Archive April 30, 2025

Over 40 countries claim that Israel’s ban on the UN’s aid agency violates international human rights law, and Michael Lynk examines the ICJ case.

Samar Abu Elouf, a Palestinian photographer, captured the image Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged Nine, which was published last year for The New York Times, in this month and won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year award.

Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, where at least 52, 365 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, resulted in Ajjour’s death, with both of his arms falling off. Although the boy’s head and armless torso are partially obscured in the award-winning photo, his emptiness is still evident in his eyes.

Ajjour, who recently spoke to Al Jazeera, recalls how he felt when his mother informed him that he had lost his arms: “I started crying. My mental state and I were very depressed. Due to Israel’s criminal blockade of medical supplies and all other supplies essential for human survival, he was then forced to undergo surgery without an anaesthetic, a practice that has always been practiced in Gaza. I screamed loudly because I couldn’t bear the pain. The hallways were filled with my voice.

How will I be able to hug you, the child’s mother asked, according to Abu Elouf.

Abu Elouf’s portrayal of Ajjour captures the cataclysmic suffering Israel has inflicted on the children of the Gaza Strip with the full support of the United States. The UN Children’s Fund reported that some 1, 000 children in Gaza had already lost one or both legs just two months after the genocidal assault began in mid-December 2023.

Fast forward to the present day and the UN’s warning that besieged territory was causing at least 100 children’s deaths or injuries every day. How many pictures do you need to depict a genocide, though, according to legend, a picture is worth a thousand words?

Today, April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, another bloody historical occurrence in which the United States played a significant role in the massacre that continues apace in Gaza. Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old girl who was killed in a US-supplied napalm attack outside the South Vietnamese village of Trang Bang in June 1972, also served as the face and body of that conflict.

The now-famous image of Phuc was captured by Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut as she ran naked down the street in the aftermath of the apocalyptic apocalypse, her skin scorched, and her face pictured in agony. The photo, which is sometimes referred to as The Terror of War as “Napalm Girl,” won the 1973 World Press Photo of the Year award.

In an interview with CNN about the photograph’s 50th anniversary in 2022, Phuc recalled the incident: “Unexpectedly, there was the fire everywhere, and my clothes were burned up by the fire. I still remember what I thought. I pondered, “Oh my goodness, I got burned, I’ll be ugly, and people will see me] differently.”

In any remotely civilized world, it should be obvious that any child or adult must endure this, whether physically or psychologically. After being hospitalized for 14 months, Phuc continued to experience excruciating pain, suicidal thoughts, and shame over having her naked and mutilated body exposed for public viewing.

Napalm was only one of many tools in a US-backed toolkit that included human body incineration and other disfigurement techniques to protect the planet from capitalism. The millions of tonnes of ammunition that the US dropped on Vietnam during the war have still left them with the death toll.

Half a century after the end of the war, Agent Orange, a lethal defoliant, was used by the US to swathe vast areas of Vietnam.

The late American author Susan Sontag argued that the purpose of images like those that appeared on the front pages of the world’s newspapers in 1972, including a naked South Vietnamese child sprayed by American soldiers and running down a highway with her arms open, screaming in pain, likely contributed to the public’s disgust with the war than the ten hours of televised barbarities.

Despite Ut’s publication of his photo, US-backed barbarisms in Vietnam continued for three more years. The fact that nearly every image from the Gaza Strip could be labeled The Terror of War just proves that barbarism is still raging at its best.

The desensitizing effect on the public cannot be understated in the current era of social media, where both still images and videos are reduced to flashy visuals for instant consumption, even when it’s talking about nine-year-old children who have both of their arms blown off.

Abu Elouf stated in an Instagram post on April 18: “I always have, and still do, wish to capture the photo that would stop this war, – that would stop the killing, the death, the starvation.”

What is the value of a photo, she continued, “But if our photos can’t stop all this tragedy and horror, then what’s the point? What image do you need to see to understand what’s happening in Gaza?

What, in the end, is the worth of an opinion article, on that depressing note?

Eric Ham, a political analyst, discusses Trump’s defiance and his low approval ratings in his first 100 days.

President Donald Trump repeatedly clashed with Terry Moran of ABC News about whether Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported by the United States government to El Salvador in March disregarding a court order, had “MS13” – representing the MS-13 gang – tattooed on his knuckles.

During the ABC interview that aired on April 29, Trump referred to an image he shared on his Truth Social platform on April 18 showing what he said was Abrego Garcia’s tattoo.

The image shows a left hand with four tattoos, one on each finger: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with the letter X for eyes, a cross, and a skull. It also displays an “M”, “S”, “1”, and a “3” in a printed font above these tattoos. The words describing the pictorial tattoos also appear below each one in a small, printed typeface.

Trump insisted Abrego Garcia’s hand says “MS13”, which Moran said was disputed and that some had said the tattoos were “interpreted that way”. The president said, “Don’t do that. M, S, one, three, it says M, S, one, three.”

Moran countered, “That was photoshopped.”

He tried to move on, but Trump continued. “Terry, do you want me to show you the picture?” Trump said. “He had M, S as clear as you can be. Not interpreted.”

After Moran again tried to shift to a question about Ukraine, Trump said Abrego Garcia has “got ‘MS13’ on his knuckles”.

The interview goes far beyond the impression Trump left when he shared an image on Truth Social of what he said were Abrego Garcia’s finger tattoos, as he insisted that the “MS13” tattoo was part of the evidence used to deport him.

When we asked the White House for comment, a spokesperson said any law enforcement or immigration official with on-the-ground experience could link Abrego Garcia’s tattoos to the MS-13 gang.

The letters and figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols do not appear in other recent photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including one that Salvadoran government officials took when he met Senator Chris Van Hollen Jr on April 17. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele shared it on X.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹 pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn

The tattoos also do not appear in a family photo of Abrego Garcia shared by immigration advocates.

MS-13 experts told PolitiFact that none of the pictorial tattoos in the photograph is a known signifier of MS-13.

The Abrego Garcia case and gang allegations

The Trump administration deported Abrego Garcia on March 15 to CECOT, a Salvadoran mega-prison where it has sent hundreds of Salvadoran and Venezuelan men who were previously in the US. But Abrego Garcia had a protection order that was supposed to prevent him from being deported to El Salvador. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers acknowledged that they were aware of the restriction and, in court filings, called his removal an “oversight” and “an administrative error”.

The Trump administration has said Abrego Garcia and others deported to El Salvador were MS-13 gang members, which Abrego Garcia and lawyers have denied in court filings. All the men were deported without due process; the government did not present evidence of their gang membership before a judge in the deportation case, and the migrants were not given the opportunity to defend themselves. The New York Times reported that most of the 238 men deported to El Salvador have neither criminal records in the US nor documented links to a Venezuelan prison gang.

When Abrego Garcia was arrested in March 2019, a police informant told police he was an MS-13 member, according to a report known as a “gang field interview sheet”. A judge initially ruled in 2019 that government evidence about Abrego Garcia’s gang membership was “trustworthy” and was upheld on appeal; later, two federal judges ruled that the government’s information was unsupported. It was based on clothing Abrego Garcia wore at the time of his 2019 arrest and information from what a since-fired police officer called a confidential source.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers say the MS-13 gang membership accusation was fabricated. They have sought to reverse his deportation, but the government has argued that since he left US jurisdiction, it cannot take action.

The US Supreme Court ruled that the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release. Abrego Garcia has since been moved to a lower-security prison, according to news reports.

What do the tattoos in the photograph mean?

As for the pictorial tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hand, marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.

“I don’t believe a dangerous individual would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand,” said Liliana Castaneda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience.

Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, “The tattoos in the photo don’t look familiar to me.”

Such designs are out of character with typical MS-13 tattoos, Kennedy said.

“Within MS-13 culture, such markings would likely be frowned upon and even viewed as a sign of cowardice, as they could be interpreted as an attempt to hide or downplay gang affiliation,” Kennedy said. “That type of concealment goes against the gang’s norms, which often demand bold, visible demonstrations of identity and loyalty.”

Charles Katz, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, concurred.

While Katz said local law enforcement would be more familiar with specific tattoo designs in a given region, “I have worked on issues related to MS-13 for the past 15 years in El Salvador and the US, and I have never seen tattoos or graffiti suggesting that these particular tattoos are associated with MS-13.”

Experts said tattoos can be helpful in identifying gang members, as long as they are one of multiple pieces of evidence.

“While police gang experts often use so-called gang tattoos as circumstantial evidence of alleged gang involvement, in my experience, they never use tattoos alone as definitive evidence of gang affiliation,” said David M Kennedy, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who studies gangs. “This is particularly true where, as here, the tattoos are ambiguous and may reflect things other than gang ties, such as religion, loss, personal transformation or cultural identity.”

Our ruling

Trump said Abrego Garcia “had ‘MS-13’ on his knuckles tattooed … He had MS as clear as you can be, not interpreted.”

The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols do not appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including one shared by the Salvadoran government.

Experts in MS-13 and other gangs say the pictorial tattoos shown are not typical designs for MS-13 or other gangs, and they say that several of those tattoos are commonly used by people unaffiliated with gangs.