Headlines May 18, 2026 from Democracy Now!

Israel has assassinated Izz al-Din al-Haddad, the head of Hamas’s military wing, in a strike on a residential building in Gaza City on Friday. Al-Haddad was killed alongside his wife and their 19-year-old daughter. Hamas condemned what it called Israel’s “treacherous and cowardly assassination.” On Sunday, Israeli attacks killed at least eight Palestinians across the Gaza Strip; three victims were community kitchen workers, according to Al Jazeera. Israeli attacks have killed at least 871 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called ceasefire took effect last year. This is Walaa Baroud, whose brother was killed in an Israeli strike.

Walaa Baroud: “Every citizen in the Gaza Strip is at risk of being directly hit by the Israeli occupation at any moment. The occupation makes no distinction between charitable workers, journalists, security personnel, Civil Defense workers, security forces, emergency responders or doctors. The Israeli occupation has targeted every segment of the Palestinian people. The Israeli war continues. It has not stopped to this day, and the bloodshed continues, and the number of martyrs increases daily.”

Israel’s Cabinet has approved plans to build a military compound at the former site of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel bulldozed UNRWA’s headquarters in January after seizing the site last year in an act condemned by the U.N. and governments around the world.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities have forced dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem’s al-Bustan district to make way for a biblical theme park called the King’s Garden. The Guardian reports some Palestinians were forced to demolish their own family homes, where multiple generations previously lived.

Israeli forces have begun intercepting ships with a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla off the coast of Cyprus. The Global Sumud Flotilla says Israeli military vessels intercepted the fleet in international waters, actions it condemned as “illegal acts of piracy.” Organizers of the flotilla said Israeli forces had intercepted 17 boats and that contact had been lost with nearly two dozen vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. The flotilla had been attempting to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians. This is an activist aboard one of the aid ships.

Martina Comparelli: “We are being intercepted in broad daylight. The occupation forces have no shame whatsoever. They’re doing it in front of the whole world, because they know that everything they did in the past has been met with full impunity. This means that this is the moment to mobilize as much as we can to go into the streets and show that the people of the world are against their criminal acts. This is how far they’re willing to go to continue their genocide of the Palestinian people.”

More than 50 ships with the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail from the Turkish port city of Marmaris last week. Israeli media reported that Israel’s Navy will transfer the arrested activists to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency due to the rapid spread of Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Sunday’s announcement came a day after the African Union’s public health agency said it had confirmed Ebola infections in the DRC, where over a hundred deaths have been reported. Cases have since been confirmed in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, where residents fear a repeat of deadly outbreaks in 2022 and last year.

Naome Kayondo: “I would like the government to, one, quickly spread awareness about Ebola and how it is spread, to break down this information even for the layest of people to understand, but also start to institute measures to avoid the spread of Ebola in Kampala and Uganda as a whole, so that there is a feeling of safeness, of security against this disease of Ebola.”

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a two-term incumbent, lost his primary after President Trump backed his challenger, Congressmember Julia Letlow. Cassidy is the first GOP senator in nearly a decade to lose renomination. President Trump had vowed revenge against Senator Cassidy after he voted to impeach Trump following the January 6 insurrection. In his concession speech on Saturday, Senator Cassidy made an apparent reference to Trump, saying, “Our country is not about one individual.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy: “And when you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen. You don’t find a reason why.”

President Trump endorsed Representative Julia Letlow, who finished first in Saturday’s primary with 45% of the vote. Louisiana state Treasurer John Fleming came in second with 28%. Both of them will advance to a runoff in June. President Trump took to Truth Social to celebrate Senator Cassidy’s defeat and went after Kentucky’s Republican Congressmember Thomas Massie, who co-authored the bill compelling the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Trump wrote, “Tom Massie of Kentucky, the worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country, is an even bigger insult to our Nation than Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who suffered an unprecedented loss tonight by not even being allowed to run in the Republican Primary. This is the first time such a thing has ever happened to a sitting U.S. Senator!”

New financial disclosure forms released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show President Trump made between $220 million and $750 million in trades in the first three months of 2026, including purchases and sales of securities in companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Apple and Goldman Sachs. According to News of the United States, Trump bought between half a million and a million dollars’ worth of Nvidia stock a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China. The Trump Organization claims the investments are managed exclusively by third-party financial institutions and that neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in investment decisions.

In Washington, D.C., thousands of people gathered on the National Mall Sunday for a taxpayer-funded Christian evangelical service backed by President Trump. The eight-hour lineup featured song, prayer and speeches by government officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who shared the stage with religious leaders Franklin Graham, Cardinal Timothy Dolan and others. President Trump appeared in a prerecorded video that was apparently recorded weeks ago at a separate White House event titled “America Reads the Bible.” Others appearing by video included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Freedom from Religion Foundation blasted the event as an “unprecedented and shocking mix of church and state,” adding, “Our Constitution is godless by design. The government has no authority to organize religious revivals, much less use them to promote a Christian nationalist agenda.”

The Supreme Court on Friday turned down an effort by Virginia Democrats to implement a new congressional map which would have allowed Democrats to gain up to four additional seats in the House. The decision, with no dissents, leaves in place a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court striking down the map. The push to redraw congressional maps began last year when President Trump pressured Republican-led states to come up with new district maps ahead of the midterms.

In Alabama, thousands of people joined a rally at the state Capitol in Montgomery on Saturday, demanding an end to racist gerrymandering by Republican state legislatures in Southern states targeting Black voters. The National Day of Action came in response to the Supreme Court’s April ruling which gutted Voting Rights Act protections for majority-Black districts. Saturday’s protests began in Selma with a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the former Confederate officer and Ku Klux Klan leader, which was the site of the historic 1965 voting rights march that became known as Bloody Sunday. This is Laketa Smith, an organizer who traveled from New Orleans to join Saturday’s march.

Laketa Smith: “Selma has a special place in my heart. I’m a Southern girl, and I believe that suppression of voting rights is what’s happening across the South and the United States. It requires all hands on deck.”

Five unions representing more than 3,500 workers for the Long Island Rail Road have staged their first strike in more than 30 years, bringing all train service to a halt on North America’s largest commuter railroad. The strike follows three years of failed contract negotiations. Union leaders say wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living and that workers haven’t received raises since 2022. More than 270,000 daily riders rely on the service to commute between New York City and Long Island.​