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MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Palestinians survey the damage to an apartment building after an Israeli military strike killed several people in Gaza. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
In short:
At
least 30 people have been killed in Gaza as Israel carried out its
heaviest air strikes in weeks, according to local authorities.
The
strikes occurred one day after Israel accused Hamas of new ceasefire
violations and a day before the Rafah crossing along the border with
Egypt is set to open.
What's next?
Gaza's
Health Ministry has recorded 509 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire
since the start of the ceasefire on October 10, 2025.
Israeli strikes have killed at least 30 people in Gaza, marking one of the highest death tolls since the October ceasefire,Palestinian health officials said.
The
Israeli military said it had targeted commanders and sites belonging to
Palestinian militant group Hamas and its ally, Islamic Jihad, in
response to a breach of a US-brokered ceasefire agreed last October
after two years of war in Gaza.
Hamas, which retains control of just under half of Gaza, said Israel had violated the truce.
It did not say whether any of its members or sites were struck in Saturday's attacks.
Strikes
hit locations throughout Gaza, including lethal ones on an apartment
building in Gaza City and a tent camp in Khan Younis, officials at
hospitals that received the bodies said.
The casualties
included two women and six children from two different families. An air
strike also hit a police station in Gaza City, killing at least 11 and
wounding others, Shifa Hospital director Mohamed Abu Selmiya said.
The
series of strikes also came a day before the Rafah crossing along the
border with Egypt is set to open in Gaza's southernmost city.
All of the territory's border crossings have been closed throughout almost the entire war.
Palestinians
see Rafah as a lifeline for the tens of thousands in need of treatment
outside the territory, where the majority of medical infrastructure has
been destroyed.
The crossing's opening, limited at first, marks the first major step in the second phase of the US-brokered ceasefire.
A Palestinian man surveys the damage to an apartment building after the Israeli strike on Saturday.
(AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
Reopening
borders is among the challenging issues on the agenda for the phase now
underway, which also includes demilitarising the strip after nearly two
decades of Hamas rule and installing a new government to oversee
reconstruction.
Death toll in Gaza still rising
Even as the ceasefire agreement inches forward, Saturday's strikes are a reminder that the death toll in Gaza is still rising.
Nasser
Hospital said the strike on the tent camp caused a fire to break out,
killing seven, including a father, his three children and three
grandchildren.
Meanwhile,
Shifa Hospital said the Gaza City apartment building strike killed three
children, their aunt and grandmother on Saturday morning, while the
strike on the police station killed at least 11, including four police
women, and inmates held at the station.
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said Palestinians civilians were also killed in the strike.
Hamas
called Saturday's strikes "a renewed flagrant violation" and urged the
US and other mediating countries to push Israel to stop strikes.
A
military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with
protocol, could not comment on the specific targets, but said Israel
carried out overnight and Saturday strikes in response to what the army
said were ceasefire violations the day before.
Israel's
military, which has hit targets on both sides of the ceasefire's yellow
line, has said strikes since October have been in response to
violations of the agreement.
In a statement on Friday, the military said they killed three militants exiting a tunnel in an Israeli-controlled zone in Rafah.
Gaza's Health Ministry has recorded 509 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since the start of the ceasefire on October 10.
The
ministry, which is part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed
casualty records that are seen as generally reliable by UN agencies and
independent experts.
Stephen Miller is considered one of the most powerful advisers in Donald Trump's inner circle. (ABC News: Kylie Silvester)
When Stephen Miller was in high school, his classmates made a short film about him and called it "Strange Times at Samohi".
At
Santa Monica High, or Samohi, as it is known, Miller stood out as an
outspoken teenager who forced his conservative views on his ardently
liberal classmates.
He would go
on to be Donald Trump's hype man at campaign rallies, his speechwriter
and eventually the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and
homeland security.
He is the
architect of the Trump administration's hardline approach to
immigration, but before he cracked Washington, Miller ran for student
council.
And part of a pitch he made to his classmates was featured in the amateur documentary they made about him.
"I
will say and I will do things that no-one else in their right mind
would say or do," Miller said, riling up the crowd before him.
In
this very early campaign, the platform he ran on was that students
should not be required to pick up rubbish because "janitors are paid to
do it for us".
Stephen Miller was campaigning in high school and was so provocative, his classmates made a documentary about him. (Supplied)
Miller
knew he was different, but that only made him louder. Opinionated and
forthright, the young firebrand borrowed a quote from Theodore Roosevelt
for his high school yearbook.
"There
can be no 50-50 Americanism in this country. There is room here for
only 100 per cent Americanism, only for those who are American and
nothing else," he wrote.
Miller
waged war on what he considered to be "political correctness out of
control" at his school. He thought it was a problem that the school
communicated in Spanish to its large Latino cohort and, for him, the
staff and students weren't patriotic enough.
In
the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Miller challenged the
school administration, accusing it of breaching the state code that
required each public school to perform "appropriate patriotic exercises
each day". He said it took months of campaigning, but the school did
bring back the Pledge of Allegiance.
"Stephen
made it his business at the school to be heard and be known. He was
outspoken and a provocateur in every sense of the word," a former classmate told NPR years later.
The
teenager even authored a now-famous letter to the editor at his local
newspaper where he blasted his teachers, saying they would "denounce the
US as wickedly imperialistic" and "insult and demean the president".
In
the final line, he did what so many political operators do and launched
a call to action: "If you feel, like me, that political correctness has
crossed the line, call the school or the district. Ask them to leave
their liberal agendas at the front gate. Enough politics, it's time for
common sense."
A page from Stephen Miller's yearbook includes a quote about "100 per cent Americanism". (Supplied)
Even then, Miller was using populist language to rally for his cause.
By
the age of 16, he had figured out these views could generate attention
and attention might lead to power. On the airwaves, he tuned into the
conservative Larry Elder Show and one day, he wrote the radio host a
letter about his so-called unpatriotic school. Elder would later say he invited Miller on the show, where the teenager "just blew everybody away".
While some teenagers might stumble, Miller was confident and articulate and impressed Elder.
This
would be a pivotal moment because it was this performance that lifted
Miller from high school student to a regular on a nationally syndicated
radio program where he could preach to a conservative crowd, gain
experience, momentum and in Elder, a mentor.
By the time he finished high school, Miller had reportedly been on the show 70 times.
And by age 31, he was in Donald Trump's White House.
"The president loves Stephen," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the ABC. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Now,
Stephen Miller holds an immense amount of power. He is one of Trump's
most senior advisors and one of the few who fared well enough in his
first term to be welcomed back for the second.
And
for his undying loyalty to Trump, Miller's ideas have rocketed to the
top of the agenda. He has seemingly unchecked scope and power to unleash
those ideas on America, on the people within it who might never be
citizens, and those who dare to try to cross its border.
Because
within that teenager, out of place at his large, liberal public high
school, were the seeds of the hardline immigration policy terrorising
communities across the United States today.
From a family of migrants
Miller
did not always go to a public high school. His family had once been
able to afford to enrol him in private education but a series of
financial misfortunes and legal woes beset the Miller family and their
middle boy, Stephen, would have to go public.
He
is reported to have grown up in a moderate household, with a family
member telling the ABC that Miller's views are "self-made".
In
speeches and public comments, Miller talks about "forces of wickedness
and evil" that need to be defeated. He rallies crowds against the
Democratic Party that he calls a "domestic extremist organisation". He
talks about "enemies" and how determined he is to save "civilisation, to
save the West".
Executing
policies he has been instrumental in devising, Immigration Customs and
Enforcement (ICE) agents have been patrolling US streets, have detained
tens of thousands of people, and in violent clashes in Minnesapolis,
have killed two American citizens.
The
United States has long known Miller was driving immigration policy, but
as the crackdown across the country escalated, he became more resolute,
more determined to prevail.
Miller's views and his fierce rhetoric sit very uncomfortably against his own family's story.
Through
his mother, Miriam, Miller is a descendent of Wolf-Leib Glosser, who
left a small Jewish village in what is now Belarus for the journey to
New York City at the turn of the last century.
Glosser,
his family and his community were facing escalating violence from
anti-Jewish pogroms and as the patriarch, he set sail in search of a
safer, more prosperous life in America, arriving on Ellis Island in
1903.
Whether
he likes it or not, the story of how Stephen Miller came to be is
partly an immigrant story. As his uncle has said, it is a "classically
American tale".
Miller's
ancestors settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and started a retail
empire, including this Glosser Brothers store pictured in 1922. (Supplied: David Glosser/Johnstown Area Heritage Association)
Glosser's
children and wife soon made the voyage across the Atlantic too,
including the man who would become Miller's great-grandfather.
More
than a century later, Miller has risen to the highest echelons of
American power and is using that to carry out a fierce attack on
immigration across the country that gave his family safe passage.
Miriam's brother, David Glosser, told the ABC he watched in horror as his nephew betrayed his family's history.
"It's
a complete repudiation of pretty much everything that our family, our
family history and our family's mores and principles has stood for," he
told the ABC.
On the
campaign trail, Miller has been dispatched to the small Pennsylvania
town of Johnstown. It's here where the Glosser family settled and built a
retail empire and on stage, Miller has been quick to claim that
connection.
During the 2024
campaign, he told the crowd: "This city is in my blood, it is in my
bones, it is in my veins. Generations of my family are buried in the
soil here."
In Republican
circles, he's widely considered to be a very effective and skilled
political operator, be it making or writing speeches or taking Donald
Trump's whims and turning them into real policy enacted on real people.
His language is acerbic and vitriolic, whether he's crossing into CNN or standing in front of a crowd of Trump faithful.
Stephen Miller opened for Donald Trump at Johnstown, where his family has very deep roots. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
In
Johnstown, the big turnout ate up his promises about returning to the
glory of the previous century before "globalists" choked the town.
He told them Johnstown needed to be saved, and that Donald J Trump could "reclaim America for American citizens."
David
Glosser has taken issue with Miller's messages at Johnstown, watching
on during a previous speech in Trump's first campaign.
"Stephen had the nerve to imply that my family would be supportive of the ideals that Trump was presenting," he said.
"You
could hear my dad turning over in his grave as the speech was said and
my mum was horrified. That's absolutely not who they were."
Jean
Guerrero, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, visiting
professor at the University of Southern California and immigration
reporter, authored Hate Monger, a book that investigated the making of
Miller.
"It's the machismo.
That idea of brute force being the rule of the land: there's something
about that that really appeals to Stephen that makes him be able to
completely disregard everything else about what he learned from his
ancestors," she said.
The ABC asked the White House and Miller about that apparent contradiction and his uncle's statements.
In
response, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "Stephen Miller is one
of President Trump's most trusted and longest-serving aides."
"The president loves Stephen."
The decision to change America
In the 1990s, California saw protests against anti-immigration moves made by the state. (Getty: Bruce Chambers)
It
might be tempting to think of teenage Miller as a little red fish
swimming against the current in the big blue pool of California, but the
Golden State was different then.
For
most of the 1990s, California had a Republican governor in Pete Wilson
and anti-immigration sentiment was in the street and on the airwaves.
Some of the messages from that time are recognisable in the rhetoric Trump and Miller use today.
"California
was experiencing a significant demographic shift. White people became
the minority in the state for the first time," Guerrero said.
"And you had conservative politicians who were railing against what they called an invasion at the border."
Republican
Pete Wilson was governor of California for most of the 1990s and
championed Proposition 187, a state law designed to deny most social
services to immigrants who did not have legal status. (Getty: James Leynse)
Among
white conservative men, there was a fear "they were being overtaken and
replaced", Guerrero said, and characters like Miller used that
perceived victimhood "to transform conservative politics."
"It
couldn't have come out of anywhere besides California in the 1990s,
where, in fact, white conservative men were becoming a minority and they
saw themselves as being under attack," she said.
In
California, Miller slipped in social class. His family had come into
hard times and as this was happening, society around him was changing.
He
moved from high school, to college, to Washington DC. When he arrived
in the capital, what he lacked in political experience, he made up for
in conservative connections and a resume that included more spots in
national media.
By this time,
he had again gained attention, speaking on network television and
writing scathing op eds about the "radical left" when three white
lacrosse players from Duke University, where he was also a student, were
found to have been wrongly accused of rape by a young black woman.
He had also
arrived in Washington having been mentored by David Horowitz, one of
the most prominent voices in conservative America, and he'd been noticed
by Steve Bannon.
Guerrero said
Miller had been "deeply, deeply influenced by white supremacists and
white nationalist literature, ideologues and mentors".
By
22, he working for a congressional representative where his ideas
started to become political speeches and eventually political policy.
Years
later, when Miller was working for then-senator Jeff Sessions, he
attended a dinner with his boss and Bannon and they decided to change
America.
The Republican Party
was at a crossroads and one faction believed it needed to become more
inclusive and reach into marginalised communities, but at their dinner,
the three men decided to take their party in the opposite direction.
Miller had with him analysis that said in the previous midterm election, there was a "missing white voter", Guerrero explained.
"They
decided that they were going to try to create a political movement, a
populist movement that was going to double down on bringing those white
voters out by using immigration to court white fear and white rage," she
said.
Stephen Miller and right-wing political operative Steve Bannon worked together in the first Trump administration. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Miller
is on record in 2014 as saying of Trump, "I wish he'd run for
president" and that name, that was spelt out in gaudy gold letters on
the side of some Manhattan buildings, was being thrown around as a
possibility.
So when Trump confirmed he would run, Miller signed up, believing he had found a vehicle for his immigration overhaul.
"Trump
was initially focused on targeting criminals and rapists, … keeping out
cartels. And then when Stephen Miller came to the table, they
transformed it into a platform that was going to radically transform and
strangle legal pathways into the country," Guerrero said.
"Because
for him, it wasn't about law and order. It was not about national
security. It was about preserving some core whiteness that he saw as
being essential to the character of the United States."
In
his first term, Trump built some of his promised border wall, he used
executive orders to issue travel bans and visa restrictions for people
from a list of mostly Muslim countries and, for a time, he ordered the
separation of children from their families as they tried to cross into
the United States.
Donald Trump faced harsh and sustained criticism over his first-term policy that separated migrant children from their families. (Reuters: Jose Luis Gonzalez)
After
Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office, Miller founded a legal firm
designed to go up against the Americal Civil Liberties Union, calling it
America First Legal.
When Trump returned to office in 2025, he was ready with a slew of new immigration actions.
But
as those domestic policies collide with the United States's aggressive
foreign posturing, Guerrero says she has noticed a new item on Miller's
agenda.
Miller's expanding presence
Immigration was Stephen Miller's gateway into MAGA and Trump's inner circle, but now he is being consulted across policy areas.
When
Donald Trump was asked who exactly would be running Venezuela after a
US mission snatched Nicolás Maduro and his wife from the presidential
compound, he gestured to the line of men behind him.
On the end was Miller.
Stephen Miller is now regularly commenting on United States foreign policy. (Reuters: Jonathan Ernst)
Without ever being elected or tested and scrutinised by a confirmation process, Miller occupies a very big seat at the table.
Senior
fellow at the United States Studies Centre Bruce Wolpe called Miller
"formidable" and said he was the most powerful person on Trump's staff
aside from chief of staff Susie Wiles.
"He
has a commanding position over issues that Trump cares about very much,
particularly immigration … and it's not just domestic policy," he said.
"He
also travels with the president. He sits in on meetings in the Middle
East. He is a constant spur to implement what Trump wants."
In
a recent interview with CNN, Miller was speaking on US actions to
capture Maduro and said: "We're a superpower and under President Trump,
we're going to conduct ourselves as a superpower."
After
a second American citizen was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis,
Miller was quick to call the victim, Alex Pretti, a "would-be assassin."
After
the death of right-wing political podcaster Charlie Kirk, Miller said
the government was "going to use every resource we have" to "identify,
disrupt and dismantle and destroy" what he refers to as "left-wing
networks".
Both Wolpe and Guerrero said this language was very classic of Miller because it was warlike.
"That
really set the frame as to their posture in American politics, which
is, the left is the enemy, the Democrats are the left, we want them
destroyed," Wolpe said.
After
more than 10 years of being on the national political stage, Miller has
more power than ever and with his absolute loyalty to Trump, he buys it
in return.
As ICE faces
intense criticism over the killing of two bystanders and American
citizens in Minneapolis, Miller is able to deflect blame and remain very
secure in his West Wing role.
At
just 40 years of age, he is poised to impact conservative politics in
the United States for a very long time, and his mission, according to
Guerrero, appears to be evolving.
Guerrero
said, "historically, it has been about race", for Miller, but as the US
makes and threatens incursions into Latin America, another pattern has
emerged.
She said the foreign
policies being employed by Trump were "not actually going to decrease
immigration" to the US, which was Miller's initial goal as he tried to
"radically re-engineer the racial demographics of this country".
"Now
I think it's becoming more about engineering a permanent underclass for
elites in the United States and across the Americas,"
Guerrero said
"Because what they're doing is, they're fuelling the conditions that are displacing people in their home countries.
"And
long-term, what that's going to do is … create new waves of mass
migration that are going to replace the people who are currently being
deported."
And the people who
are at risk of deportation now are those "who've been here for a very
long time and have homes, jobs and citizen children and therefore more
political power than some elites are comfortable with".
That
teenager who found more friends among radio hosts and conservative
provocateurs than his classmates has ascended above them all and now
sits comfortably close to power with every intention of using it.
