Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

In April 2025, a Dutch government official organised a networking event for Israeli investors in Tel Aviv. More than 50,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister and Defence Minister. She put the photographs on LinkedIn.

Six months later, she left the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) and joined Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), a fund built from the alumni network of Unit 8200, Israel’s military signals intelligence unit, whose flagship exit ran through a no-employee Dutch shell company and ended in a $25 billion acquisition. Nobody wrote about it.

Three weeks after she signed her contract at JVP, the Netherlands signed Pax Silica.

IMAGE: Buildings lie in ruin, following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, January 21. (Siurce: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas)

There is more. The Dutch company that serves as European headquarters for Israel’s state-owned arms manufacturer lists a London address that has been closed and unused for years. The Israeli minister banned from entering the Netherlands in July 2025 for inciting ethnic cleansing has kept full control of that state arms company’s weapons factories across Germany, the United Kingdom, and Spain, through a The Hague letterbox with no employees. And on June 23, 2026, the Netherlands and Israel co-signed a Joint Statement on AI Opportunity inside a US State Department summit, a joint political commitment to the future of artificial intelligence, five months after a Dutch court found a grave risk that Israel is committing genocide.

None of that has been reported before now. What follows is how it connects.

Forty-One Days

On November 6, 2025, the Hague Court of Appeal handed down a ruling that should have changed everything. The case was brought by Al-Haq and a coalition of human rights organisations against the Dutch state. The court found what it called a “grave risk” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, confirmed the Netherlands’ binding obligations under the Genocide Convention to take all available measures to prevent it, and issued ruling ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2025:2290 into the public record.

Forty-one days later, the Netherlands joined Pax Silica, and Israel was already inside.

Pax Silica is the United States government’s flagship initiative on artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor supply chain security, launched by Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg at a Washington summit on December 12, 2025. Israel was one of the seven founding signatories. Five days after that founding summit, on December 17, the Netherlands signed on as a partner.

READ MORE: Pax Silica Hands the Philippines to Israel’s AI Empire

On June 23, 2026, Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma flew to Washington and formalised the Netherlands’ full membership at the Second Pax Silica Summit, signing in front of Helberg. Sjoerdsma told reporters: “The Netherlands plays a unique, leading role in the global chip industry. Pax Silica presents opportunities for the Dutch economy and will strengthen the Netherlands’ trading position.”

IMAGE: Dutch Foreign Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma signs the Netherlands into Pax Silica, Washington D.C., June 23, 2026 (Source: IO+)

Hours later, the European Commission signed the same declaration on behalf of all 27 European Union (EU) member states. The Commission had not been a founding member. The Netherlands had been inside since December, positioning  ASML, its nationally strategic chip equipment monopoly, at the centre of an alliance structure that was waiting for Europe to follow. Europe followed.

On X, Helberg announced the Dutch accession with language worth keeping:

Today, the Kingdom of the Netherlands joins the Pax Silica Initiative as our 16th partner.

We are deciding who we trust to build our chips, power our AI, and secure the technologies that will define the future. The Netherlands is a global leader in advanced and emerging… pic.twitter.com/fPYJJJS3fn

— Under Secretary of State Jacob S. Helberg (@UnderSecE) June 23, 2026

The Netherlands is the home of ASML, the only company on earth that manufactures extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, the devices without which no advanced semiconductor can be produced. Every significant chipmaker on earth, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung, and Intel, depends on ASML.

IMAGE: A High NA EUV tool is seen before the attachment of its top module as it is assembled at ASML’s headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands, November 14, 2023. (Source: ASML/Michel de Heer/Handout via REUTERS) 

By signing Pax Silica, the Dutch government placed that monopoly inside an alliance that designates Israel a “trusted technology partner.” The same alliance published the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity at the June summit, signed by both the Netherlands and Israel, committing all signatories to a shared philosophy of AI governance, “promoting a pro-innovation and pro-growth approach to AI” while “emphasising secure AI supply chains.” The Netherlands and Israel have now co-signed, in a US State Department document, a joint political statement on the future of artificial intelligence. The Hague Court of Appeal ruling sits six months behind it.

What Was Already Built

In 2024, Israeli companies sent €44.9 billion into the Netherlands, more than half of all Israeli foreign direct investment globally, nearly four times what went to the United States. The Netherlands invested €27.3 billion into Israel, making it the second-largest external investor in the Israeli economy after only the US. Roughly two-thirds of all European investment into Israel passes through the Netherlands first. The Dutch Central Bank‘s own language suggests the country is one through which corporations “channel large sums of money” for “legal and tax reasons.” The Tax Justice Network ranks it seventh-worst in the world for enabling corporate tax abuse.

A new five-part investigation by SOMO, the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, published June 30, 2026, calls this “flag-swapping capital”, and the term is precise. Israeli investment does not pass through the Netherlands as its identity of origin is replaced with a Dutch one that comes with access to 75 bilateral investment treaties, a participation exemption shielding dividend income from taxation, no withholding taxes on cross-border interest or royalty payments, and private advance tax rulings negotiated by the Dutch Tax Authority behind closed doors. The Tax Justice Network calls these the “crown jewels” of corporate tax avoidance. The NFIA lists them on its website.

The Dutch state built this. When Israeli chemicals conglomerate ICL was choosing where to put its European headquarters in 2014, Prime Minister Rutte made personal calls. The NFIA wrote to ICL’s chief executive officer (CEO) and told him to open negotiations with the Dutch Tax Authority, which would show him “how favorable a ruling would be in your case.” The NFIA offered to pay half of ICL’s KPMG consulting fees. The ruling “met the expectations of ICL.” The company opened in Amsterdam in 2015. Dutch bilateral investment treaties have since been invoked in 106 known investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases globally, generating claims totalling $105 billion, of which arbitration tribunals have awarded $18.2 billion in compensation, 71 percent of cases filed by letterbox companies created purely to access the treaty network.

IMAGE: PostNL Dutch postal service, automatic package pickup and delivery point locker system. 24 7 accessible lockers for packages and mail (Source: Alamy Contributor, Harry Wedzinga)

Any Dutch government that attempts to freeze Israeli assets or cancel the bilateral tax treaty risks billions in arbitration claims from companies that purchased Dutch corporate nationality by routing investments through Dutch shells. The legal architecture was designed to make itself expensive to dismantle.

The Woman Who Ran the Tel Aviv Office

Jacqueline Bouscher was Area Director and Head of the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA) Tel Aviv office from January 2021 until September 2025, on the Dutch government payroll, inside the Dutch Embassy compound, under the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The April 2025 investor event she organised was not unusual. In fact, it was the job, four and a half years of it.

IMAGE: Dutch Embassy Tel Aviv (Source: The Siasat Daily)

In September 2025, she left the NFIA and joined Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) as Head of Business Development Europe. What isn’t trivial is the fact that JVP co-founded the Unit 8200 alumni accelerator with Israel’s Ministry of Economy. In January 2017, it signed a formal cybersecurity partnership with the Dutch state; Crown Prince Constantijn attended in his capacity as Special Envoy for StartupDelta, alongside the Hague Security Delta (HSD) and KPN Ventures, to “create and nurture a cybersecurity ecosystem involving Israel, the Netherlands, and New York.” JVP’s flagship investment was CyberArk, backed from a $120 million company into a $25 billion acquisition completed by Palo Alto Networks in February 2026.

IMAGE: The 2017 signing of the JVP–Hague Security Delta cybersecurity partnership, attended by Crown Prince Constantijn of Holland, that linked Dutch state security infrastructure to Israeli military intelligence alumni networks (Source: HSD Foundation)

Palo Alto Networks routes its Israeli operations through a Dutch holding shell, Palo Alto Networks (Holding) B.V., with no employees and $522 million in assets. Between 2017 and 2019, that shell issued three interest-free loans to the Israeli subsidiary totalling $485 million. In 2023, it moved $704 million in cash through the same structure to fund the acquisition of two Israeli cybersecurity startups. In March 2026, a Palo Alto Networks partnership won Israel’s largest network security contract, “critical network infrastructure” for an undisclosed “major Israeli customer“, worth up to new Israeli shekels (NIS) 500 million.

The company was founded by Nir Zuk, who ran software development for Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit whose AI-assisted targeting systems helped identify bombing sites in Gaza and whose mass surveillance operations against Palestinians The Guardian documented in 2025. That same year, Microsoft terminated the Israeli military’s access to its core technology specifically over Unit 8200’s surveillance programme.

Bouscher spent four and a half years recruiting Israeli companies to the Netherlands on behalf of the Dutch state. She then joined the venture capital firm whose flagship exit was absorbed by a company using a Dutch shell to finance Israeli military cybersecurity acquisitions. The 2017 Dutch-JVP partnership her future employer signed with a Crown prince in the room helped build the investment corridor that made the $25 billion deal possible. None of this required any arrangement. It is just how the system works when nobody decides it should stop.

The picture that emerges from her own public record is not of a Dutch civil servant who happened to work on Israel. It is of someone personally rooted in Tel Aviv, fluent in Hebrew, who moved through the Dutch state’s foreign investment infrastructure and used it to open European corporate doors for Israeli companies, before returning, for what she describes as personal reasons, to Jerusalem Venture Partners: a firm whose founder chaired the Knesset’s Cybersecurity Taskforce, whose portfolio includes a company founded by a former Shin Bet director, and which has partnered with Unit 8200, Israel’s military intelligence corps. The NFIA never asked who that infrastructure was really serving. Perhaps it should have.

IMAGE: Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence corps — whose alumni built the cybersecurity industry, and whose AI targeting systems were used to identify bombing sites in Gaza. (Source: NoonPost)

From 2020 to 2025, Bouscher served simultaneously as Vice Consul of the Netherlands in Tel Aviv and Head of the NFIA office based inside the Dutch Embassy, the same office officially mandated to recruit Israeli companies, on a confidential basis, into Dutch corporate structures.

The Security Delta source is undeniably one of the most revealing links, as it confirms JVP, Prince Constantijn, and the Hague Security Delta (HSD) all in one room three years before Bouscher took over the NFIA Tel Aviv post, which fed directly into the same pipeline.

The Letterbox with a London Address That No Longer Functions

In The Hague, there is a company called ERCAS B.V. Zero employees. Registered director listed at 1st Floor Gallery Court, 28 Arcadia Avenue, London, an address Declassified UK found to have been closed and unused for years. It publishes almost nothing under Dutch law, classified as a “small company.” It holds £181.2 million in assets. It is the European headquarters of  Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, one of Israel’s three largest weapons companies, and the man on the UK Companies House filing as its active director is Yoram Aldo Aron.

IMAGE: Rafael Iron Dome (Source: Portail Aviation)

Before Rafael, Aron spent nine years at Elbit Systems building thermal imaging and targeting equipment. He moved to CONTROP Precision Technologies, an Israeli manufacturer of electro-optical surveillance systems, leading European and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marketing. In July 2022, he was appointed Managing Director of Rafael in the United Kingdom (UK) and simultaneously appointed director of ERCAS B.V. He sits on the board of Pearson Engineering, Rafael’s UK subsidiary, alongside Lord John Hutton, former British Defence Secretary, who joined the board weeks after Rafael acquired Pearson for £100 million.

Through ERCAS B.V., Rafael runs arms manufacturing across three European countries. Dynamit Nobel Defense in Germany recorded €146 million in 2024 revenue, making missile launchers and vehicle protection systems for the German military and NATO partners. Pearson Engineering makes countermine and improvised explosive device defeat systems for US and allied armoured forces, what the company calls “decades of support to the US Army and US Marine Corps.” PAP Tecnos is the primary weapons supplier to the Spanish Armed Forces; the Spanish government suspended its €285 million anti-tank missile contract with PAP Tecnos in 2025 over Rafael’s Israeli connections.

Rafael is wholly owned by the Israeli state, under the authority of the Ministry of Finance. Since 2022, Bezalel Smotrich has run the ministry. In July 2025, the Dutch government declared Smotrich persona non grata, his statements, in the government’s own language, “incited settler violence and called for ethnic cleansing.”

IMAGE: Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister. Declared persona non grata by the Dutch government in July 2025. His ministry’s arms company transferred €129 million through a Hague letterbox to his treasury the same year (Source: NBC News)

ERCAS B.V. kept its registration in The Hague. The vehicle through which Smotrich’s ministry controls arms manufacturing in Germany, the UK, and Spain, directed by a man registered at a defunct London address, kept operating without interruption.

Rafael transferred approximately €129 million in net profit to the Israeli state treasury in 2024, routed through that letterbox, to the government whose military campaign the Dutch court found carries a grave risk of constituting genocide.

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest publicly traded arms company, runs the same playbook through two Dutch micro-companies, namely, Truley Investment B.V. and Talla-Com Wireless B.V, both registered at corporate service provider addresses and required to disclose almost nothing. Their Romanian subsidiary ELMET is Romania’s largest military exporter. Their German subsidiary makes the EuroPULS rocket artillery system, already sold to the Dutch, German, and Greek militaries. Europe is Elbit’s largest market outside Israel at $2.1 billion in annual sales. The Dutch shells are what qualifies Elbit as a European company in European procurement.

Fort Foundry One

On January 16, 2026, ten weeks after the Dutch genocide ruling, one month after the Netherlands joined Pax Silica, the United States and Israel signed a memorandum of understanding to build “Fort Foundry One,” a chip manufacturing and AI megapark on 16,000 dunams in either the Negev or the Gaza Envelope, the ring of Israeli territory bordering Gaza. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed by Brigadier General Erez Askal, chief of Israel’s National AI Headquarters, and Jacob Helberg, the same man who would stand next to Sjoerdsma in Washington five months later. The United States took a 99-year lease on the land. American technology companies will operate on Israeli sovereign territory under a framework Helberg’s own office described as serving national security.

IMAGE: Brig.-Gen. (Res.) Erez Eskel, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee at signing of joint AI statement
(Source: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM via Israel Prime Minister Office)

Also within the Pax Silica framework, we find Nebius, a Dutch company based in Amsterdam, a Yandex spin-off incorporated in the Netherlands, selected by the Israeli government to build Israel’s national AI supercomputer infrastructure. The project is worth €138 million, one-third directly funded by the Israeli state. Israel’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology called it “an investment in national security.” Amnesty International has called on all states to stop supplying Israel with AI and cloud infrastructure supporting its military apparatus. The Dutch company kept building.

The Second Pax Silica Summit also launched “Foundry School,” a workforce development programme run in partnership with Stanford University, an advanced manufacturing and AI supply chain curriculum that Pax Silica member states are expected to adopt and deliver in their own educational institutions. The Dutch and Israeli university students who will study it have not been told what the programme was built inside of.

The Pension Funds, the App, the Prosecutors

Three of the Netherlands’ five largest pension funds, ABP, PFZW, and Bpfbouw, held investments in companies the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council listed for “risking complicity in human rights violations” in Gaza as of mid-2025. ABP, the civil servants’ fund with €533 billion under management, held €674 million across those UN-listed companies while over 2,000 of its own participants had written personally to demand divestment. Dutch financial institutions collectively held $78.6 billion in companies contributing to occupation and genocide as of November 2025, according to the annual “Don’t Buy Into Occupation” report by a European and Palestinian non-governmental organisation (NGO) coalition.

IMAGE: Pro-Palestinian protesters gather at Museumplein ahead of a 6 km march through the city as part of a protest demanding a tougher stance from the Dutch government against Israel’s war in Gaza, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 5, 2025. (Source: REUTERS/Charlotte Van Campenhout)

Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, has been under a criminal complaint since November 2023, accused by SOMO and a coalition of civil society organisations of laundering profits from Israeli war crimes by listing rental properties in illegal settlements. East Jerusalem alone went from 13 to 39 Booking.com listings in the year following the complaint’s filing. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service sat on it. As of April 2026, SOMO and its partners were going to court to force the prosecutors to make a decision.

The Dutch Foreign Minister sent a letter to Brussels in May 2025 calling for a formal Article 2 review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the human rights clause. The EU found Israel in breach. The Dutch parliament voted in April 2026 to push for suspension of the trade component. The Dutch government called itself a leading voice for accountability in Gaza. The NFIA office in Tel Aviv remained open through all of it. The pension funds held, the prosecutors did not move, and  Sjoerdsma flew to Washington.

The Sequence

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Dutch foreign direct investment (FDI) to and from Russia collapsed. The same letterbox infrastructure that had processed Russian capital became hostile to it practically overnight. When the Dutch state decides capital should stop moving, it stops.

The full sequence for the record:

November 6, 2025, Hague Court of Appeal, genocide ruling, ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2025:2290. December 12, 2025 Pax Silica founding summit, Israel a founding signatory. December 17, 2025, the Netherlands joins as partner. January 16, 2026, Helberg and Brigadier General Askal sign the Fort Foundry One MOU in southern Israel. June 23, 2026, Sjoerdsma signs the full Pax Silica declaration in Washington. Netherlands and Israel both sign the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity. European Commission signs the same declaration for all 27 EU member states. June 30, 2026,  SOMO publishes the Netherlands-Israel Investment Files.

The Pax Silica membership list is also a political map. Germany, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands are in. France, Spain, which suspended the Rafael missile contract, Ireland, and Belgium are not. The countries that are in are mostly the countries that kept selling weapons, kept hosting shells, kept the tap open. The countries that are out are mostly the ones that at some point tried to close it.

READ MORE: The Quiet Operational Architecture Behind U.S.-Israel Integration (and Pax Silica)

Sjoerdsma was in Washington lobbying against the Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act (MATCH Act), a US legislation that would give Washington the power to force ASML to stop maintaining machines already sold to China, on the same day he signed the document designating Israel a trusted technology partner. He flew there to argue about the terms of inclusion while signing the inclusion. Israel was never a term being negotiated. Israel was the fixed point.

IMAGE: The second Pax Silica summit, Washington, June 2026. The banner says everything they chose not to (Source: Agenzia Nova) 

The party in Tel Aviv in April 2025 was the system in public, government badges, LinkedIn photographs, the NFIA logo, a room full of Israeli investors who understood exactly what the Netherlands was offering and what it would keep offering. Bouscher ran it. Then she went to work for JVP. Then the Netherlands signed Pax Silica. Then the European Commission signed behind it. Then the Joint Statement on AI Opportunity went into the State Department record with Dutch and Israeli names on it. Then SOMO published its files. Then Helberg posted on X that without the Netherlands, there is no cutting-edge AI.

He was not wrong about that. He just did not mention what the cutting edge is for.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

The private colonial administrative board that claims authority over Gaza’s future, banks with JPMorgan, and whose architect, Tony Blair, refuses to explain.

This investigation is about a body whose legal personality remains contested, whose accountability framework remains opaque, and whose money has been routed through a private JPMorgan Chase account outside the official World Bank fund created for Gaza reconstruction. The Board of Peace was announced by Donald Trump in January 2026 as the vehicle for Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Tony Blair among its founding executive members. What emerges from official filings, leaked governance drafts, congressional hearing records, financial reporting, and testimony from former insiders is not simply a reconstruction body, but an attempt to privatise the governance architecture of Gaza’s future.

The timing of this story is critical because the contracts have not yet been awarded, the official World Bank fund has received no donor money, and several of the people involved in designing or executing the system sit at the intersection of government, finance, technology, Gulf capital, and post-war reconstruction planning.

IMAGE: The Board of Peace convened its inaugural meeting on Thursday, February 19, 2026 at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace in Washington (Source: boardofpeace.org)

The name “Board of Peace” does not necessarily refer to some peace mechanism. The entity will be best characterized as a financial, legal, and political architecture for governing 2.3 million Palestinians through a structure Palestinians did not elect, that member-state parliaments did not ratify, and that no court or auditor has yet clearly shown it can compel.

The Mandate Returns

The piece that sparked this investigation was published by Follow the Money, which reported that Tony Blair had become “Trump’s Gaza salesman in Europe,” using his institute and his contacts to lobby European policymakers into joining the Board of Peace. That reporting was important, but the framing understates the story. Blair is not merely the salesman. He is one of the architects of the governance model that European officials were later asked to legitimise.

IMAGE: League Of Nations – Mandate For Palestine with 1933 Motor map of Palestine, Survey of Palestine in the background (Source: Created by Author via UN and Wikimedia)

According to reporting cited by IRIS, Blair sat down in Abu Dhabi in late 2023 with Jared Kushner, Israeli minister Ron Dermer, and Mohamed Dahlan, the UAE-backed Palestinian exile long discussed as a possible post-Hamas power broker. Over the following months, Blair’s circle developed a governance proposal known as the Gaza International Transitional Authority, or GITA. On September 17, 2025, the Times of Israel reported that the proposal would seek a UN mandate to act as Gaza’s “supreme political and legal authority” during a transitional period.

Twelve days later, Trump’s 20-point plan stated that Gaza would be governed by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” under the supervision of a new international body chaired by Trump and including Blair. That is enough to say the Trump plan closely echoed Blair’s architecture. It is not enough, on the present public record, to say the language was copied “almost word for word.”

The Follow the Money investigation that first reported Blair’s European lobbying is solid work, but it leaves open the deeper question: what exactly was the Tony Blair Institute building before it began selling the Board of Peace to Europe? Internal documents obtained by Follow the Money and shared with Democracy for Sale and Lighthouse Reports show that TBI representatives told the European Commission that the EU “should not be shy” about playing a role in Gaza and that the EU had “leverage” and “money”. A TBI spokesperson denied that this was lobbying, saying the meeting was a conversation about Gaza, Trump’s peace plan, and TBI’s work to support the new government in Gaza.

A Board Without a Ballot

The financial structure makes the design clearest. When the Board of Peace was formalised through Resolution 2803, the World Bank created the Gaza Reconstruction and Development Financial Intermediary Fund, known as the GRAD Fund. Carnegie later described the World Bank’s role as that of a “limited trustee,” with “no responsibility or accountability, fiduciary or otherwise” once funds were transferred onward to the Board of Peace.

IMAGE: World Bank building (Source: Wikimedia)

That is not normal oversight. It is institutional legitimacy attached to a legal firewall. The World Bank lends its name to the reconstruction mechanism, but the Board of Peace controls how money is used after transfer, while the Bank’s own role is limited by design.

Ajay Banga sits at the centre of this conflict. His official World Bank biography confirms he is president of the World Bank Group, and contemporary reporting confirms he was previously CEO of Mastercard. In January 2026, the White House and subsequent coverage listed Banga among the founding Executive Board members of the Board of Peace.

Civil society groups have since demanded that the World Bank withdraw from the Board of Peace and terminate the GRAD Fund, warning that the arrangement risks legitimising an imposed reconstruction framework that excludes Palestinian self-determination. Banga has defended the World Bank’s role as that of a limited trustee, saying the Board of Peace would decide how money is used on the ground. That leaves him in an extraordinary dual position: president of the institution administering the official fund, and member of the board that may ultimately direct the reconstruction architecture.

Blair and the Map

The Board’s legal status remains one of the central unresolved questions. Resolution 2803 welcomed the Board of Peace and endorsed the Gaza framework, but congressional reporting shows U.S. lawmakers still lacked clarity on what legal framework applied to the body. NBC reported that the Board’s charter gave the organisation a broad mandate and raised questions about member-state commitments and legal structure. Times of Israel published the full Board charter, which shows the formal structure through which Trump chairs the organisation.

IMAGE: Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Institute for Global Change have offered both paid and free advice to the UAE. (Converted to Black and White by author) (Source: Victoria Jones/PA)

The point is not that the Board has no documents. It is that none of those documents clearly answer who can sue it, audit it, discipline it, or compel disclosure. International legal analysis has questioned the Board’s personality and accountability structure, with Opinio Juris describing the charter as creating a “dubious legal personality”. Carnegie has warned that Resolution 2803 elevates a U.S.-Israeli governance framework while leaving Palestinian self-determination structurally subordinated.

The routing question begins with the officials publicly assigned to execute the Board’s mandate. On January 15, 2026, the White House appointed Aryeh Lightstone and Josh Gruenbaum as senior advisers to the Board of Peace, saying they were charged with “leading day-to-day strategy and operations” and translating the Board’s mandate into “disciplined execution”. Lightstone is especially relevant to donor diplomacy: Middle East Eye reported that he travelled to Saudi Arabia in April 2026 to press Riyadh over its unpaid $1 billion pledge to the Board of Peace.

That does not prove Lightstone instructed UAE or Moroccan officials to use JPMorgan. It does make him a necessary person to question about donor routing. The same is true of Gruenbaum, whose documented role places him inside the operational side of the Board, even if several claims previously made about him must be corrected.

Gruenbaum’s background makes the operational side worth investigating, but the record has to be stated carefully. The White House appointed him as a senior adviser charged with day-to-day strategy and operations for the Board of Peace. The Wall Street Journal reported that he moved temporarily to Israel to join the U.S. team planning Gaza’s post-ceasefire administration while still serving as Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service. Al Jazeera later described him as working under U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff on the Gaza stabilisation force track.

What cannot be said on the current public record is that Gruenbaum co-drafted Resolution 2803, authored the reconstruction plan, designed the JPMorgan account, or wrote Section 8.2. Resolution 2803 was a U.S.-drafted Security Council resolution, but no public source names Gruenbaum as one of its drafters. The correction matters because the story is strong enough without assigning individual authorship where the evidence does not yet support it.

JPMorgan Enters the Ruins

By May 2026, the official World Bank-administered GRAD Fund contained zero donor dollars. The Financial Times reported that donations had instead gone directly into a JPMorgan account accessible to the Board of Peace, while the World Bank fund remained empty. NPR’s interview with the Financial Times reporter confirmed the same basic structure: donor money bypassed the World Bank mechanism and went into the JPMorgan account, with the Board saying donors preferred that route but not explaining why.

IMAGE: Gazans return home to devastation and an uncertain future (Source: UN)

That is the core accountability problem. The official multilateral fund remains unused, while actual donor money sits in a private bank account without the same independent transparency framework. The Board of Peace has described the World Bank fund as “just one of many funding mechanisms” that donors have not yet used.

The United Arab Emirates deposited approximately $20 million for operational expenses, funding Mladenov’s office and salaries for the Palestinian technocratic committee, according to reporting summarising the Financial Times account. The committee salary issue must be stated carefully: the Guardian reported that the Board’s expenditures include salaries for 12 Palestinians selected for the proposed civilian administration, and that compensation averaged between $16,000 and $17,000 a month, according to someone familiar with the committee’s operations. A Board of Peace spokesperson disputed those figures as “incorrect” and said payments were based on the Palestinian Authority salary structure, without providing further detail.

The UAE separately provided $100 million earmarked to train a Palestinian police force, but the programme had not started and the funds were frozen, according to Middle East Eye’s summary of the Financial Times reporting. The Gaza technocratic panel also separately announced a $100 million monthly budget for public-sector salaries across Gaza. These are not reconstruction projects. They are the operating costs of an administration being assembled before the official reconstruction fund has received donor money.

In early June 2026, Senator Jacky Rosen pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about oversight of the Board of Peace’s donor funds and whether money in the JPMorgan account could benefit Trump, his family, or associated interests. Rosen later posted video describing the account as private and lacking transparency over who oversees the funds and how they will be used. Rubio did not provide a direct public accounting of the private donor account in that exchange.

One detail on the JPMorgan arrangement deserves particular scrutiny. In January 2026, Trump filed a $5 billion lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, alleging the bank had closed his accounts after the January 6 Capitol riot. Around the same period, negotiations were reportedly underway between the Trump administration and JPMorgan to establish a private account for the Board of Peace. That does not prove improper influence, but it does create a conflict question: the administration of the Board’s permanent chairman was suing the same bank that was being positioned to hold the Board’s private donor account.

The Board of Peace’s spokesperson has said the JPMorgan route was the donors’ choice, but no public evidence explains how that preference was communicated, who initiated it, or when. Senator Brian Schatz told the Financial Times that he had “no idea which legal framework applies” to the Board. That is a remarkable statement about an entity claiming a central role in Gaza’s governance and reconstruction.

Sovereignty by Committee

The vetting architecture itself is documented, even if its individual author is not. Drop Site News obtained a leaked Board of Peace draft resolution whose metadata pointed to the State Department and which said that only those who support and act consistently with creating a “deradicalized terror-free Gaza” would be eligible to participate in governance, reconstruction, economic development, or humanitarian assistance. That clause should be treated as a U.S.-linked Board of Peace draft provision, not as something attributable to Gruenbaum personally unless further sourcing emerges.

In mid-June 2026, Gruenbaum left the federal government. Jewish Insider reported that he would continue serving as an unpaid senior adviser to the Board of Peace and was “set to join an investment firm,” though the firm was not named. His earlier career included private equity work, and reporting has identified KKR as a former employer.

That matters because KKR was simultaneously expanding its Middle East platform. In April 2025, KKR appointed General David Petraeus as chairman of KKR Middle East and established a dedicated regional investment team. KKR’s own biography identifies Petraeus as a partner, chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and chairman of KKR Middle East. Petraeus previously served as CIA director and as a senior U.S. military commander in the Middle East, giving the firm a chairman with deep regional state, military, and intelligence relationships.

IMAGE: Former CIA Director, David H. Petraeus, Partner at KKR, Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, and Chairman of KKR Middle East (source: Crain Currency)

This does not prove that Gruenbaum is returning to KKR or that KKR will receive Gaza contracts. It does establish the revolving-door context: a former private equity figure who helped execute the Board’s operational mandate left government for an unnamed investment firm while remaining an unpaid adviser to the body overseeing Gaza reconstruction. The reconstruction contracts have not yet been awarded. That makes his next destination a legitimate reporting target.

Marc Rowan presents a different conflict question. Rowan is listed by the Board of Peace as an Executive Board member, while Apollo’s official materials identify him as the firm’s co-founder, CEO, and chair. At the Board’s inaugural meeting, Responsible Statecraft reported that Rowan described Gaza as containing roughly $115 billion in real estate and infrastructure value that needed to be “unlocked and financed”. That creates the obvious question: why is a private equity executive publicly valuing Gaza’s reconstruction economy while sitting on the body that may influence how reconstruction capital is allocated?

Martin Edelman is another underexamined node in the structure. Edelman is listed by the Board of Peace as an Executive Board member and by the Board itself as General Counsel of G42, the Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence company. MGX’s official leadership page also lists Edelman as a board member. MGX is chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, according to MGX’s own announcement of its board meeting.

The significance is not that Edelman secretly controls the Board. It is that a lawyer embedded in Abu Dhabi’s AI and sovereign investment ecosystem sits inside the Gaza reconstruction governance structure while UAE money is funding Board operations. In a system where the official World Bank fund is empty and donor money has gone through JPMorgan, that is not a side detail. It is part of the architecture.

IMAGE: Oracle CEO Safra Catz (right) during a visit to Kibbutz Kfar Aza with Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, January 2024. (Source: The Times of Israel)

That architecture runs directly into the funding structure of Blair’s institute. Lighthouse Reports found that Larry Ellison’s foundation had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Tony Blair Institute and that insiders described the relationship as turning parts of TBI into a tech sales and lobbying operation for Oracle. Oracle is not a neutral software vendor in this context. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, summarising The Intercept’s reporting, states that Oracle worked on a four-year confidential project with the Israeli Air Force called “Project Menta” and describes internal allegations around pro-Israel advocacy after October 7.

TBI’s 2024 accounts (Page 6) list GIZ, UNDP, USAID, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Katapult and the Larry Ellison Foundation as donors and funding partners. Several of those institutions also operate in Gaza or the occupied Palestinian territory. For instance, GIZ (German Government) has funded Gaza reconstruction-mechanism work via the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism III project funded by Germany’s BMZ, running from 2021 to 2025. USAID has provided major Gaza and West Bank assistance, and UNDP has administered Gaza recovery and reconstruction programmes. The accounts do not show that these donors funded TBI’s Gaza governance work, but they certainly do place Blair’s institute inside the same donor-development ecosystem that would shape any post-war reconstruction order.

DOCUMENT: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – Financial Statements for the Year Ending 31 December 2024 (Source: TBI)
Tony_Blair_Institute_YE_31.12.2024_Signed

Data Center Dynamics reported that Oracle’s Israel data centre is located nine floors underground, while Times of Israel reported that Oracle CEO Safra Catz reaffirmed plans for a second Israeli data centre during a wartime visit. The safer formulation is not that Ellison controls the narrative war over Gaza, but that Oracle’s Israeli state and military-linked technology relationships make Ellison’s role as a major TBI funder a serious conflict-of-interest question.

The Country That Was Not Asked

Mladenov’s UAE connection should also be stated precisely. He was Director General of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, a UAE diplomatic institution, before becoming the Board’s High Representative for Gaza. Middle East Eye also reported that he had been teaching at the UAE’s Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy before his Board of Peace appointment. That does not prove the UAE controlled his appointment, but it does make the dependency chain relevant: the official administering a UAE-funded operation had just come from a senior UAE institutional role.

IMAGE: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza (Source: HRW)

The Guardian later reported on UAE-linked planning for biometric-gated “humanitarian communities” in Gaza, where residents would submit biometric data to enter. That proposal should be read alongside the Board’s funding and personnel structure: UAE money supports Board operations, a former UAE diplomatic academy official serves as High Representative, and UAE-linked business figures sit near the reconstruction governance ecosystem. This is not yet proof of a single command structure. It is evidence of a dense Emirati influence channel running through the Board’s personnel, funding, and planning environment.

There are questions this investigation cannot yet answer and will not pretend to. No public document names a specific official giving banking routing instructions to UAE or Moroccan treasury officials. The Board of Peace says the JPMorgan account was the donors’ choice, but has provided no public evidence of how that preference was communicated, who initiated it, or when. Carnegie’s confirmation that negotiations were reportedly underway between the Trump administration and JPMorgan establishes that the routing was not spontaneous, but it does not identify the individual decision-maker.

Who has signatory authority over the JPMorgan account itself has not been publicly confirmed. Gruenbaum’s documented job description covered strategy and operations, but no source proves he designed the bank account. Lightstone’s documented role places him near donor diplomacy, but no source proves he instructed donors to route funds through JPMorgan. Both remain necessary people to question.

The architecture itself is the clearest part of the picture. A body with contested legal personality claims authority over Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction while donor money bypasses the official World Bank fund and moves through a private JPMorgan account. It is populated by former heads of government, private equity executives, Gulf-linked advisers, technology figures, and U.S. officials whose roles blur the line between diplomacy, finance, and reconstruction.

The governance model was shaped in part by Tony Blair’s GITA proposal, later echoed in Trump’s 20-point plan. The official World Bank mechanism remains empty while the private account receives donor money. A leaked U.S.-linked Board draft contains a vetting clause that could condition access to governance, reconstruction, economic development, and humanitarian assistance on political eligibility criteria. The Board’s High Representative came from a senior UAE institutional role, while UAE money helps fund the operation he administers.

This is what a private colonial administration looks like when it is built by people who learned, from decades of watching older versions fail, exactly how to make it look like something else.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

On the night of June 17, 2026, something happened in Peru that was not supposed to be mathematically possible. Leftist candidate Roberto Sánchez Cerón led Keiko Fujimori by more than forty thousand votes after every domestic ballot had been counted. The race was, by any sober reading of the numbers, over. Then the overseas vote came in, and inside ninety minutes, Fujimori had flipped the entire deficit and won by fifty thousand votes in the other direction. A ninety-thousand-vote reversal. In a single tranche of ballots. From a diaspora that represents less than three per cent of registered voters.

The National Office of Electoral Processes, or ONPE, later put Fujimori ahead by 49,641 votes, but the result still had to be formally proclaimed by the National Elections Board, or JNE

IMAGE: Roberto Sanchez, presidential candidate of the Together for Peru party, speaks during an interview with Reuters ahead of the general election on April 12, in Lima, Peru, April 10, 2026. (Source: REUTERS/Angela Ponce)

Before that overseas count was even published, a man named Carlos Díaz-Rosillo had already appeared on Peruvian national radio, and told the audience, with calm precision, exactly what was about to happen. He knew the margin. He knew the direction. But above all, he knew, as he put it, that the overseas vote would “reverse” Sánchez’s domestic lead and hand Fujimori the presidency, and he was right to the decimal.

Díaz-Rosillo is not a Peruvian. He has never run in a Peruvian election. He is a Cuban-American who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs inside Donald Trump’s first White House, and who went on to found and direct the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University, a state-funded institution in Miami that, according to a months-long investigation by WLRN Public Media and the Miami Herald, has received $39 million in Florida taxpayer dollars since 2020, spent less than half of it, and is now openly described by its own director as a “hub” for conservative Latin American politics. Throughout the Peruvian campaign, he was presented on Peruvian television as an independent analyst. He was, in fact, Keiko Fujimori’s primary strategic advisor. Fujimori had been a paid “Global Fellow” at his institution, compensated with $45,000 for a year of work, as Díaz-Rosillo confirmed to Peruvian media.

She flew to Miami, gave lectures, took the credential, and came home with the blessing of a machine that runs from Trump’s Doral golf resort to DeSantis’s statehouse to the Heritage Foundation to the Israeli defense industry, and that has been quietly building the infrastructure for exactly this kind of result for years.

What follows is not speculation, but rather a reconstruction built from official Peruvian government filings, Contraloría General de la República audit reports, criminal investigation records, Israeli Embassy Lima communications, Florida budget records, reporting on the first Montesinos-Kouri “Vladivideo”, open footage of the Canal N broadcast, and the documented timeline of arms deals, cybersecurity agreements, and diplomatic maneuvers that preceded and followed the vote. Peru’s new president did not win because Peruvians changed their minds. Peru’s new president won because a system had been built over years and across multiple governments to make sure she would.

GRAPHIC 1: THE NETWORK OF INFLUENCE: Who Delivered Peru’s 2026 Election
This map traces the political, financial, and operational network behind Keiko Fujimori’s victory. It connects the Trump White House alumni who advised her campaign, the $39 million Florida state-funded think tank that housed her as a fellow, the shell companies running digital influence operations from Miami and Ecuador, and the party that Peru’s own courts have designated a criminal defendant in a narco-finance laundering case. Each arrow represents a documented, sourced connection. Follow the money, the people, and the mechanics that moved this election. (Created by Author)

Miami, Doral, and the $39 Million Machine

The Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom does not look dangerous. It occupies a second-floor office at FIU’s Management and Advanced Research Center in west Miami-Dade with a blue rug and a gold nameplate on the door. What it does from that office is something else entirely.

IMAGE: Carlos Diaz-Rosillo was a senior advisor to President Donald Trump during his first administration, and he is the founding director of the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at FIU. (Source: Daniel Rivero, WLRN via Miamiherald)

It was created by Florida legislation in July 2020, signed by Ron DeSantis, sponsored by then-state Senator Ray Rodrigues, who is now chancellor of the entire Florida State University System. The founding director was Díaz-Rosillo, who had just left the Trump White House, where his portfolio explicitly covered Latin American policy and defence. The state gave it $1 million to start. Then $5 million. Then $15 million a year in recurring state funding. In six years, it has received $39 million in Florida taxpayer dollars and spent $13.4 million of it. The rest sits, or moves, in ways FIU has refused to fully explain to its own faculty senate.

The annual fundraiser is held at Trump National Doral. The Center co-hosted events with Project 2025 and its parent organization, the Heritage Foundation. Its podcast was originally produced by a Milei-linked Argentine think tank and paid for with Florida taxpayer money; that network has appeared in event materials alongside the International Republican Institute, a federally funded group whose board, until Trump nominated him secretary of state, included Marco Rubio. The Center’s advertising budget went from $680 in 2023 to $122,000 in 2025. Billboards showing Díaz-Rosillo embracing Javier Milei run in Terminal C of Reagan National Airport

FIU professors who tried to get basic budget records handed to a faculty subcommittee were denied, according to WLRN’s investigation. One faculty member told WLRN the Centre is a “Trojan horse” for right-wing politics inside a public university. Sociologist and FIU visiting scholar Katie Rainwater, whom WLRN identifies as having researched the Adam Smith Center, put it more precisely: “It’s attempting to create a network of right-wing politicians and think tanks in Latin America that are going to support American interest in the region. I don’t think it’s non-partisan. I also don’t think it’s independent. I think it’s politically directed in that it was put on FIU’s campus to further a partisan political project.”

IMAGE: Carlos Diaz-Rosillo with Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori. Fujimori gave lectures at the Adam Smith Center in 2025. (Source: FIU’s Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom)

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article315924226.html#storylink=cpy

The fellows list reads like the guest roster at a Latin American right-wing revival meeting. Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, currently under investigation for allegedly bribing paramilitary witnesses, is a Senior Leadership Fellow. Former Argentine President Mauricio Macri. Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón. Former Venezuelan “interim president” Juan Guaidó, whose $40,000 salary at the Center was paid by a National Endowment for Democracy grant, federal taxpayer dollars, despite a Florida state law banning Venezuelan nationals from being directly hired at state universities. And Keiko Fujimori, who according to WLRN “gave lectures” at the Center in 2025 and “finished first place in the first round of Peruvian presidential elections” months after completing her stint.

Díaz-Rosillo confirmed to WLRN that he has “voiced support” for Fujimori and that “three or four fellows or former fellows are actively promoting candidates” in Latin America. He claimed he always asks them not to mention the Center when doing political work. He did not explain how a publicly-funded academic institution’s money is tracked once its personnel cross the border into active campaign operations.

What he did do, on the night of June 17, 2026, was appear on Peruvian national radio and announce that the overseas votes were about to reverse everything. He was Fujimori’s man. He knew the numbers. The Center’s $25 million surplus, sitting in accounts Florida’s own faculty cannot audit, had not purchased that knowledge by accident.

GRAPHIC 2: THE ISRAEL ARCHITECTURE IN PERU: 25 Years of Strategic Penetration
This diagram maps the layered institutional infrastructure Israel has built inside the Peruvian state across five distinct domains: arms manufacturing (IWI rifles assembled on Peruvian soil, Elbit rocket systems), cybersecurity access (INCD MOU giving Israel’s cyber directorate reach into Peru’s voter database and interior ministry), diplomatic and financial alignment (Isaac Accords IDB Fund, Trump’s MNNA designation), the individuals who signed and managed each agreement, the sanctuary layer, and the documented pattern of Israeli jurisdiction shielding Peruvian political figures from extradition. The timeline runs from the Fujimori regime’s 2000 arms scandal to the night of the 2026 runoff. (Created by Author)

The Vote That Moved Overseas

To understand what happened to the overseas count, you have to understand what was done to it before it was counted, and what was done to prevent anyone from legally challenging it afterwards.

IMAGES: 2026 Elections: First ballots and electoral records arrive in Peru from abroad (Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Peru)

Peru’s Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE) had previously required overseas consulates to send scanned copies of tally sheets to ONPE immediately after vote counting, before the physical return of electoral materials by diplomatic pouch. Before the 2026 runoff, ONPE approved new “Lineamientos para las Actividades Electorales en el Extranjero – Segunda Elección Presidencial 2026”, governing overseas electoral activities for the second presidential election. Foreign Minister Carlos Pareja, who publicly urged Peruvians abroad to participate in the June 7 runoff, oversaw the foreign-vote operation through Peru’s consular network. After the vote, the Foreign Ministry denied wrongdoing, but EFE reported that Roberto Sánchez’s party accused Pareja of “arbitrarily and unjustifiably” dismantling the logistical, computer, and diplomatic custody system by sending overseas tally sheets to Peru in diplomatic pouches.

Pareja is not a neutral figure. He served inside the Fujimori state apparatus in the 1990s. He was brought back under Dina Boluarte‘s administration and placed in charge of the foreign ministry that oversees consular operations, the same consular infrastructure that processes and transmits overseas votes. His directive ensured that the chain of custody for the precise tranche of ballots that reversed the election was invisible to outside observers.

Sánchez’s party, Juntos por el Perú, did formally challenge the overseas count. They petitioned the Jurado Electoral Especial (JEE) Lima Centro 2 to nullify the overseas vote entirely, then filed separate requests to annul 1,751 mesas in Lima and 647 in the United States. The JEE rejected every one of them, not on the merits, but on procedural grounds: the resources were filed twelve days past the three-day legal deadline, and the electoral filing fees had not been paid. The fee for contesting 2,398 individual mesas at 1,375 soles per table came to 3,297,250 soles, roughly $880,000, payable upfront, in a single lump sum, before any substantive review could begin. Juntos por el Perú asked the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE) for an exceptional payment extension. It was denied. Peru’s electoral system had effectively priced a formal challenge to the overseas anomaly out of reach, and the procedural clock had run before the losing party had the funds to file. The case was closed. Fujimori was declared president-elect.

On June 30, Sánchez announced he would file a formal petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), citing the mid-count change to overseas ballot procedures as a violation of electoral intangibility. That petition, once registered, would place the overseas ballot procedure under international scrutiny for the first time. Separately, Juntos por el Perú had already filed a constitutional criminal complaint against Foreign Minister Carlos Pareja on June 21, accusing him of alleged irregularities in the transfer of overseas election records and seeking political and pretrial proceedings against him.

Meanwhile, in Lima’s southern districts, working-class neighborhoods where Sánchez ran strongest. A state-funded ballot delivery operation called GALAGA S.A.C. was under Contraloría-linked scrutiny for irregularities in the distribution of voting materials. Raids on ONPE facilities in those precincts recovered anomalous materials. The full findings have not been published.

Reportedly, in a rented office park in Guayaquil, Ecuador, a company called Karamba S.A.C. was operating what investigators from Peru’s Ojo Público and Ecuador’s El Foco described as a coordinated digital influence operation targeting the Peruvian election, including 214 YouTube ads, six channels removed simultaneously by Google during the campaign, and a now-deleted LinkedIn profile belonging to a Florida-based digital consultant named Diana Procel who described her work as managing “positive troll centers” in Peru and Ecuador. Karamba was registered in Ecuador for $800, with a Florida operator as its controlling entity. Procel worked from Miami. The Center’s very home city.

Team Jorge And The Latin American Pattern

The name Team Jorge has not yet appeared in coverage of Peru’s election, but it should. In February 2023, a joint investigation by The Guardian, Forbidden Stories and OCCRP caught on hidden camera an Israeli operative named Tal Hanan, alias “Jorge”, describing, with apparent pride, how his private outfit had swung more than thirty elections using fake social media personas, hacked communications and stories quietly planted in local news.

IMAGE: Tal Hanan, the leader of a team allegedly meddling in election and commercial campaigns around the world, including South America, at his office in Modiin, December 2022 (Source: The Times of Israel)

His company, Demoman International, had by then moved into Latin America. Researchers at Latinoamérica 21 subsequently traced his network’s footprints to Venezuela, Mexico and Ecuador, where it ran a quiet reputation campaign for the Isaías brothers, Ecuadorian bankers wanted at home and sheltering abroad. That Ecuadorian thread did not end there. Karamba, the company that placed 214 paid digital ads for Keiko Fujimori during the runoff, is an Ecuadorian-registered entity whose beneficial owners have never been publicly named. Ecuador’s Superintendencia de Compañías is a public registry. The answer is in there, somewhere. No one has looked yet.

The Party Under Criminal Indictment

The party Keiko Fujimori will govern from is not merely led by people under investigation. It is itself, as a legal entity, a defendant in a criminal money laundering case.

IMAGE: The judiciary ordered the inclusion of Fuerza Popular in the Alas Peruanas case (Source: CanalN)

On January 6, 2026, six months before the runoff, Peru’s Fourth National Preparatory Investigation Court ordered Fuerza Popular formally incorporated as an accused party in the Caso Alas Peruanas, the money laundering investigation of Joaquín Ramírez Gamarra, the party’s former secretary-general. The court ruling, issued by Judge Margarita Salcedo, was reported by Infobae in January 2026 and is a matter of public record.

The Fiscalía‘s theory is very specific and indicates that Ramírez, who built his fortune through the Universidad Alas Peruanas, a now-dissolved private university tied to a major fraud and money-laundering case, funnelled illegal proceeds from that institution into Fujimori’s 2011 and 2016 presidential campaigns. The Poder Judicial found the Fiscalía’s argument sufficient to include the party itself as an organizational defendant, on the grounds that Fuerza Popular “benefited from the commission of money laundering through the use of its organization, financial structure, and operative apparatus.”

Fujimori and her former chief legal strategist Pier Paolo Figari Mendoza, are accused as co-authors of the underlying crime. Her 2026 vice-presidential running mate Luis Galarreta and party veteran Miguel Torres face separate charges in the same proceeding for allegedly financing the 2021 “fraud” narrative with suspect money. The DEA had been investigating Ramírez since at least 2012, and in 2016 obtained an undercover recording in which he discussed laundering $15 million for Fujimori’s campaigns. The Wall Street Journal reported on it in May of that year. He resigned from the party within days. The party continued, but the money stayed.

The woman who will take office as Peru’s president governs a party that a Peruvian court has formally designated an accused entity in a narco-finance laundering case. That is not an allegation. It is a court order.

The Factory on Peruvian Soil

Peru’s public weapons factory cut its own income in half, on paper, for the benefit of an Israeli private arms company.

The three named officials are Marco Vega Oliveros, General Manager of FAME; César Álvarez Flores, Chief Legal Counsel; and Leoncio Ugas Noriega Moreano, Commercial Manager. A fourth, FAME’s Finance and Administration Manager, was also named in the audit. The audit is listed in the Ministry of Defense’s Recomendaciones Auditoría 2024 II annex as Report N.° 018-2024-2-0848, concerning the acquisition and supply of 10,000 ARAD-7 assault rifles, caliber 7.62 x 51 mm, for the Army’s III Division.

Anti-corruption prosecutor José Bustíos Ledesma opened a formal criminal investigation in February 2024 for the crime of negociación incompatible, improper influence in state contracting. MINDEF’s own audit-recommendations annex tracked the case through a June 17, 2026 deadline, making the absence of publicly visible sanctions by that date part of the official follow-up record.

The Contraloría also found that the contract eliminated the standard 12-year warranty on the weapons, reducing it to two years, as reported by La República and Canal N. Rather than requiring IWI to bring weapons samples to Peru for testing, the legally standard procedure, FAME sent ten Peruvian Army officers to Israel to conduct the evaluation at IWI’s facilities, handing the supplier control over its own product assessment.

FAME issued an official public communiqué calling the reporting “false” and “tendentious.” The same communiqué acknowledges the reduction of FAME’s margin from 12.08 percent to 5.5 percent while disputing that it was sudden or arbitrary. The Contraloría audit report is a numbered official government document, and it exists in the public record regardless.

The Presidential Family at the Table

In February 2025, Canal N’s investigative unit filmed a covert meeting at a Miraflores restaurant in Lima. Three men sat down together, as reported by Canal N.

The first was Paulo César Zevallos Rivarola, then acting as FAME’s Commercial Manager, the official responsible for IWI’s contract operations inside the factory. The second was Diego Alfaro Di Natale, a private businessman identified in the investigation as linked to IWI’s business in Peru. The third was Jorge Garboza, identified by prosecutors as an intermediary of Nicanor Boluarte, the brother of Peru’s then-sitting president Dina Boluarte. Garboza’s lawyer told América TV that Nicanor Boluarte had been contracted by Garboza’s NGO as an education expert, while denying that Garboza received anything in return.

Eight days after the restaurant meeting, Zevallos was formally appointed permanent Commercial Manager of FAME, according to Canal N. Alfaro Di Natale and Zevallos had traveled together to Spain in June 2024, and Alfaro Di Natale was also linked by investigators to a US$20.3 million contract involving Milenium Veladi Corp., described in the reporting as a company under investigation, according to Canal N and Infobae. Both face separate fiscal investigations. Neither has been charged.

The IWI-FAME relationship now runs from Israel’s weapons production lines through Peru’s presidential family, through the state weapons factory management, through contracts worth more than US$47 million, none of them put to open competition. Infobae, citing La República, reports that Diego Alfaro Di Natale participated in the US$27.3 million ARAD-7 sale to the Army and the US$19.7 million ARAD-5 sale to the Interior Ministry, both through FAME and IWI. Peruvian state officials were also accused in official audit material of having reduced Peru’s financial take in IWI’s favor. The factory that makes Israeli weapons on Peruvian soil was managed, at the moment the election was decided, by a man whose appointment had followed a Miraflores restaurant meeting with the president’s brother’s alleged intermediary and the Israeli arms company’s local man.

The Cybersecurity Door

Arms deals are visible, but often cybersecurity agreements are not. On November 21, 2025, four months before the first round of Peru’s presidential election, the Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel’s National Cyber Directorate. The MOU was authorized by Resolución Ministerial N.° 215-2025-PCM, which delegated authority to the Secretary of Government and Digital Transformation to represent PCM before Israel’s cyber directorate and sign the agreement. Jaime Alejandro Honores Coronado had been appointed to that post on July 1, 2025, through Resolución Ministerial N.° 152-2025-PCM. The agreement was signed for Peru by Honores and for Israel by Yossi Karadi, Director General of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, with Israeli Ambassador Eran Yuvan participating, according to the official PCM communiqué.

IMAGE: Government and Digital Transformation formalized a strategic alliance with the National Cyber ​​Directorate of the State of Israel on November 21, 2025 by signing a memorandum of understanding (Source: GOB.pe)

The INCD is Israel’s national cybersecurity directorate. Aviram Atzaba, its Executive Director for International Strategic Affairs, manages and deepens INCD relations with governments, international organizations and multinational companies, and supports partnerships between allied governments and the Israeli cyber industry, according to his OECD speaker profile. The same infrastructure-partnership model operates through BIRD Cyber, a U.S.-Israel program focused on cybersecurity and emerging technologies for critical infrastructure.

What Honores brought to the table was not merely a signature. Before taking the PCM role, Honores had led RENIEC’s IT office: an official Gob.pe conference page identifies him as “jefe de la Oficina de Tecnología de la Información del Reniec” in a presentation on RENIEC’s digital architecture. RENIEC’s public-facing identity system is accessible through its Identidad Ciudadano portal. Honores was later appointed Secretary of Government and Digital Transformation by Resolución Ministerial N.° 152-2025-PCM, placing him in charge of Peru’s central digital-government agenda. The man who signed Israel’s INCD into Peru’s digital infrastructure had previously managed the IT systems of the institution that underpins the country’s civil-identity architecture.

The MOU’s scope, according to PCM, was to strengthen digital security, incident management and protection of Peru’s critical infrastructure. Yinam Cohen, head of Israel’s Foreign Ministry Latin America division, stated in a DNews interview that the agreement involved not only training for Peruvian professionals but also joint and commercial work in digital-security technologies. That means the agreement opened a path not just for cooperation, but for Israeli cybersecurity companies to seek commercial footholds inside Peru’s state systems.

The groundwork had been laid months earlier. In February 2025, Honores’s predecessor, César Vílchez Inga, met with Ambassador Eran Yuvan, Aviram Atzaba and Israeli Commercial Attaché Tal Seinuk to discuss a joint cybersecurity roadmap, according to the Israeli Embassy in Lima. By November, the agreement had been signed. By June, the election was over.

Israel as Safe Harbor

Peru’s history with Israel does not begin with weapons factories and cybersecurity MOUs. It begins with the understanding, established across multiple presidencies and political currents, that Israel is a jurisdiction Peru has struggled to reach.

IMAGE: Eliane Karp, left, with her husband, former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, at a convention in Dublin, Ireland, October 16, 2014. (Source: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images via JTA)

In February 2017, as Peru pursued former President Alejandro Toledo on corruption allegations, Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Toledo would be allowed to enter Israel only once his legal matters in Peru were resolved; at the time, reporting noted that Israel had no extradition treaty with Peru, complicating any Peruvian effort to recover him from Israeli territory. Toledo’s longtime business partner was Josef Maiman, an Israeli businessman who served as the financial pipeline for Odebrecht bribes paid to Toledo. Peruvian prosecutors later took Maiman’s confession at the Peruvian embassy in Israel, where he acknowledged that the US$35 million deposited by Odebrecht in his accounts was bribes for Toledo, as reported by IDL-Reporteros and Peru’s state news agency Andina. Israeli outlet Ynet News had reported earlier that Maiman signed a state-witness agreement with Peruvian prosecutors and was expected to testify against Toledo.

Toledo himself was eventually arrested in the United States and extradited to Peru by U.S. authorities. His wife, Eliane Karp, who has Israeli citizenship and studied at Hebrew University, according to Times of Israel, was not. Karp flew from San Francisco to Tel Aviv in May 2023, just after Toledo was extradited, and Times of Israel reported that Peru has no extradition treaty with Israel and that Karp holds Israeli nationality. In December 2024, Peru approved a formal request asking Israel to extradite Karp and former Toledo security adviser Avi Dan On, with Justice Minister Eduardo Arana acknowledging that Peru had no extradition treaty with Israel and would rely instead on the UN Convention against Corruption and reciprocity, as EFE reported. In September 2025, Karp gave an interview from Israel in which she rejected returning to Peru while the preventive-detention order and Interpol listing remained in place, as Gestión reported.

The pattern is not incidental. Israel functions, for parts of Peru’s political elite, as a place where accountability can stall. The same bilateral framework that has made it a defence manufacturing partner, a cybersecurity co-signatory, and a diplomatic ally also makes it, structurally, a sanctuary. That is not a coincidence. It is an architecture whose first wing was built by the Fujimori family.

The Bigger Architecture

In January 2026, Donald Trump designated Peru a Major Non-NATO Ally by Presidential Determination No. 2026-04, signed on January 14 and published in the Federal Register on January 23. The designation placed Peru inside Washington’s privileged defense-cooperation tier, a category the State Department describes as granting benefits in defense trade and security cooperation.

Four months before Peruvians cast their first-round ballots, Washington had already moved Peru into a higher security lane. That did not formally endorse a candidate. But it told Peru’s military establishment where the next government was expected to sit: inside the U.S. security architecture, not outside it.

On June 1, 2026, one week before the runoff, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Inter-American Development Bank President Ilan Goldfajn signed a declaration of intent in Washington to promote the Isaac Accords Fund, a vehicle designed to push investment into Latin America and the Caribbean through the IDB framework. The next day, while Peru was still campaigning, Prime Minister Luis Arroyo met with Israeli Trade Commissioner Roey Fisher to discuss mining, technology, cybersecurity cooperation, and Peru’s OECD accession, as reported by Andina. The meeting was not about the past. It was about the commercial and security relationship that would exist after the election.

On June 30, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar congratulated Keiko Fujimori in Spanish, calling Peru and Israel “close friends that share common values,” according to Andina. That was not the language of a distant diplomatic formality. It sounded like recognition of a relationship already in motion.

Felicitaciones a la presidenta electa del Perú, @KeikoFujimori por su victoria en las elecciones presidenciales. Le deseo mucho éxito. Perú e Israel son amigos cercanos que comparten valores comunes, y confío en que juntos seguiremos fortaleciendo nuestros lazos y promoviendo la…

— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) June 30, 2026

The regional picture was moving in the same direction. Ecuador, where the shell company Karamba was registered and where Diana Procel’s troll operation had nodes, was governed by Daniel Noboa, a president aligned with the Isaac Accords framework. Colombia had just elected a right-wing government by a one-percent margin, in a result Gustavo Petro challenged while alleging digital manipulation on Israeli servers. Peru now joined that map: a Fujimori government preceded by an INCD cybersecurity MOU, an Israel-linked defense procurement pipeline, and congratulations from Israel’s foreign minister within hours of the result.

A TEXIN defense analysis described Peru as Israel’s “principal strategic partner in Latin America.” The missing question is what that designation bought, and what Peru’s new president owes the people who built the machinery around it.

The Defense Minister

Amadeo Flores Carcagno was sworn in as Peru’s Minister of Defense on April 22, 2026, one week after the first round of voting. Andina reported the appointment and noted that Flores had previously served as chief of staff at the Defense Ministry. América TV traced his Fuerza Popular record: candidate for Lima councilor in 2018, adviser to congresswoman Rosangella Barbarán from 2021 to 2023, and party donor for S/4,150 over the same period.

El presidente de la República, José María Balcázar, tomó juramento a Amadeo Flores Carcagno como nuevo ministro de Defensa y ocupará el puesto de Carlos Díaz, quien renunció en horas de la mañana a la cartera ministerial.

Todos los detalles en https://t.co/43QpuLsB8e pic.twitter.com/rLv4WPnQlj

— Perú21 (@peru21noticias) April 23, 2026

That résumé matters because Flores was not entering the ministry from outside. From November 2024 to July 2025, he served as Chief of Staff of the Defense Ministry’s Ministerial Cabinet, inside the building while the Elbit Systems PULS rocket-launcher process advanced. In July 2025, Defensa.com reported that FAME had selected Elbit Systems as its strategic partner to assemble artillery systems in Peru, including PULS.

The deal was not minor. It put Israel’s rocket-artillery platform inside Peru’s domestic defense-production system, through FAME. Flores Carcagno was in the ministry while the arrangement moved forward. After the first round, he became the minister overseeing the file.

He replaced Carlos Díaz Dañino, who left amid controversy over a separate F-16 Block 70 fighter-jet acquisition. The minister caught in the American fighter controversy was removed. The official who had been inside the ministry while the Israeli artillery deal advanced took his place.

The Man Who Never Goes Away

Alberto Fujimori’s relationship with Israel was not ideological. It was operational. It moved through weapons, intelligence, procurement channels, and the men who understood how to turn state secrecy into private money.

IMAGE: Vladimiro Montesinos sonríe al expresidente Alberto Fujimori en su primer encuentro en los juzgados, en junio de 2008 (Source: AFP/archivo)

At the center of that world stood Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s intelligence chief and the regime’s shadow operator. Around him moved Israeli arms dealer Moshe Rothschild Chassin, tied to the purchase of MiG-29 and Sukhoi-25 aircraft for the Peruvian Air Force. Peru’s Ministerio Público later obtained an asset-forfeiture order over more than US$8 million in a Swiss account belonging to Rothschild, describing him as an Israeli businessman linked to the overvalued purchase of 36 MiG-29 and Sukhoi-25 aircraft during the Fujimori government. Andina reported that Peru’s judiciary eventually secured repatriation of the Swiss account, while noting that Rothschild had not been sentenced because he remained an absent defendant.

Peru tried to bring him back. In 2013, Times of Israel reported that Peru was seeking Rothschild’s extradition from Israel over alleged bribes connected to fighter-plane sales, and that Peru and Israel had no extradition treaty. Convoca later exposed Rothschild’s offshore structure, identifying him as the largest arms seller linked to the Fujimori government and the Montesinos corruption network; Peru’s Ministerio Público separately tied him to illicit commissions from arms contracts and the Swiss offshore account later recovered by the state. Rothschild was not a peripheral figure. He was part of the original machinery.

By 2026, that machinery no longer looked like the clandestine procurement networks of the 1990s. It had become formal, multilateral, and institutional. Israeli weapons were no longer simply arriving in Peru; they were being assembled there. EDR Magazine reported in 2023 that Israel Weapon Industries and FAME signed a transfer-of-technology agreement to establish an assembly and production line in Peru for the ARAD family of assault rifles. European Security & Defence later reported that the IWI–FAME plant was already supplying ARAD rifles to Peru’s armed forces and National Police.

The digital side followed. Israel’s cybersecurity directorate now has a signed MOU with Peru covering digital security, incident management and critical infrastructure. Israeli businessmen appear in both tracks: Rothschild in the Fujimori-era arms network, and Josef Maiman as the financial conduit for Odebrecht payments to Toledo. Peruvian prosecutors took Maiman’s confession at the Peruvian embassy in Israel, where he acknowledged that the US$35 million deposited by Odebrecht in his accounts were bribes for Toledo, as reported by IDL-Reporteros and Peru’s state news agency Andina. In both the Rothschild and Karp cases, the same hard wall appears: Peru has no extradition treaty with Israel, a fact noted by Times of Israel in its coverage of Eliane Karp’s flight to Tel Aviv.

Carlos Díaz-Rosillo told WLRN that Adam Smith Center money “absolutely” does not go to political campaigns in Latin America. “Zero,” he said. But WLRN also documented the center’s public funding, private-donor structure, Latin America programming, and ties to conservative political networks. Díaz-Rosillo paid Keiko Fujimori US$45,000 for a fellowship, publicly supported her during the campaign, and appeared in Peruvian media as a foreign analyst while his proximity to her was already visible. “Zero” does not describe a wall. It describes a loophole.

Peruvian journalist Marco Sifuentes and former presidential candidate Mesías Guevara publicly questioned Díaz-Rosillo’s role, accusing him of posing as an independent commentator while operating in Fujimori’s favor, as reported by Mesa Redonda. Díaz-Rosillo acknowledged being a voluntary adviser to Fujimori and denied being paid. That denial answers only the narrowest question. It does not answer the larger one: what was being built around her, and who paid to build it.

The four FAME officials named in the IWI rifle audit have not been publicly sanctioned. MINDEF’s own Recomendaciones Auditoría 2024 II annex tracked Report N.° 018-2024-2-0848, the audit concerning the acquisition and supply of 10,000 ARAD-7 rifles for the Army’s III Division — through a June 17, 2026 deadline. The criminal investigation opened by anti-corruption prosecutor José Bustíos Ledesma in February 2024 has produced no publicly visible resolution. Fuerza Popular has been incorporated as a legal person in a money-laundering process related to the Alas Peruanas case, according to Infobae. Eliane Karp remains in Israel, beyond the easy reach of Peruvian justice, in the same country whose cybersecurity directorate now has a signed agreement covering Peru’s state digital-security architecture.

Keiko Fujimori is Peru’s president-elect. The Israeli weapons assembly line inside FAME continues to operate, and the INCD agreement remains in place. The Adam Smith Center’s surplus remains inside a Florida university-adjacent structure whose finances are difficult to inspect from outside, as documented by WLRN.

The crumbs are not hidden. In fact, they form a path which ends in a country whose weapons are increasingly built through Israeli foreign defense companies, whose digital-security systems are opened to Israeli cybersecurity partnerships, whose governing party is under money-laundering scrutiny, and whose president benefited from a Florida operative who predicted her path to victory before the count was done. The question is not whether the architecture exists. I believe we have established that. The hard question is who, among the people who built it, will ever be asked to answer.

Host Jim Webb talks with journalist and geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen from 21st Century Wire to unpack the real driving forces behind the explosive immigration issue. Watch: 

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Dialogue Works host Nima Alkhorshid talks with 21st Century Wire’s Patrick Henningsen. Watch:

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Three hundred bodies. Children among them. Hands tied behind their backs. Buried in a hospital courtyard in Khan Younis. That is what an unnamed French woman described in a short clip that went viral on May 21, 2026, almost drowned out by a louder story breaking the same day when French nationals from the Global Sumud Flotilla landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport with cracked ribs, fractured clavicles, and accounts of sexual assault inside Israeli detention containers at Ashdod Port.

A French aid worker: “We found a mass grave in Gaza containing 300 bodies. Small children were killed with their hands tied behind their backs” pic.twitter.com/nfd94GldZC

— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) May 22, 2026

Among them was Meriem Hadjal, a 38-year-old French nursing assistant and pro-Palestinian activist, who described being groped and beaten inside a black container by three Israeli soldiers while a fellow activist lay on the ground with his trousers pulled down. Her testimony, and others like it, triggered a formal criminal investigation by France’s National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) into torture and war crimes within two weeks of their return.

That story dominated the news cycle. Running alongside it, almost drowned out, was a shorter clip featuring an unnamed French woman, seated at a table with a microphone, describing a mass grave in Gaza holding around 300 bodies, children among them, killed with their hands tied behind their backs. No organisation. No name. No date. Amplified by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor chairman Ramy Abdu on X and shared across platforms on May 21, it went viral fast. Hadjal’s testimony was about Israeli detention. The clip was about something the flotilla never reached: the inside of Gaza itself.

VIDEO | “Discovery of mass graves ‘stark evidence of war crimes’: Al-Haq”
Al-Haq spokesperson Zainah Haroun confirms on camera that bodies recovered at Nasser Hospital included victims with their hands tied behind their backs, and calls the findings “stark evidence of war crimes and of the genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” Civil Defence footage from the Nasser Hospital compound is shown throughout. (Source: Al Jazeera English)

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She is almost certainly not a flotilla activist. The flotilla never reached Gaza. It was intercepted near Cyprus in international waters, and everyone on board spent their time inside Israeli detention, not inside Gaza. Whoever this woman is, she had been inside the territory itself, at a grave site, counting bodies. IBTimes UK, which first reported the clip’s circulation, acknowledged it could not verify her identity, her organisation, or the specific incident she was describing. That inability to verify is not a problem with the reporting. It is a precise illustration of the problem this article is about.

The Signature

In April 2024, Palestinian Civil Defence teams returned to the Nasser Hospital compound in Khan Younis after Israeli forces withdrew following a months-long military occupation of the site. What they found took seven days to excavate. More than 390 bodies pulled from three mass grave sites dug into the hospital grounds. Dr Muhammad Al-Mughair, head of evidence at Civil Defence, told NBC News that 78 of the dead were children. Of the 165 bodies identified at that stage, approximately ten had bound hands. Bodies in hospital gowns, patients with medical needles still embedded in their skin, were buried in front of the emergency building and the dialysis centre. Civilian hospitals are protected under Article 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, protection removable only after formal warning and reasonable time to comply. No warning was issued.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said he was “horrified,” named the intentional killing of detainees and civilians hors de combat a war crime, and called for independent international investigators to be given unimpeded access. The UN Security Council issued a formal statement on 10 May 2024 demanding exactly that. The EU demanded an independent probe. Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and Amnesty International, all the same.

That was more than two years ago. Not one international forensic investigator has entered Gaza to examine those sites.

The Same Hospital, Seventeen Months Later

The bound-hands signature did not stay in 2024. In March 2025, eleven months after Nasser Hospital, fifteen Palestinian paramedics, Civil Defence workers and a UN employee were killed by Israeli forces near Rafah and buried in an improvised grave, their ambulances bulldozed over them. Sky News obtained video showing their emergency insignia were clearly visible at the moment of the attack, directly contradicting Israel’s initial account. Then in mid-October 2025, refrigerated trucks began arriving back at Nasser Hospital — the same compound, seventeen months on. Inside were the bodies of nearly 200 Palestinians, returned by Israel under the terms of Trump’s ceasefire deal at a rate of fifteen Palestinian bodies per deceased Israeli hostage. The remains were tagged with numbers, not names.

Documents found inside the body bags confirmed the dead had been held at Sde Teiman, the Israeli military detention facility in the Negev desert, already the subject of whistle-blower testimony and Knesset controversy. That detail — a number, not a name — is not clerical. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed that Israel has refused to provide any nominal list of detainees held, living or dead, in violation of its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Families trying to identify the returned remains had nothing to work with. DNA testing equipment, which would have made identification possible, remained blocked from entering Gaza by Israel.

Dr Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital, examined the returned bodies and told The Guardian: “Nearly all of them were blindfolded, bound, and had gunshot wounds between the eyes. Almost all were executed. There were also bruises and discolored areas indicating they had been assaulted before their deaths.  Additionally, there were indications that their bodies had been mistreated post-mortem.” On identity, he was direct: “They are aware of the identities of these individuals but seem intent on prolonging the suffering of the victims’ families.”

Gaza Health Ministry director general Muneer al-Boursh described what he saw as evidence of “systematic torture, crushings by vehicles such as tanks, strangulation, burns, severe wounds and lacerations.”

VIDEO | “Evidence of torture, executions, and people buried alive found in Gaza mass graves”
Palestinian Civil Defence director Dr. Muhammad al-Mughayyir presents evidence from the Nasser Hospital mass graves: 392 bodies recovered, children among the dead, hands bound, patients buried with medical tubes still attached. International lawyer Geoffrey Robertson calls for an independent investigation. “The Civil Defence team is accusing Israel of committing crimes against humanity.” (Source: Al Jazeera English)

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Haaretz had previously reported Israel was holding approximately 1,500 Palestinian bodies at Sde Teiman, refrigerated, classified by number. An Israeli doctor at the facility had written in a letter reported by Haaretz: “All patients are handcuffed on all four limbs for the entire day, with their eyes covered, and fed with a straw, regardless of how dangerous they are.” The Guardian confirmed at least 135 of the returned bodies came from Sde Teiman, based on documents found with the remains. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) denied tying any bodies before release, even though the forensic photographs seen by the Guardian, as well as the BBC, which could not be published due to their graphic nature, said otherwise.

By February 2026, 195 bodies had been returned across multiple transfers. The unidentified dead were reburied in new mass graves in Deir el-Balah, tagged with numbers. The French woman’s clip describes Nasser Hospital in 2024. The trucks arriving at Nasser Hospital in 2025 describe the same signature, from inside Israeli military custody. Nasser Hospital is where both stories end up.

VIDEO | “Israel buries Palestinian children in ‘numbered graves'”
Israeli authorities are withholding the bodies of Palestinians in graves marked only with numbers. Among them are 21 children whose families are unaware of their burial locations. Rare images show the secret military cemeteries where personal data is kept by the army while the graves carry only numbers. Reporter: Mohammed Elwan. (Source: Al Jazeera English)

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820 Days

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruling in South Africa v. Israel, issued a binding order requiring Israel to prevent the destruction of evidence and ensure its preservation. Binding means enforceable. It means non-compliance is a violation of international law, not a policy disagreement. South Africa has filed formal non-compliance submissions, as the ICJ issued five separate sets of provisional measures. All five were ignored. Three months after the first order, Israeli bulldozers drove over the Nasser Hospital courtyard. Satellite imagery confirmed the disturbance of the grave sites. The IDF said it was searching for hostages. Nobody has been charged for destroying evidence under a standing court order. No mechanism has been triggered. The Security Council members who demanded access in May 2024 have not reconvened on the question since.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) dispatched its largest-ever investigative team to Bucha, Ukraine, within eleven days of bodies being found there in April 2022. Gaza’s hospital mass graves have now gone more than 820 days without a single international forensic investigator gaining access. The ICC warrants issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024 cover starvation and civilian targeting. The bound-hands executions documented across three years and multiple sites are not in them. Nobody sought a warrant for those either.

In June 2026, the ICRC warned that thousands of bodies under Gaza’s rubble, 61.5 million tonnes of debris, twenty times all conflict-generated rubble in the territory since 2008, may never be identified as decomposition accelerates. The evidence is not just uninvestigated. It is being allowed to disappear.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Geneva-based organisation that has been documenting Gaza’s mass graves since October 2023, is now fighting for its institutional life. Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs released a formal report in May 2026 describing it as a Hamas-linked influence operation. On May 26, Israel banned 40 Euro-Med activists from entry, including chairman Ramy Abdu and board chair Richard Falk. Italian prosecutors are pursuing a case involving alleged Hamas-linked financing connected to Abdu’s brother, accused of transferring over €462,000 to Hamas. Euro-Med’s Gaza office closed on June 16, 2026. Abdu and Falk deny all of it.

Every substantive claim the organisation has documented about bound hands, children’s bodies, and execution-style wounds is corroborated on the record by the UN, NBC News, CNN, BBC, the ICRC, Medical Aid for Palestinians, and Gaza’s Civil Defence. The Sde Teiman body returns were confirmed by The Guardian, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera using documents from the body bags themselves. In May 2026, legal scholar Muna Haddad published a peer-reviewed analysis in the South African Journal on Human Rights tracing Israel’s use of mass graves from the 1948 Nakba to Gaza, arguing they function as active mechanisms of territorial erasure, not merely criminal evidence sites. France’s PNAT counterterrorism prosecutors are formally investigating war crimes by Israeli forces against French nationals.

Discrediting Euro-Med does not touch any of this. It just keeps attention away from the question that has gone unanswered for 820 days:

Why has no independent forensic investigator been allowed in, and who in the international community decided that was acceptable?

Palestinian authorities estimate more than 10,000 people remain buried under the rubble. Around 8,500 are officially registered as missing. The last trucks arrived at Nasser Hospital in February 2026. The bodies inside had no names. They had numbers; some of them were children, yet nobody is coming to find out what happened to them.

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In this episode of Liberty Report Extra, RPI’s Daniel McAdams chats with Patrick Henningsen, journalist and founder of 21st Century Wire.

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Mats Nilsson

Why does China’s quest for prosperity mark it as America’s ultimate geopolitical target? The assertion is provocative, especially in a period marked by renewed diplomacy between China and the United States. However, it must be said: Iran is an intermediate target. The ultimate target is China. This claim, echoing an older European tradition of geopolitical analysis, reframes not only contemporary tensions in the Middle East, but the entire structure of 21st-century global competition. It posits that American-led pressure on Iran is not merely a contained crisis over nuclear proliferation or regional hegemony, but a flanking manoeuvre in a much larger, epoch-defining struggle against Beijing.

The historical parallel is equally striking, reaching back to the early 20th century, when the British Empire, then the reigning maritime hegemon, viewed Imperial Germany not merely as a rival, but as an existential threat. The cause of that threat was not a hot war, but a railway: the Berlin-Baghdad-Basra line.

To the British strategic mind in the years 1905-1910, this iron ribbon stretching from the heart of Europe to the Persian Gulf was a dagger pointed at the jugular of the British Empire, because it promised to connect Germany’s industrial might directly to the resources and markets of the East, bypassing the British-controlled sea lanes of the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. This wasn’t just competition; it was a perceived lethal threat to the maritime dominance upon which British global power was built. The narrative argues that this land-based challenge to sea-based supremacy was a primary catalyst for the First World War, a war Britain initiated to smother a peaceful, innovative, and economically ascendant competitor. In this article, a sweeping historical analogy casts the United States as the anxious British hegemon, while China is the new Germany, a nation peacefully focused on innovation and economic prosperity, building up a trade surplus, thereby being considered a threat to powers that want to dominate.

From this premise, we must ask: If China is the new Germany, what is its Baghdad Railway? The answer is not a single line of rail but a sprawling, multimodal network of infrastructure, finance, and digital connectivity that constitutes China’s grand strategy. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one name, and its purpose, in American eyes, is remarkably similar to that of its early 20th-century precursor: to rewire the global economic and geopolitical map in a way that renders America’s maritime-centric dominance obsolete, thereby making China the definitive target in a new struggle for Pacific and global primacy.

The Ghost of Berlin-Baghdad

To understand Washington’s anxiety about Beijing today, one must first immerse oneself in the strategic psyche of a hegemon in peril. Once upon a time, British power rested on two pillars: unchallenged naval supremacy and command of the global financial system. The Royal Navy controlled the critical maritime chokepoints: the English Channel, Gibraltar, Malta, the Suez Canal, the Cape of Good Hope, and Singapore. This aqueous ring locked down the Eurasian landmass, dictating the terms of global trade and ensuring that all economic arteries flowed through British-controlled valves.

The Berlin-Baghdad Railway represented a revolutionary circumvention of this entire system. Financed by German banks like Deutsche Bank, built by German steel and engineering firms, and backed by the German state, it was a geopolitical masterstroke of connectivity. It promised to link Berlin, via the Orient Express network, through the Austro-Hungarian heartland, across the Balkans, and directly to Constantinople. From there, it would plunge into Anatolia, sweep through the mineral-rich Mesopotamian plains, and terminate at Basra on the Persian Gulf, a warm-water port just a stone’s throw from British India.

For British strategists, this was a nightmare made real. Firstly, it threatened their economic supremacy. German goods could travel to Asian and African markets faster and cheaper than British goods, which were reliant on the long sea voyage. Secondly, it threatened the Suez Canal’s strategic monopoly. A German-controlled rail corridor alongside the Tigris and Euphrates offered an alternative route to the East, outside the Royal Navy’s reach. Thirdly, it threatened the Raj. The railway’s potential extension to Iran and Afghanistan would place a hostile industrial power on India’s very doorstep. In this calculus, Germany’s peaceful focus on commerce and construction was indistinguishable from an act of geopolitical war. Its economic philosophy, a threat to a power that equated its own dominance with global stability, made conflict inevitable. The railway was the proof that Germany wasn’t just playing the game differently; it was trying to change the entire board.

The New Rails

Now, invert this historical template onto the contemporary landscape. China is today’s Germany; a manufacturing and export titan that has transformed itself from a peripheral player into the world’s workhorse, accumulating massive trade surpluses and directing its national energy toward technological innovation and economic efficiency. It preaches a doctrine of peaceful coexistence and mutual prosperity, famously reframing its rise as a peaceful development. Yet, to the United States, the reigning maritime hegemon, this economic prowess is the visible tip of a deeply threatening strategic iceberg. The BRI is in this context a conscious, state-directed effort to build the 21st-century arteries of trade. Just as the German railway was more than steel and sleepers, the BRI is more than ports, highways, and fibre-optic cables. It is a systemic challenge.

The “Silk Road Economic Belt,” the overland component of the BRI, is the direct spiritual descendant of the Berlin-Baghdad concept. A network of transcontinental railways, the most prominent being the China-Europe Railway Express, which now links megacities like Chongqing, Xi’an, and Chengdu to a future terminus in Duisburg, Germany, with spurs reaching Madrid, London, and beyond. These modern “iron camels” carry Chinese-manufactured goods such as laptops, auto parts, apparel and ideas, across the Eurasian steppe in a fraction of the time it takes to ship them by sea.

To an American politician, this belt provides a land-based continent, connecting China’s manufacturing engine directly to the wealthy European consumer market, completely bypassing the US Navy’s command of the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, and the Indian Ocean. In a conflict scenario, a  US Seventh Fleet’s naval blockade would be rendered far less effective if vital supply chains could hum along on high-speed rail across Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus. This is the “lethal” circumvention, not of the Suez Canal specifically, but of the entire American thalassocracy.

The Maritime Road

The BRI’s maritime component completes the strategic encirclement from the other direction. Instead of a railway terminal in Basra, China is building or upgrading a string of deep-water ports from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean. The crown jewel is Gwadar in Pakistan, a major Chinese investment that offers a direct Arabian Sea outlet for western China, unfreezing vast economic regions and providing a critical energy import gateway. This is followed by the container port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, a logistics hub leased to China for 99 years, and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar, terminus for oil and gas pipelines that again bypass the Malacca Strait. From Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, where China has established its first overseas military base, to the port of Piraeus in Greece, where COSCO Shipping controls the main container terminal, this chain is the modern version of the Kaiser’s desired Persian Gulf foothold. Each port is a node not just for trade, but for naval resupply, dual-use logistics, and intelligence gathering and its approaches challenge the US Navy’s traditional supremacy in central strategic waters.

Financial and Digital Railroads

The BRI is financed by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Silk Road Fund, and the New Development Bank; Chinese-led institutions that act against the current primacy of the American-dominated IMF and World Bank. This financial tracklaying is as critical as the physical kind. It offers developing nations an alternative to the old Washington Consensus of neoliberal reform, one that comes with no lectures on governance or human rights, only a transactional “win-win” partnership. This allows Beijing to weave a global financial web where the yuan plays an increasingly prominent role in trade settlement, creating a parallel monetary system that nibbles away at the dollar’s reserve currency status, the very lifeblood of American power.

The digital dimension adds a layer the Kaiser’s Germany could never have imagined. Huawei’s 5G networks and undersea fibre-optic cables are the ghost-railways of the 21st century. They transmit the data that powers modern economies. For Washington, a global digital architecture built on Chinese technology is an existential threat, a “digital Baghdad Railway” that routes the world’s most sensitive information through Shenzhen instead of Silicon Valley, creating a pervasive vulnerability that could be weaponized for economic espionage or infrastructure disruption.

The Logic of the Intermediate Iran

Now the original claim that “Iran is an intermediate target” fits seamlessly into this historical framework. Old Mesopotamia was the crucial middle section of the German railway project. It was the territory that connected the Anatolian plateau to the Persian Gulf, the land where the railway’s strategic value crystallized. For Britain, preventing German dominance in Mesopotamia was an absolute strategic imperative, leading to the invasion of Basra in 1914 and the eventual carving up of the Ottoman Empire.

Today, Iran is the geopolitical lynchpin of the BRI’s central corridor. Geography has made it unavoidable. It is the bridge connecting the Caspian region to the Persian Gulf, the only land route for China’s overland belt to reach the Middle East and connect seamlessly with the maritime road. As such, Iran is the intermediate target par excellence. The US strategy of imposing crushing sanctions, unilaterally withdrawing from the JCPOA and applying continuous military pressure in the Strait of Hormuz mirrors Britain’s pre-WWI strategy of undermining the Ottoman Empire’s integrity to stop the German advance.

The goal is not merely to restrict Iran’s nuclear ambitions or its regional influence over proxies. The deeper strategic purpose is to sever the ligament of the BRI. A chaotic, sanctioned, and isolated Iran represents a fundamental fracture in China’s Eurasian land bridge. It stops the east-west flow of goods and energy, containing China within its own littoral and preserving the Indian Ocean as an uncontested American lake. The attempts to hinder the 25-year comprehensive cooperation agreement between China and Iran, a $400 billion project to rejuvenate Iran’s infrastructure and integrate it into the BRI, are the contemporary echo of British diplomatic pressure on the Ottoman Sultan to stall German construction.

The target is China, but the battlefield is Iran.

So why is China’s peaceful, connectivity-focused strategy considered a “lethal threat” by those powers that see themselves as natural aggressive hegemons? The answer lies in maritime empire. A sea-based power derives its strength from its ability to police stations, nodes, and flows. Its wealth comes from being the tollgate of the global commons, and a rival land-based empire that integrates the entire Eurasian supercontinent drastically reduces that toll revenue and erases the strategic geography that makes maritime dominance possible.

The United States’ global primacy since 1945 has been built on precisely this British model, elevated to a planetary scale. Its military ensures command of the commons, guaranteeing the free flow of oil from the Middle East, manufactured goods from East Asia, and capital across all borders. The US dollar, as the currency for all commodity trade, ensures American financial hegemony. A successful BRI, therefore, strikes at both foundations of American power by creating a parallel logistics system beyond naval control and seeds a parallel financial system beyond the dollar’s sole purview. For the American strategic community, it is a blueprint for a post-American world; peaceful economic integration is the mechanism of disempowerment. The trade surplus Beijing accumulates is not seen as a sign of healthy commerce but as the war chest of a challenger, the tangible fuel for a geopolitical machine designed to reorder the world without American consent. Since you cannot simply lay naval mines on a trans-Eurasian railway, you attack its nodes, its sponsors, and its enabling technologies through a multi-pronged campaign.

The primary form is a trade and technology war. The seemingly surgical tariffs placed on Chinese goods are high-explosive aimed at the manufacturing centers of Zhengzhou and Shenzhen, the starting stations of the China-Europe railway. The real krieg is the decapitation strike on Huawei, SMIC, and other tech champions, starving them of advanced semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment; It is an attempt not only to prevent China from building its network, but also to stop it from climbing the value chain, from the “world’s factory” to the “world’s laboratory”, a transformation that would make its challenge to U.S. dominance permanent.

The second form is the relentless attack on the BRI narrative itself. The coordinated characterization of the strategic narrative initiative as “debt-trap diplomacy” is a form of psychological bombing. It aims to explode the credibility and soft power that lubricate the BRI’s expansion, turning China from a partner into a predator in the global consciousness. Every Western report of a scaled-back port project in Sierra Leone is treated as a strategic victory, a successful payload detonating on the railway’s ideological foundations.

A third, more covert form, is what the original premise labels as coronating the Russian connection. The instigation and management of the Ukraine crisis serve, from this perspective, a dual purpose. It cuts Europe’s most critical energy and resource ties to the Eurasian heartland, a prerequisite for breaking the logic of the land bridge. How can a Berlin-Duisburg train compete with a ship if the route goes through a war zone or a pariah state? By triggering a crisis that forces Europe to decouple from the Eurasian mainland and re-anchor itself firmly to the US-led maritime system of LNG terminals and American weapons contracts, Washington plants explosives in the very middle of the modern Baghdad Railway.

The Inevitability of a New Great Game

China today is not Wilhelmine Germany, a bellicose, semi-authoritarian state with a propensity for dramatic, destabilising blunders. Nor is the modern globalised economy as zero-sum as that of 1913. Yet, as a tool for understanding the psychological drivers of US strategy, the Berlin-Baghdad paradigm offers a profound and chilling clarity, because it reveals the tragic arc: a dominant thalassocracy views a rising, commercially oriented continental power’s natural expansion as an inherent act of aggression.

The American strategic mind is haunted by a spectral railway crossing Eurasia. It sees China’s quest for innovation and its swelling trade surplus not as aspirational economic milestones but as the clinking sounds of the handcuffs being made for an empire in decline. In this light, the pressure on Iran is indeed just a saboteur’s mission on an intermediate target, a preliminary demolition on a bridge we must cross to get to the real objective.

The ultimate target is China because, in the eyes of its rival, China is building the infrastructure of a world where American dominance is just a historical memory. And for a power that has conflated its own dominance with the very definition of what is “excellent & good,” there can be no threat more lethal than a peaceful path to its own obsolescence. The war against that future, like the one ignited over a century ago, begins by bombing a railway.

Mats Nilsson, LL.M is a Swedish geopolitical analyst and Senior Analyst at Dissident Club, Sweden. His analysis focuses on great-power competition, NATO and US strategic doctrine, Eurasian infrastructure corridors, and the historical logic of maritime empires confronting rising continental powers. His work often situates contemporary conflicts, from Iran to Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific, within the broader transition from a US-led unipolar order toward an emerging multipolar world.

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