Israel is Vanishing Palestinians. The U.S. Is Vanishing Protesters.

As Israel accelerates its genocide in Gaza, the U.S. is targeting those who speak out—harming not only Palestinians, students and American jews, but also Jews around the world.

They call it war, but war has rules. War has armies. This is something else—something honed over decades, armed with weapons, dollars, and the silence of those who claim to care about human rights. A machine designed to erase a people, to turn their homes into rubble, and their children into nameless, faceless statistics.

Since Israel broke the ceasefire last week, nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed—400 of them women and children. A six-month-old boy, his mother, and his siblings were brought to Al-Ahli Hospital in severed remains after an airstrike targeted their family home. The Israeli military has blocked all humanitarian aid to Gaza for 22 days, longer than the October 2023 siege. There is no food, no medicine, no fuel, no water. The UN warned there is enough flour for just four more days. That was 5 days ago.

Today, Israel beheaded another child.

A Palestinian father cradles what remains of his child, his hands trembling as they press against the shattered fragments of a life that had barely begun. An Israeli rocket tore through their home in Gaza City, reducing walls to dust, bodies to wreckage. Now, he presses his forehead to his child's, whispering a goodbye that will never be enough.

In Khan Yunis, Israeli warplanes bombed Nasser Medical Complex, killing at least five and injuring many more. In Rafah, families fleeing airstrikes are massacred, hospitals are targeted, the last semblance of refuge reduced to ash.

The Israeli military has retaken the Netzarim Corridor, slicing Gaza apart, further trapping the displaced. It issues evacuation orders to Palestinians with nowhere to go, directs them to so-called “humanitarian zones” that serve only as waiting rooms for the next massacre. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has announced a Voluntary Emigration Bureau, renewing annexation threats and urging Palestinians to “depart to third countries.” A thinly veiled attempt at forced expulsion.

Israel’s pilot program aims to encourage the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, which Israel referred to as “voluntary migration”. The program aims at expelling 100 Palestinians from Gaza to Indonesia.

In the West Bank, the settler project accelerates. On Sunday, Israel approved plans for 13 new illegal Jewish settlements. Since the start of 2025, it has authorized 10,503 settlement housing units, surpassing last year’s total in just three months. The ethnic cleansing is happening in real-time, with full U.S. backing. The bombs, the bulldozers, the drones—they are all American-funded.

And now, the crackdown extends beyond Palestine. In the U.S., nearly 1,000 academics, teachers, and students are mounting an academic boycott of Columbia University, calling it complicit in the U.S. government’s efforts to criminalize protest.

Meanwhile, Tufts grad student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, was abducted by ICE in broad daylight while heading to an Iftar dinner in Massachusetts. Ozturk, who held a valid F-1 visa was reportedly being watched for two days before her arrest., disappeared for writing an article critical of Israel and in support of BDS. The government that funds the genocide is now punishing those who speak out against it.

ICE agents took Rumeysa off the street—federal agents, broad daylight. One of several who dared to write for the school paper, to call for a ceasefire, to name a genocide. ICE agents are pulling Muslims from sidewalks for what we say. And the silence from those who profit off the First Amendment? Just another reminder—our rights were never meant for us.

Outside Tufts, the crowd keeps growing. Today thousands are chanting, marching, and demanding answers. It’s the kind of scene we’re used to watching unfold in authoritarian regimes, not in the so-called “land of the free.” But here we are.

Her name is now a rallying cry, a symbol of something bigger. The crackdown on pro-Palestine activism, the weaponization of immigration enforcement, the state’s fear of young people who dare to organize. They want to send a message: Stay silent. Stay in line. But that message isn’t landing the way they hoped.

If anything, it’s backfiring. Trump’s latest attempt to suppress dissent is only drawing more people into the streets. More students. More organizers. More communities that understand what’s at stake. Because this isn’t just about Rumeysa—it’s about all of us. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that repression doesn’t kill movements. It strengthens them.

They are also coming after Jewish students.

Grant Miner stood at the fault line of power, a Jewish student, a labor organizer, a dissenter in an age when dissent carries consequence. Columbia University, an institution draped in the language of inquiry and justice, had, in his telling, "expelled and fired" him, bending under the weight of the most powerful office in the world. The charge? That the Ivy League school had caved to the demands of President Donald Trump, a man for whom power was never about truth, only the fear it could instill.

A Ph.D. student in English and Comparative Literature, Miner took to X to lay bare what he called "the real story" behind his dismissal. His words did not waver.

"Thousands of students across the country have been exercising our First Amendment rights to oppose genocide," he wrote. "Standing against genocide is not just a moral imperative—it is an act of anti-racism and solidarity. Columbia’s response? Expulsions, suspensions, and retaliation."

This is how it happens. The machinery of repression is rarely loud at first. It starts in boardrooms, in quiet meetings where principles are weighed against profit, where justice is measured against the risk of displeasing the powerful. And when the moment comes, the institutions that claim to teach history do not heed its lessons—they repeat them.