The title of this article may seem like an extreme or speculative scenario. However, as will be explained below, given the persistent discourse around “domestic enemies” and “civil war” in the United States, such a development cannot be entirely dismissed as implausible.

An article published in Middle East Monitor, titled “Drones tried and tested in the genocide against Palestinians are now swarming American cities” [1], reports that artificial-intelligence-powered autonomous drones, produced by the U.S.-based technology company Skydio and trained, tested, and deployed by the Israeli military during the war and genocide in Gaza, are now being used under the Donald Trump administration to monitor civilian dissent in U.S. cities.

Designed for surveillance and battlefield operations, these drones are capable of operating autonomously in environments where GPS is either nonfunctional or prohibited. They are equipped with thermal imaging and facial-recognition technologies that allow them to track individuals and upload captured imagery to cloud-based databases for law-enforcement use. Skydio maintains extensive technological and military partnerships with Israel’s advanced defense industry, which played a central role in developing these systems.

The report further reveals that these unmanned aerial vehicles have been deployed across major American cities to surveil opposition movements and collect massive quantities of visual data. Currently, they are being utilized by more than 800 U.S. law-enforcement and security agencies nationwide.

The Trump Administration’s Domestic Enemy Doctrine and the Priority of Civil Conflict

Within the framework of the Trump administration’s definition of a “domestic enemy,” the deployment of these civilian-massacre tools to monitor political opponents raises an alarming possibility: their potential use in a forthcoming domestic civil war. Inevitably, one is compelled to ask, “Is America becoming the new Gaza?”

It will be recalled that, upon the call of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, nearly 800 senior American generals and admirals serving around the world convened at Quantico Base in Virginia on September 30, 2025. During his address to the military officers, President Donald Trump criticized the army’s traditional focus on external threats, urging instead that it direct its attention toward internal issues such as crime, immigration, and protests. “America is under an invasion from within,” he declared. “The enemy inside our borders is no different from a foreign army, but in many ways, more dangerous—because they don’t wear uniforms.” Trump went on to assert, “Something great will happen for the people in this room, because we must neutralize the internal enemy before it spirals out of control. The big cities governed by radical left Democrats will be training grounds. This is a war—a civil war.”

Acting as Commander-in-Chief, Trump identified Democrat-controlled cities such as Portland and Los Angeles as “battlefields” and instructed the military to prepare for conflict against internal adversaries.

Prior to this meeting, on September 22, 2025, the President issued an executive order designating ANTIFA (Anti-Fascist Action Movement) as a “domestic terrorist organization,” thereby mobilizing the National Guard and the armed forces to confront what he described as an “internal uprising.”

Considering Trump’s increasingly sharp rhetoric about “domestic enemies” and his directive for the army to prepare for civil conflict, the deployment across the United States of AI-powered surveillance drones—the same type used by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza to collect data, track, and mark targets, contributing to the killing or injuring of thousands of Palestinians—suggests that these tools are not merely instruments of internal security. Rather, they reveal an intention to militarize civilian life.

The daily flight of hundreds of Skydio drones over cities such as New York, Chicago, Miami, and Atlanta, their use in monitoring “No Kings” protests, anti-genocide encampments at Yale University, and similar demonstrations on U.S. campuses, along with the fact that the New York Police Department alone conducted more than 20,000 drone operations in less than a year, justify the public’s fear of these machines, now complicit in mass violence.

The images of Gaza in ruins, along with the hundreds of thousands of civilians—mostly women and children—killed or injured, starkly illustrate the potential horrors that could unfold should the Trump administration attempt to implement Israel’s AI-driven model of internal warfare within the United States under the guise of a domestic civil war.

The Other Side of the Coin

While Donald Trump has broadly characterized Democrats as “leftist enemies” and ordered military interventions in states governed by them, the war in Gaza has simultaneously fueled a different perception of “the enemy” among his grassroots base. For many within this segment, the real adversary was no longer domestic political opponents but rather Israel and the Zionists, whom they believed had taken control of the U.S. government.

The Gaza war—much like in other parts of the world—exposed the extent to which the Zionist lobby and Israel’s influence have shaped U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Recognition of this reality led to a rapid decline in support for Israel among the Democratic base, accompanied by........

© Stratejik Düşünce Enstitüsü