Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Emails from former Israeli UN ambassador Ron Prosor’s hacked account, obtained by the group Handala and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, have exposed Yahav Lichner, now director of UNICEF’s Washington office, as a UN official who appears to have functioned as an Israeli asset inside the organisation. The emails were examined by Drop Site News, while other public records suggest Lichner’s story is much bigger, and older, than anyone has reported

The emails examined by Drop Site News begin in 2014, but Lichner’s involvement in the political management of Israel’s wars in Gaza reaches back much further.

According to PassBlue, Lichner served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)  from 2000 to 2006. It was a six-year stretch at a time when ordinary compulsory service for Israeli men lasted three years. No public record identifies his rank or unit, but that length of service suggests the military was a formative professional chapter in his life, rather than an obligation completed before moving into civilian work.

By 2009, Lichner was already inside Israel’s London embassy as a parliamentary researcher. That August, he wrote to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and transmitted a newly published Israeli government report titled The Operation in Gaza, 27 December 2008–18 January 2009, Factual and Legal Aspects.

The report presented Operation Cast Lead as a necessary and proportionate response to Hamas, defended the IDF’s conduct around civilian casualties, UN facilities and white phosphorus, and blamed much of the destruction on Hamas’s operations within populated areas. Its authors described their purpose with unusual candour. The document had been released, they wrote, “to answer propaganda and prejudice with facts and law.” Lichner was telling Parliament that allegations of civilian killings and unlawful attacks were propaganda, while presenting Israel’s own account as fact and law. Weeks later, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that Israeli forces had committed serious violations of international law, including grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and acts amounting to war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity.

IMAGE: In 2009, Yahav Lichner, then a parliamentary researcher at Israel’s London embassy, sent the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee the Israeli government report defending its conduct in Gaza. (Source: Editorial illustration)

The parliamentary record identifies Lichner by name and embassy position. He was carrying the Israeli government’s legal and political defence of a military operation directly into the British committee examining it.

Years later, UNICEF would entrust him with advancing the rights and protection of children caught in war. By then, he had already spent years helping Israel manage how foreign institutions understood one of its most destructive campaigns in Gaza.

Lichner followed Ambassador Ron Prosor from London to Israel’s UN mission in New York. Drop Site News found that when he applied to join the UN Population Fund in 2014, Prosor pressed Samantha Power, then Washington’s ambassador to the UN, to support him. He also supplied UNFPA with a glowing reference, praising the “utmost integrity” of a man who would soon send confidential UN material back to Prosor’s mission.

By May 2014, Lichner was working inside UNFPA. Within weeks, the information began flowing back.

The emails published by Drop Site show Lichner passing Israeli diplomats unpublished correspondence from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, private accounts of high-level meetings, advance information about investigations into Israel and reports explicitly marked “strictly confidential.” He marked material as sensitive, demanded discretion and sometimes moved it through his personal email. Across two years of correspondence, the same warnings keep appearing. “For your eyes only.” “Do not forward.” “Complete sensitivity.”

In one exchange, Lichner supplied a confidential account of meetings held in Washington by UN human-rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein while Israel faced investigation over its 2014 assault on Gaza. The report revealed concern inside Al-Hussein’s office that congressional anger over the inquiry could threaten US funding for the UN human-rights office.

The Israeli diplomat’s reply showed where Lichner’s information was headed. He would take it to members of Congress. Israel now had advance warning of the human-rights office’s vulnerability and an opportunity to apply pressure through the politicians who controlled its funding.

The intelligence had already left the UN, reached the government under investigation and entered Washington’s political machinery before the inquiry had completed its work.

Another exchange went further. Lichner passed Israel an unpublished draft letter from Ban to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. He told the mission that he and an unnamed “friend” inside the UN were working to insert a reference to Palestinian rocket fire. His access was no longer confined to discovering what the United Nations intended to say. It had reached the process through which the UN’s language was being written.

Prosor understood the value. “As usual, amazing and first-hand information,” he wrote after one briefing. When Lichner later thanked him for the career “tailwind,” Prosor answered, “Glad we had an influence.”

The relationship rewarded both men. Prosor helped Lichner enter and advance through the UN system whilst Lichner gave Israel an inside view of the institution, scrutinising it and providing advance warning of threats and opportunities to shape the response.

Gaza never disappeared from Lichner’s career. By early 2024, he had already spent years as a senior UNICEF adviser based in London. He then joined Sigrid Kaag’s UN team, whose mandate included coordinating, monitoring and verifying humanitarian relief consignments entering Gaza.

Honoured to have joined the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza @SigridKaag to her meeting with the EU Foreign Affairs Council #FAC to discuss the implementation of SCR 2720 https://t.co/V0uXzSnP7x

— Yahav Lichner (@YahavLich) February 20, 2024

Lichner travelled with Kaag to the United Arab Emirates, where she secured a $5 million pledge for her office. When PassBlue asked who staffed Kaag’s team, the UN spokesperson offered no names, referring only to “a team of experts from the UN system.” Lichner’s presence became public because he announced it himself.

Kaag’s office sat inside sensitive negotiations over aid routes, inspection, monitoring and reconstruction for Gaza. Entrusting Lichner with a role in that office created an obvious risk to its independence and confidentiality, given his documented history of passing confidential UN material to Israel. The UN’s refusal to identify the team kept an appointment that plainly demanded scrutiny out of public view.

A British Companies House filing records Lichner as Hungarian. Read alongside the hiring correspondence identifying his Israeli nationality, the filing indicates that he holds dual Hungarian-Israeli nationality. Filed in February 2022, it identifies him as a lawyer residing in England.

The available emails end in 2015, so they cannot tell us whether the leaking continued. They record Lichner using UN access to assist Israeli officials, helping them prepare for investigations of civilian deaths in Gaza and working with an unidentified contact to influence language coming from the secretary-general’s office.

The correspondence remained hidden for a decade. By the time it surfaced, Lichner was running UNICEF’s Washington office.

The Drop Site News investigation deserves to be read in full. It allows readers to follow the relationship through Lichner’s and Prosor’s own words, from confidential reports and unpublished drafts to lobbying plans and attempts to influence UN language from within. The emails leave little room for misunderstanding about what Lichner was doing, who benefited and how comfortably the arrangement operated.

Read the complete investigation and examine the documents for yourself. They show how a member state gained access to the UN’s private deliberations, turned that access into political leverage and helped the man supplying it continue his rise through the institution.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

David Miller said he was “overwhelmed and delighted” when the judgment arrived on August 4. The former professor of political sociology had spent seven years under complaint, investigation or litigation after his teaching and public statements about Zionism drew pressure at the University of Bristol. He lost his position, failed in an internal appeal and fought through two tribunal proceedings to establish that the university had acted unlawfully.

IMAGE: David Miller outside Bristol Civil Justice Centre in October 2023 during the tribunal case whose findings Bristol later failed to overturn (Source: BristolPost)

On August 4, 2026, the Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld findings that Bristol discriminated against Miller because of his anti-Zionist belief, dismissed him unfairly and breached his contract by denying him notice. The decision now carries appellate authority, so employment tribunals across Great Britain must follow its legal reasoning when materially similar disputes come before them.

Miller joined Bristol in 2018 after holding professorships at Strathclyde and Bath. His academic work examined state and corporate propaganda, public relations, Islamophobia and the networks that shape political debate. The Zionist movement was one of his research interests. Until the dispute began, Bristol had never subjected him to disciplinary action.

The pressure that came before dismissal

The first complaints arose from a lecture he gave in February 2019. Miller had discussed Islamophobia and identified parts of the Zionist movement as one of the forces involved in fostering it. The process began after two students approached the Community Security Trust, which passed their complaints to Bristol. On April 4, a later complaint was submitted by Nina Freedman and Hannah Rose, then presidents of Bristol Jewish Society and the Union of Jewish Students respectively.

Bristol appointed Aileen McColgan KC to investigate the complaints and related questions about Miller’s conduct. Her first report arrived in December 2020 after a process that had occupied almost two years of his professional life. She paid close attention to the relationship between the disputed speech and Miller’s research and concluded that his conduct could not reasonably be treated as misconduct. Her overall finding was that there was no formal case to answer on any matter she had examined.

The finding brought no lasting relief. On February 13, 2021, Miller spoke at an online event titled Building the Campaign for Free Speech. He described Zionism as racist and Israel as a settler-colonial society. He also placed Bristol Jewish Society and the Union of Jewish Students within the wider organisational structure of the Zionist movement.

IMAGE: David Miller addressing the online Building the Campaign for Free Speech event in February 2021. His remarks triggered a new wave of complaints and demands for disciplinary action (Source: Labour against Witchhunt)

The reaction was immediate. Some online accounts falsely accused him of advocating genocide and ethnic cleansing. Miller responded through comments to the Jewish Chronicle and via an email to a student journalist. He argued that Jewish student societies operated within organisations committed to promoting Israel and that campaigns against critics of Zionism made Arab, Muslim and anti-Zionist Jewish students less safe

The university received a large volume of demands for disciplinary action. Miller contended that groups and individuals opposed to his anti-Zionist beliefs had been engaged in an organised campaign to remove him since 2019. In March 2021, more than 100 MPs and peers wrote calling on Bristol to act. The Union of Jewish Students called for his suspension, while Conservative MPs used a parliamentary hearing to describe the university as a “hotbed of antisemitism.” Miller’s employment had become a national political issue while the investigation was still underway.

When lawful speech became misconduct

Bristol commissioned McColgan again. Her new remit covered whether Miller’s February statements had crossed the boundaries of acceptable speech under university policy and the Equality Act. Her  May 28 report found no formal case to answer on that basis. She found that his statements concerned Zionism and Israel rather than Jewish people as such and did not categorise them as antisemitic. Bristol later acknowledged that its independent KC had concluded that his comments were not unlawful.

IMAGE: Aileen McColgan KC concluded that Miller’s February 2021 statements presented no formal case to answer as unlawful or antisemitic speech (Source: Unison)

McColgan also recognised that universities could enforce reasonable standards of staff behaviour. Bristol pursued that route through its internal conduct process. Professor George Banting, a retired Bristol emeritus professor of molecular cell biology, conducted a parallel internal investigation and recommended disciplinary proceedings because Miller had directed critical comments at students and student organisations. The case now rested on his tone, his choice of targets and the effects attributed to his words.

The career left behind

Professor Jane Norman, then Dean of Bristol’s Faculty of Health Sciences, was appointed as the Appropriate Manager under the university’s conduct procedure. She heard the disciplinary case in September 2021 and was responsible for deciding whether Miller had committed misconduct or gross misconduct and what sanction should follow. Her 53-page decision accused Miller of singling out students, speaking in an unnecessarily aggressive manner and failing to respect the difference in power between an established professor and the young people he criticised.  In deciding the sanction, Norman also considered whether Miller was likely to change his manner of engagement, concluding that he had given little indication that he would do so. On October 1, she ruled that his actions amounted to gross misconduct and dismissed him immediately.

IMAGE: Professor Jane Norman, then Dean of Bristol’s Faculty of Health Sciences, issued the 53-page decision dismissing Miller for gross misconduct (Source: University of Nottingham)

The dismissal took effect immediately, ending his salary and denying him the notice required by his contract. Its consequences reached far beyond Bristol. His internal appeal failed in February 2022, exhausting the university’s own process and leaving legal action as his only remaining means of challenge.

When Miller gave evidence in 2023, he said the dismissal had “effectively ended” his academic career. A warning, he argued, might have left him able to seek a post elsewhere. Summary dismissal carried a stigma he believed no other university would overlook. Bristol’s internal process was over. The legality of what it had done was now for a tribunal to decide.

“I can never get a job at another university,” he told the hearing.
(Source: Independant)

What Bristol’s own evidence showed

Bristol’s position had narrowed by the time the case reached the Employment Tribunal. Its counsel confirmed that the university would not suggest Miller was antisemitic and that he had not been dismissed for expressing antisemitic views or breaching the Equality Act. The university nevertheless maintained that his comments amounted to gross misconduct warranting immediate dismissal. That was now the fault line in the case. Bristol accepted that Miller’s speech was lawful, was not antisemitic, incited no violence and posed no threat, yet argued that its manner, targets and effects justified the most severe sanction available. The tribunal now had to decide whether that distinction could sustain a dismissal.

IMAGE: The University of Bristol accepted at tribunal that Miller’s speech was lawful and not antisemitic while continuing to defend his summary dismissal (Source: Wikimedia)

The tribunal ruled in February 2024 that Miller’s belief qualified for protection under section 10 of the Equality Act. It defined that belief carefully. Political Zionism was, in Miller’s view, inherently racist, imperialistic and colonial and ought therefore to be opposed.

British equality law protects certain deeply held non-religious convictions alongside religious faith. A belief must be genuine, serious and coherent, and it must concern a substantial part of human life. The threshold is deliberately modest, and political content carries no automatic disqualification. In this case, Miller’s opposition to Zionism met the test.

The tribunal accepted that Miller’s opposition to Zionism was separate from hostility towards Jews or Judaism. It also accepted his evidence that he neither supported nor remained open to violence as a means of opposing Zionism. Those findings were part of the reason his belief was considered worthy of respect in a democratic society.

Bristol’s own evidence carried the discrimination claim. Norman accepted under questioning that Miller’s anti-Zionist belief ran through the statements she had classified as gross misconduct. She also accepted that linking a student organisation to wider political interests in a pro-Zionist context would not have produced the same finding.

The tribunal concluded that Miller’s description of Zionism as racist and colonial had materially influenced his dismissal. Bristol relied on his manner of expression, though its evidence showed that the substance of his protected belief formed part of the reason he lost his job.

Miller succeeded in claims for direct discrimination, unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal. The tribunal considered a lesser disciplinary sanction proportionate but reduced his unfair-dismissal awards by 50 percent because it considered his comments about students and student organisations culpable and blameworthy. That reduction reflected the tribunal’s assessment of Miller’s conduct; it did not validate Bristol’s decision to dismiss him summarily. The tribunal found that the university had failed to give adequate consideration to a warning or another lesser sanction, a significant omission given its acceptance that Miller’s speech was lawful, was not antisemitic, incited no violence and posed no threat to anyone’s safety.

The February 2024 judgment vindicated Miller after more than two years outside the university. Bristol challenged every central finding against it through nine grounds containing numerous subsidiary arguments. Once more, Miller had to rely on supporters to fund the case and spent another two years defending a judgment he had already waited years to obtain.

A judgment others can use

The Employment Appeal Tribunal heard Bristol’s challenge in November 2025. Its ruling arrived on August 4, 2026. Every finding of liability survived. Miller’s belief remained protected, and the dismissal remained discriminatory, unfair and wrongful. The 50 percent reduction also remained. One calculation involving the possibility that later social-media posts could have led to a lawful dismissal was returned to the original tribunal for fuller reasoning. Miller’s cross-appeal on findings about misconduct, harassment and compensation failed.

IMAGE: The Rolls Building in London, where the Employment Appeal Tribunal heard Bristol’s challenge to the judgment in Miller’s favour (Source: Judiciary.uk)

With Bristol’s challenge to the liability findings rejected, the protection Miller established now stands before every employment tribunal in Great Britain. A coherent belief that political Zionism is racist, colonial and imperialistic can qualify under the Equality Act even when it is controversial, political and expressed in uncompromising terms.

Miller presented the ruling as a victory extending far beyond his own case

Full statement on my decisive Employment Appeal Tribunal victory against the Zionist movement, solidifying anti-Zionism as a protected philosophical belief under UK equality law.

People can no longer be discriminated against for their anti-Zionist beliefs. pic.twitter.com/zWktJOO2bn

— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) August 4, 2026

Document: Judgment approved by the court for handing down University of Bristol v Dr David Miller (Source: UK Government)
University of Bristol v Dr David Miller - Find Case Law - The National Archives

For people whose support for Palestine includes opposition to Zionism, the workplace is where the ruling will be felt first. An employee disciplined for describing Zionism as racist or advocating its dismantling can point to appellate authority recognising those ideas as part of a protected philosophical belief. Employers will need evidence that any sanction arose from conduct capable of being separated from the belief. Complaints and reputational pressure cannot make that decision for them.

Miller’s own career shows what is at stake for academics whose research challenges Israel and Zionism. His statements concerned subjects he had studied and taught for years. McColgan specifically examined that connection when she found no misconduct in the first investigation. The judgment gives other scholars firmer ground when universities face campaigns demanding professional sanctions over lawful research, teaching or public argument.

Beyond universities, the ruling reaches charity workers involved in Palestine campaigns, trade unionists supporting boycotts and employees whose political activity reaches their workplace. Students and members of qualifying organisations can draw on the same protected characteristic under other parts of the Equality Act. Their disputes will depend on their own evidence, but anti-Zionism can no longer be rejected at the threshold as a belief unworthy of protection.

Protection for political belief may travel further, including to people whose views on Iran arise from a settled anti-war, anti-imperialist or sovereigntist conviction. Opposition to sanctions, foreign intervention and regime change can form part of a wider political philosophy. Miller’s case confirms that political content alone cannot disqualify such a belief from protection.

Outside Great Britain, the judgment carries persuasive weight, though courts will apply their own laws. Its immediate force lies in British workplaces and institutions, where organisations must now account for the legal status of anti-Zionist belief before punishing those who hold or express it.

Bristol failed to overturn the findings of direct discrimination, unfair dismissal and wrongful dismissal. It succeeded only on a narrow issue affecting the calculation of future loss, which the Employment Appeal Tribunal sent back for reconsideration. For Miller, the appeal prolonged a fight that began with his dismissal in 2021. He lost his job and income and, by his own account, the academic career he had built over decades. His compensation remains unresolved. Years after Bristol dismissed him, the judgment against the university has survived appeal. Material redress has not.

The August ruling cannot restore the years Miller lost. But the next academic whose expression of a protected belief is cast as gross misconduct will begin with the precedent Miller spent those years establishing.

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Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

On the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow border separates Morocco from a piece of Spain. On the night of July 29, that border gave way. Tens of thousands of young men surged into Ceuta by land and sea, following online claims that the crossing had been opened. By morning, bodies were being pulled from the water and collected from the fence.

IMAGE: Thousands move along Ceuta’s coast after crossing from Morocco by land and sea, July 2026 (Source:  NBC News)

It looked like chaos, but it did not come without warning. For years, Israeli and American political figures had threatened Spain over Gaza, questioned its sovereignty in North Africa and presented Ceuta as a pressure point. Months before the crossing, a former Pentagon adviser published the method almost exactly as it later unfolded, calling on Morocco to send an unarmed mass march into the city while NATO stood aside.

This investigation follows the trail that preceded the crowd, through Israeli threats, Washington pressure, Moroccan lobbying, military agreements and a digital mobilisation that delivered tens of thousands of people to one of Spain’s most exposed borders. The fence gave way only after powerful interests had spent years explaining exactly what Spain’s loss of control over Ceuta could achieve.

On the night of July 29, 2026, an estimated 70,000 people, mostly young men, crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta in under forty-eight hours. At least 88 people died at the border fence, and in the water; a toll Spanish authorities and news organisations repeatedly revised upwards in the days that followed. Morocco’s Interior Ministry put the figure at 11, while the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) estimated that nearly 130 people had died. More than a thousand required medical treatment, yet days later there was still no agreed account of how many lives the crossing had taken.

Moroccan police were present along the route in visible numbers. Videos circulating within hours showed officers watching the crowds pass and, in some cases, appearing to direct people towards crossing points rather than stopping them. By the weekend, testimony published by international news organisations had made those images harder to dismiss. Several people who reached Ceuta said Moroccan officers had told them, “Go that way” or “Come to Spain.” The force capable of stopping the movement was not absent. It was there, along the route, as tens of thousands advanced towards the border. That shifts the investigation away from how Morocco lost control of the crossing and towards the evidence that, for the crucial hours in which it gathered momentum, control was deliberately withheld.

IMAGE: People cross into Ceuta by land and sea, July 2026. (Source: OPB)

Within a day, Spain’s government said the situation had almost entirely reversed, with most of the crowd returning voluntarily to Morocco. According to Spanish Government Delegate in Ceuta Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano on 3 August 2026, approximately 2,500 irregular migrants remained in the city,  a number that, based on Interior Ministry data, exceeded Ceuta’s capacity to care for them.

The Spanish Interior Ministry credited Moroccan authorities with cooperating “faithfully and permanently” and with preventing the arrival of even larger numbers. Morocco’s embassy in Madrid called the cooperation “exemplary.” Unnamed Moroccan diplomatic sources told Euronews the same week that the assistance on the ground had actually been “limited and insufficient to contain the pressure.” Both accounts referred to the same forty-eight hours, but they point in different directions.

Washington did not direct its criticism at Rabat. Statements from American officials and allied commentators in the days that followed focused instead on Madrid, particularly Pedro Sánchez’s positions on Gaza, Spain’s refusal to allow the United States to use its air bases during the Iran campaign, and the government’s broader posture towards Israel. The US State Department raised its travel advisory for Ceuta, while American commentary presented the crisis as the consequence of Spain’s failure to secure its borders. Morocco, whose government controlled the frontier through which the crowds passed, faced no equivalent public criticism from Washington. Nor did it face any from Jerusalem. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, used the crisis to describe Ceuta and Melilla as “colonial enclaves” that Spain should explain before lecturing anyone else. Spain’s transport minister, Óscar Puente, replied: “Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.”

The response did more than spare Morocco scrutiny. It redirected responsibility towards Spain and placed the crisis inside arguments Washington and Jerusalem had already been making against Sánchez for months. The crossing had lasted less than forty-eight hours, but the political case used to explain it had been assembled long before the first crowds reached Ceuta.

A border settled by treaty, not by conquest

Ceuta’s status is not ambiguous. Portugal took the city in 1415, and Spain acquired sovereignty under the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. In 1860, the Moroccan Sultanate signed the Treaty of Wad-Ras, fixing Ceuta’s modern boundaries and formally recognising Spanish sovereignty over the territory. The independent Kingdom of Morocco did not emerge until 1956, nearly a century after the Sultanate had signed that recognition and more than five hundred years after Ceuta first passed into European hands.

The present Moroccan claim therefore does not arise from an unresolved act of decolonisation. It asks that a sovereignty recognised by Morocco’s own predecessor state be treated as though that recognition never occurred. Calling Ceuta a “colonial enclave” therefore does not resolve that contradiction. In fact, it conceals it

IMAGE: The 1668 Treaty of Lisbon transferred Ceuta to Spain (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A threat made seven years in advance

On May 25, 2019, Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s son, posted a map of Spain’s North African holdings, Ceuta, Melilla, and the Alborán Sea islands, captioned: “Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start.”

Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start! pic.twitter.com/Ci5R0dOXN7

— Yair Netanyahu (@YairNetanyahu) May 25, 2019

When Spanish users responded, he made the trade explicit, suggesting that Israel would stop funding NGOs calling for Spain to relinquish Ceuta and Melilla if Spain stopped funding NGOs calling for Israel to relinquish Judea and Samaria. The Times of Israel later described the exchange as a direct linkage between Palestinian advocacy, NGO funding and the transfer of Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco. That exchange took place seven years before Moroccans crossed into Ceuta by the tens of thousands.

The same argument later came from someone who did hold office. In September 2025, after Spain barred Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country over their positions on Gaza, Ben Gvir publicly told Spain to “give the people from Gaza free entry.” Ten months later, as tens of thousands were crossing into Ceuta, he posted in Spanish to congratulate Sánchez on his “deep commitment to welcoming immigration and human diversity.” He then made the demand explicit: “As someone who shows great concern for Hamas and the residents of Gaza, I call on you to translate words into actions: open the doors of Spain and grant refuge to the residents of Gaza.”

By then, migration was no longer being invoked as a hypothetical answer to Spanish policy. Ben Gvir was using a real mass crossing into Spanish territory to repeat a punishment he had prescribed ten months earlier. Ceuta had become the setting in which years of Israeli rhetoric linking Spain’s territorial integrity, its support for Palestine and the movement of displaced people were brought together in a single political message.

Mis felicitaciones al Presidente del Gobierno de España, Pedro Sánchez, por su profundo compromiso con la acogida de la inmigración y la “diversidad humana”.
Como alguien que demuestra una gran preocupación por Hamás y los residentes de Gaza, le llamo a traducir las palabras en…

— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) July 31, 2026

Nine days after Rubin’s second op-ed, a Moroccan journalist writing in the Israeli outlet Ynet, Amine Ayoub, argued that Israel should reward Morocco for the Abraham Accords and punish Spain for its position on Palestine, using Ceuta and Melilla as the mechanism. The piece leaned directly on Rubin’s framing.

The campaign that came before the crowd

On March 12, 2026, Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Middle East Forum, published an op-ed arguing that Ceuta and Melilla were occupied Moroccan territory and that Spain, as a colonial power, had no standing to criticise Israel. Four days later, on March 16, Rubin published a second piece proposing that Morocco organise a new Green March, invoking the name of its 1975 mass civilian crossing into Western Sahara. This time, the proposal was specific. Unarmed Moroccan civilians would advance on Ceuta and Melilla with bulldozers, breach the border fences and raise the Moroccan flag. Rubin argued that NATO’s mutual-defence clause would not apply because the enclaves lie outside Europe and North America.

In four days, the argument had moved from stripping Spain of legitimacy to setting out a method for breaking its border. The proposed instrument was not the Moroccan military, but a mass civilian movement directed at the fences under the assumption that Spain would be left to confront it alone. Four months later, tens of thousands of civilians moved towards Ceuta, Moroccan security controls gave way, and Spain faced precisely the dilemma Rubin’s proposal had anticipated.

IMAGE: Michael Rubin called for a new Green March into Ceuta and Melilla (Source: MoroccoWorld)

Spanish newspapers picked up the articles within days and placed them within a broader Washington current favourable to Morocco, identifying the Middle East Forum, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and the Moroccan American Center for Policy. The latter is funded by the Kingdom of Morocco, and Spanish reporting described it as financing reports, events and opinion pieces that reinforced Rabat’s case against Spain.

On April 3, three weeks after Rubin’s second article, Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, then chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing State Department funding, told El Español that Ceuta and Melilla “are not in the geographic territory of Spain” but “in the territory of Morocco,” and that their status should be negotiated between allies. On April 30, his subcommittee filed its formal report on the 2027 State Department appropriations bill. Under the heading “Morocco,” it states that “the Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory” and encourages the Secretary of State to promote diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain over their future status. The language does not appear in H.R. 8595, the bill passed by the House, and the committee report carries no legal force. Its significance lies elsewhere.

Within seven weeks of Rubin calling Ceuta and Melilla occupied Moroccan territory, the same territorial premise had travelled from Washington commentary into an official congressional document. Morocco’s claim had not become US law, but it had acquired a foothold inside the machinery that shapes US foreign policy.

IMAGE: House Report 119-631 places Ceuta and Melilla in Moroccan territory (Source: US Congress)

Díaz-Balart’s connection to this machinery extended into his own family. His brother, former congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart, ran Western Hemisphere Strategies (WHS), which received roughly $1.2 million between 2012 and 2017 from the Moroccan American Centre for Policy (MACP) to “positively affect relations between Morocco and the United States.” The firm was retained at $20,000 a month to advise and advocate before Congress and the executive branch in support of stronger US–Moroccan relations. Its contract expressly prohibited WHS from lobbying Representative Mario Díaz-Balart or his staff, acknowledging in writing the conflict that the restriction was intended to contain.

IMAGE The MACP contract excluded lobbying Díaz-Balart’s office. (Source: US Department of Justice FARA filing)

Mario Díaz-Balart’s office has denied that any lobbying contact with his brother took place, and his support for Morocco’s territorial positions dates back to at least 2011, before the contract. What the filing establishes is that a Moroccan-funded advocacy organisation paid his brother’s firm to influence US policy while formally placing Díaz-Balart’s congressional office behind a contractual firewall. Years later, it was Díaz-Balart’s subcommittee that inserted Morocco’s claim over Ceuta and Melilla into an official congressional report.

The House passed the broader appropriations bill on July 15, eleven weeks after the report language was filed. The mass crossing into Ceuta began fifteen days later. On July 31, Al Jazeera’s opinion desk asked whether Spain was being punished, noting that pro-Israel voices had “conspicuously raised the issue of the enclave” in the months before the crossing and citing Rubin’s articles directly. Spanish, English and Arabic-language outlets subsequently reconstructed the same chronology, from Yair Netanyahu’s 2019 map and Ben Gvir’s migration rhetoric to Rubin’s March 2026 articles, Díaz-Balart’s report language and the Israel–Morocco defence relationship already in place.

None of this emerged after the crossing. Before the first crowds reached Ceuta, Spain’s sovereignty had been challenged, a civilian march against its border had been proposed and Morocco’s territorial claim had entered an official congressional report. When the crossing came, Washington and Jerusalem turned their criticism on Madrid while leaving Rabat largely untouched. The pressure was already there. The crossing gave it force.

The pressure campaign was never just two men

The proposal to replace Spain with Morocco as Washington’s military partner was already in circulation. In June 2025, retired General Robert Greenway, a former Trump national security adviser and head of the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center, wrote on X that it was “time to relocate NAS Rota and Morón Air Base… to Morocco.” By April 2026, the argument had moved closer to government. After Spain refused to support the Iran campaign, the late Senator Lindsey Graham called for the removal of American bases from Spain to a country willing to permit their use. José Lev Álvarez, a Middle East Forum writer and former Israeli army officer, argued that the Israel–Morocco security relationship had created “a new reality” that the White House could use as leverage against Madrid. On April 24, Reuters reported that an internal Pentagon email had listed possible measures against allies that resisted the Iran campaign, including suspending Spain from NATO.

This was no longer pressure on Sánchez alone. Spain was being told that its bases could be moved, its place in NATO reconsidered and its strategic role handed to Morocco. At the same time that Washington figures were giving Rabat’s claim over Ceuta a foothold in Congress, they were laying out how Spain itself could be displaced on the other side of the Strait.

Time to relocate NAS Rota and Moron Air Base…to Morocco. https://t.co/8pKIUStLN4

— Robert Greenway (@RC_Greenway) June 27, 2025

No direct Moroccan payment to Rubin, the Middle East Forum or the American Enterprise Institute appears in the public records examined for this investigation. Their available tax filings do not identify the Moroccan government or the Moroccan American Center for Policy among their disclosed sources of funding. Rubin’s articles cannot therefore be traced to a commission from Rabat. They emerged from a pro-Israel political platform that had already found its own reason to advance Morocco’s claim against Spain.

Morocco was, however, paying for representation elsewhere in Washington. Its previous arrangement with Brownstein Hyatt had gone dormant in October 2025, and a new $780,000 contract took effect on March 13, 2026, within days of Rubin’s articles. Brownstein was retained at $65,000 a month to provide government-relations and public-affairs services connecting the Moroccan embassy with the US government. The next filing covering its work during the months leading to the crossing had not been published when this investigation was completed. Rubin, meanwhile, continued writing after the crossing, again calling on Washington to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla and punish Spain for its positions on Gaza and Iran.

The political use of Morocco’s claim was already being proposed openly in Israeli media. Citing an analysis published by Ynet, Diario Socialista reported in late April that Israel could use its influence in Washington to help Morocco press its claims over Ceuta and Melilla. The proposed return was explicit. Morocco would be rewarded for its alignment with Israel, while Spain would be punished for its positions on Iran, Palestine and NATO. The argument relied in part on Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty, whose geographical language does not expressly place Ceuta and Melilla under the alliance’s collective-defence guarantee.

This was the same bargain taking shape elsewhere. Díaz-Balart was introducing Morocco’s territorial premise into Congress, Israel and Morocco had signed a joint military work plan, and Washington commentators were presenting Rabat as the partner through which Spain could be pressured or replaced. In each case, Ceuta offered the same thing—a way to put pressure on Spain without confronting it directly.

Five years since the Abraham Accords: Israel and Morocco continue to deepen security cooperation.

This week in Tel Aviv, the IDF and the Moroccan Armed Forces held the 3rd Joint Military Committee meeting, concluding with the signing of the joint work plan for 2026.

The…

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 5, 2026

Nine days after Díaz-Balart’s April 3 interview with El Espanõl, on April 9, Netanyahu’s government expelled Spain’s access to the Kiryat Gat facility, in the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), and said Spain would “pay an immediate price” for its Gaza positions. But Sánchez did not retreat one inch, and in May, he called for the European Union to terminate its Association Agreement with Israel entirely.

The architecture that already existed

Morocco entered 2026 with an established military relationship with Israel. In 2021, Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz and his Moroccan counterpart, Abdellatif Loudiyi, signed a memorandum of understanding covering intelligence cooperation, military procurement, training and joint exercises. In January 2026, the two countries held the third meeting of their Joint Military Committee in Tel Aviv and signed an annual work plan.

IMAGE: Israel and Morocco formalised defence cooperation in 2021. In Rabat, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz signed the document along with Abdellatif Loudiyi, Morocco’s defence administration minister. November 2021 (Source: Israel Defence Ministry via  Al Jazeera)

By early 2026, that relationship had produced operational military infrastructure on Moroccan soil. Israel Aerospace Industries’ Barak MX air-defence system, acquired under a deal worth approximately $500 million, had entered service. Defence reporting based on satellite imagery, including Raksha Anirveda and Infodefensa, placed the system at a newly constructed base near Sidi Yahya el Gharb in northwestern Morocco. Deliveries had begun in 2023, and by 2026 the system formed part of a layered Moroccan air-defence network.

IMAGE: Satellite-image panel showing Barak MX components at Sidi Yahya el Gharb, Morocco. (Source: Militarnyi)

Morocco was equally embedded in Washington’s regional security system. The United States designated it a major non-NATO ally in 2004, provides military financing and maintains extensive arms and training programmes with Rabat. Morocco also hosts the annual US-led African Lion, the largest military exercise in Africa.

When Moroccan controls on the route to Ceuta gave way on July 29, the military and intelligence channels linking Rabat with Tel Aviv and Washington were already active. The next part of the investigation is whether those channels carried anything beyond routine defence cooperation in the days before the crossing.

The ruling that opened a door, and the campaign that walked through it

Spain’s Supreme Court gave the crossing its mechanism. In Judgment 814/2026, published July 8, it ruled that summary “hot returns” could not be used against migrants intercepted swimming toward Ceuta or Melilla, only against those caught scaling the fence. Spain’s Interior Ministry said smugglers and rumor networks exploited that sea-land distinction directly, and most coverage has treated the ruling as the proximate trigger.

IMAGE: The Supreme Court required formal returns for interceptions at sea. (Source: CENDOJ)

Translation from Spanish to English: “IV. Accordingly, the question raised in the order admitting the appeal must be answered as follows: the Tenth Additional Provision of the Immigration Law cannot be applied to persons intercepted at sea while attempting to swim into the cities of Ceuta and Melilla; consequently, such persons must not be subjected to the border-rejection procedure, but rather to the return procedure.”

The ruling explains how a crossing on this scale became possible, but not why the border was opened at that particular moment. By then, a coordinated social media campaign was already in place, Morocco had recalled its ambassador, and six months of pressure had drawn Ceuta’s sovereignty into Spain’s positions on Iran, Gaza and NATO.

The crowd that gathered online

The people who crossed were overwhelmingly young men, rather than the mixed population of families typically associated with migration crises. Many had responded to false social-media and WhatsApp claims that Spain had opened the border, amplified through public Facebook groups including Hraga Ceuta and Haraga_ceuta. The mobilisation began online, not at the border. Meta subsequently shut down five Facebook groups with more than 230,000 members between them, where users exchanged routes, equipment information, telephone numbers and other logistical details. Before the mass crossing, CeutaTV documented Hraga Ceuta, then numbering more than 20,000 members, sharing Google Maps measurements around the Tarajal breakwater, advertisements for diving fins, information about sea conditions and requests for companions with whom to attempt the crossing. Brussels Signal independently documented the same material, including swimming distances, wetsuits, diving fins, taxi routes to the frontier and the false claim that the border had opened.

By the time the first swimmers reached the water, the rumour had already done its work. Thousands had been given the same message, shown the same routes and told what equipment they would need. What followed at the border had been gathering for days in plain sight online. The question is no longer simply how the crossing spread, but why the conditions described online coincided so closely with those encountered at the border.

IMAGE: A Google Maps image circulated in the Hraga Ceuta Facebook group measures a roughly 432-metre swimming route around the Tarajal border breakwater—an example of the maps and logistical guidance shared before the mass Ceuta crossing. (Source: CeutaTv)

At least 2 viral videos showing crowds at the border were confirmed to predate the actual crossing by several weeks, with two separate detection tools rating it 81 to 87 percent likely AI-generated; Yahoo and Firstpost both reported that verification.

IMAGE: A viral border video was flagged as likely AI-generated.(Source: Leadstories)

Independent observers moved in the same direction. Riccardo Fabiani of the International Crisis Group said the evidence pointed to some form of Moroccan official role meant to send a message, and did not exclude an effort to curry favor with the United States after weeks of pressure from pro-Israel and American right-wing voices over Ceuta. That is not proof of outside operational control, but it is an external judgment that the crossing looked political, not merely chaotic.

This was not the first time Rabat had used migration pressure as diplomatic leverage. During a May 2021 dispute triggered by Spain’s decision to admit Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali for medical treatment, Moroccan authorities appeared to relax border controls, allowing roughly 8,000 people to enter Ceuta over two days. After the crossing began and Madrid summoned Morocco’s ambassador to protest, Rabat recalled Ambassador Karima Benyaich for consultations. Al Jazeera’s 2026 analysis invoked that episode as the precedent for interpreting the July 2026 crossing as another possible attempt to pressure Spain. That episode echoed May 2021, when Reuters and others reported that Moroccan authorities had previously eased controls during a diplomatic rupture, widely read as retaliation over Spain’s decision to let the Western Sahara independence movement’s ailing leader receive hospital treatment on Spanish soil.

Both Le Monde and The Guardian raised the possibility that Rabat loosened its controls to register displeasure at Sánchez’s visit to Algeria, Morocco’s principal regional rival. The visit restored high-level political ties and sought additional Algerian gas through Medgaz, the direct undersea pipeline to Spain that bypasses Morocco. The grievance, then, was not lost transit revenue but Madrid’s renewed strategic partnership with Algiers

VIDEO: RTVE documented the May 2021 crossing at Tarajal.(Source: RTVE Noticias)

.
Moroccan lawmaker Lahcen Haddad denied that Rabat had engineered the Ceuta crossing, but she is totally missing the point. Direct orchestration was not necessary, as Morocco could exert pressure simply by suspending the border controls it normally enforced. Spain’s renewed ties with Algeria certainly added to the political grievances behind that pressure, even though Algerian gas reached Spain through a pipeline that totally bypassed Morocco, making her argument very narrow.

To resume, we have identified two border openings, five years apart, followed by Spanish decisions Rabat opposed, and in both cases, Morocco withheld the enforcement it routinely used to stop departures, turning migration into an instrument of state pressure against Madrid.

Israel publicly maintained its distance from Morocco’s territorial claims. In late April, its ambassador in Madrid, Dana Erlich, said that her government was “not thinking about” supporting Rabat’s claims to Ceuta and Melilla, calling the issue irrelevant to Israel’s immediate priorities. The denial was narrowly framed around the government’s position at that moment and did not address the wider political and military alignment between Israel and Morocco. When Danny Danon subsequently described the cities as “colonial enclaves,” Israel could portray his intervention as the personal position of a politician with a long record of challenging Netanyahu. Netanyahu fired Danon as deputy defence minister in 2014 after he publicly criticized the government’s Gaza strategy, and Danon challenged Netanyahu for the Likud leadership in 2007 and 2014.

Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.

Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in…

— Danny Danon דני דנון (@dannydanon) July 30, 2026

Yet distancing the government from Danon’s wording does not answer the central issue raised by this investigation. His intervention amplified a campaign already being advanced by Morocco’s advocates in Washington and unfolded alongside deepening Israeli–Moroccan military cooperation, allowing Israel to deny a formal policy while one of its most prominent diplomats reinforced the same pressure on Spain

The strait nobody wanted to talk about

Ceuta sits beside the Strait of Gibraltar, a corridor Washington has treated as a strategic artery for decades. A declassified State Department record called Gibraltar “the most important strait in the world” and warned that Spanish resistance to free transit threatened the strategic mobility underpinning Western defence. A Justice Department-filed account of US–Gibraltar relations documents Gibraltar’s use by American ships during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, by reserve vessels refuelling en route to the Middle East, and by US attack submarines during the 2011 intervention in Libya.

American strategic writing has likewise identified Gibraltar as a vital Mediterranean port for US nuclear-powered submarines, arguing that British control protects Washington’s access from the political restrictions Spanish sovereignty could impose. Ceuta lies on the opposite shore of that same passage.

Its sovereignty is therefore not a peripheral dispute at Europe’s southern edge, but part of the political geography surrounding a corridor central to American military movement between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Pressure on Ceuta cannot be separated from the strategic waterway beside it, or from the interests of the powers that depend on keeping it open.

IMAGE: USS Alaska at Gibraltar, June 2021 (Source: DVIDS)

That warning became reality in March 2026, when Spain denied Washington the use of Rota and Morón for operations against Iran and later closed its airspace to participating US aircraft, forcing them to bypass Spanish territory. On April 16, more than three months before the Ceuta crossing, US ambassador Mike Waltz told the United Nations that Gibraltar, Hormuz, the Bering Strait and Malacca were international waterways “too vital to be choked, to be mined, to be weaponized and held hostage.” By mid-July, Iran had asked the Houthis to prepare to close Bab el-Mandeb, where missiles and drones had already been deployed, while traffic through Hormuz remained severely restricted. Gibraltar had therefore become more valuable at precisely the moment Madrid demonstrated that American access through Spain could no longer be taken for granted.

A border that belongs to more than Spain

If Ceuta were threatened militarily, Spain would defend it as sovereign territory. The legal and strategic reality, however, is more complicated. NATO’s founding treaty limits Article 5’s geographical scope to member territories in Europe and North America, Turkey and qualifying North Atlantic islands, leaving Ceuta and Melilla outside its explicit collective-defence guarantee. Any allied response would therefore depend on a political decision reached by consensus rather than an unambiguous treaty obligation. Rubin, Díaz-Balart, Ayoub and others built their arguments around that vulnerability opportunistically.

IMAGE: Spanish forces deployed in Ceuta amid uncertainty over NATO’s explicit coverage (Source: The Globe and Mail)

Consequently, Ceuta  offered a way to challenge Spanish sovereignty, strain Madrid’s military resources and expose divisions inside NATO without directly confronting continental Spain, whose collective defence was clearly guaranteed.

What the record shows

By July 30, the conditions for pressuring Spain over Gaza and Iran had been assembled for years, in public and by name. Yair Netanyahu proposed the trade in 2019. Ben Gvir rehearsed the use of migration as punishment in 2025 and repeated it during the crossing itself. Rubin then described the method that appeared on the ground, calling for an unarmed mass movement into Ceuta under the protection of NATO’s territorial ambiguity. Six weeks later, Díaz-Balart placed Morocco’s claim inside an official congressional report, while Lindsey Graham, Robert Greenway and a leaked Pentagon planning document carried the campaign from the think-tank circuit into the machinery of American power. Netanyahu’s government warned that Spain would pay an “immediate price,” as Israel and Morocco entered 2026 with a signed military work plan and an Israeli Barak MX air-defence battery deployed at Sidi Yahya, roughly 200 kilometres southwest of Ceuta.

Then the border opened, and Morocco controlled the gate, while Washington and Jerusalem had the surveillance capacity to see the crowd gathering, the strategic relationships to understand what Rabat was doing and every reason to recognise the pressure it placed on Madrid. Yet neither condemned Morocco. Their anger remained fixed on Spain, while Israeli officials used the crossing to repeat the same arguments about migration, Gaza and Moroccan sovereignty that had preceded it. The event followed the script too closely to be dismissed as an unrelated border failure. Spain had been threatened, the method published, and Morocco already possessed the lever and security architecture when the promised pressure arrived at the precise point where Spanish territory was most exposed.

Coordination does not always leave behind a signed order; in fact, States working through convergent interests rarely need one. What they need is a shared target, compatible motives, an available instrument and confidence that the others will not interfere. By July 2026, Washington, Jerusalem and Rabat had all four.

The crowd that entered Ceuta carried more than the momentum of the crossing. It was the physical expression of a pressure campaign that had already been written, promoted and carried into official policy before the first person reached the fence.

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21st Century Wire

IMAGE: Karim Khan announces the Netanyahu and Gallant warrant applications, 20 May 2024. (Source: ICC)

The call London concealed

In late March 2024, Khan asked to brief David Cameron, the former British prime minister then serving as foreign secretary, on the warrant applications he was preparing against Netanyahu and Gallant. Khan had already briefed the Biden administration, but according to Declassified UK, the meeting with Cameron never happened,

The refusal came as Cameron was overseeing Britain’s response to mounting legal concerns about arms exports to Israel. On 3 April, he recommended that sales continue. The business secretary confirmed the decision five days later, two days after three British aid workers employed by World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza. The Guardian later reported that Cameron’s recommendation appeared to rely on an official compliance assessment that had not accounted for the strike.

On April 16, 2024, Cameron met Sir James Eadie KC, the government’s most senior courtroom barrister, who was representing the Department for Business and Trade in a High Court challenge over the same arms exports. Reportedly, Cameron flew to Israel the following day.

In Jerusalem on 17 April, he met Netanyahu, Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Foreign Minister Israel Katz. The Foreign Office’s published account said the talks covered the war in Gaza, Israeli security and the Iranian missile and drone attack that dominated public coverage that week. However, six days later, the Times of Israel reported that Netanyahu had raised the prospective ICC warrants with Cameron and sought his help in preventing them, part of an Israeli effort to enlist diplomatic figures with known influence.

IMAGE: David Cameron meets Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, 17 April 2024. (Source: David Cameron X Account)

On 23 April, Israeli ministers convened an emergency meeting over intelligence which indicated that warrants could be imminent. Soon after, Cameron got on the phone with Khan. Former members of Khan’s office who say they saw the internal minutes told Middle East Eye that Cameron warned Britain could stop funding the ICC and withdraw from the Rome Statute, the very treaty that created the Court, if it proceeded against Israeli leaders.

A source close to Cameron denied that he personally threatened Khan and described the exchange as robust. The Foreign Office has confirmed that Cameron and Khan spoke and that no officials joined the call, but it has declined to confirm the date or release a substantive record of what was said. Interestingly, the call did not appear in the published record of ministerial meetings.

Withdrawal would not have given Britain an immediate means of stopping the case. Under the Rome Statute, departure takes effect one year after a government formally gives notice and does not discharge existing obligations or halt proceedings already under consideration. The force of the reported warning stemmed from the prospect of a founding ICC member withholding funds, abandoning the institution, and encouraging other governments to follow.

Humza Yousaf, the former first minister of Scotland, has called for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee to investigate the conversation, and the committee has taken oral evidence on the matter.

It is worth noting that Britain’s position on arms exports shifted five months later. In September 2024, the government suspended around 30 arms export licences after finding a clear risk that certain exports could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law. Records show that direct exports of F-35 components for Israeli use were covered by the suspension, but components entering the multinational F-35 supply pool were exempted because the British government said Israel could not be removed from that system without disrupting the programme as a whole.

IMAGE: British F-35B fighter jets,  part of the multinational programme exempted from the UK suspension. (Source: Okdiario)

Washington’s warnings

The pressure from Washington began before Lindsey Graham’s conference call and before any misconduct allegations entered the ICC’s internal process. According to Khan’s account, a senior US official warned him by telephone on 19 April 2024 that seeking warrants against Israeli leaders would bring disastrous consequences.

Five days later, twelve Republican senators wrote to Khan directly. Their letter threatened sanctions against ICC employees and associates, while promising entry bans against them and their families, and an end to American support for the Court.

“Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators wrote. “You have been warned.”

The signatories included Mitch McConnell, then the Republican leader in the Senate, and Marco Rubio, who would become secretary of state under President Donald Trump. Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott and Tim Scott also signed. The letter was sent on 24 April, nearly four weeks before Khan filed the warrant applications and more than six months before the misconduct allegations became public.

The case passed legal review

Khan had already subjected the proposed applications to an external legal assessment. In January 2024, he convened a Panel of Experts in International Law that included Amal Clooney, a barrister specialising in international human rights law, Baroness Helena Kennedy, a prominent British criminal lawyer, and Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, a former ICC judge and senior judge in England and Wales.

The panel also included Theodor Meron, a former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as well as international-law specialists Danny Friedman and Elizabeth Wilmshurst. Academics Marko Milanovic and Sandesh Sivakumaran served as advisers.

Its members reviewed witness statements, expert evidence and authenticated video, and attended evidence sessions at the Court’s premises in The Hague. Their unanimous report was delivered on 20 May. They concluded that the ICC had jurisdiction over the situation in Palestine and that the evidence met the reasonable-grounds threshold for applications against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh. The alleged crimes included murder, extermination, hostage-taking and sexual violence against captives. The panel found the same threshold met for Netanyahu and Gallant on allegations that included starvation as a method of warfare, wilful killing, extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts. It described Khan’s process as fair, rigorous and independent.

The panel’s task was to assess whether the evidence and legal reasoning met the threshold for Khan to seek warrants, not to determine guilt. Its members concluded that they did.

It is not in question that Britain and the United States had tried to stop the applications before the panel’s findings became public. The judges then spent six months examining the case and issued the warrants on 21 November 2024.

The focus shifts to Khan

The first internal report against Khan did not initially become a formal investigation. The Independent Oversight Mechanism closed its preliminary inquiry after the woman concerned declined at that stage to pursue a complaint. The allegations only became public in October 2024 after material reached the press; She later supported an external investigation by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services.

Khan denies any sexual relationship or non-consensual conduct. The complainant maintains that the conduct was non-consensual, while the Assembly of States Parties says the UN investigation also found evidence relating to two other affected individuals.

The disciplinary process had barely begun when politicians who opposed the warrants moved to use it. In June 2024, four Republican senators, Tom Cotton, Mike Braun, Rick Scott and JD Vance, asked the US attorney general to investigate Khan personally over his pursuit of Israeli leaders. Their letter did not concern the sexual misconduct allegation, which was not public, but it marked a shift from attacking the jurisdiction of the Court to demanding action against the prosecutor himself.

When the allegations became public in October, Graham called them a “moral cloud” hanging over Khan’s office and demanded the release of internal records. The same language soon appeared in a private conversation with Netanyahu.

The calls caught on tape

On 29 October 2024, Netanyahu and Graham held two telephone conversations while Graham was campaigning in Ohio alongside Donald Trump Jr. Both calls were recorded by British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who had been following Graham for an unreleased project. The recordings became public in July 2026 through reporting by the New York Times and other outlets.

IMAGE: Lindsey Graham speaks with Netanyahu in a call recorded on 29 October 2024.(Source: AJH Productions USA via NYT)

In the first call, Netanyahu told Graham that the ICC judges were close to deciding whether to issue the warrants. He referred to the allegations against Khan as a “cloud” that “has to be removed” and suggested that Graham send a letter, perhaps with other senators.

During the second conversation, Graham told Netanyahu, “We got them both,” referring to Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ben Cardin of Maryland, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Graham asked Netanyahu to telephone both men and thank them. He also suggested that prospects for Saudi-Israeli normalisation could be used to influence Blumenthal and joked that he should receive “tons of shekels” for his work.

The call records Netanyahu asking for political action, Graham organising it and Graham reporting back on the senators he had recruited.

On 1 November, six senators sent the ICC’s Assembly of States Parties a formal letter demanding an investigation into Khan. The signatories included Blumenthal and Cardin, the two Democrats Graham had told Netanyahu he had secured. Their letter cited a “cloud hanging over the Prosecutor and his office” as grounds to question the legitimacy of any warrants issued under Khan’s authority.

The wording followed the language Netanyahu had used three days earlier. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board amplified the letter and criticised then Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer for blocking sanctions against the Court.

The judges issued the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants on 21 November 2024 anyway. The pressure had evidently failed to stop the warrants, but it had succeeded in moving the misconduct allegations to the centre of the campaign against Khan and the Court.

Sanctions move from threat to policy

The threats made in April and May 2024 became US policy after Donald Trump returned to the White House. On 6 February 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14203, which authorised sanctions against people involved in ICC investigations of the United States and its allies, and of course Khan was the first person designated under it.

The order blocked assets under US jurisdiction, prohibited transactions involving designated individuals and imposed entry restrictions. It also exposed banks, technology companies, service providers and other institutions to legal risk if they continued dealing with sanctioned ICC officials.

DOCUMENT: Executive Order 14203 imposed US sanctions on the ICC. (Source: Whitehouse)Executive Order 14203

Marco Rubio, by then secretary of state, expanded the programme through successive rounds of designations. The sanctions reached ICC judges, Khan’s two deputy prosecutors, a United Nations special rapporteur and three Palestinian human rights organisations. Each round was tied either to the Palestine investigation or the Court’s dormant investigation into alleged crimes involving US personnel in Afghanistan.

The designation of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, produced the first substantial challenge in a US court. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in May 2026 after finding that the government was likely to have violated her constitutional rights. The victory lasted less than two weeks. An appeals court stayed the injunction, and the Treasury Department restored the sanctions on 27 May while the litigation continued.

By the time Khan faced the final removal vote, the threats made before the warrants had become a sanctions system extending across the Court and the people defending its Palestine investigation.

Israel moves inside the Court

Israel opened another front in November 2025. A year after the warrants were issued, it filed a formal application under Article 42(7) of the Rome Statute seeking to disqualify Khan from the Palestine case and cancel the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

The application argued that Khan’s impartiality had been compromised because he had pursued the warrants to divert attention from the misconduct allegations. Israel was asking the Court to treat an unresolved disciplinary case as evidence that the Palestine prosecution itself was corrupt. These claims remained unproven and lacked any formal finding of wrongdoing, rendering the application’s premise baseless.

IMAGE: Israel sought Khan’s disqualification and cancellation of the warrants in November 2025.(Source: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

The disciplinary panel appointed to assess the UN investigation did not report until 9 March 2026, four months after Israel filed its application. The three judges concluded unanimously, applying the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, that the material presented by the ICC’s oversight mechanism and the UN investigation did not establish misconduct or a breach of duty by Khan.

Khan’s lawyers described that conclusion as exoneration. The Assembly of States Parties later rejected that characterisation, arguing that the panel’s mandate did not permit additional fact-finding and that its report could not be treated as a final clearance. The disagreement was not marginal. One body of judges concluded that the record did not establish misconduct under the standard it applied, while the governments supervising the Court chose to proceed against Khan on the same underlying record.

On 8 June 2026, the twenty-one-member Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties voted by a qualified majority to find that Khan had committed serious misconduct and to suspend him pending a final decision by the full Assembly.

The Bureau did not publish a state-by-state roll call. Reuters reported, citing diplomatic sources, that fourteen governments, including Belgium, Chile and Japan, supported suspension. Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Sierra Leone opposed it, while Uganda, Bosnia and Bolivia abstained.

According to reporting on the confidential decision, the Bureau found that Khan had engaged in a sexual relationship with the complainant and that any such relationship was inappropriate because of the power imbalance between them. The complainant’s account was that the conduct had been non-consensual. Khan denied that a sexual relationship had occurred at all.

The procedure then changed. Middle East Eye reported that the Bureau abandoned an earlier two-stage process, under which the Assembly would first decide whether misconduct had been established and then hold a separate removal vote. The revised procedure placed both questions into one composite motion decided by secret ballot under the absolute-majority threshold in Article 46 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which addresses “removal from office”.

Khan submitted a sixty-page rebuttal and asked the ASP president, Päivi Kaukoranta, and two other Bureau members to recuse themselves over alleged bias. Those requests were refused. He was allowed to submit written material but was not permitted to address the full Assembly in person, before it decided his fate.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the African Bar Association urged member states to accept the disciplinary panel’s findings and argued that the Bureau had violated the Rome Statute’s protection of prosecutorial independence. Khan’s lawyers maintained that the process had denied him a fair opportunity to answer the case used to remove him.

IMAGE: The President of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Paivi Kaukoranta, addresses delegates before a vote on whether to fire chief prosecutor Karim Khan for alleged sexual misconduct at United Nations headquarters in New York City, U.S., July 24, 2026. (Source: Reuters)

On 24 July, the Assembly convened at United Nations headquarters in New York. Eighty-two states voted for removal, thirteen opposed it, and fifteen abstained. The motion passed by the absolute majority required under Article 46.

The ballot was secret, leaving no public record of how individual governments voted. Britain had told Khan before the session that it would not support his return and had rejected his request to brief a minister on 1 July. It then entered the ballot alongside the other member states, fifteen months after Cameron’s reported warning over the Netanyahu warrants. The secrecy of the vote means Britain’s final choice remains hidden.

Saar’s campaign inside the Assembly

Israeli journalist Guy Azriel reported, citing a senior Israeli official, that Foreign Minister Gideon Saar had directed a task force to lobby ICC member states against Khan before the July session. The report described an intensive diplomatic effort aimed at securing his removal.

IMAGE: Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar reportedly led Israel’s lobbying campaign against Khan. (Source: ABC News)

Saar’s own statement after the vote left no ambiguity about the outcome Israel wanted. He called Khan’s removal long delayed and demanded that the Court immediately revoke the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

It has now become clear that the reported task force was only one part of a campaign operating through several channels. Netanyahu had sought Cameron’s help in Jerusalem, coordinated directly with Graham in Washington and watched the Trump administration turn congressional threats into sanctions. Israel then challenged Khan inside the Court and reportedly lobbied the governments responsible for deciding whether he would remain in office. This multi-front effort reveals a sustained campaign to neutralise an independent prosecutor rather than confront the evidence on which the warrants were based.

Ultimately, Khan’s removal did not cancel the warrants. Under the Rome Statute, they remain in force until the judges order otherwise. Saar nevertheless treated the disciplinary vote as another route towards the result Israel had been seeking since the spring of 2024, namely the elimination of the prosecutor who had issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

A method used before Khan

Khan was the second consecutive ICC prosecutor subjected to an Israeli campaign against the Palestine investigation. His predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, completed her nine-year term, but the pressure she faced established a method that would later reappear around Khan.

A joint investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call found that Yossi Cohen, the former director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, ran a covert operation against Bensouda between 2015 and 2021. Cohen allegedly appeared unexpectedly at meetings, pressed her to abandon the Palestine investigation and warned that continuing could compromise her security and that of her family.

Unidentified men left an envelope containing 500 dollars at Bensouda’s home in The Hague in 2015, together with a telephone number that Dutch investigators later traced to Israel. Bensouda also said Cohen showed her covert photographs of her husband and told her to let Israel take care of her.

IMAGE: Former ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda meets with Palestine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Riyad al-Maliki on the margins of the 18th session of the ASP, December 2, 2019. (Source: ICC-CPI)

The same investigation found that Netanyahu had ordered a covert legal team drawn from Israel’s Justice Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Military Advocate General’s Office. The team was led by Tal Becker, a senior legal adviser at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and held secret meetings with ICC officials in The Hague between 2017 and 2019. Its purpose, according to the investigation, was to make Bensouda doubt the legal basis for dealing with Palestine.

Israeli intelligence agencies, including Shin Bet, military intelligence and Unit 8200, also intercepted communications belonging to Bensouda and Khan. The surveillance gave Israel advance knowledge of the Netanyahu and Gallant applications before Khan announced them publicly.

Becker later emerged as one of Israel’s most prominent legal representatives on the international stage. In January 2024, while Khan’s office was preparing the warrant applications, Becker opened Israel’s defence at the International Court of Justice against South Africa’s genocide case and called the accusation a grossly distorted story.

IMAGE: Tal Becker presents Israel’s defence at the International Court of Justice, 12 January 2024. (Source: ICC) 

The same official who had led Israel’s secret legal contacts with the ICC during Bensouda’s tenure was now defending Israel before another international court. This reinforced the evidence that the pressure on Khan belonged to a longer operation against the institutions and officials examining Israel’s conduct in Palestine.

The office Khan left behind

The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor is now being run on an interim basis by Nazhat Shameem Khan of Fiji and Mame Mandiaye Niang of Senegal, the two deputy prosecutors who served under Khan. It is worth noting that both have been sanctioned by the United States.

The Assembly of States Parties has not finalised a procedure for choosing a permanent successor, and a vote is not expected before 2027. Whoever takes the position will inherit the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants, an unfinished Palestine investigation, a staff operating under sanctions and the record of what happened to the last two prosecutors who pursued the case. That record itself now stands as a clear warning of the personal and professional cost of continuing the investigation.

Netanyahu offered his own description of the campaign’s direction. After the vote, he said he had spoken with Rubio about delivering a decisive blow against the ICC.

Sunday Wire Radio Show Archives

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This week SUNDAY WIRE returns with host Patrick Henningsen covering the biggest stories in the US and internationally. This week, we review Trump’s latest TACO Hell meal deal with Iran—which appears to be yet another ruse used to distract and buy more time for another sneak attack by aggressors the US & Israel against Iran. Meanwhile, the war has just expanded massively this week—as Patrick breaks it all down for you in the opening segment. Later in the Overdrive hour, we’re joined by teammates Bryan “Hesher”McClain and Adam “Ruckus” Clark, for deeper at this week’s earth-shaking geopolitical developments. All this and more…

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This month’s featured music artists: The Real Anthem Band, Joseph Arthur, Peyoti for President, Peter Conway & Red Rumble, and Phil Zimmerman

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Sunday Wire Radio Show Archives

The French army’s illegal use of chemical weapons in Algeria’s war of independence, as revealed by testimony and documents.

This film is about how the French army secretly used chemical weapons in the Algerian independence war, in contravention of international law. The documentary presents archival evidence and personal testimony from former French soldiers and Algerian fighters, exposing France’s violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Historian Christophe Lafaye’s evidence includes a letter from a senior army commander to the government in 1956, which refers to the “use of chemical means”.

France set up a Special Weapons Unit in December 1956, using the same CN2D gas as in World War I, to target Algerian fighters in mountain caves. Of the estimated 8,000 to 10,000 incidents, only 440 attacks have been documented so far. One of the most devastating attacks was at Ghar Ben Shatouh in March 1959, in which an estimated 150 civilians were killed. Despite this, France did not formally ban chemical weapons until 1993, more than 30 years after Algeria’s independence.

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Run time: 49 mins
Written and Directed by: Claire Billet
Production: Solent Productions

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Peacemonger host Ian Proud talks to 21st Century Wire founder Patrick Henningsen with a scathing assessment of U.S. foreign policy failures — the Iran war, the sabotaged diplomacy, the compounded disasters in Ukraine and Gaza, and why the United States is now widely seen as agreement-incapable. Watch: 

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Host Mario Nawfal speak to 21st Century Wire editor Patrick Henningsen about the perilous position that Washington’s Gulf monarchy proxies find themselves in now. Watch: 

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• Palestine Action: Appeal will go to supreme court
• Westminster Magistrates: Arrests and chaos, guest Dr. Clive Dolphin, Defend Our Juries
• Gaza Peace Plan: Is it real?
• Palantir: Embedding itself into UK police forces 
• Migrant Invasion: Spain goes wild
• Water: Renationalisation is only way, guest Cat Hobbs, Founder and Director, We Own It
• War: Expanding rapidly
• Devolution: Westminster advances on UK regions – with your money
• Healey: stooge of military industrial complex? Chancellor wants military sidekick
• Online Safety: More ‘harms’ mean more restrictions
• In Case You Missed It: Basil’s eagle eye over the news

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All indications point to the Trump regime leaning hard on its proxy in Saudi Arabia to attack its neighbors and expand the conflict to Yemen, Iraq, and possibly other new regional flashpoints. Clearly, Saudi has nothing at all to gain other than economy pain and an increasingly fragile security situation. Meanwhile, Israel rests quietly in the background, happy to push the US further into the fray, as Tel Aviv restocks its missiles and ammunition for the next round of hostilities with Iran. Is there a realistic US and Israeli endgame? All this and more. 

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

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