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Further
You Got This: Amidst the Carnage, A Beautiful Moment
Needing a break, we honor the rare sweet sliver of comity during Monday's Boston Marathon when two runners, both on course to achieve their personal best, instead stopped to help Ajay Haridasse, collapsed on the ground and unable to stand back up, over the finish line just ahead - because, they explained, "This is what it's all about...Two is better than one." Hallelujah: For now, still human after all these years.
The "beautiful moment" of compassion and sportsmanship came almost at the end of the grueling, 26.2-mile marathon known as "the runner's Holy Grail" for its tough qualifying standards and steep terrain, including Newton's iconic "Heartbreak Hill." The world's oldest marathon was inspired by the inaugural 1896 Olympics and begun the next year; widely considered one of the most difficult races anywhere, it attracts 500,000 spectators and over 20,000 dogged participants from 96 countries. "It’s a slog. It’s a grind. It’s brilliant," said one aspirant. Another: "Nothing is like it. Runners train and train and train for this race."
So did Ajay Haridasse, a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern running his first Boston Marathon having grown up nearby and faithfully watched it for years. Haridasse had passed the 26-mile mark when, he later said, "the wheels kinda fell off." After running almost three hours and struggling against cramps, his legs abruptly gave out 1,000 feet from the finish line, when he wobbled and fell to the ground. As runners streamed by, he painfully tried to stand up again, fell, tried to stand up, fell. "You got this!" a woman yelled from the sidelines, as others joined in. "You were made for this! You can do it! You got it!"
"After falling down the fourth time, I was getting ready to crawl," Haridasse later recalled. That's when Aaron Beggs, a 40-year-old runner from Northern Ireland, suddenly
appeared
at his left. Beggs stopped, pulled Haridasse to his feet and tried to hold him upright; Haridasse began collapsing again, only to be caught from behind on his right by Robson De Oliveira, a 36-year-old runner from
Brazil
who swooped in. Beggs and De Oliveira quickly lifted Haridasse’s arms around their shoulders and put their arms around his waist; then the three men jogged and stumbled toward and over the finish line as the crowd roared.
"No marathon is easy - there's no fooling this distance," says one runner of a two, three, four hour challenge run on grit and blisters, and those who embrace it often cite the importance of "athletes taking care of each other." "It's not always about crossing the finish line first, but lifting others when they fall," said one. "We do it together." When Beggs, a member of North Down Athletic Club, paused to help Haridasse, sacrificing his own time and standing, he "embodied everything our club stands for - integrity, compassion and true sportsmanship,"
said
Club chair Jamie Stevenson, who hailed him as "a superstar (who) couldn't pass an athlete in distress. What a gentleman!"
Beggs later
said
he saw Haridasse fall a couple of times out of the corner of his eye, and "my instinct was just to go over (and) do the right thing." He doesn't blame those who ran past: "It’s a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. You have to put yourself in front of others. This time, I just happened to put somebody else in front of me...It's one of those things in life - you've got an option at any moment in time. It could be me on my next marathon." As they crossed the finish line, a wheelchair "flew past." He thought it was for Haridasse, but it was for De Oliveira, who'd
passed out:
"He used everything in him to get Ajay across the line."
"It was a split-second decision," De Oliveira later wrote of
stopping
when he saw Haridasse collapse. “I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to help him on my own. In that moment, I thought, ‘God, if someone stops, I’ll stop too and help him. And God was so generous...because two are stronger than one." In the end, De Oliveira's time was 2hr 44min 26sec, followed by Haridasse at 2:44:32 and Beggs at 2:44:36. All three qualified for next year's race, and all plan to run again - "God willing," said De Oliveira. Haridasse later thanked his two rescuers; despite his own near-obliteration, he called the race "the greatest experience ever."
In a searing piece about the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombing that killed five and wounded almost 300 - "
All My Tears, All My Love" -
Dave Zirin contrasted that tragedy with the historic joy of the Marathon. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to run it, registering as K.V. Switzer and dressing in loose sweats. Five miles in, when a rabid official noticed her and tried to force her out, male runners fought him off: "For them, Kathrine Switzer had every right to be there." The moment, Zirin wrote, "gave us all a glimpse of the possible...of the world we'd aspire to live in." This week, Beggs and De Oliveira gave us another.
"If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon."
- Kathrine Switzer
Abby Zimet
Apr 23, 2026
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'This Is a Fight for Humanity': Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize
The Goldman Environmental Foundation
announced
the six winners of the
2026 Goldman Environmental Prize
on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected
wildlife
, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the
climate crisis
The announcement comes as world leaders
have failed
to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President
Donald Trump
, leader of the world's largest historical climate polluter,
has withdrawn
the US from the
Paris Agreement
rolled back
climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to
supercharge
the extraction and use of
fossil fuels
“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies—in the US and globally—it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress."
The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners—Iroro Tanshi of
Nigeria
, Borim Kim of
South Korea
, Sarah Finch of the
United Kingdom
, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia—are women.
'There's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
"I am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,” Goldman said.
The winners also exemplify the prize's 2026 theme "Change Starts Where You Stand," as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate,
biodiversity
, and
environmental justice
As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, "At the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet."
Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.
Iroro Tanshi
Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from
wildfires
Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria's Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.
Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.
"The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but
climate change
has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely," she explained in a video.
Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of "forest guardians" to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.
"My hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like," she said. "Let's stay nimble. Let's try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground."
Borim Kim
Borim Kim helped win Asia's first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.
Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother's age, who died in her home.
"I realized that even home wasn't safe from the climate crisis," she said in a video. "I started looking for what I could do."
Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her
activism
led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to
sue
the South Korean government for
violating
the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.
In August 2024, the country's Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.
"Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state's duty to protect us," Kim said.
Sara Finch
On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.
Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts
oil
and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the
fracking
boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.
In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council's environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas' contribution to the
climate emergency
"It became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill," Finch said in a video.
She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally
securing
a groundbreaking victory from the UK
Supreme Court
in 2024, which has come to be known as "the Finch ruling."
The UK government cited the "Finch ruling" when it
revoked
its backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK's domestic
greenhouse gas emissions
that year.
"It wasn't just a win on Horse Hill," Finch said. "It wasn't even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
Theonila Roka Matbob
Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto's Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.
"Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people," Roka Matbob said in a video.
Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.
This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine's impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment's findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.
"It doesn't mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought," she said.
Alannah Acaq Hurley
As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.
Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup’ik
Indigenous
group in Alaska's Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world's largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.
"The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon," Hurley said in a video. "It didn't take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed—acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when."
Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US
Environmental Protection Agency
and push back against the company's multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold
mining
project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA
canceled
the project via its rarely used veto power.
"It's just really a testament to the power of the people," she said. "We just never stopped until we were heard."
Yuvelis Morales Blanco
Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.
Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia's Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.
“We had nothing but the river—she was like a mother who took care of me," she said in a statement.
However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia's leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.
"Man, I'm like, 'They're going to do that in Wilches?' No sir!'" she recalled in a video.
Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign's momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in
France
in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.
She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches' right to free, prior, and informed consent.
Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders—over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness
has a full tally
. Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.
"I am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we're going to win," she said.
The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube
here
Olivia Rosane
Apr 20, 2026
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Khanna Asks Elon Musk If He's OK With Billionaire Tax After Latest Claims About AI and Mass Layoffs
Rep.
Ro Khanna
put the world's richest man on the spot on Friday after
Elon Musk
acknowledged that
artificial intelligence
and robotics advancements in the future would lead to mass layoffs for human
workers
In a
social media
post, Musk, the tech billionaire and
right-wing
ally to President
Donald Trump
, acknowledged that AI would lead to disruption in the labor market, but claimed that a guaranteed universal income program could make up for it.
"Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with
unemployment
caused by AI," Musk
wrote
. "AI/robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be
inflation
."
Khanna, however, responded to Musk's post by arguing that any universal income program should be at least partly funded by the billionaire tech CEOs who are becoming even richer thanks to AI.
In that case, are you willing to pay a modest trillionaire and billionaire tax to pay for checks to working families?" Khanna
asked
. "We could start with the modest $3000 check
Bernie Sanders
and I have proposed for families under $150,000?"
Both Khanna and Sen.
Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) for months have been talking about the potential threats AI poses to working people, especially if it replaces human labor.
During a roundtable
discussion
with Sanders and author
Naomi Klein
on Tuesday, Khanna likened AI to the technological advances made during the Industrial Revolution, which saw historic gains in productivity, but also in
inequality
"If you look at the Industrial Revolution, for 60 years, worker wages fell... even as Britain became wealthy," Khanna explained. "And so the question, in my view, for AI is, are we going to let a few billionaires, trillionaires, call the shots, or are we going to make sure that the
technology
is actually used in any way to enhance workers, to enhance total productivity?"
Sanders flagged Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos
seeking to raise $100 billion to automate US factories with AI-powered robots as a particularly dangerous threat to the livelihoods of blue-collar workers.
"It means there will no longer be manufacturing jobs in the
United States
or in warehouses,” Sanders said of Bezos' plan. “He wants to get rid of the 600,000 Amazon workers and replace them with robots.
Elon Musk
is converting
Tesla
partially to a robotics company. He wants to produce a million robots a year… What do you think a robot is there for? It’s to replace a union worker.”
Sanders on Friday continued banging the drum about billionaires' plans for AI, and he slammed members of the
Democratic Party
who are reportedly wary of criticizing the industry publicly for fear of its enormous campaign war chest that it's planning to deploy during the upcoming
midterm elections
"With the AI industry planning to spend $300 million this election cycle," Sanders
wrote
on social media, "Democrats are being pressured by consultants to avoid 'antagonizing' them. Unacceptable. Democrats must get
super PACS
out of their primaries.
Citizens United
must be overturned. We must have the courage to take on the AI Oligarchs."
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Apr 17, 2026
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Apr 23, 2026
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Jake Johnson
Apr 23, 2026
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'What Are They Hiding?' Trump's Secret Contract for White House Ballroom Revealed
While the financing of President Donald Trump's planned $400 million
White House
ballroom has been shrouded in mystery for months, government watchdog
Public Citizen
has obtained important new information about the project's funding.
Public Citizen on Tuesday
unveiled
a copy of the funding agreement the
Trump administration
has used for the ballroom project after months of legal wrangling that forced the group to file a lawsuit to compel enforcement of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it made last year.
As
summarized
by The
Washington Post
, the ballroom contract's provisions "allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public."
While dozens of big-name corporate donors—including Amazon,
Apple
, Lockheed Martin, Google, Altria, and Union Pacific Railroad—have been public about their donations to the project, the fact that some donors can choose to remain anonymous is raising serious concerns among ethics experts.
Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of
Baltimore
with a long history of scrutinizing government contracts, told the Post that the contract's anonymity provisions could give the Trump administration an escape hatch from future congressional scrutiny.
"If Congress knocks on the door," Tiefer said, "the White House is going to slam it shut and say, ‘You’re not allowed to know these donors.'"
This means that there is no way to know whether these donors have business before the government, and no way to know if they expect to get something in return for their donations.
Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at
Washington
University in St. Louis, told the Post that the contract's very narrow scope of reviewing for conflicts of interest among donors renders it "nothing more than a sham."
Jon Golinger,
democracy
advocate for Public Citizen, said the key takeaway from the newly unearthed documents is that "anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement."
"The questions this raises are, of the hundreds of millions being funneled in secret, who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?" Golinger added. "The American people deserve answers, and we’ll keep fighting until they get them."
Wendy Liu, Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit to obtain the contract, said the administration's initial refusal to comply with a FOIA request was "flatly unlawful," and "the American people are entitled to transparency over this multimillion-dollar project, and this win gets us a bit closer to knowing the truth."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) blasted the Trump administration's efforts to hide the contract in a statement given to the Post.
“At every turn, President Trump has sought to conceal the facts about his monstrous multimillion-dollar ballroom,” Blumenthal said. “His administration has kept the contract under wraps, the identities of big dollar donors secret, and the American people in the dark about what big corporations have to gain by funding this boondoggle.”
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Apr 22, 2026
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Apr 23, 2026
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‘Craven Attempt to Silence Dissent’: Trump DOJ Slammed for Indictment of Anti-Hate Group
The
civil rights
and progressive advocacy community is rallying to the defense of the Southern
Poverty
Law Center after President Donald Trump's Justice Department indicted the organization on Tuesday on multiple counts of wire fraud and other charges, which the group has condemned as false and politically motivated.
The Justice Department, led by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who previously served as Trump's personal attorney—said Tuesday that a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an
indictment
charging SPLC with "11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering." The Justice Department accused SPLC, which specializes in
monitoring extremist groups and movements
, of "funding" far-right white supremacist organizations such as the
Ku Klux Klan
by paying people to infiltrate them and gather information.
Bryan Fair, SPLC's interim chief executive, said the Trump DOJ's "false allegations" won't "shake our resolve to fight for justice and ensure the promise of the civil rights movement becomes a reality for all." Fair
noted
that SPLC no longer works with paid informants but emphasized that they "risked their lives to infiltrate and inform on the activities of our nation’s most radical and violent extremist groups."
Allied civil rights organizations spoke out in defense of the SPLC and warned that the Trump administration's legal assault on the group is part of a broader attack on those who oppose the far-right and work to protect
democracy
“What is happening to civil rights organizations right now is the most coordinated assault on our sector since
COINTELPRO
," Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights
. "We are the people who train poll
workers
, run food banks, fight discrimination, protect the right to
protest
, and staff domestic violence hotlines. We are the ones who make sure that everyone can live, love, vote, work, study, travel and simply be themselves, free from discrimination. This administration views that as a threat to its power."
"In order to have absolute power, it must dismantle our rights," Wiley added. "And that’s why they’re coming after us."
"We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration."
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the consumer watchdog group
Public Citizen
, called the SPLC indictment "another example of the dangerous, overreaching abuse of executive power so endemic in this authoritarian administration."
“This is a craven attempt to silence dissent by attacking a core civil rights organization focused on combating violent
extremism
," said Gilbert. "We condemn this appalling move from a captured, weak-willed DOJ that is devoid of integrity and has lost sight of its mission under this administration. We stand in
solidarity
with SPLC."
SPLC has repeatedly criticized Trump,
members of his two administrations
, people in his orbit, and extremist groups—such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—that have supported the president's efforts to subvert American democracy,
including with violence on January 6, 2021
"To be clear: Trump’s
FBI
is going after the Southern Poverty Law Center because they infiltrated and exposed the same dangerous
right-wing
extremist groups that many Trump allies are associated with," activist Melanie D'Arrigo
said
in response to the indictment.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, said in a statement that the Trump administration's "continued weaponization of the Justice Department to target organizations speaking out against its agenda is anti-American behavior harkening back to the McCarthy era."
“The Trump administration’s attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center is a direct threat to the values that make America great," said Romero. "In this time of unprecedented peril for our democracy, we urge all Americans of good conscience to join us as we stand in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center."
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IDF Soldiers Say Commanders Turning Blind Eye to Lebanon Looting 'On a Crazy Scale'
While media coverage of Israel's war on
Lebanon
mainly focuses on the slaughter of hundreds of Lebanese civilians and
destruction of entire villages
Israel Defense Forces
commanders are tacitly condoning widespread looting by their troops in Lebanon, according to reporting Thursday.
Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, interviewed a number of IDF personnel who
described
routine theft of items including motorcycles, televisions, paintings, sofas, and rugs from the homes and businesses of some of the more than 1 million Lebanese
forcibly displaced
by Israel's assault on its northern neighbor.
Israel has seized control of more than 50 villages in southern Lebanon as part of its expanding so-called “
Yellow Line
,” with residents who cross it
risking their lives
. Their absence offers IDF troops the opportunity to loot with no Lebanese resistance.
The looting of civilian homes and businesses is formally known as "pillage" and is
strictly prohibited
under numerous Israeli and international laws and conventions. However, according to the IDF soldiers and officers interviewed by Haaretz, senior and junior commanders know about the pillaging but are not punishing offending soldiers.
"It's on a crazy scale," one soldier said. "Anyone who takes something—televisions, cigarettes, tools, whatever—immediately puts it in their vehicle or leaves it off to the side, not inside the army base, but it's not hidden. Everyone sees it and understands."
Soldiers interviewed said commanders' responses range from turning a blind eye to prohibiting looting but not punishing offenders.
"In our unit, they don't even comment or get angry," one soldier claimed. "The battalion and brigade commanders know everything."
Another said that "battalion and brigade commanders do speak up and get angry, but without action, those are empty words."
Some IDF soldiers have even posted videos of their looting on social media—usually with no consequences.
🇮🇱🇱🇧IDF soldiers reportedly filmed looting homes in southern Lebanon.
The video shows troops taking belongings from civilian houses during the ground operations.
Israel’s campaign has displaced over 1 million Lebanese in under three weeks…
pic.twitter.com/RRgjX8T9Rb
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal)
March 20, 2026
Responding to the Haartez report, the IDF claimed:
The military views any harm to civilian property and acts of looting with utmost severity and unequivocally prohibits them. Any allegation or suspicion of such acts is thoroughly examined and addressed with the full weight of the law. In cases where sufficient evidence is established, disciplinary and criminal measures are taken, including prosecution. The Military Police Corps conducts inspections at the northern border crossing as forces exit Lebanon.
However, some military police checkpoints along the border have been removed, and in some locations there have never been any checkpoints at all.
Widespread looting by IDF soldiers has previously been
documented
in
Gaza
and the illegally occupied
West Bank
sometimes
by the perpetrators themselves.
IDF looting has also been reported in
Syria
, where Israel has
seized
as many as 200 square miles of additional territory in 2024, including dozens of border villages, under cover of the
Gaza
genocide
. Israel already conquered and occupied much of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1967.
Israeli forces also
allegedly backed
Palestinians
who looted Gaza aid convoys in order to boost the narrative that it's
Hamas
, not Israel, thatof is preventing
humanitarian aid
from reaching
starving Gazans
Looting of Palestinian property was
particularly rampant
during the
Nakba
, or "catastrophe," when more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed to make way for the establishment of Israel.
The systematic theft of Palestinian land, homes, and property—which continued with the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights in 1967—is accelerating today, and can be witnessed in videos of
settler pogroms
in the West Bank and infamous footage of an American-born settler colonist telling a Palestinian family whose home he's trying to steal that "if I don't steal it, someone else is going to."
The ongoing
apartheid
in Jerusalem.
“Even if i get out of the house, it won’t be returned to u”
pic.twitter.com/5sELdmClH5
— Abed 🕊️ (@tiredpali)
May 1, 2021
Such unchecked usurpation emboldens further thievery. One soldier interviewed by Haaretz for Thursday's article said the pillage would effectively end if there were serious consequences for offenders, pointing to units in which commanders took a tough stance against looting, resulting in negligible levels of the crime.
"Lenient enforcement sends a clear message. If someone were dismissed or jailed, or if military police were stationed at the border, it would stop almost immediately," they said. "But when there is no punishment, the message is obvious."
Brett Wilkins
Apr 23, 2026
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Ala Stanford, who's running for Pennsylvania's 3rd district, has repeatedly claimed that using the term genocide to describe Israel's actions in Gaza is "hurtful" to those accused, even tantamount to using the "N-word."
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Apr 24, 2026
As the Israel lobby's influence grows overwhelmingly
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among Democratic voters, the current frontrunner for one of America's bluest congressional districts has been caught trying to hide financial backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
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'Genocide Has No Place in This World': Activists Sabotage Israeli-Owned Elbit Weapons Factory in UK
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One House Democrat said the soldier charged with placing successful bets using classified information was "probably just copying what he's seeing elsewhere."
Jake Johnson
Apr 24, 2026
The US Justice Department announced Thursday that an American special forces soldier has been arrested and charged for pocketing over $400,000 by betting, on the basis of classified information, on the timing of the Trump administration's illegal abduction of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an active-duty soldier in the US Army who was involved in planning and executing the operation to kidnap Maduro in early January, was charged with "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction," the Justice Department said in a
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