BDASC 🧡

Bristol Defend Asylum Seekers Campaign

[BDASC 🧡 @bdascasylum]

https://t.co/MBgcFMsN0y

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

It’s just incredible how quickly and aggressively the US is advancing longstanding agendas of global conquest under the Trump administration. Now they’re racing to take out Cuba.

The US president has signed an executive order to impose new tariffs on countries which supply oil to Cuba, even indirectly, which is expected to dramatically increase the pressure on the already struggling island nation. This comes as Financial Times reports that “Cuba only has enough oil to last 15 to 20 days at current levels of demand and domestic production” after the US cut off the supply from Venezuela and Mexico shelved a planned oil shipment.

Trump’s order itself contains the usual excuses we’ve come to expect from the empire of propaganda and lies, with its authors babbling without evidence about Hamas and Hezbollah and “transnational terrorist groups” receiving support from Havana, thereby making this crushing act of siege warfare a self-defense measure implemented in protection of the American people.

We’re being asked to believe that Cuba is Hamas, so Washington needs to strangle it to death in self-defense. The fact that the US has been pursuing regime change in Cuba for generations, we are told, is merely a coincidence.

The lies get dumber and dumber with each new imperial power grab. It’s just insulting at this point.

Last week The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year” which cited anonymous senior US officials saying they viewed the operation to remove Maduro from Caracas as a “blueprint” for bringing down Havana.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Emboldened by the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.

“The Trump administration has assessed that Cuba’s economy is close to collapse and that the government has never been this fragile after losing a vital benefactor in Maduro, these people said. Officials don’t have a concrete plan to end the Communist government that has held power on the Caribbean island for almost seven decades, but they see Maduro’s capture and subsequent concessions from his allies left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba, senior U.S. officials said.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that administration officials have been meeting with “Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington” with the goal of “identifying somebody inside the current government who will see the writing on the wall and want to cut a deal,” in a way similar to how assets within the Maduro government were recruited to facilitate his removal.

In a new segment on Trump’s frenzied efforts to topple Havana, CNN’s Patrick Oppmann reports from Cuba that he’s “heard from a US embassy source that diplomats there have been advised to quote ‘have their bags packed’ as the Trump administration explores new ways to destabilize the communist-run government.”

The US likes to immiserate the populations of targeted nations using economic strangulation with the goal of fomenting unrest and turning people against their leaders. In 2019 Trump’s previous secretary of state Mike Pompeo openly acknowledged that the goal of Washington’s economic warfare against Iran was to make the population so miserable that they “change the government”, cheerfully citing the “economic distress” the nation had been placed under by US sanctions. Economic distress has been widely cited as a primary factor in the deadly protests that have rocked Iran in recent weeks.

Starvation sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is widely considered both normal and ethical to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force. Deliberately impoverishing an entire nation so that it erupts in conflict and civil war is one of the most evil things you can possibly imagine, but it’s the go-to Plan A for the US empire when it comes to removing foreign leaders who refuse to kiss the imperial boot.

From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen to Syria to Venezuela to Cuba to Iran, these last couple of years the US has been in a mad scramble to eliminate governments and resistance groups which attempt to insist on their own sovereignty. There’s a new excuse every time, but the end goal is always the same: the furtherance of planetary domination.

The US empire is the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on this planet. If any regime is in need of changing, it’s that one.

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

It was 4 a.m. on August 13, 2025, when Israel bombed the home of the Abu Daf family in the al-Zaitoon neighborhood of Gaza City.

The 63-year-old father, Mahmoud Abu Daf, was killed along with five of his children. His wife survived the attack but was left critically injured.

One of Mahmoud’s sons was killed together with his seven-months-pregnant wife and their three-year-old daughter. Another son was killed alongside his two young children. Mahmoud’s daughter, Yasmin, was also killed, along with her son.

And Yasmin’s husband?
His name was Majdi. He had already been killed nearly two years earlier, on October 31, 2023, along with two of his children, aged nine and fourteen.

[Sameh Ahmed 𓂆 🇵🇸 @PalPress24]

#Barcelona commemorates the memory of the Palestinian child Hind Rajab

Hundreds of people gathered on Somorrostro Beach in Barcelona, Spain, holding a large photo of the Palestinian child Hind Rajab, who was 5 years old when she was killed by the Israeli army in #Gaza.

The gathering aimed to draw attention to the humanitarian situation in the Strip and to highlight the suffering of its people.

[Yuval Abraham יובל אברהם @yuval_abraham]

Israeli intelligence secretly surveilled officials in Gaza’s Health Ministry to check if their data on the number of civilians killed in Gaza is 'reliable', Israeli intelligence sources told us.

The army found the numbers are reliable and now regularly uses them internally in intelligence briefings.

According to two sources, Israeli intelligence has no good independent measure of the total number of civilians the army killed in Gaza, making the Health Ministry's data their main source of information.

One reason for this is that officers conducted hundreds of AI-directed assassination strikes against suspected low-level Hamas operatives, usually by destroying entire homes and killing entire families – a practice we previously termed a 'mass assassination factory’. There was often no bomb damage assessment (BDA) for these strikes, meaning there was no check on who and how many civilians were killed. This routine post-strike check was skipped to 'save time'.

'I don’t know how many people I killed as collateral damage. We only check that information for senior Hamas targets,' one source said. 'In other cases I didn’t care. I immediately moved on to the next target. The focus was on creating as many targets as quickly as possible. That’s why I trust the Health Ministry in Gaza more than the IDF for these statistics. The army just doesn’t have the information.'

@mekomit @972mag

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

This seems important…Odd, I can’t find one story in Western media.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Israeli forces killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab two years ago today.

Never forget how the media refused to name her killer and avoided saying her name.

[AJ+ @ajplus]

Days after TikTok came under U.S. ownership, Palestinian filmmaker Bisan Owda's account was banned.

While it was later reinstated under pressure from NGOs, here’s what she told AJ+ about censorship of Palestinian voices.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Making Gaza uninhabitable was the point.

[Osama Abu Rabee أسامة أبوربيع @dn_osama_rabee]

“Take my eyes so I don’t have to see the sight of death.”
From Gaza ,a child softly recites lines of a poem while washing dishes.
Cold water wraps around her small hands in the bitter chill, beside a fabric tent that tells a story of pain on its own.

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

The Nazis referred to their concentration camps as areas designated for "special treatment," "cleansing," "resettlement," or "evacuation." The Zionist concentration camp being built in Rafah as a guarded and biometrically controlled cage for Palestinian genocide survivors is being called “New Rafah,” or a “humanitarian city,” or “housing for workers.” But Kushner and Netanyahu’s Orwellian Zionist euphemisms are not fooling anyone but the willfully ignorant. And all those involved in this Board of Peace-administered final solution have an appointment with infamy.

[Eye on Palestine @EyeonPalestine]

100,000 cases of malnutrition recorded in Gaza during 2025.
The bread we see as a given, is a distant dream for thousands of families there.
Don't let normalcy kill your humanity... Gaza is starving.

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

BREAKING: Israeli settlers are currently burning down Palestinian homes in Ma’azi Jaba in the West Bank.

More than 90 settlers attacked the village. One Palestinian has been seriously injured and rushed to the hospital.

[Mohammad Hesham || محمد هشام @MohammadHeshamH]

They attacked the residents, burned their property, then stole their sheep.

Another video captures Israeli settlers, accompanied by Israeli soldiers, attacking Palestinians in my community and stealing their property under full coordination and protection from the Israeli army.

[jasper nathaniel @infinite_jaz]

— A disabled, incontinent prisoner had his wheelchair confiscated and was given just 3 adult diapers a week.
— Starving prisoners were forced to kneel w/ hands cuffed behind their backs and eat their food like dogs.

Just 2 of many newly documented horrors inside Israeli prisons.

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

"This house has so many memories for us.. We used to have fun.. We used to play"

Child Mahmoud Al-Jolani partakes in the demolition of his family’s home in Jerusalem as Israel forced them to do so under threat of a fine of +71,000 USD.

[Translating Falasteen (Palestine) @translatingpal]

❗️“From the rubble, we rise again.” Palestinian Civil Defense announced the establishment of the first Civil Defense point in the North Governorate, built directly atop the ruins of a former center that was bombed and destroyed by the Israeli occupation army. After more than a year of forced absence, crews have returned with renewed strength and determination, restoring emergency response capabilities to an area deliberately stripped of them.

Source: mohammed_abu_loay (IG)

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

Israelis block a road in Beit Imrin, north of Nablus, uproot olive trees, attack a Palestinian home & stop residents from fixing water pipelines

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

NEW: U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal USAID cable in early 2024 that warned northern Gaza had become an “apocalyptic wasteland,” with bodies left in cars and human remains on the roads, according to Reuters.

The diplomats argued the cable “lacked balance,” though it was based on UN humanitarian fact-finding missions and represented what had been widely reported in the media, sources told Reuters.

Three former U.S. officials told Reuters the descriptions were “unusually graphic” and would have attracted senior U.S. officials’ attention if widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.

Humanitarian officials said their expertise was sidelined, and the administration instead continued backing Israel to the hilt.

[BDASC 🧡 @bdascasylum]

https://t.co/oMjevmfMgn