The United Nations’ restraining order against Tehran over its nuclear program has been condemned by Iran’s parliament. Iran claims to have the authority to enrich uranium.
Published On 28 Sep 2025
Tony Blair, who was British prime minister during the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 on the heels of false claims about ww2 and is regarded by many in the Arab world and the United Kingdom as a “war criminal,” has contributed to the development of “day after” plans for Israel’s war on Gaza.
According to Israeli and Western media reports, the highly divisive figure is mentioned in American President Donald Trump’s 21-point plan, which was presented to Arab and Muslim leaders. It will become the de facto governor-general of the besieged and bombarded enclave after Hamas is forced out.
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Blair’s ultimate role is still undetermined, according to some reports, but the details are clear.
What Blair’s role, what we know about Blair’s role, and what it would mean for everyone involved if everything went smoothly, are presented in this article.
After numerous failed attempts to put an end to the genocidal war in Gaza, Trump and his team have created a new proposal that claims to leave the door open for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, something Israel has repeatedly rejected.
In exchange for the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli military jails, the plan calls for the release of all 48 of Gaza’s prisoners to be immediately released.
Hamas would also be forced to disarm, grant amnesty to those who refuse to leave Gaza, and allow others to do so.
Crucially, it states that anyone who leaves “voluntarily” will be able to return to their homes and that no Palestinians will be made to leave their territory.
In practice, this would signal a U-turn for Trump, who publicly criticized ethnic cleansing in February by arguing that the US should “take control” Gaza and permanently relocate its more than two million residents, including half of them children. Additionally, he shared a video of his “Gaza Riviera” vision that was created using artificial intelligence.
The new proposal claims to provide a “credible pathway” to Palestinian statehood, which is a further turning point for the Republican president, who has been reluctant to support the two-state solution in response to a wave of Western nations like the UK, France, and Canada.
The notorious GHF, the humanitarian organization they founded, is believed to be under US and Israeli control. Children among the countless others who have been killed by Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries operating at GHF sites have been shot by Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries.
The GHF and the Gaza Riviera plans have been linked to Israeli figures and a consulting firm in the US called Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In response to a late-july inquiry by the UK parliamentary committee, BCG claimed an investigation it conducted found that some of its US-based employees had evaded risk controls to work on GHF and “post-war reconstruction” for the Palestinian enclave.
On the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, Trump’s plan to broker a grand bargain was presented to the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, and Turkiye.
The Israeli military’s plan appears to be provisional at best as it moves forward with a plan to annex the occupied West Bank and continues to systematic destroy and seize Gaza City and starve Palestinians there. Hamas and Israel have not made any official comments on it.
The former UK prime minister, who fervently supported then-US President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, is reportedly involved with his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which claims to “turn bold ideas into reality.”
Apparently, Trump’s plan includes appointing him as head of the newly established Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA), which would oversee Gaza after Hamas was ousted for a number of years.
GITA would seek a UN mandate, which Arab states have already stressed they will need, and would also initially criticize the Palestinian Authority (PA) because Israel continues to say it won’t let the PA assume a leadership position in the future.
Before taking over from GITA, which will oversee the reconstruction of the Palestinian enclave, the PA is urged to engage in serious reforms, obtain a revised constitution, and hold elections for a new president and parliament.
A new Palestinian security force would be established in Gaza through the deployment of an international stabilization force primarily drawn from Arab and Muslim nations.
The president of Indonesia, the nation with the highest Muslim population, Prabowo Subianto, declared his willingness to send in thousands of peacekeeping forces and said, “Shalom,” at the end of his speech.
Blair hasn’t made any comments on the new suggestion. His organization called the report a “lie” in January 2024 when Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Blair had met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former head of the Israeli military in Israel in connection with a “voluntary resettlement” plan by Palestinians in Gaza.
When Blair resigned as prime minister of the UK in 2007, he was immediately appointed as the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, joining the US, European Union, and Russia. His official duties included assisting with the establishment of Palestinian institutions, economic development, and coordination with reforms in governance and security.
He officially left the position at the beginning of 2015, but he has since carried on with projects at his school.
He therefore has some local experience.
However, the majority of people in the area did not enjoy the experience, especially the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed during the conflict or the millions of people whose lives were changed by the region’s invasion.
Blair is still viewed as a “war criminal” by critics in the Middle East and the UK today, and he continues to be so.
Despite the fundamental role that Britain played in the conflict for more than a century, Palestinian commentators claim Blair failed to serve as peace envoy. Some claim that he impeded statehood as a friend of Israel, but that he did little to stop the illegal settlement expansion and settler violence during his time in office.
Blair has remained a divisive figure in British politics domestically, as evidenced by the Iraq invasion’s impact. Some commentators were shocked and skeptical about his involvement in shaping the future of Gaza.
Tony Blair was the obvious choice for Trump and Netanyahu to rule Gaza once it became clear that Satan was completely occupied elsewhere.
Beyond Blair, the 21-point plan has been criticized as a neocolonial takeover of Gaza with no real assurances that a capable Palestinian leadership will be able to rule in the future. This is also condemned online and in some media outlets.
In Israel, the plan has been portrayed in media as a far better option than more extreme ideas that are floating around in Washington and Tel Aviv, particularly those that involve forcing as many Palestinians out of the region as Israel destroys the small infrastructure that supports their basic needs and causes daily civilian deaths.
A Palestinian father ran into frantically searching for his injured son as Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili reported from Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital as he reported on the bombardment’s rise of casualties.
Published On 28 Sep 2025
A powerful myth has permeated the West in the decades since the Cold War ended. The “smart” sanction, a foreign policy tool meant to be a clean, precise, and humane substitute for war, is a myth. The idea is that a successful attempt can be made to defeat a hostile regime’s main revenue sources and finances without causing harm to its citizens.
This delusion is risky. The sanctions regime on Iran was far from a surgical strike, as our recently published research on the subject revealed, but it was a sledgehammer that defied the middle class, the group that provided the best chance for a more moderate and stable future. In this regard, the West’s major strategic failure is the devastation of the Iranian middle class.
The modern middle class’s rise in Iran took a long time to come about. A secular, professional class of civil servants, professionals, and managers who funded the country’s modern infrastructure, which was funded by oil rents, was the birth of the Pahlavi dynasty. The Islamic Republic continued to expand the middle class after the revolution of 1979, bringing millions of previously underprivileged families into a new world of opportunity and education.
The political foundation for change was this educated, powerful class. In the late 1990s, President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement based its power there. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests were led by the faces of the 2009 Green Movement’s crowds. The entrepreneurs who created localized versions of Amazon (Digikala) and Uber (Snapp) that provided millions of their fellow citizens in Tehran were responsible for creating a vibrant tech scene from scratch.
A contemporary Iran with a future bent on this was its engine. Sanctions destroyed everything.
How can we be certain that sanctions were to blame for this, rather than just the regime’s ongoing mismanagement? Beyond anecdotes and partisan claims, we had to look beyond the evidence to find out. We constructed a “virtual Iran” using data in our peer-reviewed study that was published by the European Journal of Political Economy.
We created a data-driven twin of Iran using a potent statistical technique known as the synthetic control method, a composite weighted average of comparable nations like Tunisia, Qatar, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, and Indonesia, which perfectly mirrored Iran’s economic and social trajectory before 2012 but was never the target of international sanctions.
Without sanctions, this rigorous analysis provided a reliable, empirical baseline to assess the actual damage. Iran has been the target of a number of sanctions since its radical foreign policy began in 1992, but the intensity and scope of those sanctions are much higher than they were in the previous years.
The outcomes are heartbreaking. Iran’s middle class began to shrink significantly in 2012 in comparison to its sanction-free equivalent in our model. Between 2012 and 2019, there was a 17 percentage point difference between Iran’s middle class’s potential and actual size. The cumulative effect was devastating, with the middle class now 28 percentage points smaller than it should be, one year after US President Donald Trump launched his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
These are not abstract numbers. There are literally millions of these people. They are the retired engineers, doctors, teachers, small business owners, and retirees who finally gained economic security before the sanctions regime, which ended it all, caused by.
You can see it in the way Iranians view themselves, not just in the way our model tells the story. A global representative survey (World Value Survey) conducted in 2005 revealed that 79 percent of the respondents were confidently classified as middle-income. They had arrived. That figure was down to less than 64 percent in the early 2020s. Economists on the ground in Iran have also confirmed that it is a devastating collapse.
This economic collapse was directly caused by foreseeable economic mechanisms, not by accident. First, the sanctions deprived the nation of the skilled, well-paying jobs that needed to be created. The money that would have been used to build factories and finance tech startups has vanished.
Second, they slowed the trade of the nation. The backbone of any healthy society is formed by thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, which were suddenly unable to import essential components or export finished goods.
Finally, and perhaps most cruelly, sanctions caused a flurry of inflation. Families’ life savings were wiped out as the currency fell. This was a devastating blow to the middle class’s very core, which included salaried professionals and pensioners on fixed incomes. They were referred to as the “new poor.” In consequence, informal employment has increased significantly.
Sanctions did not operate in a vacuum, of course. They entered a country with political corruption and mismanagement that the Iranian government has already hampered. However, these already present flaws are explicitly explained in our analysis. A difficult economic situation turned into an unavoidable social catastrophe as a result of the sanctions.
A story about economics transforms into a story about profound injustice at this point. The middle class is a nation’s most potent force for moderation and stability. It supports gradual reforms, serves as a buffer against extremism, and has the resources to sustain organized political movements.
Western governments cleared the way for the very hardliners they claimed to oppose by crushing this group, not just creating hardship. The ruling party now had the ability to blatantly blame all suffering on a foreign country, while its economic dominance gave it even greater control over a famined populace.
The ultimate irony of “maximum pressure” is that it created ideal conditions for the most extreme elements of the regime to flourish. It is much harder to organize for democratic reform when people’s top priority is putting food on the table. Desperation fosters authoritarians, but it also fosters instability, which in turn gives rise to democracy.
Sanctions were portrayed as a surgical strike, but in reality they were a self-defeating economic war against a whole society.
Those who pushed for them to impose severe UN sanctions on Iran today should reevaluate their position: Are we merely reducing suffering and empowering the very actors they claim to oppose, or are we just making things worse?
No modifications to previous sanctions are made. They are a foolish gamble that will ultimately result in the punishment of the nation’s future leaders rather than its current ones.
In what was Germany’s largest Gaza protest to date, 100 000 people in Berlin staged a demonstration in support of Palestinians. The demonstration, known as “All Eyes on Gaza,” demanded that Israel’s support be ended. Participants were filmed undergoing violent arrests by police.
Published On 28 Sep 2025
