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Washington, DC – United States President Donald Trump has said he will sign an executive order labelling fentanyl, and its core precursors, as a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD), in the latest instance of his administration using increasingly militarised language to justify its operations against drug cartels and smugglers.

The announcement on Monday comes after the Trump administration’s repeated references to drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists” and its designation of Latin American cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”.

The administration has repeatedly claimed that international drug smuggling groups are not criminal networks bent on profit, but organisations aimed at destabilising the US.

“There’s no doubt that America’s adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States, in part because they want to kill Americans,” Trump said on Monday during a White House event.

“That’s why today, I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country,” he added.

“With this historic executive order I will sign today, we’re formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.”

It was not immediately clear if the label would have any practical impact, or what bearing it would have on fentanyl legally bought for medical use.

The executive order called simply for a series of actions from the heads of executive agencies to “eliminate the threat of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to the United States”.

Under current US law, which the president cannot unilaterally change, a weapon of mass destruction is defined as “any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors”.

The definition includes “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector”, as well as “any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life”.

It also defines a WMD as any “destructive device”, including traditional bombs, missiles, grenades or items that can be converted to expel a projectile.

Increased threats

The Trump administration has used efforts to mitigate fentanyl smuggling as a pretext for increasing tariffs on Mexico and China.

The administration has also used its wider campaign against drugs to justify strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific – in what rights groups say could amount to extrajudicial killings – and to justify surging military assets off the coast of Venezuela.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to begin land attacks on Venezuelan territory to counter drug smuggling.

He repeated the threat on Monday. “We’re going to start hitting them on land, which is a lot easier to do, frankly,” he said.

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro has maintained that the US pressure campaign is aimed at toppling his government.

Despite the heightened rhetoric against Venezuela, regional experts have noted that the country, and South America, are not known hubs for fentanyl production or exports.

“To be perfectly clear, there is no fentanyl coming from Venezuela or elsewhere in South America,” John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said during an expert briefing earlier this month.

The Israeli military will demolish 25 residential buildings in the occupied West Bank’s Nur Shams refugee camp this week, according to local authorities.

Abdallah Kamil, the governor of the Tulkarem governorate where Nur Shams is located, told the AFP news agency on Monday that he was informed of the planned demolition by the Israeli Defence Ministry body COGAT.

Faisal Salama, the head of the popular committee for the Tulkarem camp, which is near Nur Shams, said the demolition order would affect 100 family homes.

Israel launched Operation Iron Wall in the occupied West Bank in January. It says the campaign is aimed at combating armed groups in refugee camps in the northern West Bank.

Human rights organisations have warned that Israel is using many similar tactics it used in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza to seize and control territory across the occupied West Bank.

“This is part of a wider campaign that has persisted for about a year, targeting three refugee camps and demolishing or damaging a total of about 1,500 homes in the past year, and forcibly displacing 32,000 Palestinians,” said Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from the West Bank’s Ramallah.

Palestinians and human rights organisations say such demolitions are an attempt to “cage in” Palestinians and alter the geography in the West Bank, she added.

On Monday, a dozen displaced Nur Shams residents held a demonstration in front of armoured Israeli military vehicles blocking their way back to the camp. They protested against the demolition orders and demanded the right to return to their homes.

The head of the Palestinian National Council, Rouhi Fattouh, said that the Israeli decision is part of “ethnic cleansing and continuous forced displacement”, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

‘Social death’

Omer Bartov, a professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, told Al Jazeera that Israel was “dehumanising” the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank.

“[It is creating] a growing situation of social death, which is a term that was used to describe what happened to Jewish populations in Germany in the 1930s. That is, that your population, the Jewish population of Israel, increasingly has no contact with the people on the other side, and it exists as if they don’t exist,” he said.

“It dehumanises the population because you treat it as a population that has to be controlled, and it dehumanises the people doing it because they have to think of that population as being lesser than human.”

Aisha Dama, a camp resident whose four-floor family home, housing about 30 people, is among those to be demolished, told the AFP she felt alone against the military.

“On the day it happened, no one checked on us or asked about us,” she said.

“All my brothers’ houses are to be destroyed, all of them, and my brothers are already on the streets,” said Siham Hamayed, another camp resident.

Nur Shams, along with other refugee camps in the West Bank, was established after the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel.