by Hend Salama Abo Helow

Coastal tourism sites, 180 gleaming skyscrapers, business and industrial centers, new urban cities, more than 100,000 housing units, over 200 schools, more than 75 medical facilities, and a colossal number of job opportunities. This is Jared Kushner’s futuristic master plan for Gaza.

Kushner — Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former U.S. special envoy — presented his master plan in Davos at the World Economic Forum in the form of a computer-generated, color-coded map of what he described as a “new Gaza.”

“I know it’s a little risky to be investing in a place like this, but come, take faith. Invest in the people,” Kushner said. Two years of genocide have altered Gaza into a flattened wasteland, with over 90 percent of residential buildings lying in ruins. Yet, despite the so-called ceasefire, the interests that are profiting from its collapse and exploiting its devastation have never truly withdrawn.

Trump had proposed clearing the area of its inhabitants and turning it into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a vision depicted in an AI-generated video shared by the U.S. president in 2025. It is an unoriginal approach to imposing free-market economy principles on Gaza: Shimon Peres had previously envisioned the transformation of Gaza into another Singapore, as if both were once poor, backward, and demolished cities. If Singapore was turned into modern city, Gaza has the same potential, according to Peres.

Referring to his own plan, Trump reasserted, “I’m a real estate person at heart, and it’s all about location.”

Aligning with these free-market interests, Kushner set a $25 billion budget to reconstruct Gaza within three years, under specific frameworks and conditions. He also called on the private sector to invest confidently in his plan, which many of us who live here see as an imminent Vegas-ification of Gaza.

The redevelopment plan encompasses four phases. Phase one is set to begin in Rafah and parts of Khan Younis, while phase two will expand to the rest of Khan Younis. Phase three involves cramming displaced families into refugee camps in central Gaza, while phase four transforms Gaza City into an industrial zone. Yet, the entire plan is conditioned on Hamas’s full disarmament.

Mohammed Johar, a young, educated father in his twenties who lives in Gaza, described Kushner’s plan as a “sword with two edges.” He continued, “We are all aspiring to see Gaza rebuilt and thriving, but not at the cost of plundering Palestinian sovereignty and statehood.”

Johar, like many other Gazans, has long suffered from unemployment and suffocating living conditions. Reflecting on the plan, he said, “The lofty promises of job opportunities, dignified lives, and sustainable necessities feel like a breakthrough compared to what Gaza has been buried beneath.”

Johar added, “Beyond the physical reconstruction, this will erase Palestinian culture, history, and identity.” Pouring into details, he continued, “Separating Gaza from the West Bank under the pretext of a ‘new Gaza’ poses a serious and growing threat of creating a new generation caught in glitzy towers and lavish, advanced sites, rather than being well-grounded in the decades-long struggle for freedom and educated about our historical landmarks that have been either stolen or erased.”

Kushner’s plan necessitates a flat, ready-to-build surface to embark on the investment project from scratch. Johar remarked, “This means wiping out what is left of Gaza’s physical body — clearing the rubble, then robbing Palestinians of their land and property.” In a muted voice, he continued, “This will not only strip Palestinians of their land and force them to submit to U.S.-Israeli backed control, but also revive the old myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land.’ It will further fuel domestic conflicts among Gazans over original land ownership and present residential allocations.”

Ibrahim Faris Abu Ammar, a 68-year-old retired teacher who lost his home and several family members, told me the plan seems vague, and unsettling. He said, “People are feeling perplexed about Gaza’s master plan — fearful of its consequences, yet cautiously hopeful about rebuilding Gaza.”

He bowed his head, then added, “They have successfully and undeniably engineered our society. It has all been contrived upon us without any prior consultation, and whatever happens, we are left with no choice but to accept it, unopposed.” Abu Ammar continued, putting it plainly, “The U.S. and Israel are treating us as the defeated side, and the defeated are expected to woefully submit to the victor’s order.”

Yet, the newly established National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, under the so-called “Board of Peace,” has not been engaged in Kushner’s talks. Abu Ammar commented: “Neglecting the role of the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian factions, and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza in decision-making on such watershed matters of self-determination is deeply concerning.”

He reflected bitterly: “This reminds me most of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a death trap dressed up as salvation. This, too, is an investment-driven expropriation plan masquerading as a beneficial reconstruction project for the public good.”

Mohamed J. Abu Safia, a journalist from Gaza, sees the plan as “profoundly dangerous.” He stated critically, “No one has the right to decide on behalf of Palestinians. No one has the right to invest in land they do not own.”

He then questioned:

If the intention to turn Gaza into an investment project existed long ago, weren’t they able to intervene and stop a killing machine that raged for over two years unabated? If they truly care about Gaza, then rather than forging systematic plans for shiny skyscrapers and tourism destinations, they should think about lifting the blockade and ending the occupation — and rebuilding Gaza meaningfully for its people, not for tourists, and not in ways that implicitly force migration.

One of the plan’s promotional hooks was the promise of building a seaport and an airport. But Abu Safia interrupted me and said, “We once had a seaport and an airport — and Israeli forces demolished them. So why not grant Palestinians the space and sovereignty to improve their lives in the way they see fit?”

Abu Safia lost his home in northern Gaza, and another piece of his land recently fell behind the so-called “Yellow Line.” He recounted:

My grandparents were expelled from Hamama village, thinking naively it would only be a matter of days. But look — it has been decades. Yet I will never relinquish my own rights. Even if they offered me skyscrapers or palaces, I do not want them. I do not want either. I want my home — even if it is in ruins. My land. I want to be the one who rebuilds it, who decides where the car garage stands and where to plant olives and roses in the garden. And I will not compromise that right.

Through his work, Abu Safia has learned that his perspective widely shared. “I meet people. I conduct interviews. This is not just my sole opinion,” he said. “People are determined to return and rebuild their homes once Israeli forces fully withdraw. They are not relinquishing a single centimeter of their land.”

He has been displaced to Rafah — a city that satellite images show as almost entirely destroyed. It is the same city Kushner envisaged as a “new Rafah.”

“Rafah was once bustling and vibrant with its people. Now it is barren terrain,” Abu Safia stated. “Nevertheless, the ones, and the only ones who have the right to be stakeholders in its future are Rafah’s inhabitants.”

Abu Ammar challenged Kushner’s claims. “It is impossible to complete this in three years,” he said. “Delays and the prolonged stagnation of reconstruction will force many to leave, seeking life beyond Gaza’s perils — my family and I among them.”

Yet Abu Safia added, “I think it is impossible to even implement such a plan, and I hope it fails.”

But Johar put it plainly: “The best plan for Gaza is the full withdrawal of Israeli forces and the facilitation of reconstruction materials and equipment for its people and architects to rebuild it with their own hands — without foreign pressure or intervention.”

Abu Safia called on the world to expedite the engine of reconstruction — but not to “steal our land in return for rebuilding.”

by Pamela Ferdinand

In Greece, Novartis Hellas paid for physicians to attend international medical congresses and warned it would withdraw support if prescription quotas for its drugs were not met.

The subsidiary admitted misconduct in 2020 and agreed to pay $225 million in criminal penalties under a deferred prosecution agreement, as parent company Novartis AG entered a series of settlements with U.S. enforcement agencies to resolve Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations abroad. Previously, in 2016, Novartis paid $25 million to resolve SEC civil charges over bribery in China, without admitting or denying the findings, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Meanwhile, Pfizer subsidiaries in multiple countries, including Italy and Russia, were accused by the SEC in 2012 of paying bribes over about a decade to foreign officials to secure regulatory and formulary approvals, boost sales, and increase prescriptions, the SEC complaint shows. In China, one subsidiary allegedly created “points programs” that let doctors earn gifts based on prescribing its medications, according to the SEC, while in Croatia, another offered a “bonus program” that reportedly rewarded doctors with cash, international travel, or free products.

After voluntarily disclosing the misconduct in 2004 and cooperating with investigators, Pfizer and an indirect subsidiary agreed to pay more than $45 million in separate settlements, without admitting or denying the allegations, the SEC reported. In a parallel action, Pfizer H.C.P., an indirect, wholly-owned healthcare-focused subsidiary, agreed to pay a $15 million penalty to resolve its investigation of FCPA violations after admitting to improper payments to foreign government officials, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

And in Greece, Poland, and Romania, Johnson & Johnson subsidiaries, employees, and agents were accused by regulators of using slush funds, sham contracts, and off-shore companies in the Isle of Man to reward doctors and administrators who ordered or prescribed its products, including surgical implants. The 2011 SEC complaint also accused the company of paying kickbacks in Iraq to obtain business.

Johnson & Johnson voluntarily disclosed some of the violations and conducted an internal investigation. Without admitting or denying the allegations, the company agreed to pay more than $48 million to settle the case and $21.4 million to resolve parallel DOJ criminal charges, SEC records show.

Together, these pharmaceutical companies, their subsidiaries, and others have reportedly paid at least $12.6 million in bribes to win drug approvals, boost sales, and secure government contracts, a new analysis of international enforcement records shows. The cases resulted in more than $1.1 billion in sanctions, often without admissions or denials of wrongdoing. Yet many alleged schemes designed to prioritize profits over patients persisted for years before they were uncovered.

From a public health perspective, the impact of pharmaceutical industry bribery extends well beyond financial penalties and corporate reputations, the study’s authors say. Corruption, they note, is harmful for patients, especially when companies seek to promote the sale of drugs with unproven or dangerous uses.

“It creates barriers to health services and products and compromises quality of products and care,” said lead author Prof. Jillian Kohler of the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, Dalla Lana School of Public Health & Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. “In the worst case, corruption kills.”

Published last month [February 2026] in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the review draws on reports published between 1999 and early February 2025 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Working Group on Bribery. The OECD does not directly investigate international business transactions but documents alleged bribery incidents and monitors enforcement under its Anti-Bribery Convention, which requires member states to criminalize foreign bribery.

The reports summarize cases provided by member states, including the United States, and are informed by on-site visits and consultations. (Cases involving medical devices were excluded from the review.)

While corruption and unethical practices in the pharmaceutical sector have been well documented, the study offers one of the most comprehensive cross-country snapshots of investigations and enforcement actions related to bribery in the global pharmaceutical industry. It points to systemic vulnerabilities in how medicines are approved, purchased, and prescribed worldwide, and highlights structural weaknesses in pharmaceutical oversight and enforcement.

The review also notes some common patterns:

• Bribery was often approved (or at least knowingly tolerated) by high-ranking managers.
• Intermediaries and complicated corporate structures obscured bribes, with subsidiaries, third-party vendors or shell companies disguising payments as legitimate transactions.

Among other harms, systemic bribery (including individual medical specialist payments not related to research) can distort prescribing patterns and reimbursement decisions, diverting resources toward higher-cost, lower quality or unnecessary drugs and treatments, which is damaging to patients both medically and economically, the researchers say.

“In the worst case, corruption kills.”

Bribes can also compromise regulations designed to ensure drug safety and efficacy, jeopardize clinical decision-making, and undermine trust in medical institutions and practitioners, the study’s authors say. Such impacts, they say, erode public confidence in medical institutions and can harm patient outcomes “when decisions are driven by financial incentives rather than medical need.”

The researchers say the scale of financial penalties underscores how improper practices can become institutionalized, while the wide range of concealment tactics highlights the complexity of detecting and prosecuting such misconduct.

Government officials, regulators, and health care providers were allegedly bribed through cash, gifts, luxury travel, and fraudulent research to gain market access, increase sales or influence prescribing, according to the study. Additional reported tactics, the authors say, included compensating officials under the guise of consulting or speaker fees, using charitable front groups, and making direct payments to inspectors or regulators.

“These findings underscore the systemic nature of bribery in the pharmaceutical sector and call for stronger oversight and accountability to protect public trust and equitable medicine access,” wrote Kohler and her co-authors.

“Bribery is not limited to one region; it was documented across a wide geographic spectrum. The repeated reliance on sham clinical studies, inflated distributor discounts, and disguised consulting contracts supports the idea that certain systemic weaknesses transcend national boundaries.”

The global scope of pharma bribery investigations

Researchers identified 21 investigations involving pharmaceutical companies and their subsidiaries in five OECD countries. The United States accounted for 14 cases, followed by Germany and Denmark with three each, and Greece and Italy with one each.

Other findings are:

• In total, 19 companies and many of their subsidiaries were implicated, including allegations against publicly named firms, including: BioTest, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Teva, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, SciClone, Nordion, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk.
• Across the cases, the total timeframe of the investigations ran from 1994 to 2016. The longest, documented alleged scheme lasted 11 years, with the average persisting for nearly five years. Once uncovered, cases took more than four years on average to move from detection to prosecution.
• Alleged bribes amounted to at least $12.6 million, the review shows. Total financial sanctions reached more than $1.1 billion, including roughly $586 million in fines, $447 million in corporate disgorgement (repayment of profits linked to alleged misconduct) and roughly $77 million in prejudgment interest.
• The largest single sanction of more than $519 million for foreign bribery was imposed on Teva Pharmaceuticals in a 2016 deferred prosecution agreement to settle parallel civil allegations and criminal charges that it paid officials to win business in Russia, Ukraine, and Mexico. (Just two years earlier, a Chinese court fined GlaxoSmithKline nearly $500 million after finding its local subsidiary guilty of bribery.) “While the conduct that resulted in this investigation ended several years ago, it is both regrettable and unacceptable, and we are pleased to finally put this matter behind us,” said Teva’s Erez Vigodman in a 2016 statement. “Since becoming CEO, I have worked diligently to make our culture of compliance central to everything Teva does.”

The research review relied only on cases that advanced to official investigation and prosecution and were made public. Other incidents—for instance, those involving companies not listed on major exchanges or operating in countries with less rigorous enforcement—may never come to light, the authors say.

“The discrepancy between the small number of detected cases and the extensive use of sophisticated concealment methods suggests that the OECD [Anti-Bribery] Convention, while significant in principle, has had only a modest effect on curtailing opportunities for corruption,” they wrote.

Where and how bribes were allegedly paid

According to the review, alleged bribery payments were directed toward recipients in 30 countries across Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Many schemes targeted public hospitals and ministries of health in systems where governments play central roles in financing and procuring medicines.

“Bribery is not limited to one region; it was documented across a wide geographic spectrum.”

In the U.S., the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) generally prohibits bribery of officials in other countries to get or retain business and requires publicly traded companies to maintain accurate and transparent accounting. The FCPA also prohibits indirect bribes made to any person “knowing” that some or all of the payments will be used to bribe foreign officials or other prohibited recipients.

The researchers categorized bribery cases into three types, with varying degrees of health risks for patients and consumers:

• Boosting profits without directly compromising drug quality, such as paying prescribers to favor certain approved drugs, potentially steering decisions away from cost-effective or optimal care.
• Bypassing regulatory scrutiny to boost the sale of falsified, substandard, adulterated or unapproved drugs, creating direct public health risks. In these cases, bribes were paid to inspectors, regulators or supply chain actors to ignore safety and manufacturing violations.
• Combining profit-driven motives with drug quality or misuse risks, such as off-label marketing or securing approvals without full review, which increase sales while exposing patients to unproven or dangerous uses. For instance, pharmaceutical sales teams, incentivized by bonuses, promoted drugs for uses not supported by evidence, or bribed officials to overlook inadequate clinical testing.

Common pharma bribery tactics, up and down the corporate ladder

Schemes targeted publicly and privately employed physicians, nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators, government health staff, and others, the study reports. Customs officials, members of parliament, and employees of state-run procurement agencies were also implicated. In at least one instance, consultants from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) were involved.

“Across cases, company employees at every level from frontline sales and distributor personnel to middle managers, local executives, and even high-ranking corporate officers were directly complicit in planning, executing, or approving bribery strategies. Senior managers authorized inflated payments or disguised expense claims,” Kohler and her colleagues wrote.

“At times, executives approved false documentation or misrepresented financial transactions in official records and audits, and lower-level sales representatives regularly funneled funds or gifts, meticulously tracking prescription volumes or purchase orders to justify continued bribes. Frequent internal warnings and compliance reviews, which spotlighted obvious red flags in accounting and documentation, were often ignored or treated as isolated incidents.”

In one case, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s joint venture in China reaped more than $11 million in profits from alleged misconduct that included faking invoices, receipts, and purchase orders to fund improper payments to health care providers in exchange for prescription sales, the SEC alleged. Without admitting or denying the findings, the company agreed in 2015 to pay more than $14 million to settle charges that it violated the FCPA’s internal controls and recordkeeping provisions.

Sponsorships, travel, gifts and entertainment

Pharmaceutical companies frequently paid for healthcare professionals to attend congresses, conferences, and educational events, the study reports. However, investigations found these payments were “often inflated or included lavish, non-work-related perks such as shopping trips, sightseeing tours, and family travel, leading to their classification as bribes,” the reviewers write. Some companies provided personal loans to doctors with no repayment expectation or transferred cash directly to their bank accounts.

Beyond travel-based incentives, alleged schemes featured weekend retreats to spas, bathhouses, and karaoke bars pitched as educational seminars or symposia. Luxury items such as cameras, jewelry, and expensive wine were provided alongside smaller perks like shopping vouchers and electronics, the review shows. “In such cases, sales teams meticulously tracked each health care professional’s prescription volume to ensure a return on investment,” the reviewers write.

Falsified or manipulated clinical studies and research

Some companies set up fraudulent or low-value clinical studies—sometimes labeled as “Phase IV,” “observational,” or “epidemiological” studies—to funnel money to health care professionals. Sales representatives also recruited physicians who prescribed certain drugs, paying them “study fees” or for “data collection,” though paperwork was “often incomplete or deliberately misleading,” according to the review.

Novartis Greece, for instance, used an epidemiological study to boost prescription drug sales, not for genuine research, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Employees made improper payments between 2009 and 2010 to health care providers, recognizing that many believed they were paid to prescribe, not provide clinical data, federal prosecutors said.

Consulting, speaker fees, and medical roundtables

Hiring health care providers or government officials under titles such as “consultants,” “speakers,” or “Key Opinion Leaders” was another common tactic, the researchers note. “Individuals were paid for little or no actual work while the expenditures were classified as ‘advisory services,’ ‘lecture fees,’ or ‘professional consulting,’” the reviewers write.

“We strongly caution company officials from averting their eyes from what they do not wish to see.”

For instance, Teva, a leading manufacturer of generic pharmaceutical products, engaged a senior Ukrainian government health official as the company’s “registration consultant” between 2011 and 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. It paid him a monthly fee and provided him with travel and benefits worth $200,000 to influence government approval of Teva products, including insulins and the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone^®. Teva and its wholly-owned subsidiary in Russia admitted paying bribes to the official as part of its 2016 deferred prosecution agreement.

Some companies held “medical roundtables” and paid healthcare providers honoraria, sometimes routing funds through third-party journals (labeled as advertising) that were then funneled to attendees or speakers. Because the events were billed as external meetings, they often bypassed internal compliance or due diligence controls.

“Like other ‘consultancy’ arrangements, these roundtable payments served as covert bribes that were recorded in corporate books as legitimate marketing or professional fees,” the researchers wrote.

Distributor discounts, credit notes, and margin manipulation

Some companies gave excessive discounts or credit notes to distributors, who used the surplus to bribe doctors or government officials, the reviewers write. These payments, used to boost prescriptions or secure contracts, were falsely recorded as marketing or margin expenses, which concealed the bribe payments.

In Brazil, Lilly’s subsidiary gave excessive distributor discounts, enabling markups that concealed bribes to government officials to purchase Lilly products, the SEC alleged. One distributor allegedly used $70,000 (6% of sales) to secure $1.2 million in purchases, and the Lilly Brazil sales and marketing manager who requested the discount allegedly aware of the arrangement, according to the SEC.

As part of a broader civil settlement to resolve reported FCPA violations between 1994 and 2009 related to its affiliates, Eli Lilly announced it agreed in 2012 to pay more than $29 million without admitting or denying the allegations. It also agreed to an independent review of its internal controls and FCPA compliance.

“Lilly requires our employees to act with integrity with all external parties and in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations,” said Anne Nobles, Lilly’s chief ethics and compliance officer in a statement at the time. “Since ours is a business based on trust, we strive to conduct ourselves in an ethical way that is beyond reproach.”

Bribery of government officials

Pharmaceutical companies also have been accused of bribing public officials directly or through intermediaries to accelerate regulatory approvals, speed product registrations or secure government contracts, the review shows. Payments were hidden through inflated contract prices, forged consulting agreements, or manipulated marketing budgets.

For instance, Eli Lilly’s subsidiary in Russia was accused by the SEC of paying millions of dollars to offshore entities for alleged “marketing services” to drive drug sales among pharmaceutical distributors and government bodies. About $2 million went to an offshore entity belonging to a government official, while another $5.2 million went to entities owned by someone closely connected to an important member of Russia’s parliament, the SEC alleged. Though the company became aware of violations, the arrangements continued for years, federal investigators said.

The company reached a civil settlement with the SEC as part of the 2012 compliance agreement, without admitting or denying the allegations, and the SEC noted that improvements to its global anti-corruption compliance program since the initial complaint.

“When a parent company learns tell-tale signs of a bribery scheme involving a subsidiary, it must take immediate action to assure that the FCPA is not being violated,” said Antonia Chion, associate director in the SEC enforcement division at the time. “We strongly caution company officials from averting their eyes from what they do not wish to see.”

United Nations program kickbacks

Under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program, later placed under Iraqi control, pharmaceutical companies were required to sell products to Iraq through an UN-supervised system intended to provide humanitarian relief. The review identified pharmaceutical companies that inflated contract prices and funneled the excess as disguised “agent commissions” to Iraqi ministries.

“These payments were falsely recorded as legitimate fees or marketing costs while the companies recovered the padded amounts from the UN escrow fund,” the authors wrote.

Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiaries and pharmaceutical agent was accused in 2011 by the SEC of allegedly paying more than $850,000 in kickbacks demanded by Iraqi ministries to receive contracts and disguising the illicit payments as legitimate commissions, according to the SEC complaint. J&J voluntarily disclosed some of the violations by its employees and conducted an internal investigation, according to the SEC.

Without admitting or denying the allegations, the company agreed to pay $70 million to settle the case and parallel criminal charges by the U.S. Department of Justice, including separate allegations of bribes to doctors in Greece, Poland, and Romania, the SEC reported.

“These findings underscore the systemic nature of bribery in the pharmaceutical sector.”

Novo Nordisk, a leading supplier of insulin at the time of the program, acknowledged responsibility for its agent paying roughly $1.4 million in improper payments to the former Iraqi government by inflating the price of contracts before submission to the United Nations for approval, then inaccurately recording them as “commissions.” The company agreed to pay a $9 million penalty in connection with the scheme as part of a deferred prosecution agreement, U.S. Department of Justice records show. It also settled related allegations with the SEC, without admission or denial.

Shell companies, pass-through vendors, and false invoicing

Other techniques were widely used by intermediaries to create fraudulent invoices for nonexistent services such as “advertising,” “storage,” “consulting” or “marketing,” the analysis found. “In some cases, vague descriptions such as ‘distribution freight’ were used to funnel funds to officials or doctors without raising immediate red flags,” the reviewers wrote.

Charitable or philanthropic fronts

Pharmaceutical companies also allegedly disguised bribes as charitable donations or contributions to philanthropic foundations connected to public officials. Internal emails and documentation explicitly referred to these payments as quid pro quo arrangements for regulatory approvals or favorable reimbursement decisions, the reviewers say.

For example, Eli Lilly’s subsidiary in Poland was accused of transferring $39,000 to a high-ranking health official’s small charitable foundation in return for the official’s support for placing Lilly drugs on the government reimbursement list, the SEC alleged in a 2012 complaint. The payments were falsely characterized for computer purchases and conferences, which never took place, according to the complaint.

Without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations, the company agreed to a final judgment permanently enjoining it from violating the FCPA as part of a wider settlement, SEC records show. It also agreed to pay more than $29 million in financial penalties and related payments.

Small penalties vs big profits

Foreign bribery by pharmaceutical companies persists, the researchers say, because the risk of detection is low,  and the expected cost of being caught — the amount of a bribe and the risk of penalties from one — is often low relative to increased revenues. For example, Johnson & Johnson’s agreement to pay $70 million in financial penalties, without admitting or denying the SEC’s allegations, occurred the same year it reported earning $65 billion in sales — and years after the SEC alleged bribery schemes by its subsidiaries in four countries began.

In 2023, the DOJ and SEC resolved 14 FCPA actions across all industries with total sanctions of approximately $571 million—a significant decrease from the prior year when 10 actions yielded more than $1.68 billion in corporate penalties, according to the most recent data compiled by the multinational law firm A&O Shearman in its annual report. As discounts for cooperation and compliance rose, the average penalty dropped to nearly $44 million in 2023, down from an average of $168 million in 2022 and a peak of $686 million in 2020.

“In short, pharmaceutical companies as rational profit maximizers (irrespective of legality) will compare the potential gains from bribery against the expected cost of being caught and punished,” the researchers wrote. “Lengthy delays between scheme initiation and their detection and prosecution, coupled with the potential to contest charges, reduce the effective expected cost of corrupt practices. As a result, high financial penalties do not necessarily translate into meaningful deterrence against corruption.”

The same calculation may be true domestically, suggests a research letter published earlier this month [March] in JAMA Network Open. Researchers found that pharmaceutical manufacturers fined by the U.S. government for illegal kickbacks paid penalties equal to just 2.2% of their sales earned from selling drugs that were implicated in violations over the past 25 years. The total penalties were about $10.2 billion, while U.S. revenue during that same period totaled roughly $459 billion, they say.

Alleged schemes typically involved paying doctors to prescribe federally reimbursed drugs, the researchers say, and criminal prosecution under the U.S. Anti-Kickback Statute was uncommon.

“Moreover, all cases were resolved through negotiated settlements, likely due to resource constraints and uncertainty of judicial judgment, which also makes settlement more predictable for manufacturers. Thus, our findings suggest that AKS settlements may be economically tolerable for some pharmaceutical manufacturers and function as a cost of doing business,” the new study concludes. The median time from alleged misconduct to settlement was 3.8 years.

Calls for broad structural reforms

OECD reports on which last month’s expansive review is based include only pharmaceutical bribery schemes made public through official investigations. Enforcement also varies widely across countries, creating what the researchers describe as “a ‘dark figure’ of corruption that is never formally documented.” And intricate financial arrangements, incomplete reporting, a fragmented health system “outmatched” by the global reach of pharmaceutical firms, and limited public disclosures often obscure misconduct, they say.

Added to that, after temporarily suspending enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act last year, the Trump Administration has signaled potential changes to enforcement priorities, including a substantially smaller team at the Justice Department and a shift in priorities to national security threats.

What is needed, Kohler and her colleagues argue, are more proactive monitoring and audit mechanisms, including enhanced due diligence and tighter oversight of distributors, local agents, and third parties, as well as mandatory transparency in intermediary relationships, such as public disclosure of service fees and clinical trial data.

The authors also urge structural reforms, including:

• Expanding independent financing for clinical trials
• Improving transparency through data analytics, AI risk detection, and automated financial tracking
• Mandating disclosure of industry payments to healthcare providers
• Reducing regulators’ reliance on industry financing
• Strengthening whistleblower protections

“These findings underscore the systemic nature of bribery in the pharmaceutical sector,” they wrote, “and call for stronger oversight and accountability to protect public trust and equitable medicine access.”

Reference

Kohler J, Khan A, Bowra A. Bribery and the Global Pharmaceutical Industry: An Exploration of Patterns and Penalties in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Reports. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Published online 2026:1-11. doi:10.1017/jme.2026.10237

by Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

Photo: Rob Wilson

Big Green groups taking millions from Big Tech have abandoned vulnerable communities to become accomplices in data center proliferation rather than opponents.

“We refer here to the struggle against our own weaknesses. Obviously, other cases differ from that of Guinea; but our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves — no matter what difficulties the enemy may create — is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples.” – Amilcar Cabral

As David Holt, Mayor of Oklahoma City, remarked to Politico last month, “ If you had asked me about data centers five months ago, I would have said: ‘What’s a data center?” He continued, “Now it’s everywhere. So that’s a short amount of time to fully formulate what you think about it.” While it’s true that data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) are a ubiquitous aspect of the current U.S. lexicon, the idea that positions on data centers have not been fully formulated is questionable. Clearly, Big Tech corporations are solid in their position that they need as much influence over the government and other decision makers to proliferate their data center infrastructure wherever they want and as quickly as they want. This, in part, explains why Big Tech corporations including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple were among the largest donors to President Trump’s “renovations” to the East Wing of the White [people’s] House, as well as why many of these same corporations, along with a handful of CEOs representing AI firms, also dolled out millions of dollars to fund activities and events associated with Trump’s second inauguration.  The president has repaid his Big Tech donors with a series of favorable policies designed to fast track the approval and construction of data centers, and get them connected to the grid with equal haste, most demonstrated by an Executive Order entitled,  Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure.

The term “techlash” is widely attributed to Adriene Woolridge, who first used the term in a 2013 article in the publication The Economist to describe growing public discontent with the Big Tech sector and the Silicon Valley elite. At one point in the article, Woolridge suggests, “[Silicon Valley] Geeks have turned out to be some of the most ruthless capitalists around. They are increasingly renouncing their Spartan past and instead making a splash with their money.” No one understands the growing techlash in the country due to data centers than Big Tech corporations. As Black Alliance for Peace National Co-Coordinator, Austin Cole, pointed out earlier this year, “We already see certain corporate actors trying to maintain their ability to construct data centers as they see fit, with Microsoft recently releasing a “Community First AI Plan” that co-opts social justice language and makes data center construction seem inevitable.” But Big Tech has found another entity to co-opt social justice language and promote the idea that the masses can live with these energy hungry, water draining, and highly emitting data centers, and it’s a guild that is less surprising than many elements of the masses may realize – larger, historically white-led environmental groups.

Source: Data Center Watch, 2025

The push back against the placement of data centers in communities has seen a meteoric rise in the last year alone. According to the publication Data Center Watch, in the second quarter of 2025 approximately 20 data center projects were blocked or delayed due to local resistance, costing the Big Tech sector an estimated $98 billion in investments. And these communities are not homogenous politically or geographically as they represent both rural and urban areas, as well as “red” and “blue” congressional districts. But rather than joining these communities in preventing the construction and operation of data centers, large environmental groups are choosing instead to find ways to accommodate them in ways that they believe these communities can live with, which has surfaced tensions between the people on the ground who would have to live with data centers if approved, and Washington, D.C. based environmental groups that are mostly just talking and theorizing about them through a metaphysical lens.

It’s no secret that there have been historic tensions between frontline, environmental justice communities and grassroots organizations and the larger, historically white-led environmental groups commonly referred to as “Big Green.” These tensions are largely due to the outsize influence the Big Green groups have on the development of environmental/climate change policies – many that are antithetical to the Principles of Environmental Justice that are championed by groups representing and accountable to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities – as well as the iniquitous imbalance in the amount of philanthropic support these groups enjoy compared to smaller, local grassroots climate/environmental justice organizations. For instance, in 2023 the Yale School for the Environment reported, “Foundations have given more money to individual green groups, including the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and The Nature Conservancy, than to every U.S. environmental justice group put together.” It turns out that Big Tech has not just been throwing its money at the Trump administration and other lawmakers from both “major” political parties to secure favorable data center/AI policies, they have also been using their own foundations to invest in certain Big Green groups who have signaled a willingness to capitulate to data center construction and promote policies to facilitate their proliferation under the guise of “sustainability.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the larger Big Green groups in the U.S., recently signaled its support for re-opening a nuclear power plant in Iowa to provide power for a data center owned by Google. In comments NRDC submitted to support this move, the group stated, “NRDC’s preliminary view is that the plant’s restart is likely to have both climate and environmental benefits and consumer benefits.” Their President and CEO, Manish Bapna noted, “This is unprecedented for us because it marks the first time in our history that we have taken action in support of an individual nuclear power plant.” This is a curious stance considering the fact that NRDC publicly purports to adhere to the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice on the section of its website dedicated to  “Equity and Justice.” It would appear that NRDC needs a refresher on these principles as the group clearly neglected Principle #4, “Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.”

So the question becomes why would a “leading” environmental organization that claims to be in solidarity with environmental justice communities take a public stance calling for re-opening a nuclear power plant to accommodate Google, a corporation whose greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 51% in the last six years? The answer is simple – money. Google furnished NRDC with an estimated $2.5 million over a three year period, and also furnished the group with approximately $5.3 million in “advertising value” as part of the Google for NonProfits initiative. Given NRDC’s promotion of nuclear energy and support for reopening a previously shuttered nuclear plant, despite documented risks to public health and the physical environment of such an action, it can be argued that Google didn’t provide NRDC with a donation as much as it made an investment in the organization – and the return on investment comes in the form of giving a Big Tech corporation cover and reputational capital that portrays them as environmental stewards.

NRDC is not the only Big Green group actively promoting myopic and egregious ideas/policy proposals to accommodate data centers rather than stop them outright. Take the Sierra Club, the organization founded by white supremacist John Muir, whose viewpoints were so racist the organization publicly apologized for them in 2020 while also committing to, “re-examine [their] substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.” It appears that the Sierra Club has forgotten this commitment based on its promotion of renewable energy as a “solution” for the profligate amount of energy required to power data centers. And the Sierra Club is not alone as numerous historically white-led environmental groups are also calling for Big Tech to utilize renewable energy in lieu of fossil fuels to run their data centers – much to the chagrin of climate and environmental justice organizations. For instance, the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) recently drafted a letter calling out the Energy Foundation’s “Clean Data Center Campaign,” noting, “Building more data centers, even when powered by “clean” renewables, without zoning regulations that require actual community approval, enforceable checks on water and energy use, strict environmental standards, and genuine accountability, risks repeating the exact same mistakes we saw with the fossil fuel industry.” The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, Evergreen Action, and other larger environmental groups also share the approach that renewable energy can act as some sort of sustainability panacea that would assuage the myriad environmental, climate change, and public health concerns associated with data centers. What these groups also have in common is the large largesse they receive from Big Tech corporations, which likely explains why rather than calling for a moratorium on data centers, they are instead greenwashing them in an attempt to beguile the masses.

At the height of the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, you would be hard pressed to find a Big Green group that didn’t embrace the slogan, “Mni Wiconi,” a Lakota phrase meaning “water is life,” affirming the idea that water is not just a resource, but a sacred living being that is essential to all existence as we know it. A convenient amnesia seems to be preventing groups pushing to power data centers with renewables from accounting for the adverse impacts to water associated with the extractive process of critical mineral mining, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities domestically and globally. For instance, the “Lithium Triangle,” which encompasses the South American nations of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, accounts for roughly half of global lithium supply that is held in brine pools situated beneath the region’s salt flats. Miners pump the brine into large pools of water on the surface of the flats, where the water evaporates out resulting in lithium carbonate, which is then used for producing clean energy technologies. According to a report by the World Resources Institute, the process for producing lithium carbonate uses up to half a million gallons of brine water to extract one ton of lithium. The brine water is not fit for drinking or agricultural use and, based on some reports, the withdrawal of such high amounts of water may lead to the mixing of freshwater with salt water while also accelerating the depletion of surface and groundwater supplies in the region. In Chile alone, it is estimated that copper and lithium extraction has consumed nearly 65% of the local water supply, which has led to widespread challenges for local Indigenous communities.

But let’s say that these Big Green groups are able to rationalize the implications for water resources associated with mineral extraction – they still have to contend with profligate water use of data centers in order for them to function.  According to California’s Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, data centers, nationally, are using approximately 627 million gallons of water per day for consumptive use – water that isn’t returned to its source.  To put this in perspective, the roughly 150.4 billion gallons of water expected to be consumed by data centers over a five year period in the Great Lakes region alone is equivalent to the annual water withdrawals of 4.6 million U.S. households, which is more than 2.5 times the number of households in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Grand Rapids combined. As such, for Big Green groups to be so cavalier about an issue like water, a resource that is absolutely necessary to sustain the functions of the planet that, in turn, sustain all life as we know it, is reckless, irresponsible,  and perniciously close to the same attitude held by many polluters who view natural resources as nothing more than instruments to increase profit. And the fact that the United Nations has declared that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” accentuates how derelict many of these environmental organizations are by willfully overlooking the salient issue of data centers and water usage.

And it’s not just the issue of water consumption and depletion. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) admonishes, “Powering data centers with solar or wind requires significantly higher initial amounts of critical minerals (such as copper, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements) per unit of energy capacity compared to traditional fossil fuel power plants.” Further, scientists Laura J. Sonter, Marie C. Dade, James E.M. Watson, and Rick K. Valenta warned, as part of a study they conducted, “Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production and, without strategic planning, these new threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.” The journal, Science Direct, further notes that the regions of the world including Africa, South America, and the United States with the highest abundance of critical mineral resources, “…face elevated risks of environmental injustice, particularly where mining takes place on or near indigenous lands,” and added, “In many cases, local communities endure significant environmental degradation.” Additionally, Science Direct points out that regions with an abundance of critical minerals also have long histories of extractive colonialism that are being exacerbated by intensified competition over natural resources. This is a key point given that the Trump administration is utilizing soft imperialism to coerce Global South nations to increase access to critical minerals for U.S. based corporations under the threat of higher tariffs.

It’s bad enough that these nations are being exploited for minerals needed to produce AI software chips,  yet powering data centers with renewable energy would only exacerbate the need for critical minerals potentially making them the new fossil fuels. At a time when the world is currently navigating fossil fueled-wars/conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa as well as fossil-fueled imperialism in Latin America, it’s not far fetched to conclude that the U.S. and other Western colonial nations would apply the same imperial machinations to control the global supply of critical minerals. In fact, we don’t even need to imagine this scenario as the Trump administration threatened military force against a NATO ally as part of a conquest for critical minerals on the island nation of Greenland, and also shook down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for access to the nation’s critical minerals as a condition for continued U.S. military aid and support.

In sum, the confluence of Big Tech and Big Green is an equation that will result in more environmental racism and environmental injustices, as well as potentially more militarism and Western imperialism. As such, it’s a sadistic irony that one day employees of these Big Green groups are taking part in land acknowledgements on their multiple daily zoom call meetings, and the next day they are pushing ideas that will increase pollution on these lands while also deracinating the very concept of Indigenous and tribal sovereignty of their lands. Some refer to this as the “sustainability paradox,” but we need to call it what it really is – a banal continuation of capitalism under a false flag of sustainability.

As author and scholar Olufemi Taiwo names in his book Elite Capture, “In the absence of the right kind of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities – in other words, the elites – will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrow social project that disproportionately represents elite interests.” Big Green groups pushing renewable energy to power data centers have been willingly captured by the Big Tech corporations they take large amounts of money from, which, in part, may explain why they are acting no different than capitalist corporations that have no concerns for expanding the domestic and global periphery in service to a smaller core – these are their values, which now appear to also be the values of Big Green groups. Taiwo also notes, “When elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.” This adroitly describes the approach of these non-profiteering bourgeois Big Green groups who are pushing for renewable energy for data centers that use more energy than entire cities, rather than putting forth a full throated effort to transition these cities from fossil fuels to renewable energy in ways that are just, equitable, and affirm the self-determination, people(s)-centered human rights, and sovereignty of Indigenous and environmental justice/disadvantaged communities domestically and globally.

By aligning with Big Tech corporations, Big Green groups have also signaled a willingness, like most corporations, to prioritize their profits over the material conditions of the masses. This represents an internal weakness of the larger global climate community that must be confronted and vanquished. As Amilcar Cabral diagnoses this internal weakness that requires a daily battle against ourselves, “…no matter what difficulties the enemy may create — is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples.” Perhaps it will become easier to wage these battles when we collectively come to the conclusion that the Big Green groups who, by aligning with the wealthiest corporations in the world, are willing to continue pursuing a feckless idea that the planet can be saved by tinkering with and reforming capitalism are, in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us,” the global masses who are fighting for our lives as opposed to the next check from philanthropic foundations.

No Compromise

No Retreat

by Alexis Baden-Mayer

Industrial agriculture is perpetuating one of the greatest threats to mankind. From the rampant overuse of antibiotics in factory farm animals to the heavy spraying of pesticides on food crops, industrial agriculture has given rise to deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

In the United States, more than 2.8 million antimicrobial resistant infections occur each year, causing 35,000 deaths. Globally, the annual death toll due to antimicrobial resistance is 1.27 million.

Infections resistant to last-resort antibiotics have jumped nearly 70 percent since 2019.

The germs are multiplying so rapidly that the number of deaths caused by drug-resistant infections could outpace those caused by cancer by the middle of the century, according to a study in the Lancet. In 2050, drug-resistant bacteria will be associated with 8.22 million deaths worldwide, rivaling those killed by cancer in 2022.

Antibiotic resistance is primarily attributed to the over-prescription of antibiotics, but the other main drivers are human drugs given to livestock raised on factory farms and antibiotic pesticides like glyphosate.

Factory farms expose humans to deadly antibiotic-resistant infections

In 2017, the Food & Drug Administration banned antibiotics use for growth-promotion, but continued to allow farms to use antibiotics routinely to prevent disease, which has the same effect. Farms still report using antibiotics for growth promotion even though the practice is illegal.

Chloramphenicol, a medically important antibiotic that’s been banned from agriculture for 30 years, still shows up in beef, poultry and pork products. Consumer Reports detected it in samples of meat products sold in the U.S. Recently, it has turned up in beef jerky sold on Amazon in Canada and beef shipped from Argentina to China.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says chloramphenicol “can cause serious side effects such as bone marrow suppression, including aplastic anemia, a rare but serious condition. There are also concerns about its potential to cause cancer, genetic damage and antimicrobial resistance.”

Nearly two-thirds of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are administered to conventionally raised cows, pigs, and chickens to prophylactically treat disease.

The result is antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be passed on to humans through the consumption of animal products or produce or water contaminated with animal manure.

Manure is a major reservoir of antimicrobial-resistant genes.

World Animal Protection U.S. tested 45 water samples and 45 soil samples from eight sites, both upstream and downstream of factory farms in North Carolina. All 90 samples tested positive for at least one antibiotic-resistant gene. Resistance to tetracyclines was identified in 89 out of 90 samples, and 23 out of 90 were resistant to additional antibiotics, like penicillin, that are critically important to human medicine.

This explains why people living near pig farms or cropland fertilized with pig manure are 30 percent more likely to contract MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria.

And why farm workers in intensive animal farming environments are 3200 percent (32 times) more likely to develop antibiotic-resistant infections than the general population.

The findings highlight the need to transition to regenerative organic agriculture where animals are kept healthy by spending their lives outdoors foraging in the sunshine and their waste is absorbed by the pasture.

Antibiotic pesticides sprayed on farms fueling drug-resistant infections

In addition to drug-dependent factory farms, antibiotic resistance is also coming from pesticide use. Hundreds of millions of acres of farmland are sprayed with antibiotic pesticides that confer resistance to bacteria in the soil and water they contaminate. Chlorine and the other disinfectants used to treat tap-water don’t kill superbugs.

According to Beyond Pesticides, over the last decade, scientific evidence has established a link between common herbicides and antibiotic resistant bacteria. A 2015 study found that Salmonella and E.coli exposed to the herbicides glyphosate, dicamba, and 2,4-D built resistance to commonly used antibiotics. Subsequent research found that soil sprayed with these same herbicides has higher numbers of antibiotic resistant bacteria than areas where the chemicals were not applied. Even those areas won’t be safe for long, as resistant genes move through the environment via horizontal gene transfer.

New evidence that agricultural soils exposed to glyphosate are a breeding ground for hospital superbugs

Antimicrobial resistance isn’t just driven by bacteria evolving to resist antibiotics; certain weedkillers can have the same effect.

Scientists publishing in Frontiers in Microbiology recently showed that the most common species of multi-drug-resistant bacteria from hospitals are not only resistant to multiple antibiotic classes, but also to high concentrations of the weedkiller glyphosate.

These results suggest that weedkillers have the unintended side effect of selecting for antimicrobial resistance among bacterial communities within the soil.

Fungicides sprayed on farms fueling drug-resistant yeast and mold infections

It’s not just bacteria that’s growing resistant to important medications. Reports of new cases of a drug-resistant fungal yeast infection have scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on edge.

Candida auris preys on people with a weakened immune system, affecting newborns, the elderly, diabetics, and people with autoimmune disorders who take steroids which suppress the body’s immune system. The fungal yeast infection is resistant to major antifungal medications and is quietly spreading around the globe.

It killed an elderly man who was admitted to the Mount Sinai Hospital in Brooklyn. According to the New York Times:

The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it.

Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president told the Times:

“Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump. The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.”

Candida auris’s origin was a mystery until it was detected on fungicide-treated apples. This is evidence that it was agricultural fungicide use that was responsible for its emergence. Non-organic apples and other fruits and produce are routinely sprayed with antibiotics while in storage to prevent spoilage.

Candida auris is one of dozens of dangerous bacteria and fungi that have developed resistance. Similar to how antibiotics are overused in livestock, scientists believe that overapplication of fungicides to prevent food crops from rotting may be contributing to drug-resistant fungi.

Farmers in the U.S. apply more than 100 million pounds of fungicides to about 17.7 million acres of cropland. Introduced in the 1940s, synthetic fungicides are sprayed on dozens of crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, almonds, apples, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, citrus, lettuce, peanuts, potatoes and sugar beets.

The pesticide industry says fungicides increase fruit and vegetable yields by 50 to 95 percent, allowing growers to gain $12.8 billion in profits. But the chemicals are showing up in U.S. waterways where they can incubate resistant fungal microbes and transport them into our drinking water.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey found one or more fungicides in 20 of 29 streams sampled near soybean farms. Since then, the fungicides have been breeding anti-fungal-resistant microbes, and it’s common to find them on farms.

Take, for instance, Aspergillus fumigatus. It’s a mold that can infect humans and cause invasive aspergillosis in immunocompromised individuals. Cases of invasive aspergillosis increased 3% every year between 2000 and 2013, and roughly 300,000 are diagnosed each year worldwide. Aspergillus fumigatus is commonly found both indoors and outside. Infection can occur by simply inhaling a small amount of the mold.

In human medical settings, A. fumigatus infections are treated with azole antifungals, so scientists hypothesized that azole-resistant A. fumigatus infections had their origins on farms that used azole fungicides.

They sampled soil, compost, or plant debris from 53 farms in Georgia and Florida that used azole fungicides. In addition, two samples were taken from organic farms and one was taken from a compost pile.

Of 700 A. fumigatus samples collected, nearly 20 percent (123 samples) displayed some level of resistance to the commonly used azole fungicide tebuconazole. Twelve of the 123 were highly resistant at clinically relevant levels for human health care.

No samples taken from organic sites contained resistant fungi, underscoring the fact that the best way to protect yourself and your family from drug-resistant infections is to eat organic food.

The researchers figured that if the strain of A. fumigatus infecting people developed its resistance traits on farms, that strain would also have developed some level of resistance to other, non-azole, agricultural fungicides. Sure enough, the azole-resistant strains also displayed resistance to other fungicides, but the clincher was that the genome sequences of A. fumigatus samples from farms matched those stored from clinical settings.

“The strains that are from the environment and from people are very closely related to each other,” study co-author Marin T. Brewer, PhD, said. “It’s not like there are different strains that are developing resistance in people and in the environment. It’s all the same. So people who have these infections that are resistant have likely acquired them from the environment.”

It doesn’t have to be this way

Farmers in Europe stopped using antimicrobials to boost growth over a decade prior to those in the U.S. They also no longer use antimicrobials routinely to prevent disease. Antimicrobials on European farms have dropped by around 43 percent over nine years up to 2020 at which point their use was more than 80 percent lower than in the U.S.

Organic farmers and food sellers worldwide prove that fresh produce can be grown, stored, and sold without resorting to antibiotic herbicides and fungicides and farm animals can be kept healthy without antibiotics.

Under U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) organic regulations, organic farmers and ranchers aren’t allowed to routinely feed animals antibiotics as a preventive measure. They are required, however, to administer antibiotics to animals when they get sick, even if that means the animal’s meat or milk won’t be able to be sold under the USDA Organic seal.

How do organic farmers and ranchers manage to raise livestock without the routine use of antibiotics to prevent disease, when industrial factory farm operators claim they can’t?

Animals in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are much more susceptible to disease, because they live in crowded, filthy conditions that cause stress that weakens their immune systems.

All livestock producers should be prevented from giving medically important antibiotics to healthy animals and should avoid the use of drugs that are critically important for human medicine when treating disease.

A systematic review published in the Lancet Planetary Health found that interventions that restrict antibiotic use in food-producing animals reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in these animals by up to 39 percent.

So why hasn’t the Food & Drug Administration stepped in to restrict antibiotic use in U.S. meat production?

Could it have something to do with the fact that drug company lobbyists don’t want the government to do anything that might dent their $5.5 billion market for animal drugs?

Why hasn’t the Environmental Protection Agency done anything about the growing disease risk from the more than 475 antibiotics and antifungals sprayed on fruits, vegetables, and grains?

Could it have something to do with the fact that chemical company lobbyists don’t want the government to do anything that might dent their $108 billion market for pesticides?

Trump & Kennedy Aren’t Addressing Industrial Agriculture’s Drug-Abuse Problem

The Trump Administration is ignoring a legal petition that urges the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of medically important drugs as pesticides.

The petition points out that the CDC has determined that the medically important antibiotics the EPA has approved for pesticide use on crops can facilitate antibiotic resistance in bacteria, causing increased risk of staph infections and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

It also notes that the United States lags behind many other countries in banning pesticides that pose higher risks to human health. Streptomycin, a medically important antibiotic, is banned from use on crops in many countries. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that more than 125,000 pounds of the medically important antibiotics streptomycin and oxytetracycline have been sprayed on crops in just one year. In that same year the use of medically important antibiotics and antifungals on crops totaled more than 8 million pounds.

In President Donald Trump’s first election, agribusiness companies contributed $4.6 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, twice what they gave to his Democratic challenger. That was why Trump’s USDA fought global guidelines on livestock antibiotics, rejecting World Health Organization recommendations to help preserve drugs’ effectiveness by halting their routine use in healthy animals.

For all the talk about making America healthy again, not much has changed since Trump’s second election. If anything, things are worse.

Before Trump took office again in 2025, the Food & Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine had several initiatives underway, begun under President Joe Biden, to better manage and track the use of antimicrobials in farm animals. These include draft guidance to encourage animal drug makers to voluntarily stop the continuous use of medically important antibiotics in food animals. The FDA was also close to publishing revisions of another set of voluntary guidance which tells drug makers how to assess the risk to human health from antimicrobial resistance when assessing the safety of new antimicrobial drugs for animals.

But the pendulum was already starting to swing back towards increased use of antibiotics for livestock. New data from the Food & Drug Administration show the volume of medically important antibiotics sold for farm animals going up for the first time in a decade, climbing 16 percent in 2024. Worse, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a significant number of pig farms admit to using antibiotics for growth promotion, even though that practice has been illegal since rules promulgated under President Barack Obama took effect in 2017.

Expect the boom in antibiotic use on farms to continue. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has sent a strong message to industry that his agencies won’t be policing antibiotic use on farms. This message was transmitted through staff cuts and inactivation of the President’s Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria.

The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine lost about 23 percent of its staff last year, and the CDC lost 3,000 workers. Both layoffs included employees who worked on antibiotic resistance.

The President’s Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (PACCARB) includes public health, veterinary science, and agricultural industry experts and is tasked with advising the HHS on antibiotic resistance policy. It met two to four times a year between 2016 and 2024. After Trump took office, a meeting scheduled for the end of January 2025 was canceled, and the council hasn’t met since. That meeting was supposed to be dedicated to developing a five-year National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, to follow the 2020–2025 plan. Now, no plan exists.

In October, HHS fired 55 employees in the office that oversees PACCARB. Kennedy’s HHS reorganization plan has that office being absorbed into the newly created Administration for a Healthy America.

Trump’s choice of Timothy Schell to lead the Center for Veterinary Medicine is also concerning. According to his Food & Drug Administration bio, “Between 2015 and 2019, Dr. Schell was at Elanco Animal Health where he led regulatory affairs strategies in several different areas, expanding the firm’s global initiatives in animal drugs and feed additives.” In other words, he was an industry lobbyist whose job was to keep the livestock antibiotics market open and profitable.

As Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a group advocating for the end of factory farming, told U.S. Right to Know, “It’s pretty hard to take seriously the idea that FDA is going to curb antibiotic use on farms when they appoint a former…drug company lobbyist as the chief regulator.”

Shame on the Trump Administration for putting the profits and interest of the meat and pharmaceutical industries over the health of the American people!

by Paul Krugman

Although I expected the war on Iran to be a disaster, I didn’t expect the Trump administration to be implicitly conceding defeat after barely a month. Yet that’s where we are:

The stock market has soared on the news of potential U.S surrender, which tells you something about how the war is going. Unfortunately, declaring victory and running away will be a lot more difficult than Trump thinks. For one thing, thousands of U.S. ground troops are on their way to the Persian Gulf, and it will be very hard to avoid succumbing to the temptation to use them, at which point we will have entered what Robert Pape calls the “escalation trap.”

At the same time, Trump’s claim that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem is whistling in the dark. Trump is telling Europeans that if they lack the “courage” to seize the jet fuel they need — funny how the vastly larger U.S. military isn’t doing the job — they can just “buy from the U.S., we have plenty.” Here’s what has happened to the average price of jet fuel at major U.S. airports:

Does this look to you as if we have “plenty”? It doesn’t look that way to airline executives:

The reality is that U.S. prices of petroleum distillates and other products in which Persian Gulf nations are key producers have soared. The rise in gasoline prices, for which the national average just hit $4 a gallon, has made headlines. But other prices are also hugely important.

Most non-electric cars run on gasoline, but most trucks are fueled with diesel. And diesel prices are up even more than gasoline prices — approximately $1.70 per gallon as opposed to $1:

The feedstocks for fertilizer are largely manufactured from natural gas, and Persian Gulf nations were major producers, shipping their production out through the Strait of Hormuz, before the war. Here’s what has happened to the price of urea:

Source: Trading Economics

And where do you think plastic comes from? Here’s the price of polyethylene:

Source: Trading Economics

How important are these non-gasoline price shocks? The Energy Information Administration has a useful chart — the data are for 2022, but the numbers will look similar for the eve of the Iran War:

Less than half of U.S. consumption of petroleum products was gasoline. And the price of distillate fuel oil — mostly diesel — is up about 70 percent more than the price of gasoline. Add in soaring costs for fertilizer and feedstocks for plastic, and the surge in gas prices, even though it dominates headlines, is well under half of the economic story.

And who pays the higher prices of diesel, jet fuel, fertilizer and plastics? The answer is that these show up initially as costs to producers but will quickly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for shipping and, indirectly, almost everything you buy.

How big is the non-gasoline price shock? We consume around 4 million barrels of diesel a day, which is about 60 billion gallons per year (there are 42 gallons per barrel.) The price of diesel is up $1.70 a gallon, so if prices were to stay at current levels, that alone would be a roughly $100 billion hit to consumers. Substantial additional hits will come from higher prices of jet fuel, fertilizer and petrochemicals.

And, of course, gasoline has gotten a lot more expensive too. Do you still think that the Strait of Hormuz is other countries’ problem?

Now, America produces a lot of oil, and the domestic oil industry will be earning large windfall profits even as U.S. consumers suffer. But so what? We don’t have any mechanism in place to capture and redistribute those windfall gains, so ordinary U.S. families will bear the full brunt of the global oil shock even though America is a net oil exporter.

There’s an additional, technical but important reason to be even more worried about soaring prices for diesel, jet fuel and industrial materials than about gasoline prices. It involves how the Federal Reserve is likely to react.

The Fed normally bases its decisions about whether to reduce or increase interest rates on “core” inflation — inflation excluding food and energy prices. The reason it does this is that food and energy prices are highly volatile and are usually a poor indicator of what inflation will be over the next few years. So the Fed tries to “look through” inflation fluctuations driven mainly by the prices of groceries and gasoline. For example, it didn’t raise rates in 2011, when there was a temporary uptick in inflation driven entirely by oil prices.

There is a major debate among monetary policy experts about whether the Fed can safely focus only on core inflation and look through the inflationary effects of the Hormuz blockade, which if unresolved will be the worst energy crisis in history. In any case, however, core inflation only excludes energy directly purchased by consumers. Oil-related price shocks such as soaring jet fuel and diesel prices, which raise the cost of doing business, aren’t excluded, which means that they will increase the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation. This will push the Fed toward raising interest rates or at least holding off on rate cuts.

The Fed could, in principle, try to look through the effects of the Strait crisis on business costs as well as direct effects on consumer prices. But given how nervous everyone is about the risk of 70s-type stagflation, it probably won’t.

So the diesel/jet fuel/plastics shock will lead, other things equal, to a more hawkish Fed — and an elevated risk of recession.

The moral here is that the United States retains a vital interest in seeing the Strait of Hormuz reopened. Much as Trump would like to declare victory and insist that the blockade is other countries’ problem, reality won’t oblige him.

MUSICAL CODA

by Erica Cirino

Microplastics, plastic particles smaller than 5 millimeters, can be found in land, air, and water, and have infiltrated our food chain, resulting in far-reaching health consequences for humans and nonhumans alike. In 2020, scientists discoveredthe “highest level of microplastic ever recorded on the seafloor,” revealing the extent of their impact on the marine ecosystem.

The lead author of the study, Ian Kane from the University of Manchester, said: “Almost everybody has heard of the infamous ocean ‘garbage patches’ of floating plastic, but we were shocked at the high concentrations of microplastics we found in the deep-seafloor.”

These microplastics enter the marine ecosystem directly and indirectly, for example, from landfills, where they are carried by wind into rivers and seas. “It is estimated that 8 million tonnes of plastics enter the seas and oceans each year,” stateda 2021 study published in MDPI.

Mussels can act as sentinels to assess and monitor microplastic pollution. Globally distributed in both freshwater and saltwater ecosystems as filter feeders, mussels are both sensitive to environmental pollution and play a key role in engineering aquatic ecosystems by processing huge quantities of water.

With serious concerns about microplastic contamination of food, particularly seafood, and human bodies growing, mussels will inevitably serve as an increasingly important bioindicator of microplastic pollution from the present into the future.

The Impacts of Plastic Disintegration

Manmade, fossil fuel-based plastics don’t biodegrade like natural materials; instead, they break up into increasingly tiny plastic particles. Scientists categorize these particles by size: those 5–10 millimeters are called “mesoplastics,” those between 1 nanometer and 5 millimeters (about the diameter of a pencil eraser) are called “microplastics,” and those 1 nanometer (a human hair is 80,000-100,000 times nanometers wide) and smaller are “nanoplastics.” While nanoplastics are too small to be seen, microplastics and mesoplastics are fairly visible.

Microplastics that are “intentionally produced” for inclusion in cosmetics or exfoliating products, such as soap scrubs and toothpastes, are typically manufactured as tiny beads or flat pieces of glitter. These ready-made microplastics are called “primary” microplastics. Primary microplastics also include nurdles—small pellets of plastic melted down into the plastic products we are familiar with. Nurdles are often discharged into waterways through industrial wastewater runoff from plastic production facilities, and during shipping fires and spills from cargo ships. About 445,970 tons of nurdles are estimated to directly pollute the environment globally every year, especially aquatic ecosystems.

Plastic particles that form due to the disintegration of plastic materials are called “secondary” microplastics. These particles may be pieces of plastic film, fibers (from textiles and rope), foam, hard or soft fragments, and lines (such as from fishing gear). They break down from plastic packaging, synthetic textiles, paint, and other plastic materials used in our homes. Plastic’s breakdown is accelerated by sunlight, extreme temperatures, exposure to bacteria, fungi, and water, and by weathering.

These particles were first documented in marine ecosystems in the early 1970s and have since been found in indoor and outdoor air, drinking water, fresh and processed foods, fresh waters, household dust, plants and trees, oceans, soils, and in animals—including humans.

Plastics are not only harmful to our health but also impose significant economic costs. “Estimates suggest that plastic pollution causes about $75 billion per year in environmental damages, with $13 billion of this tied to marine ecosystems. For example, plastic pollution can deplete fish stocks and impact coastal tourism by littering popular beaches. It can damage infrastructure like urban drainage systems. It can even de-operationalize or sink ships by entangling propellers or clogging water intake systems responsible for cooling their engines,” pointed out the World Resources Institute.

Microplastics Threaten Marine Life

While plastic particles have virtually contaminated the entire Earth due to their constant movement through the biosphere, marine ecosystems in particular are a major repository for mesoplastics, microplastics, and nanoplastics. Freshwater systems empty into the oceans, and populous coastal areas—especially those that have been industrialized—are major sources of microplastic pollution in marine ecosystems. About 80 percent of plastics in the oceans are estimated to have traveled there via rivers and other freshwater systems. Flooding and weather events can push microplastics into rivers in significant quantities.

A 2021 report by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) stated that plastic accounts for 85 percent of marine litter, and by 2040, we can expect the volume of plastic pollution to nearly triple if we don’t take preventative measures.

Fish and other marine animals are exposed to microplastics in waters and sediments, from the sea surface to the seafloor. Many animals, including some fish species that people eat, consume nurdles and other round microplastics because they resemble their usual food sources, such as fish eggs and other plankton. Some fish species and marine animals are attracted to the smell of weathered plastic particles. Even relatively small amounts of plastic can be deadly to marine wildlife. For example, a 2025 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests consuming the equivalent volume of less than one sugar cube of plastic can kill one in two Atlantic puffins; less than half a baseball’s size in plastics can kill one in two Loggerhead turtles; and the amount of plastic in less than a sixth of a soccer ball can kill one in two harbor porpoises.

Microplastic consumption has been linked to adverse health effects in marine animals, including mussels. “Circulatory system of fish is impacted by the microplastic bioaccumulation in their tissues, influencing a number of hematological indices that are connected with immunity, osmotic pressure, blood clotting, molecular transport and fat metabolism,” stated a 2024 study in Toxicology Reports. Microplastics and plastic chemicals have also been linked togastrointestinal blockages, neurological issues, starvation, toxicity, and reproductive issues in marine life.

Filter feeders, including mussels, have limited abilities to sort and reject plastic particles as they siphon water for food. Mussels pull in about one-fourth cup of sea water per minute, a huge volume for a small animal. Studies have shown mussels from different regions with varying quantities and types of microplastics in their soft tissues and digestive systems. Mussels and other filter-feeding shellfish ingest greater amounts of microplastics than other marine creatures. Like other pollutants, microplastics bioaccumulate up the food web, concentrating inside the bodies of predators as they consume prey.

Ingestion of polyester plastic fibers has been shown to stunt the growth of young blue mussels by more than one-third. Smaller mussels with lower growth rates and stressors like inflammation can reduce the survival of mussels, and thus the overall availability of food sources for animals that prey on them, from birds to crabs, starfish, whelks, and, of course, people. Microplastics have also been linked to cellular and molecular damage in mussels.

What’s more, chemicals commonly manufactured into plastics, such as heavy metals, phthalates, and PFAS, have also been shown to bioaccumulate in the marine food web.

Marine Microplastic Pollution Raises Human Health Concerns

Microplastics have been detected throughout the human body, in people’s bloodstreams, bones, bone marrow, brains, breast milk, urine and feces of adults and infants, hair, hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs, penises, placentas, saliva and sputum, semen, skin, spleens, stomachs, testes, throat and airways, uteruses, and veins.

The presence of microplastics in people has been linked toAlzheimer’s disease, dementia (in mice), Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders; inflammation, heart attack, stroke, and death; they have been found in samples ofbladder cancer; and are suspected to harm human fertility and reproductive health. Exposure to microplastic particles is also linked to cell damage and death.

Exactly how and why microplastics cause harm is under investigation. But scientists do know that microplastic particles can contain any number of 16,000 plastic chemicals, at least 4,200 of which have already been linked to adverse human health effects, including causing cancer and disrupting hormones.

In fish, microplastics tend to accumulate in the gills and digestive system, so it would seem that eviscerating fish before human consumption would minimize exposure. However, gilling and gutting fish does not necessarily eliminate microplastics. What’s more, some seafood, including some bivalves, crustaceans, and oilfish like sardines, are typically eaten whole, and it’s not always possible or practical to excise microplastic hotspots in their bodies. Seafood may contain more microplastics during certain seasons due to changes in ocean currents, rainfall and runoff, flooding, and other factors that increase pollution.

“Researchers estimate that adults in the United States may ingest nearly 4 million microplastic particles per year from protein sources alone,” stated EarthDay.org.

Scientists are still determining the full range of risks linked to human consumption of microplastics. Recommendations on the frequency and type of seafood consumption, based on age, sex, and pregnancy status, currently exist in the United Statesand Europe to minimize exposure to chemicals like PCBs and mercury. However, pollutants on which such guidelines have been developed do not necessarily include microplastics.

The Way Forward

The fact that seafood—and other major sources of nutrition, including fresh fruits and vegetables—are increasingly polluted with microplastics is a serious concern for human health. Billions of people around the world depend on seafood as a key source of nourishment (not to mention their livelihoods).

Scientists continue to search for microplastics inside the flesh, gills, and guts of marine animals eaten as seafood, including mussels. Researchers have found microplastics in all of the most-eaten mussel species purchased from markets, with an average of 0.13 to 2.45 microplastic particles per gram of mussel meat. The most contaminated organisms were found in the North Atlantic and South Pacific. In another 2024 study, researchers found that 99 percent of seafood samplespurchased in stores and collected from fishing vessels on the U.S. West Coast contained microplastics, with shrimp being the most contaminated type of seafood studied.

The study and understanding of how microplastics affect food safety is still in its “infancy.” Advanced analytical methods can help ensure more accurate detection of microplastic levels in certain foods, thereby enhancing monitoring. Governments, meanwhile, need to step up regulations and ensure “specific practices in food production, processing, and packaging to minimize the introduction and spread of microplastics,” according to an article in Smart Food Safe. Greater Industrial and international cooperation to address the issue can lead to consistent standards to make the food chain safer from microplastics. Moreover, “Regularly updating methodologies and standards based on new scientific findings ensures that strategies remain effective and aligned with the latest knowledge,” added the article.

California is leading the U.S. in monitoring microplastics in the marine environment. In 2022, it established its Statewide Microplastics Strategy, focusing on identifying microplastic pollution trends, risks, and sources. Academics continue to focus on monitoring microplastics, increasingly in sentinel species like mussels, often with the help of community scientists.

Mitigating Plastic Pollution Needs to Start at the Source

Pressure from consumers and strong policies, such as bans and taxes on single-use plastic products, can help eliminate plastic that inevitably breaks down into secondary microplastics. These actions are necessary to force businesses to move away from plastic and adopt plastic-free practices and products. Other laws, like the European Parliament’s 2025 legally binding regulation implementing mandatory prevention measures relating to “pellet loss” and the U.S. Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which “prohibits the manufacturing, packaging, and distribution of rinse-off cosmetics containing plastic microbeads,” further help address the issue of primary sources of microplastic pollution upstream.

Litigation is also another tool utilized by communities and organizations to hold polluters accountable. Some cases successfully target downstream pollution resulting from microplastics. Others are working to address longstanding systemic issues like racism that perpetuate the unjust targeting of underserved communities as “sacrifice zones” for industrial polluters. While some others are challenging polluters’ use of false and misleading marketing claims around their plastic products labeled as “sustainable” or “healthy.”

The key to mitigating plastic pollution is starting at the source, with fossil fuel extraction and plastic production. Ultimately, society needs to shift its reliance on fossil fuels and plastics toward safe, plastic-free reuse and regenerative solutions at a systemic level.

Plastic recycling is not a solution in and of itself; it actually can perpetuate plastic production and requires virgin (new) plastic and plastic additives, as plastic diminishes in quality with each round of recycling.

“Fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have used the false promise of plastic recycling to exponentially increase virgin plastic production over the last six decades, creating and perpetuating the global plastic waste crisis and imposing high costs on communities that are left to pay for the consequences… As of 2021, the U.S. recycling rate for plastic is estimated to be only 5-6 percent,” according to a 2024 report by the Center for Climate Integrity.

Plastic and fossil fuel corporations have long pushed recycling as a solution to plastic pollution, when in reality, ceasing plastic production is the core solution. Inevitably, some recycling may be required in the future to address the plastic already in circulation, but recycling practices might be improved to prevent further harm. Similarly, while cleanups cannot solve the problem, they will inevitably be needed in the future to reduce the risks posed by microplastics.

Microplastics are a systemic pollution problem requiring a coordinated global response, such as a strong Global Plastics Treaty that addresses plastic pollution throughout its toxic life cycle. While negotiations on the treaty continue, countries need to take steps to reduce plastic production and use, and consumers need to make better choices to drive change at the individual level. These steps are necessary to mitigate the damage already caused by the unchecked plastic use and to ensure a more sustainable future.

by Burcu Ayan & LevFem

Image by LevFem.

Burcu Ayan: How did LevFem emerge, and what political and social context shaped its beginnings? In relation to this, how would you describe the broader landscape of feminist organising in Bulgaria today, and what strategies or tensions define the work of feminist organisations in the country?

LevFem emerged in 2018 in a very specific moment of upsurge and renewal in the history of the Bulgarian feminist movement. This was the year in which we experienced a massive, well-organized reactionary wave against the adoption of the Istanbul Convention (aka “Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence”, which reactionaries in Eastern Europe have accused of introducing “gender ideology”). Religious and conservative organisations, parties, and political actors were leading this campaign, and within only a couple of months, they managed to dramatically shift the public narrative around gender justice, women’s rights, and the rights of LGBTQI+ people. The campaign was deeply homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic in its nature and specifically attacked the definition of gender as a social construct that is rooted in the Istanbul Convention. As a result, even the Constitutional court of the country declared that gender in Bulgaria is, apparently, a biological dichotomy, which makes it very hard to talk about gender, gender roles, gendered division of labor, gender specific policies, etc. As a direct aftermath of this reactionary wave, feminist and especially LGBTQI+ rights have been under a massive attack in the years since, and the lives of queer and trans people have been increasingly put in danger.

However, also as a result of this backlash, since 2018, there has been a surge in newly founded feminist organisations because we saw how organised and powerful the reactionary movements were, and still are. LevFem is part of this “new feminist wave” in Bulgaria in the aftermath of the lost battle for the adoption of the convention. LevFem was initiated as an informal group that included a handful of women and queer people from a few New Left groups that formed around the social centres, left-leaning publications, and movements in the 2010s. Its first action was a small online campaign that we issued around November 25th, 2018 – the International Day Against Violence against Women. We called on comrades to write short articles on violence against women. Our goal was to broaden the public discussion around the topic and thematise structural violence as gender-based violence: a topic and aspect that was ostensibly lacking from the public discussion. In the modern history of the Bulgarian feminist movement after 1989, violence against women has been very narrowly defined as domestic violence in a romantic relationship, and most of the efforts of the big women’s organisations in the past have been focused on lobbying and providing social services for survivors of domestic abuse. However, we know violence against women is much more than that. The exploitation in the capitalist system is a form of violence against women; racial capitalism adds the layer of racist policies and racist border regimes, which are also forms of violence against women; poverty is a form of violence; and so on. The issue is much bigger, and we knew that if we wanted to address it, we needed to address the systems that enable all aspects of gender-based violence – patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. This is the context in which we emerged and the message we have been trying to convey ever since.

Burcu Ayan: You bring feminist, socialist, and anti-racist perspectives together in your work. In a country with a socialist past and a complex post-socialist transformation, why is it important for you to hold these struggles jointly? What specific tensions or challenges arise from working across these perspectives in such a context?

We see our organisation as part of a lineage of especially autonomist Marxist feminism where patriarchy, capitalism, and racism are seen as systems of oppression that have been intersecting historically, socially, and politically to shape the specific forms of subordination that women and other marginalized groups experience. We see this tradition as important within the post-socialist New Left, because it allows us to both keep a deeply structural analysis, acknowledge structural advancements in the socialist past, as well as recognise some of the structural limitations of ‘really existing socialism’ in which actual policies and practices fell short of necessary deep structural change to combat capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. For us, then, naturally, as part of this political tradition, not acknowledging the complex ways in which these systems interact means that we would never be able to understand the roots of the problems and effectively fight them. For instance, it is impossible to fight for the liberation of women from patriarchal expectations and stereotypes if we don’t acknowledge how capitalism requires free labor of women (e.g., child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.) to guarantee the social reproduction of the workforce, which puts a double shift on the shoulders of the women workers. Similarly, it is futile to just fight for women’s rights without understanding how institutional racism guarantees that there is a supply of racialised workers who have worse chances to get a decent job and are thus easier to exploit – especially if they are women.

Basing our political activism on such a theoretical standpoint poses some challenges to navigating the present-day Bulgarian feminist field. The dominant political alignment among feminist organisations in Bulgaria in the last 30 years has been liberal feminism. We acknowledge and respect what these organisations have achieved, especially when it comes to legislative reforms against gender-based violence. Yet, we also see how this worldview limits the potential for a more daring feminist agenda that goes beyond fighting domestic violence and being on friendly terms with those in power to lobby for minor legal changes. Moreover, we are an openly socialist feminist organisation – this brings many negative associations because of the widespread cliche that socialism necessarily and always means repression and lack of democratic initiative. Anti-communist sentiments are very prevalent among the Bulgarian liberal middle class; this also affects some of the feminist organisations (especially the ones active before the 2018 wave of feminist mobilising around the Istanbul convention). In their reading, socialism achieved certain positive changes for women, but they were introduced from the top down, thus the “real” feminist movement (e.g. one that is similar to Western European feminism) started in the 90s. We dare to disagree. Socialism in Bulgaria (and elsewhere) is anything but a monolithic block of 45 years – there were more liberatory and progressive periods, as well as more conservative ones. The decision-making process within the Bulgarian Communist Party was much more complex and nuanced, and women were actively fighting within the ranks of the party for one or another feminist achievement. To completely erase these struggles is disrespectful to the work and achievements of generations of women.

However, our socialist identity does not mean that we have it easy with the contemporary left-wing political actors either. Bulgaria’s only prominent nominally left-wing party – the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) – has taken a very conservative course since 2016 and was among the parties who were most vocally against the Istanbul convention. The ideological development of the BSP mirrors to an extent the development of SMER in Slovakia, even if the electoral results of the BSP in Bulgaria are tragic (currently polling between 5-7%), while SMER is governing Slovakia. It is easier for us to communicate with some members and factions within the BSP on the anti-capitalist axis and about women’s rights, however, the moment we mention LGBTQI+ justice, things get very ugly. The non-party left is small, fragmented and not very powerful: at the moment, LevFem is among the bigger, better-recognised, and organised collectives in this context.

Finally, as you can imagine, we are a target for different sorts of reactionary and conservative actors as we represent everything they hate – class-conscious feminists and anti-racists, who fight for queer liberation.

So we need to be smart and resourceful when navigating the field and searching for allies, but it is not mission impossible and we have had our successes – among some more progressive (feminist) organisations, politicians, unions, workers and younger activists.

Burcu Ayan: How do you understand the feminist labour struggle in Bulgaria today? What challenges do women workers face? As a feminist organisation, what has your engagement with trade unions and labour organisations been like? How have feminist perspectives been received in those spaces?

The feminist movement and the labour movement are fighting their battles separately, which is a dangerous development with long-lasting consequences in our reading. This is a direct result of the liberal understanding of the world that separates “human rights” (where feminism is usually positioned) from labour rights and tries to convince us that equality is achievable without challenging capitalist exploitation. For example, around March 2019, there were the March 8th feminist protests, nurses went on a national protest to fight for better labour conditions, and mothers of children with disabilities were taking to the streets the demands for better public care for their children. All these struggles were fought separately; there wasn’t a big joint demonstration. Now, some feminist organisations approached the nurses and the mothers of children with disabilities, but the latter decided not to join forces, as key actors in the nurses’ mobilisation were also affected by the ongoing conservative anti-gender wave that emerged around the adoption of the Istanbul Convention and saw the feminists as a threat. Here we clearly push for a feminist-and-labour movement that is able to see that beyond the liberal notion of separation between struggles. However, we also feel like the powerful reactionary agenda contributes ever more towards dividing the working class and weakening our power.

The lack of feminist reading within the contemporary organised labour movement in Bulgaria makes it harder for workers to understand the specific ways in which gender affects their experience at the workplace. For instance, very often we hear from women workers statements like “we have achieved equality, we have all the rights that men have, why should we bother about feminism”. Behind such statements, however, there is the same old story of invisible, underrecognised and poorly remunerated women’s labour: women predominantly work in fields that are badly paid; their salaries stagnate after maternity leave; discrimination is rampant towards women with small children during the jobhunt period (“she is a woman with small children, they get sick, she will be constantly taking leave to care for them, I can’t deal with this”); women shoulder the burden of the domestic, child care and elderly care labour at home and in their extended families and neighbourhoods; women’s pensions are lower than those of men because of the persistent gender pay gap and as pensions are calculated on the basis of lower salaries they got throughout their active years; and of course, sexual harassment at the workplace is a gendered experience that usually affects women.

In this context, Levfem is trying to act as the political agent that actively introduces labour issues and class consciousness within the feminist movement and pushes the feminist viewpoint within the labour movement. While our union organisations are usually acting as enclosed environments that solely focus on their specific agenda, we have managed to establish connections and have sporadic joint events and initiatives with some more progressive unions or feminised unions, which represent social and public workers, nurses and medical staff, and agricultural workers. We often invite their representatives as speakers to our events, and participate in their protests, and they have shared some of our content and have connected us to workers for interviews. Yet, while we see some increased sensitivity towards feminist viewpoints among some of the union members and workers, for the time being, the effects are predominantly on an individual level. We recognise, of course, that this is a long process and requires a lot of trust-building and work alongside the unions and movements. Our dream is that one day we will have a big feminist workers’ movement in Bulgaria that challenges the patriarchal capitalist system. But it is a rocky road ahead of us if we are serious about achieving this goal.

Burcu Ayan: Your report “Who Cares? Feminised Care Labour and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Bulgaria” offers a strong analysis of paid care labour in the country. Based on this work, where do you see the key sites of struggle around care today? And what practical steps do you think are needed to move toward public, accessible, and dignified care?

Given what we spoke about earlier, our report on the care sector in Bulgaria, based on 40 interviews with care sector workers, was published in a vacuum of political and public discourse and awareness about what we see as absolute core topics in the feminist and labour movement: care work and social reproduction, and their deficit and dire conditions in Bulgaria. First of all, we define the paid care sector rather broadly by including the systems of social reproduction – pre-clinical healthcare, early years, primary education, and social services. Very often, care work is defined even among feminists as the act of taking care of someone physically, but in our understanding care needs to be seen through the lens of social reproduction – the systems that make life possible. Having this theoretical understanding is useful to see the connections between seemingly very different sectors, but it also makes it very hard to highlight specific recommendations, as the situation in the healthcare system is different than the one in the education system, and elderly care takes many formal and informal forms.

Still, there are certain common traits that can be observed in all spheres of the care sector in Bulgaria. For instance, all of these spheres have a very feminised workforce and moreover – it is usually older women (50+) who predominantly find occupation in the care domain. Young people rarely choose these professions as the salaries are usually very low. In addition, many care workers choose to migrate to Western and Southern Europe in search of better pay, where they usually continue to perform care labour and are once again subject to harsh working conditions and racialised discrimination. These two processes result in a massive workforce shortage in Bulgaria, putting additional stress on the workers who remain in the system and creating a severe care deficit. As a consequence, people in Bulgaria have less and less access to decent care, as women working in the sector have all but decent working conditions. The lack of access to decent public care puts additional pressure on individual families (and specifically on women) to perform further unpaid care labour at home, while private providers are also invited to “fill in the gaps”, thus making access to decent care dependent on the financial situation of those in need. These aren’t problems specific to Bulgaria; many other Eastern European and Balkan countries face similar issues, while the deficit of care workers is a global phenomena. Yet, Bulgaria is specific as it shares some of the vices of both core and peripheral countries in the global economy. As a peripheral country, it sends care workers abroad. Yet, while it has the ageing population of a core country, currently it also has a particularly restrictive migrant labour regime which does not allow it to fill in the gap of emigrant care workers with immigrants.

Beyond this, we see two other major challenges ahead of us. First of all, there is no collective understanding of the care sector, except as ‘humane professions’ in which women’s ‘altruistic’ self-denial or even self-sacrifice is taken for granted. Equally absent is a shared public recognition of care as a human right and as a public good/interest. Furthermore, within a very re-traditionalising discourse that has soared since the conservative mobilisation around the Istanbul Convention, women are seen as possessing ‘natural qualities’ that make them more suited to providing care. These notions are not just prejudices, but have an impact on the material conditions of care work in both the workplace and the home. The result is, firstly, the feminisation of care professions and a shortage of male workers; secondly, low pay and low status, as well as poor working conditions in these sectors; and last but not least, the unequal distribution of care work at home, which is mainly performed by women.

There isn’t a silver bullet solution to address all these complex issues, but we need to start somewhere. In our analysis, we identify a number of steps that need to be taken in the short-term, middle-term and long-term for progress on this complex situation to be achieved. First of all, there is a need for a widespread information campaign that raises awareness of the challenges faced by care workers. It should address the links between ‘naturalised’ female care work, the poor conditions of pay and work in the care sector, and the nation-wide care deficit, and articulate concrete demands for financial remuneration and public recognition of work in this field. To this effect, one of our units is now engaged in the presentation of the report across the country and tailoring such demands together with members of feminist groups and labour unions in the care sector. Secondly, it is imperative to increase the pay of care workers as a whole, but also to reduce the differences between the private and public sectors and the differences in job hierarchies in certain sectors, particularly healthcare. We see it as unacceptable that the powers-that-be vote budgets that heavily subsidise military production and securitisation, not least as this is a direct pathway to austerity in all other sectors, including the care sector. And specifically for Bulgaria, there is a need for taxation reform, as we have suffered under a flat tax policy for the good part of two decades. We need a progressive taxation that puts the tax burden on the shoulders of businesses and economic elites instead of the working poor, as it is now. So a feminist initiative that wants to promote care as the basis that makes society possible should also engage with political demands for an economy that at least puts militarised capitalism in check (and at a later stage dismantles it entirely, of course). Third, there is also a need for effective policies, agreed upon by those working in the sector and their representative associations, aimed at tackling discrimination based on gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Finally, in our analysis, on an international level, there is a need for a solidarity care tax paid by wealthier countries attracting care workers to poorer countries like Bulgaria which send care workers in migration and experience a massive care deficit. We need to close the care work gap. We would like to oversee such a campaign first developing within the European Union, where Bulgarian trade unions, NGOs, and politicians have the opportunity to make this issue central to their mobilisation and lobbying efforts. Yet, if successful on the EU level, such a campaign should also be scaled up on a global level, within a larger struggle for reparation within colonial capitalism: we dream big.

Burcu Ayan: When you think about feminist organising in the Balkans, what shared challenges and possibilities come to mind? And how do you imagine solidarity and collaboration between movements in neighbouring countries such as Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, which often face similar political and social backlashes?

The Balkans is a very specific place with 12 countries (depending on how you count), at least 4 different language groups, and diverse ethnic and religious communities spread across a very small territory. We don’t even share a common language the way, say, Latin Americans do, and coordinating and organising among ourselves needs to happen in English. At the same time, we have countries with vastly different political pasts: imperial projects, anti-imperial struggles, former Eastern Bloc countries with diverse experiences with socialism, former Western Bloc countries, military dictatorships and coup d’état, genocides, wars and ethnic cleansing among neighbors, and more recently divisions across the lines of NATO and EU membership. Every 200 km, you have buried skeletons from past violent conflicts, which makes political organising incredibly challenging and nationalist sentiments very prevalent. All that being said, we can clearly see that we face some very similar threats – conservative waves that practically copy the same anti-gender narratives from Croatia through Bulgaria to Türkiye; increasingly more right-wing and even authoritarian governments; increased state violence on the borders to counter migration; deeply rooted corruption and oligarchic capitalist structures capturing the states.

The Balkans is also a place that has produced some powerful mobilisation waves in the last years – the Serbian students and their movement; the Romanian and Bulgarian anti-corruption protests; the Greek farmers strikes; the Turkish anti-Erdogan protests as well as the workers and feminist mobilisations around the withdraw of the country from the Istanbul convention; the Slovenian (and pan-European) My body, my choice campaign that took Europe by storm. There have been initiatives in the past that try to connect the struggles we face, most notably the migrant solidarity campaign across the Balkan route that has been active for about a decade, and more recently – the feminist network Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (EAST). EAST is a project that LevFem was heavily involved in as one of the coordinating collectives. It was an attempt to connect feminist, labour, and migrant organisations from Eastern Europe and beyond in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that we have a space for exchange on the struggles in the social reproduction sector that we face. It was a common infrastructure via which we were able to better understand what was going on in different countries in the region, to show solidarity with each other, and learn from the strategic experiences of others. Unfortunately, the network is no longer active, but this type of common coordination and exchange space is clearly needed in our region. So we should probably start there.

Finally, in the last 30 years, at least in many post-communist countries, we have been convinced that we need to “catch up” with the West and be more (Western) European to have a decent life. However, the current protests in Bulgaria show a shift in this notion. While calls for Bulgaria to become a “decent European country” are popular among many of the protestors, there is something beyond this. For instance, we see how the protests are being described as “Gen Z” protests. While this description is in itself highly problematic and not at all representative of what is going on in the streets (where Gen Z is definitely not the most populous group among the protestors), it is an attempt to create and mobilise a collective identity that goes beyond the national and the European and ties Bulgaria to a global wave of protests among young people mostly in the Global South. We think that this shift in the collective imagination might be productive for the region more broadly. Maybe we can start thinking of identities that go beyond the national and the (white) European and tie us not so much to the hegemons and the powerful, but rather to the struggles of other ‘wretched of the Earth’ – the same way the Soviet Union was supporting the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles worldwide. Maybe a more productive way forward could entail building a collective Balkan identity that is rooted in our experience with historical complexities and traumas, but goes beyond the past and searches for connections with other pariahs of the world whose pain we can relate to and fight together.

Burcu Ayan: Looking ahead, what are LevFem’s main priorities? What kinds of political and organisational efforts do you hope to focus on in the coming period?

We would want to continue expanding our work on the care economy and possibly do a campaign with demands for better conditions in the care sectors around March 8th, hopefully in coordination with a bigger coalition of organisations. March 8th is usually a small demonstration in Sofia done by urban activists – this is a good starting point, but it needs to be much, much bigger, with women from all walks of life (care workers, office workers, self-employed, poor women, etc.) joining and demanding the dismantling of oppressive patriarchal, capitalist, and racist systems. We don’t have experience with bigger, more recognisable campaigns, so this will be challenging and exciting at the same time. Also, we would like to expand our capacities to fight against the anti-feminist and anti-gender movement: this has always been a priority of ours, but we have rather been reactive – the conservatives attack us, and we respond. We need to think about proactive strategies, too – and part of a proactive strategy needs to include political education that allows us to enlarge our base and convince more previously not politically active people to join the movement.

by Vikas Meshram

From Sloping Land to Prosperity A Journey of Transformation

Chikli Badra village in Banswara district of Rajasthan where the land is sloping, rainfall is unreliable, and the roots of tradition run so deep that even the winds of change could not shake them. Women here worked in the fields, but their voices never carried beyond the field boundaries. There was no place for them at the decision-making table. But four women from this very village Kalpana Pargi, Santosh Pargi, Manjula Pargi, and Lalidevi Pargi  together wrote a story that became an inspiration not just for their families, but for women across the entire region. On just 2 bighas of land, they cultivated American maize through community farming and earned an income of nearly one lakh rupees. This is not merely about money it is the beginning of a new way of thinking.

The lives of Chikli Badra’s women followed a fixed rhythm. Head to the fields at sunrise, toil through the day, and return home in the evening to sink into household responsibilities. The labour was theirs, but all decisions related to farming — which crop to sow, where to source seeds, where to sell the produce, and how to spend the money — all of this fell within the domain of men.

Kalpana Pargi recalls “We worked in the fields all day, but farming decisions were made by the men. Income was low and expenses were high. Sometimes we had to take loans. That’s when we felt something new had to be done. “Sloping land has its own limitations. Soil erodes, water doesn’t stay, and yields are never stable. In rain-dependent farming, one failed season could throw the entire year into crisis. When rains were scarce, crops withered. When rains were excessive, the water simply ran off. Families remained economically weak, trapped in this cycle. Santosh Pargi describes the pain: “If the rains fell short, the crop would fail. Many times we had to do wage labour. Running the household became very difficult.”

Every great change begins with a small knock at the door. Lalita Makwana, a community facilitator from Vaagdhara, came to Chikli Badra, listened to these women, and inspired them to organise. It began with community meetings, where women were informed about government schemes which schemes existed, how to benefit from them, and what the application process was. Group management and new livelihood options were also discussed. The women were connected to the Saksham Group When the idea of community farming was raised in these meetings; it was entirely new for these women. In traditional farming, each family worked alone on its own land small plots, limited resources, and big risks. The concept of community farming was simple: work together on one piece of land, share the costs, share the labour, and share the profits equally.

Around this time, the suggestion of growing American maize came forward. This crop was different from traditional maize higher yield, strong market demand, and no need to travel far for sale. The four women deliberated among themselves. There were risks a new crop, new techniques, and the anxieties of their families. But collective courage pushed individual fear a side. Making a decision is one thing; putting it into practice is another. These women faced several practical obstacles simultaneously. Family members were sceptical about this new experiment, and fear of loss was natural. Lalidevi Pargi shares “People at home said there is risk in new farming. But we explained, and gradually the family came around.

Shortage of resources was another major challenge. Seeds, irrigation, field preparation all of it required money and means. The women found a solution through their group. Collective purchasing reduced costs and collective effort made the work easier there was no prior experience or training in growing American maize. Here, Vaagdhara played a crucial role once again. The organization provided hands-on training the right time to sow, organic fertilizers, water requirements, and pest control. This training not only gave the women technical knowledge but also instilled in them the confidence that they were moving in the right direction. The four women then prepared a 2-bigha joint field. From tilling the soil to sowing the seeds, every task was done together. No one was alone — not in the labour, not in the responsibility. Every day these women went to the field, tended to the crop, and gradually the American maize plants began to flourish.   When the crop was ready, they contacted traders from Udaipur and Banswara, sold the American maize produce in the markets, and together the four women earned an income of nearly one lakh rupees. This amount was not merely a figure for them it was proof of their capability.

One lakh rupees meant money for the children’s education, the ability to meet household needs, and the possibility of freedom from debt. But something even greater came with it recognition. These four women were no longer seen merely as field laborers; they began to be recognized as farmers and this recognition was not given to them by anyone else. They earned it themselves. Success leaves its mark not just on a bank account, but on the mind. After this experience, a new self-confidence awakened within these women. They   now speak openly, participate in  decisions, and show others the way forward.  Kalpana, Santosh, Manjula, and Lalidevi are now playing a new role in the village. They share their experiences and inspire other women toward community farming.

2 bighas of land, four women, one lakh rupees these numbers may seem small, but behind them lies struggle, courage, and solidarity. Even on sloping land, crops can flourish  all that is needed is a strong resolve. The four women of Chikli Badra have proven exactly this, and their journey does not end here this is only a new beginning.

Vikas Parasram Meshram – vikasmeshram04@gmail.com

by Nandita Bajaj

Photo caption.  A family in South Korea, which has the lowest Total Fertility Rate in the world (0.8).

Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime. Source: World Population Prospects 2022 report from the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

ST. PAUL, Minnesota, USA, Mar 12 2026 (IPS) – As birthrates continue to decline in many industrialized countries, anxious governments are running out of schemes to keep women procreating.

In the US, millionaires and billionaires are lining up to donate to Trump’s “baby bonus” savings accounts. Trump accounts give parents $1,000 for all babies born between now and 2028, plus whatever private donors add.

Late last year tech billionaires Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to them. The accounts are part of Trump’s far-Right pronatalist agenda, and also part of the broader trend of governments using heavy-handed pronatalist policies, ranging from bribes to outright coercion, to convince women to have more babies and shore up the supply of future workers, taxpayers, and soldiers.

These interventions are notoriously ineffective. A recent Heritage Foundation report recommended using economic incentives to convince American women to have more babies, “with preferences for larger-than-average [families],” while shaming those who choose to have fewer or no children.

But it also admitted, “Other nations have tried to reverse declining birthrates through financially generous family policies, none has succeeded. Government spending alone does not ensure demographic success.”

Nor can such policies achieve what Heritage calls “success.” Trying to raise birthrates by incentivizing women to have babies not only undermines hard-won reproductive rights, it’s a waste of money.

Such spending is not a priority for U.S. taxpayers, as most Americans do not see falling birth rates as a crisis. Instead, they overwhelmingly want the government to address untenably high child care costs. But a one-time Trump account infusion makes no dent in high costs of raising children and other barriers to motherhood.

Just as recent cuts to SNAP and Medicaid disproportionately affect marginalized women and children, Trump accounts benefit least those who need help most. By the Administration’s own calculations, the accounts will benefit wealthy parents disproportionately.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Trump accounts and other pronatalist policies aren’t really about empowerment or saving families or supporting children. They are a bid to make more white Americans, part of a larger nativist program which includes cracking down on immigration from African and Muslim countries, detaining and deporting non-white people in huge numbers, and even abandoning former U.S. efforts to fight child exploitation and trafficking.

These policies overtly stoke panic about falling birthrates, and tacitly uphold the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

That makes support for pronatalism from some progressives especially disturbing. Even if their intent is not nativist, advocating policies that push women to have more children is anti-feminist and fundamentally at odds with reproductive agency.

And even when such policies intend to serve feminist goals–for example Finland’s generous parental leave and child and health care—they fail to raise birthrates. That’s because the biggest factor in childbearing decisions isn’t affordability; it’s empowerment.

Nobel prizewinning economic historian Claudia Goldin has shown high birthrates are no longer tied to economic prosperity, as women increasingly choose education and careers over traditional family roles. In fact, she found an inverse relationship between per capita income and fertility. “Wherever you get increased agency,” she said, “you get reduction in the birth rate.”

Another study across 136 countries confirms this: whenever women achieve reproductive agency, birthrates decline, whether the economy is growing or shrinking.

But hundreds of millions of women and girls are denied this agency. Over 640 million alive today were child brides (including in the US). Over 220 million have an unmet need for contraception. More than half of pregnancies are unintended—121 million annually. Cuts in USAID and other aid programs make the situation more dire.

Despite birthrates declining in many countries, global population is going up, projected to swell by 2 billion to 10.4 billion by the 2080s, with vast ecological and social consequences. Extreme climate events are expected to kill more than a billion people and displace up to 3 billion this century, most in countries where women and girls are disempowered and fertility rates remain high. Pronatalism will only make ecological and social crises worse.

We need new policy thinking that recognizes this and embraces the many advantages of declining fertility and less growth. As fertility rates fall, female labor participation will increase and gender pay gaps will narrow.

As median age rises, changing demographics could enable policy shifts that improve wages and conditions for workers and extend job opportunity to billions on the sidelines who want work but don’t have it.

There is no lack of good ideas, from economic models that center wellbeing and rethink growth to radical ecological democracy. Exploring them requires getting off the endless growth treadmill that enriches elites at the expense of the rest of us. We must stop treating women like reproductive vessels for making more people to serve the economy, and start reshaping our economies to serve more people and the planet.

Nandita Bajaj is executive director of the NGO Population Balance, senior lecturer at Antioch University, and producer and host of the podcasts OVERSHOOT and Beyond Pronatalism. Her research and advocacy work focuses on addressing the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive and ecological justice.

IPS UN Bureau

by Richard Hil and Gideon Polya

Unbridled cruelty is the warning to Humanity of both the ongoing Gaza Genocide and the WW2 Warsaw Ghetto.To say so is, for some, immediately contentious – some will insist that drawing any parallel between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto is antisemitic, an erasure of Jewish suffering, or a distortion of history. But the point is not to collapse distinct experiences or equate incomparable horrors; it is to recognise recurring patterns of dehumanisation, enclosure, starvation, and the systematic destruction of a people’s capacity to live. Gaza forces us to confront, in real time, the same underlying logic that once governed the Warsaw Ghetto: the belief that an entire population can be sealed off, punished collectively, and intentionally made to disappear.

It is in this light that the story of the Warsaw Ghetto must be revisited—not as a distant tragedy, but as a warning flaring again in our own time. It the reason too why what is happening in Gaza resonates in so many ways with the events in Poland, circa 1943. Gaza is a warming about the lengths to which rogue states – those who brazenly flout international law – will go to achieve their ends. It is a warning too about the future and what will occur when, in the midst of a deteriorating climate, states seek to supress dissent and maintain oligarchal power. Warsaw, like Gaza, reveals a cruelty unleashed not merely to erase a people – though that is unmistakably part of the design – but to impose a new order founded on raw racialized power and unrestrained impunity.

“In the ghetto we learned that to remain human was itself a form of resistance” – Janina Bauman, survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.

“We are not extraordinary people. We are people who refuse to disappear” – Mohammed El‑Kurd, Palestinian writer, poet, journalist.

“Gaza is a sacrifice zone. It is where the logic of settler colonialism is laid bare — a population rendered superfluous, contained, and punished” – journalist, Chris Hedges.

The Warsaw Ghetto

The final scenes of Roman Polanski’s Academy Award–winning film The Pianist (2002) are harrowing in the extreme. They depict a world once bustling with life, now obliterated – emptied of human presence, and consigned to history.

Based on the experiences of the Polish‑Jewish pianist Władysław Szpilman, who spent two and a half years in hiding, the film recounts the callous brutality of the Nazi occupation – the roundups, killings, starvation, humiliations, and ultimately the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

At its height, the ghetto held around 450,000 starved, beaten and traumatised people crammed into a 1.3‑square‑mile killing zone, enclosed by a 10‑foot wall topped with barbed wire. All contact with the outside world was severed. Jews were forbidden to leave on pain of death. Starvation and disease were rampant. Corpses lay in the streets. Lack of sanitation, food, water and medical supplies led to deadly epidemics, including typhus. In the first two years alone, over 100,000 ghetto residents died from hunger and disease.

In July 1942, the first major “resettlements” began—a Nazi euphemism for mass deportations to extermination camps. Between July and September, approximately 300,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka and murdered. Fewer than 60,000 remained in the ghetto.

On 19 April 1943, as the Nazis prepared the final liquidation, a few hundred remaining Jews—poorly armed but determined—rose in revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted 27 days, until 16 May 1943. The Germans labelled the fighters “criminals” and “bandits.” Many, including the 24‑year‑old resistance commander Mordechai Anielewicz and his partner, twenty-two-year-old Mira Fuchrer, chose suicide rather than surrender. Most survivors were killed on the spot or sent to Treblinka. A few managed to escape through sewers. On 16 May 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop (later hanged for his crimes) reported triumphantly to his superiors: “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more.” In material terms, he was right.

In early 1945, as German forces fled before the advancing Red Army, Szpilman emerged from hiding into the ruins of his former life, a ghost walking through the ashes of memory. Nothing was left. “Everything that had been familiar,” he later wrote, “had vanished. Whole districts had ceased to exist, as if they had been lifted away by a hurricane.” The vast majority of the people who once inhabited the Jewish quarter had been murdered. The Great Synagogue, the Judaic library, schools, universities, hospitals, apartment blocks, government buildings—every structure—had been levelled.

Gazing with incomprehension at the devastation, Szpilman shuffled through the dust and rubble, searching for anything that might make sense of nothingness. “I was,” he reflected, “alone in a world that had ceased to exist.” There was not a living soul. “Warsaw was dead. I walked through the ruins as if through the tomb of a giant city.”

Erasure and memory

Szpilman was not the first, nor indeed the last, to witness such deliberate devastation. To bear witness to the annihilation of everything familiar – to hold the unbearable present against the flickering embers of the past – is the story of countless brutalised and vanquished peoples who, over centuries, have been subjected to the vicissitudes of brute power and cruelty. Colonised Indigenous peoples and those prey to the whims of empires know intimately what attempted erasure looks like. It is not only buildings that must be destroyed, but the very fabric of everyday life, memory and culture.

Erasure and domination require the killing of intellectuals, artists, political opponents, trade unionists – anyone capable of reviving memory or resisting the will to power. The previous order must be overwritten with triumphalist narratives of exceptionalism and claims of cultural and even genetic superiority. Yet the problem for all settler‑colonial projects – any system intent on erasure -is that the erasure of memory is nearly impossible.

Inner stories, held in shared yet knowing silence, or acted out through coded rituals, become the reservoirs of resilience, resistance and survival, allowing for persistence and awaiting the moment when the struggle for justice can be ignited.

Physical places possess their own vocabularies of attachment, expressed through ancestral stories and shared experience. Environmental philosopher Val Plumwood reminds us that “shadow places” speak of an immovable presence that defies the overlay of the present. Reflecting on the destruction of European cities in the Second World War, W. G. Sebald observed: “The remnants speak more loudly than the whole ever did.” American novelist Toni Morrison, writing of the attempted erasure of place, notes that, “all that is left is the haunting” – the presence of past lives, of grievous suffering, and the unextinguished desire for justice.

Storytelling, testimonies and revisionist histories have each refused the triumphalist narratives and discursive neutralisations that seek to erase memory and moral culpability. The land itself, covered over by infrastructures of erasure – like the Spanish colonists’ edifices built on the ruins of Indigenous foundations, or the Nazi-planned “Neue deutsche Stadt Warschau” to replace old Warsaw  – speaks of a presence that cannot be dislodged from history. As the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney observes, “the ground remembers what the mind forgets”. Ultimately, it is the shared, storied memories, weighed with meaning and connection, that pull displaced peoples back to where they feel they belong. The ruins, as Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels observes, are simply “the map of our return” to places infused with inherited griefs and the histories that refuse to stay buried.

Shadowlands: The return

But what if this return is to places that have for decades been the sites of relentless violence, displacement and ruination; places of grievous loss and deprivation? What if the land is under constant occupation, overseen by powers that
claim it, desire it, for their own ends, irrespective of what that land means to its former inhabitants? Such places have long proliferated in the annals of colonial history: places of indescribable suffering, yet to which its inhabitants often yearn to return.

It is the historical relationship to that land, to its ancestral resonances that people wish to return, whatever the physical destruction, and despite all the suffering. Buildings can be replaced – miraculously so in the case of the reconstruction of Warsaw’s old town (stare miasto) – but the disappeared remain in the shadows of memory, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not.

To venture today through the ghostly terrain of Warsaw’s former Jewish quarter – now a dense grid of tree-lined apartment blocks, along with schools, shops, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and the Ghetto Heroes Monument – is to experience the inescapable, lingering tragedy of the past. General Stroop, who to the bitter end, showed no remorse for his murderous deeds, gloated in late 1943 at the spectacle of ghetto erasure, perhaps reflecting the vacuity of his own soul. To be sure, few of Warsaw’s Jews survived the Jewish Holocaust (between 10,000 -15,000), with  only around 2,000-3,000 Jews currently residing in Poland’s capital.

On 19 October 2025, four days after the ceasefire announced on 15 October, The New York Times reported on the experiences of Palestinians permitted to return briefly to their homes in and around Gaza City. For thirty‑two‑year‑old Majdi Nassar, the return to his hometown of Jabaliya lasted less than 24 hours. Heading back south to Deir al‑Balah, Nassar said he would not return until clean drinking water had been restored. Shocked by the scale of the devastation, he said: “I could not find any trace of the building where I had an apartment, not even the rubble… Everything is gone.” For Abu Ghanem, the return to Gaza City was equally traumatic. Entire neighbourhoods no longer existed. Everything familiar – including the people – had vanished. “There was no one at all around,” she said. “There were no services, no water or electricity, and, of course, no markets to buy food.”

Twenty‑seven‑year‑old Fatima Abu Steita and her husband, Abdallah Abu, returned to Gaza City to search for their home in the Zeitoun neighbourhood, but it was “completely erased… Everything around that neighbourhood is flat ground… It’s a return to nothing. But it’s also saying: ‘We are still here.’” On 17 October, The Guardian reported another Gaza City resident saying: “I had hoped to return and find my home standing, but what I found was quite the opposite. I couldn’t even recognise the area. Everything was levelled to the ground.” Reaching the Sheikh Radwan district on the north side of Gaza City, fifty‑year‑old Suhair al‑Absi said: “I couldn’t identify the remains of my house because the rubble of everyone’s homes is all mixed together. The destruction here is beyond imagination, something the mind cannot grasp.”

A few days earlier, on 11 October, the BBC reported on residents attempting to return to their neighbourhoods, with one elderly man saying: “This is the last area we can reach. The Israeli army is still nearby. Look at the scale of destruction – they’ve destroyed everything.” The scale of destruction throughout Gaza – and the sustained, indiscriminate assault on its people – has been such that numerous academics, leading human rights advocates, and humanitarian organisations have accused Israel of genocide. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, noted in her 2025 report Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime that: “The level of destruction in Gaza is so extensive and systematic that it reveals an intent to destroy the population’s ability to survive.”

Two years earlier, on 6 November 2023 – shortly after the start of Israel’s onslaught – UN Secretary‑General António Guterres warned: “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened. The level of destruction is unprecedented.” Things only got worse – considerably worse.

After many months of sustained assault, on 16 September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) concluded that: “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention… including killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.”

The COI further found that: “The Israeli authorities intended to kill as many Palestinians as possible through its military operations in Gaza since 7 October 2023 and knew that the means and methods of warfare employed would cause mass deaths of Palestinians, including children.”

In addition to the systematic destruction of agricultural land, cultural sites, educational institutions and civic infrastructure, the report documented other egregious acts, including the destruction of maternity facilities and 4,000 embryos stored in Gaza’s largest fertility clinic.

Two years on from the start of Israel’s onslaught, The Guardian reported on 7 October 2025 that 92 percent of homes in Gaza had been destroyed or damaged, and 2.1 million people – 95 percent of the population – had been displaced. Medieval mosques, Ottoman‑period bazaars, churches, and ancient heritage sites had suffered damage or been wiped out. Ninety percent of schools had been damaged or destroyed, leaving 745,000 children and university‑age students without access to formal education. Around 80 percent of higher‑education campuses and 60 percent of vocational training centres had been damaged or destroyed. Repeated attacks on healthcare facilities had killed 1,700 health workers. Relentless bombing of hospitals and clinics created a critical shortage of medicines and medical equipment, crippling Gaza’s ability to provide even basic care.

The health of the Palestinian population deteriorated sharply as food aid was cut off and agricultural land systematically destroyed. Since 2023, Gaza has lost 97 percent of its tree crops, 95 percent of its shrubland, and 82 percent of its annual crops, rendering large‑scale food production impossible. Today, only 1.5 percent of cropland remains accessible and suitable for cultivation.

The Palestinian economy, already on its knees after decades of occupation and oppression, has been plunged into further crisis as a result of the ongoing carnage. Thousands, of professionals have been killed since 7 October. They include healthcare workers, senior physicians, journalists and media workers, teachers and education workers, humanitarian and aid workers (the largest loss of humanitarian workers ever recorded in a single conflict), civil defence and emergency responders, engineers, technicians, municipal workers, academics and university staff, and legal professionals. Thousands of others across a wide range of vital industries have also lost their lives or been severely injured.

The full spectrum impacts of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the West Bank is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say that every aspect of Palestinian life – and the environment that sustains it – has been spectacularly altered since 7 October 2023. Killing has taken many forms: urbicide (the destruction of towns, villages and cities), ecocide (the destruction of ecosystems), sociocide (the destruction of social institutions), and genocide (the destruction of a people).

Yet despite all this – and notwithstanding the continuation of mass killing and destruction since the so‑called “ceasefire” announced on 15 October 2025 – the Palestinian people have shown remarkable resilience and courage in the face of continued bombardment, restrictions, lack of healthcare, chronically poor living conditions, and perilous winter weather.

As Francesca Albanese has observed: “Despite unthinkable devastation, Palestinians continue to show a steadfastness that the world must finally honour instead of exploit.” Similarly, Jan Egeland, Secretary‑General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, noted: “What I see in Gaza is a people who refuse to give up on life, even when everything around them is being taken away.” This remarkable tenacity and enduring commitment to people and place has also been recognised by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who remarked: “The resilience of Palestinians in the face of such profound injustice is a testament to the human spirit’s refusal to be broken.”

The greater Israel project

This refusal has come at an enormous cost for the Palestinian people whose suffering did not begin on 7 October 2023. Far from it. Forced displacements and killings have been ongoing since 1948, as have sieges and blockade: all part of the world’s longest military occupation. Since 2005, just over twenty years ago, the IDF has mounted numerous devastating, mostly “mowing the grass” operations designed variously to weaken Palestinian armed groups and instil fear and impose control over the population.  This has been done in addition to countless more targeted operations (like assassinations, sniper deployments, and “free fire” killing zones, etc.) that have resulted in large scale death and destruction. Operation Summer Rains (2006) was Israel’s first major post‑disengagement ground and air campaign in Gaza. This was followed by Operation Hot Winter (2008) a large assault on northern Gaza, Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009), a three‑week war; one of the deadliest assaults on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Défense (2012) an eight‑day air campaign targeting Hamas leadership and infrastructure, Operation Protective Edge (2014) involving a massive 50‑day war with ground invasion, widespread destruction, and very high civilian casualties, Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), an eleven‑day air war, Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), a three‑day assault targeting Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and most recently, the ongoing “Iron Swords” triggered by the events of 7 October 2023; the largest and deadliest assault on Gaza in history. Such operations were and are part of a general plan to eradicate the “terrorist threat”, lower the morale of the Gazan population and deplete its collective energies, weaken its infrastructure, and thereby create the conditions that render life on the Strip unbearable. This is a choreographed strategy, the aim of which is to create a “greater Israel” largely free of an Arab presence.

The desire for territorial expansion has long been an integral part of Israel’s stated regional ambitions. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, remarked in 1895: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

In the 1930s, the Irgun paramilitary organisation – whose ideological lineage runs directly into today’s Israeli far‑right – envisioned a “Greater Israel” encompassing all of Palestine and Jordan. By 1977, this expansionist vision had become mainstream political doctrine. In that year’s election campaign, Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared that Gaza and the West Bank were integral to Israel’s future, insisting: “The Land of Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”

In 1989, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was equally blunt in rejecting any territorial compromise, asserting his desire for permanent control over all occupied territories: “The Arabs are the same Arabs and the sea is the same sea.” The implication was clear: nothing fundamental had changed, and Israel must therefore retain all conquered land.

Some years later, addressing Israeli settlers, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly encouraged the seizure of Palestinian land through settlement expansion: “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can… everything we take now will stay ours.”

Today, the most extreme elements within the Israeli government cite biblical claims to demand territory “from the Nile to the Euphrates,” encompassing parts of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Israel’s current Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich – one of the most explicit contemporary advocates of radical Zionism and the annexation of the West Bank – has stated unequivocally: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Itamar Ben‑Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has called for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians (a euphemism for forced expulsion), asserting: “The land of Israel belongs only to the Jewish people.”

As far back as 1989, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that Israel should have used moments of global distraction to carry out mass expulsions, saying: “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” More recently, in a 2025 interview with Israel’s i24 News, Netanyahu made no attempt to hide his support for a Greater Israel, saying he agreed “absolutely” with this goal, adding that: “I am on a historic and spiritual mission… very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel.”

In 2024, Netanyahu presented a map to the UN General Assembly depicting Israel occupying all of historic Palestine as well as the Syrian Golan Heights, surrounded by states he implied were either compliant or hostile. Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and India were shown as aligned with Israel, while Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Yemen and Pakistan were marked as adversarial – an unmistakable pitch for a regional order shaped by Israeli dominance and territorial maximalism.

To legitimate the removal of Indigenous people, the latter was homogenised in terms of its moral culpability for attacks on Israel.  Thus, in 2023, Israeli President Isaac Herzog declared: “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” These remarks were later cited in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The broader pattern

The desire among leading Israeli political figures – across decades – to expand territorial control over lands they regard as historically or religiously theirs has been consistent. Such views invariably include the rejection of Palestinian statehood and enthusiastic support for settlement expansion.

Given the broad support for the Greater Israel project among significant sections of the Israeli public, it is clear that Israel seeks possession of all of historic Palestine plus the Syrian Golan Heights. It currently occupies over half of Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and parts of southern Lebanon and Syria. These Arab lands are coveted, but only on the condition that they are emptied of their Indigenous Arab populations.

Most countries recognise the State of Palestine and support a Western‑favoured “two‑state solution,” with the Palestinian state composed of the currently occupied Palestinian territories. Israel rejects this and seeks to rule all of the land it occupies, including territories it has formally annexed.

For the occupied population, this means the negation of basic human rights under foreign military rule and confinement in what are effectively concentration zones or ghettoes. In ways not dissimilar to the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, Palestinians in the occupied territories have, for over 56 years, been excluded from voting for the government that rules them and subjected to a wide range of legal, civic, economic and cultural deprivations and injustices.

In an Advisory Opinion issued on 19 July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unequivocally stated that the occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal and that Israel must withdraw, end apartheid practices, permit the return of refugees, and make reparations for nearly eighty years of displacement, mass killing, demolition, human rights violations, and denial of self‑determination. The Trump Peace Plan for Gaza directly contradicts the ICJ ruling and therefore violates international law. Devised without any inputfrom Palestinians, the plan proposes foreign control of Gaza and the exploitation of its resources, including the appropriation of land for luxury real‑estate development and offshore gas extraction.

With neighbouring states unwilling to absorb further Palestinian refugees, the US-Israeli “solution” for Gaza and the West Bank appears to involve continued killing, forced expulsions into neighbouring countries, and “voluntary migration” schemes -effectively coerced displacement – to third states such as Somalia or the self‑declared and US- and Israel-recognized Republic of Somaliland. For those who remain, the plan envisages, in addition to Israel’s existing carceral system, mass confinement in what are effectively detention complexes: Rafah‑style “screening sites,” “processing zones,” and “humanitarian islands” where Palestinians would be held, interrogated, and sorted.

Construction of these facilities began in 2024, involving the bulldozing of large tracts of land, the building of new perimeter roads and earthworks, and the establishment of Israeli military positions surrounding the zones. Mass civilian containment in such environments offers few safeguards for those interned, as evidenced by conditions in Israeli prisons where tensof thousands of detainees – many held under “preventative detention” – have reported physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. These accounts have been widely documented by Israeli, Palestinian, UN, and international human rights organisations, UN bodies and special rapporteurs, and investigative journalists.

The power asymmetry between the Israeli state and Palestinians is exhibited both in their respective armouries and loss of life.  Between 2008 and 6 October 2023, 7,077 Palestinians and 340 Israelis were killed—a ratio of twenty‑one to one. Applying this ratio to the events after 7 October would have implied roughly 25,200 Palestinian deaths as reprisals. Yet estimates suggest that after two years of bombardment 875,000 Palestinians may have been killed by violence and imposed deprivation (see below), producing a death ratio of 729 to 1.   This exceeds by a factor of 73 the death ratio of 10 to 1 ordered by Hitler and immediately carried out by Nazi forces in the 1944 Ardeatine massacre in Rome.

Such comparisons are often condemned as “antisemitic”, but as Jewish American scholar Professor Bertell Ollman of New York University has remarked: “For obvious reasons, the Zionists are very sensitive about being compared to the Nazis… Yet the facts on the ground, when not obscured by one or another rationalization, show thatthe Zionists are the worst anti‑Semites in the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the Nazis.”

This understanding of antisemitism takes on added significance given that Palestinians are a Semitic people, while the predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish population leading the assault on Gaza is culturally Semitic but not ethnically Semitic, descending largely from non‑Semitic Khazar converts to Judaism in the ninth century CE. This observation radically alters how the continuation of well‑documented war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank is interpreted.

Counting the dead and injured

Numbers matter, and vitally so, when assessing the dead and injured during wars and occupations. To paraphrase philosopher and essayist George Santayana, history ignored becomes history repeated. Israel’s actions toward an Indigenous people follow well‑worn patterns of settler‑colonial practice: dispossession, domination, and the systematic erasure of responsibility. Denial, deflection, and the concealment of harm are the stock-in-trade of states that brutalise those they rule.

Counting the dead and injured, of course, is not a simple empirical exercise. It is fraught with methodological and political complications. Yet it is essential in terms of understanding the nature and magnitude of the trauma experienced by victims of genocide,  as well as assessing the needs of impacted communities and for culpability of perpetrators and their associates.

Before the Gaza massacre commenced on 7 October 2023, there were approximately 15 million Indigenous Palestinians worldwide: around 7 million living in exile, 5.6 million in the occupied territories (including 2.4 million in Gaza), and 2.1 million residing within Israel. After two years of the IDF’s military onslaught – resulting in an estimated 875,000 Gazans killed by violence and deprivation – only about 1.5 million Gazans remain. How did we arrive at this number?Epidemiological studies published in respected medical journal, The Lancet, estimated that 64,260 Gazans had died violently by 30 June 2024 (day 269 of the assault), implying 136,000 violent deaths by 25 April 2025 (day 569). Using a broadly accepted wartime index, the ratio of indirect deaths from deprivation to direct violent fatalities in war ranges from 2:1 (in the Iraq War, 1990–2011) to 16:1 (in the Afghan War, 2001–2021). Epidemiologists have conservatively estimated four deprivation‑related deaths for every violent death in Gaza. This yields approximately 544,000 indirect deaths and a total of around 680,000 Gazans killed by 25 April 2025.

Since the so‑called “ceasefire” of mid‑October 2025, the killing of Palestinians has continued. By 7 October 2025, day 731 of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza, violent deaths totalled roughly 175,000.  Applying the conservative 4:1 deprivation‑to‑violence ratio produces an additional 700,000 indirect deaths, resulting in a combined total of 875,000 Gazan deaths after two years of bombardment and deprivation.

Assuming, in the absence of more granular data, that the proportions of children, women, and men among indirect deaths mirror those reported by Gaza’s health authorities for violent deaths, the 875,000 total therefore would include approximately 325,000 children, 207,000 women, and 342,000 men. These figures, however, underestimate child mortality, as they do not account for the extreme vulnerability of children under five, who represent about 70 percent of avoidable deaths from deprivation in impoverished settings (Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”).

The mid‑October 2025 “ceasefire” substantially reduced direct killing but did little to alleviate deprivation. Severe Israeli-imposed restrictions on aid delivery and proposed exclusion of 37 food and medical aid organisations from Gaza mean that Palestinians continue to die from hunger, disease, and lack of medical care.

After more than twenty‑seven months of assault, the people of Gaza – 47 percent of whom were children before the genocide – have endured bombing, shooting, the near‑total destruction of homes and infrastructure (including hospitals and clinics), and catastrophic shortages of water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Gazans have been driven in part by a man‑made famine and deliberate mass starvation. The world has watched the catastrophe unfold through the work of Palestinian journalists, yet the suffering continues.

The humanitarian crisis facing Gaza’s children is unprecedented in the modern era. Gaza’s suffering is vast and deeply layered: during the height of the conflict more than ten children lost one or both legs every day, over a thousand have already undergone amputations, and explosive weapons left fifteen children a day with life‑altering injuries throughout 2024; more than 11,000 now live with permanent disabilities, while tens of thousands have lost parents, siblings, or entire families, creating a generation of orphans in a place where tens of thousands children have been killed and more than a million require urgent psychosocial support. The psychological toll is immense. In late December 2024, The Guardian reported on a survey of Gaza’s children, noting: “The sense of being doomed has become pervasive. Almost all the children (96 percent) felt their death was imminent, and 49 percent actually wished to die—a feeling much more prevalent among boys (72 percent) than girls (26 percent).”

Before the mass killing of Gazans beginning on 7 October 2023 – and despite a century‑long process of dispossession and violence that had resulted in over 2.2 million Palestinian deaths from military action and deprivation – the 15.1 million people under Israeli control (across Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and annexed territories) included 7.7 million Indigenous Palestinians (51 percent), 7 million Jews (47 percent), and 0.4 million others (2.5 percent). After more than two years of the Gaza Genocide, the remaining 14.2 million people under Israeli rule include 6.8 million Indigenous Palestinians (48 percent), 7 million Jews (49 percent), and 0.4 million others (3 percent). This demographic inversion reflects a long‑running process of population reduction that has unfolded over the past century, resulting in more than 3 million Palestinian deaths from violence and imposed deprivation. By comparison, deaths from violence and deprivation in the Second World War Jewish Holocaust totalled between 5 and 6 million.

The scale of the killing in Gaza demands comparison with other atrocities. For instance: (1). the rate of killing of children in Gaza has been 325,000 over 2 years or 162,500 per year, as compared to the rate of killing Jewish children in Occupied Europe by the Nazis of 1,500,000 in 6 years or 250,000 per year. (2). The rate of killing of Gazans has been 875,000 over 2 years (437,500 per year) as compared to the rate killing of Jews in occupied Europe by the Nazis of 0.8 to 1.0 million per year. (3). Nearly 37 percent of the pre-conflict population of Gaza has been killed in 2 years as compared to the Nazi killing of  59 percent of the total pre-war Jewish population of occupied Europe, 87 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of Poland, and 28 percent of the pre-war Jewish population of Hungary. (4). Prisoners killed per day per million of captive population has been 600 in Gaza versus 23 for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2.

Other present-day comparisons can be made. Gaza journalists, for example, have been reporting the carnage but have clearly been targeted. Israel leads the world in the killing of journalists on an annual per capita basis: 50 for Gaza versus 0.007for the rest of the world. When it comes to children killed on an annual per capita basis in Gaza, Israel leads the world: 83,000 in Gaza or 11,000 times greater than for the world (7.6) and 1,100 times greater than for crime-wracked Honduras (75.7). The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1 May 2022, Francesca Albanese, who has been subject to severe US sanctions, noted of our finding published in Arena in 2025 that 680,000 Gazans had died from violence and deprivation by 25 April 2025: “In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza. And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.” While a ceasefire was established in mid-October 2025, the daily violent killing continues, albeit at a much lower rate.  However, Israel still restricts life-saving aid and proposed banning 37 aid organizations from entering Gaza by March 2026, precisely the people required to both assess how many have died and to save the lives of innocents caught up in this ongoing conflict.

Complicity, collusion and abandonment

As detailed above, and based on data and methodology published by expert epidemiologists in The Lancet, total Gaza deaths amount to36.5 percent of the pre-7 October population.

Despite the obvious point that the figures provided by the Gazan Ministry of Health – although credible, and in fact used by the IDF – are necessarily limited, they represent only a fraction of the overall mortality. The Ministry’s methodology is careful and systematic, but it can only record confirmed bodies brought to hospitals or reported by families. It cannot account for the unknown numbers buried under millions of tonnes of rubble, nor can it empirically verify the far larger number of deaths caused by imposed deprivation (starvation, dehydration, untreated wounds, disease, exposure).

Despite this, Western journalists, politicians, and academics have overwhelmingly limited their reporting to the Ministry’s figures, which currently hover around 75,000 deaths. This undercounting is reminiscent of the vast under-reporting of Iraqi deaths following the 2003 US‑led invasion, when the press relied almost exclusively on figures from Iraq Body Count, a London‑based research organisation that recorded only those deaths that could be triangulated through media reports, documentation, and visual verification. As a result, the Iraq Body Count total remained around 100,000, even though peer‑reviewed epidemiological studies (e.g., The Lancet Iraq mortality surveys) estimated well over one million deaths from violence and deprivation combined.

A similar pattern is now unfolding in Gaza. The Gazan Health Ministry’s figures dominate mainstream media coverage, with almost no reference to the much larger numbers implied when bodies under rubble and deprivation‑related deaths are included.

The unwillingness of Western journalists to offer a fuller accounting of Israel’s actions has occurred alongside increasing efforts across several countries to curtail “pro‑Palestinian” demonstrations and, through the lobbying power of major Jewish organisations, to equate criticism of Israel with “antisemitism.” Avoiding the total number of deaths has enabled Israeli authorities to promote the manufactured narrative that they have exercised “restraint” and targeted only “terrorists” allegedly hiding among civilians. Whatever the limitations of the Ministry of Health figures, they pale in comparison to the far larger totals produced by alternative methodologies.

As Ralph Nader has argued, it is in the interests of Israel and its allies to present a lower figure for the dead and injured in Gaza – just as Hamas has an interest in doing the same, given the horrendous scale of Israeli retaliation after 7 October. The United States, through its multi‑billion‑dollar arms transfers, roughly $5 billion per year in military aid, and repeated vetoes at the UN Security Council, has enabled a genocide whose full consequences it continues to deny. It too has an interest in minimising death figures, just as it did in Iraq during the first and second Gulf Wars.

More broadly, the US‑led alliance – including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, and several EU states – has been largely inactive in the face of the genocide. The strongest action taken by some has been symbolic recognition of the State of Palestine, something Israel rejects outright. Many countries, however, have taken a robust stand in relation to the ICJ’s ruling in the genocide case South Africa v. Israel (26 January 2024). As the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights summarised following the ICJ’s 19 July 2024 Advisory Opinion:

“Israel and other UN Member States must immediately comply with the authoritative determination by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory… The Court declared that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is unlawful, along with the associated settlement regime, annexation, and use of natural resources. The Court added that Israel’s legislation and measures violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The ICJ mandated Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to Palestinian victims, and facilitate the return of displaced people.”

Across the world, numerous states issued formal statements supporting the ICJ’s authority, welcoming the genocide ruling, or calling on Israel to comply with the provisional measures. In Europe, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, and Malta condemned Israel’s actions. Multilateral bodies such as the African Union, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, CARICOM, and ASEAN parliamentarians also expressed support for the ICJ finding.

Other countries have played a less honourable role. Australia has failed to openly support the ICJ judgment while continuing to supply parts for Israel’s F‑35 fighter‑bombers. Its stance on Israel’s actions has been tepid and often contradictory. While Australia mildly protested the Israeli killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, it remained silent about the killing of several Australians in Lebanon and the deaths and injuries of thousands of relatives of Palestinian‑Australians in Gaza. With the backing of the Coalition Opposition, the Australian Labor Government sought to obscure the genocide through a campaign of “terror” and “antisemitism” hysteria that intensified after the horrific Bondi Massacre (15 killed, all but one Jewish).

Australia’s contradictory stance on Gaza mirrors its broader approach to human rights. In its World Report 2026, Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticised Australia for its cruel asylum‑seeker policies (including offshore detention) and its failure to advance the wellbeing of Indigenous people. “Australia,” the report concluded, “is a democracy with a strong human rights record in many areas, but significant failings in others… Australia is the only Western democracy without a national human rights act or charter.”

Missing from the HRW report, however, are recent abuses condemned by anti‑racist Jewish and non‑Jewish human rights experts. These include Australia’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, its adoption of the Zionist “Antisemitism Report,” , adoption of the highly- flawed IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism (condemned by over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations including the anti-racist Jewish Council of Australia), the imposition of McCarthy‑style restrictions on political expression, draconian “hate speech” laws enabling the banning of law-abiding organisations and the imprisonment of their leaders for up to 15 years, and the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Australia despite his role in the ongoing atrocities in Gaza. The backward Australian state of Queensland recently legislated 2 years in prison for anyone causing fear by publicly uttering the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” (common chants at weekly rallies for Gaza and Palestinian human rights in Melbourne) – Gideon Polya, the author of “Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel,  Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide” was advised by a lawyer “Don’t go to Queensland”.

Resisting annihilation

Despite all the horrors that have befallen the Palestinian people before and after 7 October 2023, they nonetheless cling tenaciously to their homelands and to the promise of peace with justice. The attempted erasure of the Palestinian people has not succeeded. As Palestinian scholar Edward Said wrote in 1998: “Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared. No matter the sustained and unbroken hostility of the Israeli establishment to anything that Palestine represents, the sheer fact of our existence has foiled, where it has not defeated, the Israeli effort to be rid of us completely.”

The same can be said today as Palestinians return to their bombed‑out neighbourhoods and struggle to hold on to their homes and land in the face of intensified settler violence. The bludgeoning, violence and oppression cannot eradicate the idea of Palestine or the Palestinian people. As Said further remarked: “As an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine has simply not disappeared.”

But the assault on Gaza is more than a settler‑colonial project. It is a warning. It reveals the extent to which a determined state, backed by the world’s largest military power, can go to achieve its ends. It exposes the weakness of international institutions in restraining a rogue state, the trampling of international law, and the impunity which, as Italian human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese insists, “won’t last forever.”

Chris Hedges, in Genocide Foretold, argues that the warning extends beyond Gaza. It foreshadows the anticipated breakdown of international borders and nation‑states as the climate catastrophe accelerates, leading to the collapse of entire societies, massive population movements, and the rise of fortress states. The impunity shown in Gaza—the disregard for the “rules‑based order” and for international law—will be replicated in different forms as increasingly authoritarian governments impose their will on their own citizens and on those seeking refuge.

Israel has long tested the limits of international tolerance and the capacity of global governance institutions, and those institutions have been found wanting. The illegal military actions in Venezuela by the US, the resurgence of “gunboat diplomacy” in the Caribbean, and the near‑daily threats against nations that refuse to fall into line are all worrying signs of imperial impunity and authoritarian creep. Just as we have witnessed the incarceration of the Gazan population, so too do the expanding carceral systems in the United States and El Salvador offer a glimpse of what the future may hold. Gaza symbolises what brute power destroys.

“We are,” writes Naomi Klein, “living through a moral crisis,” and Gaza is the “moral X‑ray” of the world. “What is happening in Gaza,” she observes, “is not separate from the rise of authoritarianism globally — it is part of the same story.” The tragedy, of course, is that the Gaza Genocide and Gaza Holocaust is unfolding under the watch of the entire world. As Indian writer Arundhati Roy states: “The crisis is not that we are silenced. The crisis is that the world is listening and still does nothing.”

In a world governed by decency, compassion, and a commitment to human rights and international law, Israel would be required to immediately withdraw from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), immediately provide life‑sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as required of any occupying power “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” under Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and immediately face rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Reparations and war‑crimes trials would be a moral priority. None of this is underway. The Trump Peace Plan only serves to further violate international law, which demands the withdrawal of foreign forces from occupied Palestinian territory.

Conclusion

At the heart of the genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid regime is the insistence on establishing and maintaining a Jewish state in the ancient homeland of another people: the Palestinians. Israel’s version of “democracy”, in the form of a “Jewish State,” has meant democracy through expulsion, genocide, and the exclusion of Occupied Palestinians from voting for the government that rules them. In effect, the state of Israel rejects the principle of “all human rights for all,” a principle accepted by the rest of humanity.

Western countries – burdened by historical guilt and often fused with racist indifference to the suffering of Muslims – turn a blind eye to the Palestinian catastrophe, insisting that the “only democracy in the Middle East” has a “right to self‑defence,” even when that defence takes the form of occupation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The Gaza genocide is a stain on humanity. If the principle of universal human rights is to mean anything, and if Israel continues to flout international law, then it must face sanctions as severe as those once applied globally to apartheid South Africa.

In the absence of a free Palestine, the world must apply comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to the apartheid regime and to all individuals, political parties, corporations, and states that support it.

Without such urgent actions, a rogue state which, with the full backing of the US and other allies, continually flouts international law and scoffs at the prospect of peace with justice, will remain emboldened. In an era of climate catastrophe, the impunity displayed by Israel and its imperial enabler, the US, may indeed become the harbinger of equally repressive regimes to come.  Gaza, like Lebanon and Iran, is a warning. It is a warming of “sacrifice zones” in which expendable unpeoples are abandoned in favour of self-aggrandising, expansionist agendas. Gaza is the laboratory, the testing ground for what happens when people try to hold power to account.