was uncovered.

Charlie Kirk rejected an offer earlier this year from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) organization, America’s largest conservative youth association, according to a longtime friend of the slain commentator speaking on the condition of anonymity. The source told The Grayzone that the late pro-Trump influencer believed Netanyahu was trying to cow him into silence as he began to publicly question Israel’s overwhelming influence in Washington and demanded more space to criticize it. 

In the weeks leading up to his September 10 assassination, Kirk had come to loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a “bully,” the source said. Kirk was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.

According to Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle, Kirk strongly warned Trump last June against bombing Iran on Israel’s behalf. “Charlie was the only person who did that,” they said, recalling how Trump “barked at him” in response and angrily shut down the conversation. The source believes the incident confirmed in Kirk’s mind that the president of the United States had fallen under the control of a malign foreign power, and was leading his own country into a series of disastrous conflicts....................................................

 

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https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-disengagement-2005-genocide/ 

How Israel’s Gaza ‘disengagement’ planted the seeds of today’s genocide

Enraged by the 2005 withdrawal, the national-religious camp worked to brand territorial concession as a disaster — with ethnic cleansing as the only solution.

By Daniel Levy September 10, 2025

  

In August 2005, when Israel implemented its “unilateral disengagement plan” in Gaza, it came as a rude jolt to the settler movement. The plan entailed the removal of 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and an additional four in the northern West Bank, with a total of approximately 9,000 settlers relocated. The atmosphere in the country at the time felt as if a tipping point had been reached: it was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a stalwart of the Israeli right, who ordered the withdrawal of the Israeli military and illegal settlements from occupied Palestinian territory.

Twenty years later, how Israel conducted the withdrawal of its settlements from Gaza — and subsequently narrated the fallout — can be understood as a critical juncture in the demise of the two-state paradigm. It was also a harbinger of what is now replacing it: not just separating from the Palestinians, relegated to shrinking Bantustans, but annihilating and erasing them.

In the decade after the withdrawal, Israel’s right-wing national-religious camp, with Likud at the helm, succeeded in deeply embedding the idea that a withdrawal of settlements could never be repeated. This presaged the dominance since October 7 of what were long considered extreme positions, where Israeli officials openly advocate for the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that was left unfinished in the original Nakba of 1948. And after the Hamas-led attacks, it was the national-religious camp that was the quickest to recalibrate and identify a moment of opportunity........

 

...............After October 7, only one narrative resonated widely in Israel, from the extremes of the fringe hilltop youth all the way up to the military establishment: whatever was done to Palestinians, they had brought upon themselves. Take former army intelligence chief Aharon Haliva’s claim that killing 50,000 Palestinians, including children, was “necessary,” or then-army chief of staff Herzi Halevi’s promise to his wife on the morning of the attacks that “Gaza will be destroyed.”............

 

.................Center-left politicians made no attempt to argue that Hamas, having participated in elections, could and should be integrated into the political process, as had happened with countless armed resistance movements in liberation struggles throughout history. Nor did they push back against the siege and blockade of Gaza, the collective punishment of the civilian population, or the multiple rounds of destruction and killing that preceded October 2023. Indeed, when erstwhile Israeli (so-called) opposition leader Benny Gantz launched his political career in December 2018, he sought legitimacy by highlighting his own mass killing exploits in Gaza. .....

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https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2025/gunshot-palestine-children-israel-war~v1819649/

Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted. This emerges from research by de Volkskrant, which spoke with the doctors who are among the last international eyewitnesses.

Door Maud Effting en Willem Feenstra

13 september 2025, 05:00 

 

........... It is March 2024, and this is his first day. A Palestinian nurse is guiding him through the hospital. Then, suddenly, his gaze lands on two young boys lying utterly still in their beds. They look no older than eight or ten, he estimates. Their heads are swathed in bandages. They are on ventilators. The rest of their bodies are intact.

“What happened?,” he asks.

The nurse barely speaks English. But she points to their heads. “Shot, shot,” she says.

At first, Sidhwa assumes she’s mistaken. Are they shooting at children? Minutes later, looking at the scans, he sees she was right.

When they step into a second room, they find two more boys, in the same condition.

“I thought: what the hell?” he says over the phone to de Volkskrant, his deep voice steady. “How is it possible that, in this small hospital, four children are lying here with gunshot wounds to the head — all admitted within the past 48 hours?”

The four boys are all slowly dying. That evening, Sidhwa makes a note in the diary on his phone. But there’s no time to reflect. Not yet.

In the thirteen days that follow, he sees nine more children with single gunshot wounds to the head or chest — children who were likely shot deliberately. “I started to wonder if my hospital was near some crazy sniper,” Sidhwa says. “Or a drone team killing children just for fun.”

Back home, at a medical conference, Sidhwa meets an American colleague who had worked in another hospital in Gaza just before him. When Sidhwa brings up the children, the man nods. “To my surprise, he said: ‘Yeah, I saw that too — almost every day.’’”

The doctor in question, Thaer Ahmad, confirmed this account to de Volkskrant.

“That was the moment,” Sidhwa says, “when I decided: I have to find out what’s really happening here.”...........

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