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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

In early May 2026, three pro‑Palestine candidates in French municipal races were hit with a coordinated smear campaign built on lies, synthetic identities and anonymous digital attacks, which French authorities and platform investigators traced back to an Israeli influence construct and the wider cyber‑operations infrastructure behind it. In Marseille, QR codes directed passers‑by to a blog accusing La France insoumise deputy and mayoral candidate Sébastien Delogu of sexual harassment. In Toulouse and Roubaix, similar websites and social media accounts pushed fabricated allegations against François Piquemal and David Guiraud, backed by fake testimonies and AI‑generated visuals. The targets were carefully chosen, and so were the methods. All three candidates are affiliated with “La France insoumise“,  the leading left‑wing, ecosocialist movement in France, founded and led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 

French authorities quickly moved beyond the idea that this was routine local mudslinging. Reuters reported that investigators were probing whether the Israeli firm BlackCore interfered in France’s 2026 local elections, while Meta removed coordinated inauthentic accounts it said originated in Israel and were linked to the campaign targeting French political figures. Google and TikTok separately detected parts of the same operation during their own monitoring, meaning three major platforms independently identified the same Israeli‑linked network. According to Reuters, French intelligence services are now trying to establish who commissioned BlackCore and what stood behind it, a set of facts that places the firm at the visible edge of a much more complex enterprise built to strike, disappear and leave the deeper structure intact

Public corporate records and archived infrastructure traces point toward that deeper structure. Galacticos Ltd and SNI Digital Ltd are active Israeli companies registered at the same Tel Aviv address, 103 HaHashmonaim Street, alongside Benguy Escrow Company Ltd, a trust vehicle used in cross-border transactions to hold shares and options at arm’s length. An archived login page titled “Avatar Data Generator by Galacticos AI” preserves a surviving fragment of the BlackCore toolchain, days before the cluster was scrubbed. Taken together, these traces point to a layered system: legal insulation at HaHashmonaim, modular influence tooling behind BlackCore, and a broader Israeli cybersphere where elite personnel circulate between deniable operations and regulator-facing businesses.

A smear campaign with a political target

This French case is significant because of who was targeted and why. Delogu, Piquemal and Guiraud all belong to La France insoumise, the most prominent party in France taking an openly pro-Palestine line against Israel’s war on Gaza and against the political consensus shielding it. This was, without a doubt, a political selection and not a simple random opportunism. The operation landed on a current in French politics that challenges Atlantic orthodoxy and rejects the deference expected on Israel.

The alarm in France did not begin and end with Reuters. A Reuters-derived Arabic recap states that France’s Service for monitoring and protection against foreign digital interference, also known as Viginium, first detected what it described as a “limited-range” foreign interference operation targeting a French political force in Marseille, Toulouse and Roubaix, a finding later reported by Le Monde. Le Canard Enchaîné then revealed that French authorities suspected an Israeli company, and Viginum formally warned La France insoumise that its candidates were being targeted. By the time Reuters published its account, the case already had a domestic institutional trail.

The techniques employed were tailored to municipal terrain and suggest professionalism and know-how. Anonymous blogs, QR codes in public space, fake local testimony, AI-generated content and regional media seeding gave the fabrication a neighborhood texture rather than a spectacular national footprint, which made the operation cheaper, deniable and effective at precisely the scale where municipal races can be destabilized by rumor and suspicion. Whoever designed it understood that local politics offers ideal ground for foreign interference because the threshold for contamination is low and the scrutiny often arrives too late.

This episode also sits inside a broader European pattern in which Palestine solidarity is increasingly treated as something to monitor, restrict or fold into the language of extremism. Reuters reported last year that Britain moved to ban Palestine Action under anti-terrorism laws, a measure later challenged in court and criticized by civil-liberties advocates. The French case is different in form, but it lands on the same political terrain, with pro-Palestine activism and representation finding themselves under escalating pressure.

Interestingly, the French institutions treated the affair as a national security issue, and not as a campaign sideshow. Reuters reported that the probe centered on BlackCore, while Meta said it had disrupted a network originating in Israel that primarily targeted France and linked the operation to previous activity in Africa. BlackCore’s digital presence quickly vanished as scrutiny intensified, but the takedown only confirmed the disposable role of the brand. The infrastructure and legal shell around it are what matter the most.

The BlackCore toolchain

Before it went dark, BlackCore advertised itself as an “elite influence, cyber and technology company.” It claimed the ability to run more than 1,600 avatars, generate up to one million posts a month, infiltrate Facebook groups, manipulate TikTok trends and shape positive or negative narratives for political clients. That sales pitch was unusually explicit. BlackCore was presenting information warfare as a private service.

The French operation followed that logic closely. It did not require a dramatic hack or a sprawling troll farm. It required fake local credibility, synthetic content, targeted insertion and enough amplification to keep the allegations moving through regional networks. Investigative reporting by Libération and Haaretz traced BlackCore-linked infrastructure to a London-hosted server cluster active from roughly March 2025 until 13 May 2026, when the system was scrubbed within hours of press contact. That kind of cleanup points to an operation accustomed to burning evidence fast.

BlackCore had already been selling the same machinery abroad. Documents reviewed by Reuters show the company claiming responsibility for a social-media operation run for an African government starting in January and lasting around 14 weeks. After Reuters asked Meta about that African campaign, the company said the same network was behind the French disinformation push. The continuity between overseas influence work and French electoral sabotage was identified by the platforms themselves.

The exposed subdomains, cited in France 3’s recent report on the topic, are unusually revealing. Among the names publicly identified were avatar-data-generator, agentforge, fb-search and socialtrigger. The names read like a wiring diagram: a persona-generation layer, an orchestration layer, a Facebook targeting component and a narrative deployment trigger. This strongly suggests a modular production line for synthetic identities, targeted insertion and coordinated manipulation. Nothing about it suggests freelance improvisation.

One surviving artifact cuts through the fog. An archived login page captured shortly before the purge carries the label “Login – Avatar Data Generator by Galacticos AI.” That page links a concrete BlackCore-adjacent tool to the Galacticos’ name in plain sight. A single archived interface does not reveal the full backend or every operator involved, but it does tie the exposed influence stack to real entities beyond the burned BlackCore label. Once that bridge appears, the story moves from allegation to structure.

The French case exposes more than a smear campaign against three candidates. It exposes a reusable machine built to manufacture false identities, penetrate digital communities and inject pre-fabricated narratives into democratic life. BlackCore was the storefront. The surviving traces point toward the companies and legal framework that kept the backend insulated from the fallout.

The HaHashmonaim hub

Israeli corporate records show that Galacticos Ltd and SNI Digital Ltd are active private companies registered at 103 HaHashmonaim Street, Tel Aviv–Jaffa, with incorporation dates in 2022 and 2021 and recent annual filings on record. Corporate registry tools such as KYC Israel and CheckID place Galacticos, SNI Digital and Benguy Escrow at the same address with active status data, which undercuts any claim that these were purely notional shells. BlackCore itself leaves almost no durable corporate footprint. Galacticos and SNI do. They sit at the same node as Doron Afik’s law office, and a trust vehicle called Benguy Escrow Company Ltd, a structure Afik uses as trustee in cross‑border tech deals, including in U.S. SEC filings where Benguy holds founder and executive shares at 103 HaHashmonaim Street.

Benguy Escrow is not a decorative registry footnote. Public U.S. securities filings show B.E.N.G.U.Y Escrow Company Ltd. (reg. 513905034) being used in cross‑border tech transactions as a lock‑up or escrow agent from the same HaHashmonaim address. In one SMX lock‑up agreement, “BENGUY ESCROW CO LTD A/C” appears as the holder, while Doron Afik signs as trustee for Benguy and as attorney for the company, with notices routed through Afik & Co. at 103 HaHashmonaim Street. In SMX’s amended F‑1 filing, the same escrow structure is described in relation to founder and executive shareholdings, with Benguy identified as the vehicle through which their equity is held under trustee arrangements. These filings show a repeat‑use instrument for separating operators and beneficiaries from immediate visibility

That detail matters because it places Galacticos and SNI inside a standing legal architecture rather than an improvised shell game. The HaHashmonaim cluster includes:

• Afik & Co., a law firm specializing in international transactions and capital markets.
• Galacticos Ltd.
• SNI Digital Ltd.
• Benguy Escrow, the trustee vehicle repeatedly used to hold shares and options at arm’s length.

It is hard not to notice that the pattern is consistent. A law office handling cross-border corporate work sits alongside private companies tied to the BlackCore toolchain and a trust mechanism designed to insert distance between activity and ownership. This evidently suggests that a legal firewall was already in place before BlackCore became a public scandal. When the exposed infrastructure leads back toward Galacticos and SNI, it does not land on an anonymous dead end, but lands on a functioning node built for controlled opacity.

Afik & Co.’s broader profile reinforces that reading. The firm publicly markets cross-border advisory work linking Israel, Latin America and Spain, alongside capital markets, tech transactions and crypto-related practice areas. It presents itself as a bridge for international business and corporate listings. At that same address, companies linked by infrastructure and registry overlap to a French interference probe were operating under legal cover sturdy enough to survive the burning of a front brand.

A fragmented cyber ecosystem

The public face of this world does not look like BlackCore. That is part of its durability. While the BlackCore label vanished, the cyber-intelligence talent around that market remains distributed across firms, advisory roles and verticals that present themselves as legitimate and institutionally useful.

One example is Lionsgate Intelligence Network, a Tel Aviv firm whose public business centers on blockchain forensics and crypto-asset recovery. Its materials describe work with law enforcement and regulatory bodies and focus on stolen funds, fraud and illicit-finance tracing rather than social-media operations. Lionsgate’s public story is built around NemesisAI and headline cases involving the tracing of alleged Hamas-linked or “terror” funds, a branding posture that makes the firm a comfortable partner for regulators, while the wider ecosystem around it supplies private influence capacity. The company operates from a different address than the HaHashmonaim hub used by Galacticos, SNI Digital, Afik & Co. and Benguy Escrow.

That contrast sharpens the political question. One side of the same ecosystem presents itself as a guardian against illicit finance and extremism, while another is tied by infrastructure and corporate records to an operation targeting pro-Palestine politicians in France. The split between clean-facing intelligence services and deniable influence work is one of the most important facts exposed by this case.

The personnel are just as telling. Lionsgate’s advisory and executive orbit includes figures from Israel’s security and cyber establishment, including former National Cyber Directorate chief Yigal Unna, who publicly distanced himself from Galacticos by late 2024. There is no public evidence that Lionsgate ran the BlackCore operation, and its declared business is distinct. The separation works like a shield, where the disposable brand takes the fall, while the operators keep their contracts and their invitations from regulators.

That fragmentation should not be mistaken for innocence. One branch sells blockchain forensics and “digital asset intelligence” to regulators, police agencies and compliance actors. Another builds avatar farms, targeting tools and narrative-trigger systems, while a legal hub manages the corporate and trust architecture. As for former intelligence and cyber officials, they clearly circulate through the broader market. To simplify, the visible scandal burns at the edge while the rest of the ecosystem keeps its reputation, clients and access intact.

Another interference case in France

What happened in France was more than a municipal dirty trick. All point to a foreign interference operation aimed at a pro-Palestine current in French politics and executed through a private Israeli-linked ecosystem built for deniability. In this case, the political logic is difficult to miss because the targets belonged to the force in mainstream French politics most openly hostile to Israel’s war on Gaza and most resistant to the Atlantic discipline that now governs nearly every official discussion of Palestine.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry told Reuters it was unaware of BlackCore and did not say whether Paris had raised the case. That answer was narrowly framed around formal awareness of one burned label rather than the wider private ecosystem surrounding it. By the time that line was delivered, Meta had already tied the relevant network to Israel, three major platforms had detected parts of the operation, and French authorities were investigating the matter as foreign interference.

The BlackCore brand’s disappearance should reassure no one. Disposable fronts are meant to vanish once journalists, platform investigators or intelligence services begin closing in. What remains are the active companies, the legal node, the trust mechanisms, the archived toolchain and the wider professional environment that can absorb exposure without collapsing. That is why the French case matters beyond France. It shows how a privatized interference industry can be hired, shielded and deployed against democratic actors while preserving plausible deniability for those behind it.

French political and security elites have spent years treating Israeli cyber expertise as something to import, trust and integrate. This case shows the risk of such a posture. A private Israeli-linked influence apparatus is now at the center of a French interference probe involving attacks on domestic opposition figures.

France has stumbled into a market that European elites still prefer to treat as hypothetical. Municipal races are ideal terrain for these operations because they are cheaper to target, easier to contaminate and less intensively scrutinized than presidential contests. If such methods are already being used against local pro-Palestine candidates, there is no serious reason to assume the industry will stop there. The machinery exposed in this case was built for reuse.

The scandal is not a vanished website or a bad actor with a clever domain name. It is a private architecture of political sabotage. The French probe has exposed one working edge of that architecture, starting with shell companies at 103 HaHashmonaim Street, followed by a legal and escrow framework capable of shielding ownership, and a modular AI-driven stack for building fake people and pushing lies into electoral space. BlackCore burned because it was designed to burn. The real work now is to go after the system behind it, the one that was built not to vanish, but to survive.

Host Kyle Anzalone talks with 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen. Watch: 

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In The Eyes of Truth host Stanislav Krapivnik talks with 21st Century Wire founder Patrick Henningsen the true state of play in Washington and the Persian Gulf. Watch: 

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

For years, “foreign interference” has been the scarecrow Ottawa drags out whenever Beijing or Moscow are on the menu. Beijing, Moscow, Tehran… the enemy list is familiar, rehearsed, and politically safe. However, a new report from Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) blows straight through that narrative at the moment when politicians act outraged about Chinese influence, a close military partner has been running its own operations on Canadian soil and getting away with it. The document isn’t written in the soft language of a funding appeal; on the page, it reads like a case file that follows how Israeli diplomats, ministries and cut-outs bankroll opinion polls, undermine consumer labelling rules, organise propaganda junkets, pump out racist disinformation and ship spyware into Canada’s policing ecosystem.

The report also makes a broader point that shouldn’t be missed. These episodes are not random. To the contrary, they sit inside a much larger state effort to shape opinion abroad. CJPME notes that Israel’s 2026 budget reserved about $730 million for overseas image management, or hasbara, suggesting that what has surfaced in Canada is likely only a fraction of the full operation.

REPORT: Israeli Foreign Influence, Interference, and Transnational Repression in Canada, May 2026 (Source: CJPME)
EN_-_Israeli_Influence_Interference_and_Transnational_Repression_-_2026_Final

What’s in the investigative report has nothing to do with some fuzzy “diaspora” culture war; it shows Israel moving pieces inside Canada through Canadian firms, front groups and parts of the security apparatus to protect its image after the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the assault on Lebanon, while exposing how this foreign state goes after people who refuse to look away.

In 2023, the Toronto Star reported, as cited by CJPME, that Canadian security agencies had flagged Israel as one of six states “potentially engaging in influence activities” in Canada, alongside China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Not long after, “The Breach Investigation” cited in the report found that the Israeli consulate in Toronto had secretly commissioned a poll through Aurora Strategies Global to inflate apparent Canadian support for the war in Gaza.

The mechanics matter. Israeli officials used a Canadian firm to place polling in the public sphere, dressed up as neutral research while hiding the real client. Liberal insiders in the “Lib Friends of Israel” WhatsApp group were reportedly told the poll had been done on behalf of the consulate and discussed getting it in front of the Prime Minister’s Office before release. Calling this “debate” is a stretch; what you see here is perception management bankrolled from abroad.

The same pattern shows up in trade and regulation. After a federal court ruled that “Product of Israel” labels on West Bank settlement wines were misleading, Israel’s Ministry of Justice secretly hired Torys LLP, a Toronto law firm, to intervene while staying out of public view. The firm was retained to advise on food regulations, prepare talking points for discussions with Canadian authorities, and attend court hearings on Israel’s behalf while its role remained concealed. Canada ultimately appealed the ruling, siding with settlement wineries.

What’s at stake here is whether Canadians are allowed to know if they’re buying goods from occupied territory. If a Chinese state-owned company pulled the same stunt on labelling goods from Xinjiang, you can bet half the cabinet would be lining up at the microphones by morning. When the state playing those games is Israel, the file sinks into the grey zone and appears to stay there.

The report also splits the junket story in two, and that distinction is useful. One stream is covert with Canadian intermediaries such as the Ontario-based Exigent Foundation organising trips for right-wing journalists and personalities, with at least two late-2025 trips quietly funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the tune of almost $175,000 CAD, according to “Press Progress” reporting cited in the report. The other stream is official, and involves the Israeli consulate in Toronto directly sponsoring a week-long “Canadian political leadership mission” in late 2025 for municipal politicians and media figures, covering travel inside Israel, accommodation, meals and program costs.

That second category may not always meet the strictest definition of covert interference, because the Israeli state is not necessarily hiding its role. But the ethical problem is obvious enough. The entire purpose of these trips is to cultivate a carefully selected layer of Canadian public figures, build support for Israel, and send them home with a guided political narrative. The lack of proper disclosure only deepens the problem. A similar play had already surfaced in June 2024, south of the border, where Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs secretly financed a bot‑driven influence campaign aimed at US progressives and lawmakers, fronted by a Tel Aviv marketing firm and only exposed when Haaretz and the New York Times pulled the threads.

The report runs through the glossy, front-of-house lobbying, then rolls up its sleeves and digs into the muck underneath. It traces racist, anti-Muslim disinformation pushed through fake organisations and AI-generated accounts aimed at audiences in Canada and the US. Haaretz and the New York Times, as cited by CJPME, reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs backed a covert influence campaign using fake English-language sites and hundreds of fake accounts, while Canadian officials later confirmed they had corroborated “elements” of the operation and raised concerns with Israel. At a time when people were watching atrocities in Gaza in real time, the purpose was to distort the conversation, stigmatise Palestine solidarity, and muddy public anger with racism and panic.

One more piece in the report deserves more attention than it has received. CJPME flags the risk of electoral interference. It says there is no public proof yet of direct Israeli electoral interference in Canada; yet it points to Israeli-linked operators such as Team Jorge and Black Cube, both implicated abroad, as a warning that this threat is neither abstract nor far-fetched.

From lobbying to intimidation inside Canada

This is where the report broadens from interference to repression. CJPME argues that Israel’s activities in Canada are not confined to opinion-shaping or lobbying; they extend into efforts to monitor, intimidate and discipline critics, especially within Palestinian, Muslim and Jewish communities.

One major thread is the attempt to restrict democratic rights. The report points to Israel’s Foreign Minister celebrating Bill C-9, which civil liberties groups warn could be used to suppress protest, and to Israel’s ambassador openly lobbying for Canada to “limit” certain freedoms in the name of fighting antisemitism. It also points to Ontario’s failed 2026 attempt to block the Al-Quds Day rally after a meeting between Premier Doug Ford, ministers and Israeli diplomats, with public statements from Ontario officials tying the meeting directly to the injunction push. At that point, you’re no longer just tracking spin; you’re looking at an attempt to discipline dissent.

The report then turns to surveillance, profiling and doxxing. Since at least 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs has reportedly monitored pro-Palestine organising in Canada, issued reports naming organisers, tracked online engagement, and attempted to frame demonstrations as security threats in order to trigger state responses. Their ministerial report from October 2024 profiled Canadian critics of Israel alongside violent incidents targeting Jewish institutions, implying a connection between dissenting speech and violent acts.

CJPME also folds in the wider blacklist ecosystem. It points to Canary Mission, which compiles dossiers on pro-Palestinian students and professors in Canada and the US, and notes that Canadian activists are already caught in this architecture of surveillance and punishment. The report also cites plans by HonestReporting Canada to build a “name and shame” database for law enforcement and media use, and it points to anonymous harassment accounts whose attacks are then amplified by Israeli officials.

What’s under pressure isn’t simply the narrative, but the speakers themselves, who dare to speak up, and whose name ends up on a list, who pays for opening their mouth.

The spyware section sharpens that danger. CJPME places Israeli cyber firms inside a wider infrastructure of transnational repression, noting NSO Group’s Pegasus, Cytrox’s Predator software, and Paragon as examples of tools that have been used against dissidents, journalists and human-rights defenders across multiple countries. The report also points out that Israeli-linked spyware has already surfaced in Canadian policing: the  Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has acknowledged using tools with similar capabilities, Ontario Provincial Police has been linked to Paragon, and Edmonton police have used facial-recognition technology from Israel’s Corsight AI.

That creates an obvious conflict of interest. The same state apparatus that is supposed to protect Canadians from abusive surveillance is also buying into a surveillance ecosystem tied to Israeli military and intelligence networks. CJPME argues that this leaves activists, journalists and targeted communities in Canada exposed on two fronts at once: foreign repression from abroad and domestic uptake of the same technologies.

Meanwhile, Parliament’s own flagship document on foreign interference refuses to say any of this out loud. The NSICOP report never mentions Israel by name, even though its own definitions of covert influence operations and transnational repression plainly fit much of the conduct described above. Three of the six “primary perpetrators” of repression against ethnocultural communities were redacted from the public version, and CJPME argues that Israel is almost certainly among them.

Why this should alarm Canadians

Some people will still try to dismiss all of this as “Middle East politics” spilling into Canada. The report gives no basis for that comfort. It lays out a pattern in which a foreign state, its ministries, its diplomats, its proxies and its aligned technology firms repeatedly surface inside Canadian political, media and security life.

The warning signs are already here. Covert polling, hidden legal intervention, state-backed junkets, racist disinformation, pressure to curb civil liberties, surveillance of organisers, blacklist ecosystems, and spyware-linked policing all appear in the same report for a reason, and when taken together, they describe a durable structure of foreign influence and transnational repression rather than a string of isolated scandals.

The report doesn’t stop at sounding the alarm. It also spells out a list of concrete steps and recommendations, inviting lawmakers to name Israel as a threat actor, un-redact the NSICOP report, apply any foreign-influence registry across the board, send home diplomats caught running these operations, sanction the disinfo outfits, shield targeted communities, and cut Canada’s ties to Israeli spyware and the money behind it.

So the choice is a simple one. Either foreign interference is a real principle that applies across the board, or it is a political instrument used selectively against adversaries while allies are allowed to shape public debate, pressure institutions, and intimidate critics with impunity.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

The revelation that a major US university has been quietly feeding bodies donated “to science” into a Pentagon pipeline for Israeli military training collapses the usual moral firewall between campus, the US security state, and Israel’s war machine.

Recent student reporting by USC Annenberg Media and a follow-up report on the Al Jazeera documentary show that the University of Southern California has, for years, transferred human cadavers to the US Navy under paid contracts. Those cadavers were then used in trauma courses for Israeli military medical teams, including at the Navy Trauma Training Center at Los Angeles General Medical Center, without donors or families being told their remains could be used to train IDF soldiers.

VIDEO: Israeli Military Medics Are Training On Dead Americans (Source: Al Jazeera English)

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The underlying documents and investigations describe a straightforward commercial relationship: USC receives federal money to provide “fresh cadaver” bodies to the Navy, and the Navy, in turn, runs joint training that rotates US and Israeli medics through live-tissue style exercises on human remains. Administrators at USC’s Keck School of Medicine have defended the program as part of trauma education. Still, that framing obscures the core allegation: people who believed they were contributing to medical research and education were instead folded into a military-to-military partnership with the Israeli army, which is facing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice. The lack of explicit donor consent for that use sits at the heart of the scandal.

Civil-rights advocates such as CAIR-LA have called the practice “disturbing” and demanded full transparency on how many bodies were used, what contracts were signed, and which units were trained. For Palestinian, Arab, and allied students already facing repression on campus, the idea that their own university is helping prepare Israeli medics for battlefield conditions in Gaza and the West Bank lands like a grotesque betrayal. What began as a niche campus investigation has quickly widened into a national debate over consent, commodification of the dead, and the deep institutional entanglement between US academia, the military, and Israel’s ongoing war.

To dig deeper into how this pipeline was built and how USC is now scrambling to explain it, the article we are featuring today draws on Annenberg Media’s original campus investigation, which traced the cadaver contracts and their expansion, alongside Al Jazeera’s documentary “Israeli Military Medics Are Training On Dead Americans”, which puts faces, testimony, and hard numbers to a program that donors were never told existed.

IMAGE: Navy Trauma Training Center then-director Travis Polk leads a tour of the facility in 2019. (9source: Courtesy of David Kolmel)

Malik Gamble reports for USC Annenberg Media…

Al Jazeera documentary highlights USC’s sale of dead bodies to US Navy, Israeli military

Reporting by Annenberg Media, which was first published last year, exposed the sale of bodies from the University of Southern California and the University of California schools to the United States Navy. The Navy used some of these bodies to train Israeli military medical personnel.

AJ+,  a youth-focused, digital-only outlet part of Al Jazeera, released the documentary “Israeli Military Medics Are Training On Dead Americans” on Monday. Collaborating with Peabody Award-winning AJ+ show Direct From with Dena Takruri, it follows the story of two college newsrooms.

Annenberg Media and the UC San Diego Guardian teamed up for one of the stories that followed the reaction of families whose relatives were donated to the program. The documentary looks at a series of stories and provides follow-up reporting.

“The lack of transparency and informed consent for donors and their families is at the heart of this story and something we felt demanded deeper scrutiny,” wrote Takruri, the AJ+ senior presenter, to Annenberg Media. “What made this investigation especially important was revealing how a war many Americans perceive as distant is directly connected to institutions here in the United States.”

USC’s sale of bodies to the Israeli military was first discovered by a USC-affiliated physician in 2024.

“Every answer I found was more horrific than what I had imagined,” said the physician, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, in an interview with AJ+.

When 101-year-old Jeanette Volpin died, her body was donated to USC’s Anatomical Gift Program — but she was never informed of the possibility that it could be used to teach Israeli military medics. Her daughter Miriam said she was “furious” after reading the article.

“It really has destroyed any trust,” Miriam said.

Dr. Mohamad Raad, a USC-affiliated physician, talked about the lack of trust that arose in the aftermath of the reporting.

“Even during the genocide, even when the Israeli army was bombing schools and hospitals and kidnapping physicians, these contracts were being renewed,” Raad said. “What happens when these institutions lose moral legitimacy?”

UC Health only recently added to its FAQ page that donated bodies may be “shared” with other institutions and used to train military personnel.

In a letter sent to Wendy Smith, who revoked her donation to UCSD after the Annenberg Media story broke, the school stated: “We will not be responding to factually inaccurate reporting by student reporters who have an agenda.”

USC issued a statement to AJ+ through the Keck School of Medicine: “Our mission is to advance the highest standards of medical education and care for all people, and in the divided world we live in, it is even more important for us to carry out that mission irrespective of political ideology, social status, or creed.”

The student journalists involved have said they hope the investigation will pave the way for more transparency between the schools and those who choose to donate their bodies.

“We see the connections to our own university. I think just consistently our reporting reminds us that we’re a part of something much bigger than just our campus,” said Sasha Ryu, one of Annenberg Media’s investigative reporters.

If you have any information regarding this program and its participants or would like to speak with Annenberg Media about this, please email millsjacksonn78@gmail.com or securely message @jmills08.99 on Signal.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

In February, under the white light of a Bavarian assembly hall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, walked past rows of unfinished drones. The joint venture hosting them, linking Germany’s Quantum Systems with Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics, is already producing aircraft for Ukraine, plans to scale toward 10,000 units a year, and has already sent its first batch east. This is what Berlin now calls support for Ukraine, not crates on a runway, not old equipment hauled out of Bundeswehr depots, but German soil giving Ukrainian war design an industrial home.

For years, German officials sold their Ukraine policy in the language of restraint, solidarity and defensive necessity, but today, that language is buckling under what Berlin is now doing in plain sight. Germany has signed onto Ukraine’s defence innovation platform, opened itself to battlefield-data sharing, backed joint ventures that turn Ukrainian combat know-how into German-produced drones and robots, and committed itself to work on long-range strike systems with a reach of up to 1,500 kilometres. The result is no longer the picture of a cautious donor helping from a distance. It is a state folding Ukraine’s war labs into its own industrial base and building the rear area of a long war against Russia on German territory.

IMAGE: Auterion CEO Lorenz Meier, Airlogix CEO Vitalii Kolesnichenko, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz with an Airlogix autonomous strike system. (Source: Auterion)

Germany Becomes the Factory Floor

The Munich drone line strips away the euphemism. Ukraine is not simply receiving German kit from stockpiles. Ukrainian battlefield-proven designs, software and operational lessons are being fused with German capital, German factory capacity and German political cover inside ventures built to scale weapons production for a war Berlin still insists it is not fighting. The Auterion-Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH makes the point even more bluntly. Registered in Germany and launched in February, it combines Airlogix’s battle-tested Ukrainian UAV platforms with Auterion’s autonomy software and is meant to produce thousands of autonomous, combat-ready systems in Germany for the Ukrainian armed forces. Every time Ukrainian engineers find a way through Russian jamming or air defences, German industry is there to absorb the lesson and turn it into volume.

IMAGE: During the Munich Security Conference, Auterion (Germany) and Airlogix (Ukraine) announced the launch of Auterion Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH – February 2026 (Source: Airlogix)

The named systems give the arrangement a harder outline. During Zelensky’s Berlin visit in April, Germany and Ukraine signed an implementation arrangement under their October 2025 defence-industry agreement covering the joint production of the unmanned systems Anubis and Seth-X-G, with a contract value of €281 million. Anubis has been described as a heavy AI-guided deep-strike system with a range in the 1,500 to 1,600 kilometre band and a 45 kilogram warhead, while Seth-X is designed for attack missions in heavily contested environments. Production is planned in the thousands under German-backed joint-venture arrangements. Once those names are on the table, the fiction that Berlin is merely helping Ukraine hold the line becomes harder to maintain.

The War Lab Crosses the Border

Brave1 sits at the centre of this arrangement. The Ukrainian cluster was built to connect front-line units, developers, testing and procurement into a single accelerated loop, a wartime incubator where battlefield experience is turned into new weapons and quickly sent back to the field. Brave Germany is the moment that loop jumps the border. Pistorius announced that Berlin would join Brave1 to support defence innovation, while Ukraine Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov hailed the initiative as a deepening of a partnership that already accounts for roughly a third of the security support reaching Ukraine. The most revealing line did not come from any grand strategic declaration. Pistorius said promising systems could be funded through the platform so they could be deployed early on the battlefield to test their effectiveness. In the brochures, this is presented as innovation, but in reality, it is nothing short of a war-lab pipeline.

The April defence-data memorandum made the same reality harder to disguise. Germany and Ukraine agreed on a framework for exchanging defence-related data and cooperating on AI and weapons systems, giving German partners access to battlefield information drawn from DELTA and other Ukrainian military platforms so AI models can be trained, analytical tools refined and German systems evaluated under real combat conditions. Fedorov called it the first project of this scale in the world focused on defence-related artificial intelligence solutions. Specialist reporting on the agreement makes the picture even more concrete. The data stream includes real-time battle management inputs, strike tracking and large annotated datasets generated from thousands of combat flights and ground engagements, exactly the kind of material AI developers rarely receive in peacetime. Ministries prefer to present this as digital cooperation, but in plain language, Germany is plugging parts of its defence industry into a live feed from the war.

The venture network spreading out from that data stream already has recognizable shapes. In the air, Quantum Systems and Frontline Robotics are scaling drone production in Germany for Ukrainian use. Auterion and Airlogix are building autonomous strike systems in Germany for Ukrainian deployment. On the ground, ARX Robotics has secured a major Ukrainian order for hundreds of GEREON unmanned vehicles, multiplying Ukraine’s fleet fivefold and helping create what the company itself called the world’s largest connected military robot fleet. Quantum Systems has also announced additional German-Ukrainian ventures in interceptor drones and unmanned ground systems, widening the model beyond one class of drone and one phase of the war. The industry council in Kyiv described six such agreements as the practical implementation of the Build with Ukraine model, where Ukrainian solutions are scaled with European industry on joint production sites and with access to new manufacturing capacity. At this point, it makes less sense to speak of German aid to Ukraine than of a shared war industry with two postal codes.

Rearming the State for a Long War

On 13 April, Germany and Ukraine agreed a defence cooperation package worth around €4,7 billion, bundling several hundred Patriot missiles, 36 IRIS-T launchers, €300 million for long-range attack capabilities and the first phase of a plan to jointly produce about 5,000 AI-enabled medium-range attack drones under the Build with Ukraine initiative. Fedorov said the package rested on three key pillars: air defence, long-range capabilities and joint drone production. Berlin is financing the shield, the spear and the factory line at the same time.

IMAGE: 11 May, 2026 – Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius signed a Letter of Intent between the ministries on cooperation in the field of defense technology innovation.

The long-range component wrecks the official fairy tale most completely. Pistorius said Germany and Ukraine intend to jointly develop and produce drones of different ranges, including long-range drones with a radius of up to 1,500 kilometres. Reporting tied the April package and the talks that followed to deep precision strike capabilities beyond 500 kilometres and to systems meant to suppress Russian air defences and hit strategic targets far behind the front. From eastern Ukraine, a 1,500 kilometre arc reaches oil terminals on the Black Sea, fuel depots deep in western Russia and air bases that once felt well outside the war’s immediate geography. Once Berlin commits money, factories and political backing to systems like that, the claim that Germany is only helping defend Ukrainian territory stops being serious.

In April, Pistorius placed state doctrine on top of this industrial shift. The new Bundeswehr military strategy, sold under the mild title Verantwortung für Europa, names Russia as the primary threat and sets a clear ambition. Germany is meant to field the strongest conventional military power in Europe. The plan calls for 260,000 soldiers in uniform and another 200,000 in reserve, roughly 460,000 combat-ready personnel in all. Its priorities are long-range precision strike, advanced air and missile defence, drone warfare, cyber operations, AI-enabled command systems and a reserve structure able to support Germany’s role as the logistical hinge for allied forces moving east in a crisis.

DOCUMENT: The overall concept of military defence – Military Strategy and Plan for the Armed Forces – Responsibility for Europe|Verantwortung für Europa) (Source Bundeswehr, Germany)
Responsibility for Europe

That logistics role is not theoretical. Reporting on Operation Plan Germany (OPLAN DEU), Germany’s 1,200-page war plan, describes Berlin as the transit and staging ground through which hundreds of thousands of NATO and U.S. troops would flow east in the event of a large war with Russia. Germany is being built not only as an industrial rear area, but as the land bridge and organisational spine of a continental conflict.

DOCUMENT: Brochure on Operation Plan Germany (OPLAN DEU / Operationsplan Deutschland) – (Source: Bundeswehr|Germany)
OPERATIONS PLAN FOR GERMANY

Seen next to this strategy, the drone ventures no longer appear as isolated contracts. Berlin is enlarging its army, rebuilding its reserve base, preserving the legal machinery of conscription, hard-wiring itself into Ukraine’s battlefield innovation loop and scaling domestic production of systems that can sustain a long confrontation with Russia. In other words, this is a rearmament that has learned the language of startups and innovation hubs.

On paper, conscription is gone, but in the law, it has been sitting there the whole time. The Library of Congress notes that conscription was suspended in 2011, not abolished, which meant there was no need to amend the Basic Law, and the system can be reactivated at any time. Article 12a still allows men over eighteen to be required to serve in the armed forces. The new military service model introduced in late 2025 keeps formal service voluntary while requiring young men to register and undergo assessment, and it was deliberately structured so compulsory service can be restored quickly if recruitment targets are missed. The legal shell is already standing, and Berlin is only arguing about when to fill it.

The numbers reinforce the point, while the opening phase of the new strategy runs through 2029 and is meant to drive rapid growth in readiness and personnel. German and foreign reporting make clear that Germany’s rearmament plan foresees growth on both the military and civilian sides of the Bundeswehr. The army is supposed to expand from roughly 186,000 troops today to at least 260,000 professional soldiers by the mid‑2030s. Over the same period, the reserve component is meant to rise from about 70,000 to no less than 200,000 people. It is no longer possible to interpret these numbers without recognizing the language of a country settling onto a war footing and teaching its public to treat that posture as normal.

Memory, Targets, and the Return of German Power

There is a reason Moscow does not read these developments as harmless bureaucracy. Sergei Lavrov called Germany’s plans to build the strongest army in Europe very worrying and tied them directly to the world wars of the twentieth century. Russia’s Defence Ministry then published lists of European drone firms and facilities, including German-linked addresses, as potential targets, while Dmitry Medvedev said those lists should be understood literally as possible targets for Russian forces depending on what came next. He had already warned that German plants producing long-range weapons for Ukraine would be legitimate targets. 

In much of the Western press, this was treated as one more theatrical outburst from Moscow. However, that reading becomes harder to sustain once German factories are producing autonomous strike systems for the Ukrainian military and German ministers are publicly backing long-range drone projects measured in four digits.

IMAGE: The Banner of Victory on the Reichstag building in Berlin, May 1, 1945 (Source: Gateway to Russia)

Around 27 million people from the Soviet Union died in the Second World War, most of them civilians. Roughly 11 million of the dead wore Red Army uniforms. That number is so large that it can lose all meaning when it is dropped into Western commentary and immediately left behind. In Russia, this tragedy never became abstract and has lived in family memory, in photographs of men who never came home, in school rituals, in Victory Day parades and in the names carved onto village memorials from Smolensk to the Volga. When Russian officials look at a Bavarian factory helping scale long-range drones for use against targets on Russian territory, they are not responding to some fantasy of revived Wehrmacht columns rolling east. They are seeing German industry attached, once again, to systems designed to kill Russians on their own soil.

Berlin’s political class has no real answer to that history except evasion. It speaks in a moral dialect of innovation, solidarity, values and European responsibility, language soft enough to blur the steel underneath. Yet the structure is visible enough once the pieces are laid side by side. Germany has signed a strategic partnership with Ukraine that explicitly promotes joint ventures and expanded armaments cooperation.

DOCUMENT: April 2026 declaration on a strategic partnership between Germany and Ukraine (Source: Bundesregierung| Germany)
April 2026 declaration GER UKR

It has joined the institutions through which battlefield-tested Ukrainian systems are funded, refined and pushed back to the front. It has opened its industry to joint drone and robotics production, financed long-range strike capabilities and set its own military on a path toward 460,000 combat-ready personnel, with Russia named as the central danger. Nothing about that picture is defensive in the narrow sense Berlin still tries to sell at home.

A generation of German politicians spent years insisting that military restraint was woven into the republic’s post-war identity. What is taking shape now is colder and more systematic than the old rhetoric of emergency aid to a neighbour under siege. Ukraine’s war labs are being given German money, German data infrastructure, German industrial scale and German legal shelter. At the same time, Germany is rebuilding the army, the reserve base, the recruitment machinery and the strategic doctrine needed to sustain confrontation with Russia for years to come.

READ MORE GERMANY NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Germany Files

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Host Niko House talks with 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen about Trump’s impossible Iran dilemma, and how the Israel Lobby have taken over the White House and Congress. Watch:

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Correction from Patrick Henningsen: During the final part of our discussion, I spoke regarding the vacant House seat left by GOP member Matt Gaetz seat, saying it was filled by pro-Israel member Randy Fine. It wasn’t Matt Gaetz’s seat which Fine filled, but rather that of Trump’s then National Security advisor pick (now UN Ambassador) Mike Waltz. The incoming Randy Fine then defeated Democrat Josh Weil for the 6th District seat formerly held by Waltz. Gaetz’s vacant seat was filled by Jimmy Patronis in a special election. As a Florida state official, Patronis is a major Israel loyalist, and was behind Governor DeSantis’s move to ban BDS boycotts of Israel in the state, and set up a new economic package for Florida’s financial support of Israel.

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Hosts Patrick Henningsen and Mike Robinson, joined by Basil Valentine for the end of week news round-up. Watch:

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Host Danny Haiphong is joined by 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen about the prospects of the war resuming in the coming days or weeks. Watch:

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