Lee Fang

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House as the best chance to deliver his long-promised health revolution.

In the final weeks of the race, the former environmental attorney urged voters to back Trump in order to advance a reform agenda aimed at eliminating harmful substances from America’s agriculture and food supply, particularly the herbicides and insecticides sprayed on most fruits and vegetables.

“Don’t you want healthy children, and don’t you want the chemicals out of our food, and don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?” Kennedy thundered at an October 2024 rally in Glendale, Arizona. Moments later, Trump promised to empower his ally to investigate the “toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food.”

“We’re going to ban the worst agricultural chemicals” and “remove conflicts of interest” from top farm and food safety agencies, Kennedy pledged days later.

Those promises have since fallen by the wayside.

The administration has reapproved the cancer-causing weedkiller dicamba, deleted references to pesticides from its “Make America Healthy Again” action plan, and delayed enforcement of limits on so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water. There has been no meaningful action on controversial pesticides Kennedy previously warned about, including neonicotinoid insecticides and glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup—which he once called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.”

Meanwhile, representatives of pesticide and chemical companies have flooded into key regulatory roles. Former lobbyists Douglas Troutman, Nancy Beck, Lynn Ann Dekleva, Scott Hutchins, Kelsey Barnes and Kyle Kunkler now occupy senior positions overseeing agriculture and environmental policy.

What happened?

The New York Times has seized upon a new racial scandal for Zohran Mamdani. The newly elected mayor, the paper reported yesterday, has failed to appoint a single Black deputy mayor.

“After winning the Democratic mayoral primary last year, Zohran Mamdani acknowledged that his victory came without much support from Black voters, and he pledged to do better…

Delegate Stacey Plaskett, the sole representative of the Virgin Islands in Congress, is exploring a bid this year to run for governor of the island territory.

Plaskett met this week with close campaign supporters to discuss her plans, according to a source in the territory. At the meeting, she stated that Senator Milton Potter, the president of the V.I. Legislature, would be her running mate.

The role of governor would grant Plaskett—a close associate of the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—considerable control over many of his secret files that remain shrouded from public view.

That is because the Virgin Islands is one of a handful of states and territories in which the attorney general is appointed by the governor rather than elected by voters.

Albert Bryan, the current V.I. governor, used his control of the office to dismiss the only attorney general who had pursued aggressive investigations into Epstein’s criminal enterprise on the island.

Plaskett’s ties to Epstein run deep and extend over many years, as we have previously reported. Plaskett worked in the local V.I. economic development agency during the same period the office granted over $300 million in fraudulent tax credits to Epstein’s business interests. Plaskett then went on to work directly for Erika Kellerhals, a lawyer who served as Epstein’s attorney and political fixer.

Court documents show that Epstein helped elevate Plaskett from obscurity and raised cash for her to clinch her 2014 bid for Congress. Cecil de Jongh, a close aide to Epstein, noted via email that, “we have a friend in Stacey.” The race, which Plaskett won by only 737 votes, was one of the closest in V.I. history.

While in office, Plaskett worked quietly with the convicted pedophile. In 2018, she traveled to Epstein’s opulent Manhattan mansion to solicit funds from him for the DCCC, the House Democrats’ campaign arm.

Last November, the Washington Post generated national headlines by revealing that Epstein texted Plaskett to suggest questions during a 2019 committee hearing. The timestamps from the hearing video and text messages align perfectly, showing that Epstein seeded Plaskett with questions that were repeated nearly verbatim.

I join my cohost Leighton Woodhouse for a podcast discussion around the violent confrontations in Minnesota and what it might mean for America. In short order, we discuss ethnic scapegoating, whether the federal government is truly focused on taxpayer fraud, and why this Trump presidency is fundamentally different from the first administration. Will the…

The artificial intelligence revolution threatens to uproot entire professions, replace millions of workers, and reshape industrial relations. Much ink has been spilled on the ways in which AI influence has already taken root. Wall Street and Washington, D.C., are both betting on the technology to power the future of American innovation.

But little has been said about how the industry has already seized control over key components of American governance. Look no further than the quiet shifts in the application of copyright law.

Since the mid-nineties, software giants led by Microsoft have waged a global war against copyright infringement and online piracy. They bankrolled groups like the Business Software Alliance to demand increased penalties for copyright violations and pressured FBI agents to raid foreign hosts accused of harboring illicit content-sharing servers. For the old software model, duplicated Microsoft Office disks and fake software licenses posed the greatest risk.

Then-Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Brad Smith, in a 2001 interview with the Wall Street Journal, championed the crusade against digital theft as part of a sprawling battle against “organized criminal enterprises.” The company and its allies marshaled their resources to encourage the federal government to crack down on foreign piracy sites, especially illegal file-sharing firms based in Russia, Hong Kong, and Brazil.

In a case that signified this old era of aggressive copyright enforcement, the Justice Department in 2011 pursued criminal charges against Aaron Swartz, a young open internet activist, for downloading JSTOR’s repository of scholarly papers without authorization. Faced with the prospect of decades in prison, he died by suicide during the prosecution.

Much has changed since advances in artificial intelligence have made the technology the focal point of Silicon Valley innovation. Smith is now president of Microsoft, and the company and its partner OpenAI—which exclusively runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing network and was backed with $13.75 billion in investment funds from Microsoft—are at the center of a very different type of copyright dispute. This time, as the power of the tech industry still looms over Washington, D.C., prosecutors are less interested in going after those suspected of engaging in illegal downloads of copyrighted work.

That is because it is now the tech giants that are accused of exploiting pirated content on an industrial scale. Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, xAI, and OpenAI are competing to vacuum up as much data as humanly possible in a race to develop their respective AI models. The most prized training data, it turns out, are vast quantities of copyrighted material, largely in the form of published works such as academic articles, novels, and nonfiction books.

After decades of FBI warnings about copyright violations and the dangers of piracy, suddenly the federal government is no longer interested in such crimes. That has left law enforcement in the hands of civil litigation class actions, many of which have been filed by authors and writers noting that tech giants are now plundering their works for AI training without authorization, payment, or notification.

The court cases have cast a spotlight on a stratospheric level of hypocrisy. Microsoft, which once cast peer-to-peer and dark web piracy sites as an existential threat that cost the economy billions of dollars in damages, allegedly taps the very same types of illicit forums for a huge range of copyrighted academic articles, novels, and nonfiction.

The AI giants have all but admitted that they have developed their most advanced models by tapping into mass piracy. The lawsuit Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms revealed that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, used a mirror of Library Genesis, a notorious library of pirated books hosted on Russian servers, to train its generative AI systems.

Tech executives have pressed for licensing deals with some publishers—but in many cases have gone ahead with simply stealing millions of books and articles via known piracy sites on the dark web and other illicit forums. The litigation produced emails and documents showing Meta employees admitting that “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃.” In one exchange, engineers noted that use of the illegal content had been escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as “MZ”) and that the decision was “approved to use.”

Le Pod lives. After a short hiatus, we’re back with another episode about the dangers of artificial intelligence. When does a wonderful tool for the betterment of society become a dangerous dependency as we outsource our daily tasks, our cognitive abilities, our manufacturing, and our broader economy to technological entities that are no longer under our control?

The last time we spoke about this, we focused on existential risks. This week, we’re joined by University of Montreal Assistant Professor David Krueger, who has raised alarm bells about the risks of “gradual disempowerment.”

The post below is from guest contributor Ben Ryder Howe, a journalist and frequent contributor to New York Magazine.

This week sees the publication of TRUE NATURE, a biography of the writer, naturalist, Zen monk and political activist Peter Matthiessen. The 716-page book is expected to be one of fall’s major titles. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was one of the last literary men of action, known for his sprawling New Yorker travelogues on crossing the Amazon and summiting the Himalayas as well as for his National Book Award-winning fiction.

Matthiessen also spied for the CIA, which his son Lucas accidentally disclosed to a New York Times reporter at a Christmas party for The Paris Review in 1977. The Times subsequently revealed Matthiessen’s secret in an article, “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by CIA,” which came out in the wake of the Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses. At the time, the press was aggressively investigating the CIA. Matthiessen, one of the decade’s biggest literary names, was a surprise catch. The revelation threatened his career and trailed him to its end. He called working for the agency “the one adventure of my life I regret.”

Nevertheless, despite being questioned about it dozens of times over the years, he succeeded in never revealing what he had actually done. Was he an agent or a case officer? Did he have a security clearance? Did he handle other sources of intelligence, or was he the one being handled? Who or what was he spying on?

Unfortunately, the new biography doesn’t solve the mystery, or even really try. We should want to know what Matthiessen did, because there have long been unsettling indications that he spied on other writers – particularly dissident writers, including Richard Wright, the towering midcentury author of BLACK BOY, who was hounded into exile by J. Edgar Hoover because of his political activism and died an early death likely because of the stress.

We should also want to know because researchers, including TRUE NATURE’s author, Lance Richardson, have spent decades trying to get the CIA to release Matthiessen’s file, as well as the agency’s files on The Paris Review, which Matthiessen used as cover while spying – all without success. Whatever secrets the files contain, they are now almost seventy-five years old, nearly the same age as the CIA itself, raising the question: will the public ever get to know what they are? Given that nearly everyone involved has died, one has to wonder, Why all the discretion?

The intrigue centers on a few years in postwar Paris, one of the more remarkable periods in American culture. Long a magnet for expat artists, Paris saw its popularity surge after the war as living costs sank and the U.S. oppressed nonconformity at home. It was the age of McCarthyism, blacklists and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Anyone who ventured into politically unacceptable territory risked their careers. Black artists, gay artists, creators of “smut,” as well as those who just wanted a taste of subversive art, great jazz and nostalgia for the Lost Generation, flocked to the Left Bank. Among the unknowns loafing at the Deux Magots and the Tournon were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Bud Powell, Mary McCarthy, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Joan Mitchell and Ellsworth Kelly.

The scene caught the eye of intelligence agencies. The U.S. was at a disadvantage in the cold war when it came to soft power. Moscow had long excelled at penetrating Western intellectual circles, and Washington was determined to fight back by promoting Western values through literature, Hollywood, music and even abstract expressionist painting. Paris was the epicenter of the international arts scene – soon, much of it fueled by CIA money and flooded with spies.

Peter Matthiessen was one. As TRUE NATURE tells it, Matthiessen arrived in Paris in 1953 fresh out of Yale, where he was one of “at least twenty-five” members of his class (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) recruited by faculty members into the CIA. The young writer – handsome, connected, and fluent in French – was already on his way to fame, having published stories in The Atlantic. The CIA gave him a stipend and a mission he embraced.

“When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,” Matthiessen would write to his friend Ben Bradlee, Jr, executive editor of the Washington Post. “Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?”

It all turned sour, however. Matthiessen’s romantic vision of spying seems to have involved spying on foreigners – Russians, or perhaps European communists. Which he did some of the time. Richardson tells us about his attempts to learn the inner workings of the French communist party from an older writer who he approached pretending to seek feedback on a novel. (Richardson posits that it was Tristan Tzara, a Dadaist poet and art collector.)

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For the most part, however, Matthiessen seems to have spied on other expats, which blurs the lines between spying and something less noble: informing. Matthiessen was gathering information on friends, many of whom had legitimate reasons to be petrified of the government at home, which could and often did seek to harm their careers and terrorize their families. While he pretended to be just another slumming postgrad, in reality, as he would later describe, usually between his teeth, his actual duties were “checking on Americans.”

Richard Wright would have been an obvious target. A former member of the Communist Party USA, Wright had published a massive bestseller, NATIVE SON, in 1940, then moved to France to escape blacklisting and surveillance. There, while continuing to denounce the U.S., he mentored a community of black dissident writers, including future FBI target James Baldwin.

It isn’t publicly known whether Matthiessen spied on Wright. After his son unintentionally outed him, Matthiessen’s luck turned in his favor, as the media seemed to lose interest. Although some of his old Paris friends, such as the writer Irwin Shaw, came to him demanding to know whether he had spied on them (denounced as a communist, Shaw had been forced to move abroad) most of his peers seemed to shrug. Indeed, shortly after the Times article, a panel of fellow writers would lavish him with the National Book Award for THE SNOW LEOPARD – twice, in the nonfiction and contemporary thought categories. Whether it was wagon-circling or indifference, Matthiessen seemed to be in the clear. His greatest renown would come after he was exposed.

Had he faced questions about informing on one of the leading anti-racists of the time, it might have been different.

The first journalist to push deeper into the Paris years was Scottish writer James Campbell, who has long written for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1991 Campbell published a biography of Baldwin, TALKING AT THE GATES, for which he succeeded in obtaining Baldwin’s FBI file. For his next book, PARIS INTERZONE, he turned to Wright. Campbell contacted George Plimpton, co-founder with Matthiessen of The Paris Review. Initially he found little resistance. Plimpton freely admitted that a “prominent member” of the review – Matthiessen – had worked for the CIA but quit “after being asked to spy on the expatriate community.” A year after the interview, Campbell sent Plimpton galleys of EXILED IN PARIS, which he hoped the review might excerpt. Instead, Plimpton threatened to sue him unless he removed the material he had given him. Campbell published most of it anyway. There was nothing particularly inflammatory about it, leaving Campbell confused. One possibility: Plimpton just wanted the spying issue to go away, which it had after the Times exposé. However, the book not only brought it back but raised difficult issues, including Wright’s troubling death by heart attack at age 52, which Campbell believes to have been caused by paranoia and stress but others attributed to intelligence agency malfeasance. (Wright’s daughter and friends believed he had been poisoned.)

TRUE NATURE doesn’t mention Campbell’s work. Although Richardson asks, “Was Matthiessen watching Richard Wright?” he doesn’t say whether he knows the answer. The Matthiessen estate gave him broad access to his papers. In addition, he thanks the Matthiessen family for its “willing cooperation.” Yet there’s an obliqueness that mirrors his subject whenever Matthiessen’s espionage comes up. Overall, “[w]hat Matthiessen did, day to day for the CIA, remains something of a mystery,” he writes. The best he can offer is a 2008 exchange with Charlie Rose in which Rose asked point blank what Matthiessen did for the CIA.

“Well, I think we’ll just have to go to the rest of the show,” Matthiessen responded. “It wasn’t very much. It was pretty paltry, really. What it really was doing . . . Know what I was doing, spending my day doing? Deceiving people. That’s all it is.”

“Deceiving people as to—?”

“As to who you are, your identity, what you’re up to, what you want to know [. . .]”

“Were you looking for people you can convert? Were you looking to expose people?”

“No, I was getting information on people.”

Another author TRUE NATURE curiously neglects is historian Craig Lanier Allen. In 2019 Allen published a dissertation specifically focused on the question of Matthiessen’s spying and whether he was targeting Wright. Allen brought a unique perspective, as a black historian and a former spy himself, having spent decades posted abroad by U.S. Air Force counterintelligence. His thesis, “Spies Spying on Spies Spying: The Gibson Affair, the Café Tournon, and the Specter of Surveillance in Postwar American Literary Expatriate Paris, 1953-1958,” is driven by Allen’s own internal conflict: sympathy, on one hand, for the secret agent, and on the other, for the dissident, truth-seeker and outraged critic of race relations. He calls Wright a security threat whose “complicity warrants investigation.” However, he also makes it clear that Wright was a man of conscience who endured monstrous abuse.

Unlike Richardson, Allen shows real interest in getting to the bottom of Matthiessen’s spying. In one devastating quote, he shows that if he did spy on Wright (which Allen believes he did), it was unquestionably a personal betrayal.

“I was very good friends with Richard Wright who was there in Paris too and we had interesting talks about Baldwin,” Matthiessen told an interviewer in 2001. Allen goes on to analyze the clues scattered among Matthiessen’s decades of shifting statements. As a trained spy himself, he identifies what he calls “repeated patterns of deception consistent with the training of a professional intelligence operative.” Matthiessen, he argues, used “the requisite amount of plausible deniability and purposeful obfuscation” to indicate that he was hiding something.

But again, what? Allen doesn’t quite have the goods either. What he does have is the professional standing to engage in informed speculation. In his opinion, Matthiessen probably didn’t have a significant role in the CIA. He was unlikely to have been a case officer. He probably “did not himself manage other human sources of information,” but rather would have “himself been managed.” He was not, in other words, a salaried employee of what was then a burgeoning American intelligence apparatus. He was probably a contract worker hired for a specific purpose – to infiltrate the expat scene. Which some would see as an informant.

Would the distinction have mattered to someone like Wright, whose FBI file largely consisted of fellow writers and acquaintances informing on him, some for money or privileges? (The privilege of simply crossing borders, which included returning home, was cunningly rationed by the U.S. embassy in Paris.) Wright suspected everyone, especially other writers, and likely suspected Matthiessen, too. Indeed, many expats probably suspected Matthiessen, whose wife at the time was the daughter of a top U.S. diplomat.

In Allen’s view, Wright deserved to be spied on. He was a dissident with a platform, “willing to go to any length in order to attract attention to the problem of racial discrimination,” as one of his informants (not Matthiessen) wrote. That made him a “threat to U.S. national security interests,” says Allen.

Yet his enemy was at home. It wasn’t the State Department or the CIA that was obsessed with him, as Allen points out. (Wright’s file was larger than that of any American writer of his time.) It was the FBI, which is supposed to be a domestic intelligence agency. Wright was being hounded, even abroad, with the help of friends and allies. His treatment was undeniably foul, as Matthiessen, looking back, must have painfully felt. In later years Matthiessen would defend himself by distinguishing the CIA of the 1950s from the somewhat later one that came under the scrutiny of the Church Commission – before the agency “got into assassinations and all the ugly stuff,” he would say. But spying on friends is arguably the essence of an intelligence service – any intelligence service, American or otherwise.

In Matthiessen’s defense, most Americans were still processing the terms of the cold war in the early 1950s, gauging the enemy threat and figuring out just how far the nation should go to defend itself. Matthiessen, “the young Yalie,” as he described himself, drinking martinis at the club, was hardly the only one whispering about acquaintances. “Everybody thought everybody else was informing on someone or other for somebody,” said the poet Christopher Logue. Even Wright was accused of selling information.

According to Richardson, the reason Matthiessen dissembled so much was shame. At the end of his life the spying agonized him, and he made several attempts to expiate himself on paper, including something titled “THE PARIS REVIEW v. THE CIA: My Half-life as a Capitalist Running Dog.” TRUE NATURE gives us glimpses of his anguish. Which unless the CIA changes its mind about releasing Matthiessen’s file, is all we have. Allen tried harder with less, and after publishing his thesis he promised that Matthiessen’s involvement with the CIA would soon be explored “as part of a more expansive research project.” Unfortunately, he died in 2022 at the age of 52 of a heart attack.

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The first photo features Peter Matthiesen posing on the harbor on May 29,1992 in Saint Malo,France. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images). The second photo shows Richard Wright, Peter Matthiessen and Christopher Logue. Post updated on Oct. 16th to correct the Talking at the Gates publication date, name of James Campbell’s book.

I'm guest hosting Glenn Greenwald's show this week. Our latest episode exploring guest worker programs and the business of mass immigration.

I spoke to Professor Ron Hira on the Democratic Party’s retreat from core working class issues and its use of identity politics to excuse outsourcing. We also examine President Trump’s shifting promises on the controversial H-1B visa program, the tech industry lobbying machine behind guest worker programs, and much more.

To view the show please see the following link.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Updated with a new, fifth Mossad recruitment ad, which was served in Germany following this article’s publication.

Desi Banks, an Atlanta comedian and content creator, is known for his light- hearted comic sketches and currently has more than nine million followers on the social media platform Instagram. There is no public record of Banks commenting on sensitive Middle East issues, and each of his 47 ad campaigns on Meta’s platforms relates to his work as an entertainer.

The comedian, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, appears to have served a surprising role in an apparent Israeli intelligence operation over the last year to recruit members of Iran’s security and intelligence services – including those working in nuclear centers – into aiding the overthrow of their government. Would-be defectors were offered both money and the protection of their families.

Google advertising transparency records show that a production company owned by Banks, Desi Banks Productions LLC, served a set of five Persian-language recruitment ads across at least 19 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, France, Germany, India, and numerous others across the Middle East and Africa.

The fourth ad campaign included both overt and deceptive redirections into recruitment pages purporting to be run by Israel’s foreign intelligence services, the Mossad. Others advertise lucrative, tax-free jobs at apparently fictitious international consulting firms.

The most aggressive campaign redirected users to the Mossad’s official, Persian-language recruitment form, during the recent 12-day war between Israel and Iran, advising viewers to activate their virtual private network (VPN) before clicking. Google’s ad disclosure portal shows that the campaign linked to the Mossad’s official website, mossad.gov.il.

Investigation published in partnership with Drop Site News.

On March 2, 2025, hours after the Israeli government announced the blockade of all food, medicine, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza, lawmakers in Jerusalem demanded answers—not on the devastating human toll of such a decision, but on how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was preparing to handle the public relations fallout.

“I began with the example of the cessation of humanitarian aid—did you prepare for this thing this morning?” asked Knesset member Moshe Tur-Paz, the chair of a subcommittee on Foreign Affairs in Israel’s parliament.

Avichai Edrei, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces who was asked the same question later in the hearing, assured the legislators work was underway, stating, “We could also decide to launch a digital campaign in this context, to explain that there is no hunger and present the data.”

Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.

“There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times.

Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June. The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google's advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda.

Records show that the Israeli government similarly spent $3 million (NIS 10 million) for an advertising campaign with X. The French and Israeli advertising platform Outbrain/Teads is also set to receive roughly $2.1 million (NIS 7 million).

The ads have aired in response to increasing global outcry over the deteriorating situation in Gaza. In August, the UN formally declared a famine in Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the leading global authority on food security, projected the threshold for famine would be crossed in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the coming weeks, stating "this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”

The UN aid coordination office OCHA further warned on Friday of “a descent into a massive famine” in the Gaza Strip.

At least 367 Palestinians, including 131 children, have died as a result of hunger and malnutrition since the war began, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

The existence of an Israeli Google ads campaign to discredit the UN’s primary aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was similarly reported by WIRED last year. Hadas Maimon, head of public awareness for Israel’s diaspora ministry, stated during the March 2 Knesset hearing that, “For almost a year now, we have been leading a major campaign on the issue of UNRWA.”

Other Israeli government ads on Google’s platforms accused the United Nations of “deliberate sabotage” of aid delivery into Gaza and promoted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel, the U.S., and unnamed European countries. One campaign promoted prosecution of the militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, for debunked allegations of mass sexual violence as a result of a controversial report published by the Israeli advocacy group Dinah Project.

Despite the denial about the famine, prominent Israeli government voices have championed the effort to cut off food and water to Gazans as a strategy for inducing mass migration out of the territory. “In my opinion, you can besiege them,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Finance Ministry and a coalition partner to Netantayu’s government, according to Channel 12. “No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender,” Smotrich said.

Amichay Eliyahu, the Knesset member who leads the Heritage Ministry in Netanyahu's government, has similarly called for starving the Palestinian population of Gaza. "There is no nation that feeds its enemies,” Eliyahu said during a radio interview in July. In May, the minister argued the Palestinians "need to starve" and added, "If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan."