Israel has been caught spying on US troops stationed near Gaza as part of Trump's joke a peace plan but it's not exactly the first time... Right, so here’s the strange thing about this latest “shock” out of Israel: people are acting like the surveillance of US troops at a base in Kiryat Gat is some wild new departure, when the truth is it fits so neatly into Israel’s long habit of spying on the very countries keeping it afloat that you almost wonder why anyone’s surprised. A US general has had to pull an Israeli counterpart aside and tell him the recording has to stop, staff are warning each other to keep their voices down, and Israel is waving it all off as absurd, which is exactly how they always respond when the evidence gets too close for comfort. So I’ll tell you what this really is. It isn’t a scandal because it happened. It’s a scandal because it’s happened before, and everybody in Washington still pretends it won’t happen again. Right, so Israel has been accused of spying on US troops operating out of a base in Kiryat Gat, and the first thing to understand is that the shock is performative because none of this behaviour is new, none of it is surprising, and none of it stands apart from a long, well-documented pattern of Israeli intelligence targeting the very states that keep it armed, funded, and politically protected. What’s different this time is the location, the timing, the mission those US troops are on, and the fact that the leak has come from inside the American command rather than from a political briefing in Washington. A US-run Civil-Military Coordination Centre, or CMCC, has been set up inside Israel, close to the Gaza border, to monitor the ceasefire, coordinate humanitarian access, and begin the slow, bureaucratic work of shaping what Gaza’s administration will look like under the framework inherited from the Trump plan. Inside that base, according to staff, Israel is reported to have been recording meetings, openly and covertly. That includes discussions between American officers and humanitarian agencies, which is already politically dangerous because this is the one area of the conflict where Israel wants as little outside scrutiny as possible, and when those recordings became obvious enough that staff started raising the alarm, the American commander, Lieutenant General Patrick Frank, summoned his Israeli counterpart and told him the recording had to stop.