Israel Bans dozens of humanitarian organizations in Gaza

In the new year, Israel announced it will be suspending the permits of more than three dozen international aid organizations from operating in Gaza. Authorities allege that the organizations failed to pass new security and transparency registration criteria that require detailed disclosure of their staff, funding, and operations. Israel continues to deny life-saving aid to millions of Palestinians on the unfounded pretext that Hamas is infiltrating and exploiting “humanitarian frameworks for terrorism,” a claim these aid groups have vehemently refuted. Meanwhile, the IOF has been terrorizing Palestinians on a near-daily basis since the October “ceasefire.”

This announcement comes as Trump threatens to escalate the war on Gaza in a Mar-a-Lago meeting with Netanyahu on December 29th. The second phase of the ceasefire deal — which demands for Hamas’s disarmament — is set to launch in January 2026, and Trump has thrown the full weight of the US military behind “whatever Israel wants” should Hamas refuse to disarm. After the meeting, the Pentagon awarded Boeing an $8.6 billion contract to build new F-15 fighter jets for the Israeli Air Force. In return, Netanyahu says Trump will become the first non-Israeli to win the “Israel Prize” as consolation for not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Saudi-United Arab emirates Proxy war in Yemen heats up

On January 2nd, Saudi Arabia conducted a series of airstrikes against United Arab Emirates-back secessionist militants in Yemen, killing 20. This is the latest salvo in a bizarre proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, fought on Yemeni soil, that began on December 2nd, 2025 with an offensive into Hadhramawt province, controlled by the Presidential Leadership Council – Saudi Arabia’s puppet government in Yemen, by the Southern Transitional Council – the UAE’s puppet government in Yemen.

The Saudi and UAE presence in Yemen dates back to late 2014, when Ansar Allah (AKA the Houthis) overthrew the Saudi-backed government of Yemen. Outraged by this assault on their puppet regime, the Saudis assembled a US-backed coalition of Arab states, which included the UAE, and invaded Yemen in early 2015. The UAE left the Saudi coalition in 2019, over opposition to the Saudi’s backing of Islamist forces in Yemen – though both the Saudis and UAE stand accused of recruiting Al Qaeda fighters into their proxy forces in Yemen.

Yemen has been wracked by civil war since 2014, and has been subject to intervention by regional powers, and US imperialism, since 2015. Now, the interventionists are fighting each other, on Yemeni soil, to determine the future of Yemen, totally without regard to the desires of the people of Yemen themselves.

The US empire Bombs Venezuela and Kidnaps maduro

On January 2nd, in a cowardly escalation, US imperialism attacked Venezuela, dropping bombs on the Caracas, and carrying out an extrajudicial kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. This criminal terrorist act is not only the culmination of months of aggression against Venezuela and Columbia by the Trump government, but the the culmination of decades of bipartisan intervention and economic warfare against Venezuela, since it’s people had the audacity to claim their own sovereignty, elect their own leaders, and control their own natural resources. Trump’s war-and-peace-through-twitter approach, and his empowering of Gusano swine Marco Rubio are just the latest expressions of the long-standing US imperialist belief that Washington DC controls what happens in Central and South America. The dead laying in Caracas are just the latest stripe of the flag that flies over Guantanamo Bay, and the aircraft carriers that are stalking the seas of Latin America. Trump and his bottle-blonde enforcer Pam Bondi have contacted a fairytale of Nicolás Maduro as a drug trafficker to justify the long-standing US goal of toppling the government of Venezuela. This lie is absurd on it’s face, given Trumps recent pardoning of actual narco-trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. More importantly, no one from the CIA to the Sackler family has done more to bring drugs into the US than the US ruling class, despite Trump’s racist scapegoating.