Tag: ethnic cleansing

The United Nations Has Run Out Of Alibis

Institutions built to prevent atrocities eventually face the question of what they actually protect. For the United Nations, voting patterns, internal investigations and its own decisions this year no longer support the fiction of neutrality. An UNRWA school in Gaza sat above a Hamas tunnel shaft and three anti-tank positions, and its own principal was on the payroll of both institutions at once – a fact that American investigators, not the UN, brought to light.

The pattern is old: during the oil-for-food scandal, a mid-level program director faced US prosecution while the officials who managed the program from above kept their positions. When UN failures surface, line staff absorb the exposure. The people who set the policy rarely do.

The arithmetic alone dismantles the pretense of balance. In 2025 the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted 15 resolutions targeting Israel, and only 11 addressing the rest of the planet combined – a tally covering North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Russia and the United States together. From 2015 through 2024, the total reached 173 resolutions against Israel, compared to 80 for all other member states combined. The UN Human Rights Council has run comparable numbers since 2006, adopting 112 resolutions against Israel compared to 45 against Syria, despite a civil war there that killed hundreds of thousands.

On Nov. 20, 2025, the UNGA’s Fourth Committee passed six resolutions condemning Israel while producing not a single resolution on Sudan, where fighting has killed more than 150,000 people and driven 12 million from their homes. The bloc that commands the UNGA’s automatic majority sets these priorities; the scale of actual human suffering has nothing to do with it.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) supplies the starkest illustration. After October 7, the agency’s own internal review found that nine employees may have taken part in the massacre – a figure that American investigators have since made look negligible. According to USAID:

“The USAID Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG), a statutorily independent law enforcement and oversight entity, has referred for suspension/debarment consideration the names of 101 current or former staff at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for participation in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and/or affiliation with the military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) of Hamas. Among the individuals referred were UNRWA school principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counselors, and medical professionals, including:

– A deputy school principal serving as an al-Qassam deputy company commander in the Ain Gallout/5th infantry battalion.
– A deputy school principal serving as squad leader for the Khan Younis Brigade/2nd infantry battalion.
– A teacher serving as squad leader in Hamas’ military security department/intelligence unit who tracked assignment of explosive devices.
– A teacher serving as a platoon commander of the Central Brigade/Al Quds 2nd Battalion.
– A math & computer teacher with ties to an al-Qassam intelligence squad.
– A teacher with expertise as a sniper for Hamas.
– A teacher and Hamas soldier with orders to bring two anti-tank missiles to a prescribed location during the October 7 terror attacks.
– A deputy school principal serving as a platoon commander in Hamas’ Nuseirat battalion with communications responsibilities on October 7th.
– A school principal assigned to the chemical department of a Hamas military manufacturing unit whose school had three anti-tank positions and a tunnel shaft located under the facility.”

One of those referred, Hafez Mousa Mohammed Mousa, coordinated with fellow operatives during the Oct. 7 massacre while running an UNRWA school, and became the first person affiliated with a UN humanitarian agency ever debarred by the US government for terrorism. Under mounting pressure, UNRWA itself dismissed 70 staff linked to terrorist organizations in Gaza in the weeks before the referral was published, an admission that followed the release of evidence rather than the agency’s own vetting. Groups tracking UNRWA’s personnel put the true scale of Hamas penetration considerably higher, closer to 1,500 employees still drawing a UN salary.

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The Spark in Tell: How a Village Resistance Disrupted Israel’s West Bank Strategy

During a military raid on the small town of Tell, southwest of Nablus, a moment of direct defiance shattered the illusion of total Palestinian submission.

Faced with relentless military incursions, land confiscation, and settler harassment and violence, local villagers and farmers refused to retreat.

In the confrontation that followed, a single Palestinian disarmed an Israeli soldier and opened fire on the invading forces near the illegal Havat Gilad settlement outpost, killing two soldiers and wounding three others.

What followed was the predictable, unyielding fury of the occupation: Israeli forces and state-backed armed settlers immediately launched a series of raids across Tell and neighboring communities, killing four Palestinians, setting fire to homes, and converting residential buildings into field interrogation centers.

In a swift collective punishment campaign, Israeli occupation troops detained over 70 Palestinians – including more than 40 in Tell alone – while expanding military incursions into Jenin, Tubas, Tulkarm, Ramallah, Hebron (Al-Khalil), Bethlehem, and Jericho.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz promptly ordered a “wide-scale military operation,” while UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese unequivocally condemned the combined army-settler assaults as “pogroms against defenseless civilians,” reiterating calls for an immediate arms embargo and trade sanctions against Israel.

Yet to understand the spark in Tell, one must understand the explosive pressure cooker that the occupied West Bank has become.

Netanyahu’s Primitive Calculus

Netanyahu’s immediate response to the incident in Tell was not a departure from policy, but the activation of an old, entrenched doctrine: every act of Palestinian resistance – no matter how localized – must be weaponized to accelerate the state-sponsored theft of Palestinian land.

For decades, Israel’s security apparatus has used local resistance as cover to achieve long-standing demographic and territorial ambitions. Under the current far-right coalition, this strategy has reached unprecedented levels of speed and brutality.

The Scale of Destruction

Since October 2023, while global media attention focused primarily on the horrors in Gaza, Israel systematically expanded its offensive across the occupied West Bank:

  • Over 1,090 Palestinians – including at least 239 children – have been killed by Israeli forces and state-backed armed settlers.
  • Over 6,800 Palestinians have been injured by live ammunition, shrapnel, and physical assaults, with settler attacks alone accounting for a surging majority of recent civilian injuries.
  • More than 10,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced due to home demolitions, violent settler rampages, and severe access restrictions. Entire Bedouin and rural communities across the South Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley have been systematically depopulated and cleansed.
  • Over 11,000 Palestinians have been swept into detention through military night raids, held under arbitrary administrative detention without charge or trial.
  • Under Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich – who was granted official authority over civilian affairs in the West Bank – the Israeli government declared tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian territory as “state land,” marking the largest continuous land grabs since the Oslo Accords. Concurrently, dozens of illegal settler outposts were retroactively legalized, and thousands of new settlement housing units were advanced.

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Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

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‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it.

“I owned land in the area of the Gush Etzion bloc’s expansion — land covered in hanging grapevines and almond trees of all kinds,” Ibrahim Ataallah, a resident of Khirbet Beit Skaria, told Mondoweiss. “But I was barred from accessing it after a confiscation order was issued [in 1984]. Even though we in Beit Skaria hold the legal documents proving ownership of the land we live on, they see us as an obstacle to the settlement expansion in Gush Etzion.”

As Atallah described the location of his plot of land, and the grapevines and almond trees it once bore, he looked at the maps and advertisements published by Hebrew real estate websites advertising properties in the Gush Etzion area. An advertisement describing the features of a plot for sale caught his eye. Though he could not pinpoint his own land on the map due to its lack of clarity, the descriptions of the land for sale and the lifestyle being offered to potential settlers hit close to home. 

“I really did drink my coffee at sunrise and waited for my friends from Jerusalem to join me,” he said. “We would talk about the price of grapes at the market, the coffee still warm by the time they arrived.”

“All that separates us from Jerusalem was a few kilometers,” he lamented. Today, that short distance no longer implies access. As a Palestinian ID holder, Atallah is barred from entering Jerusalem without a permit, transforming what was once a routine trip to visit friends into a near-impossible journey.

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Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the ‘Two-State Solution’ Fantasy

Creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel seemed feasible when President Bill Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo accords at the White House in September 1993. The goal was reaffirmed in 2011 when 90 percent of the Senate co-sponsored a resolution supporting “a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

But today, the two-state scenario is far-fetched to the point of delusion if not evasion.

For politicians, it has become a box to check. According to data from the American Jewish Congress, every Democrat and most Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee currently say they support “the two-state solution.”

Whatever the rhetoric, ending Israeli control over Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967 is not on the table.

“Nobody who talks about a so-called ‘two-state solution’ talks about an end to settlements and colonization, and an end to the occupation,” Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi said in an interview this year. “If you don’t have those as the preconditions, it’s not a state – it’s some reshuffling of a status quo of colonization and occupation.”

At best, only such reshuffling is on the horizon. The essence of colonization and occupation is baked into Israel’s Jewish nationalism that has hardened into systemic cruelty toward Palestinians undergoing genocide.

Yet the boilerplate refrain for a two-state solution has great political utility in the United States. For most politicians, it’s very handy for virtue signaling. The same holds true for pro-Israel pressure groups. Even AIPAC, while incapable of faulting the Israeli government for anything, blames Palestinians for refusing “to negotiate on the basis of the Trump peace framework – which envisions a two-state solution.”

Especially for politicians eager to have the deep-pocketed Israel lobby on their side at election time, saying “two-state solution” has become little more than a way of dodging key facts that exist on the ground. The Israeli military now controls 70 percent of Gaza after reducing it to rubble that has buried an unknown number of bodies. The 2.1 million Palestinians still alive in the enclave are confined to just 30 percent of its 141 square miles, under terrible living conditions.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank has pushed Palestinian people into smaller and smaller fragmented areas, divided by hundreds of checkpoints, while they face lawless violence from Israelis akin to the KKK’s terrorizing of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Several hundred settlements and outposts in the West Bank are now home to upward of 730,000 Israelis, with more arriving all the time.

Given such realities, advocates for a two-state solution have no credible answer to a basic question that is rarely asked: Where would the putative Palestinian state actually be located?

When Britain, Canada and Australia announced their formal recognition of a Palestinian state last fall, putting the number of nations doing so over 150, they were recognizing a phantom. “Israelis and Palestinians alike say the possibility of a two-state solution seems more remote than ever,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has devastated the enclave. Israeli settlements have become ever more entrenched in the West Bank.”

But in U.S. politics, the routine is to maintain the convenient fantasy of a two-state solution. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was simply offering up requisite platitudes during a CNN interview in August 2024 when she declared her commitment to “work toward a two-state solution, where Israel is secure and in equal measure the Palestinians have security and self-determination and dignity.”

David Mandel, a Sacramento chapter leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, told me: “In light of demographic and political realities, a ‘two-state solution’ has become a mostly empty mantra, frequently mouthed by politicians who did nothing to bring it about when it might have been a viable path to end violence and build toward something better.” He added: “It has also become a political refuge for many Americans, including a great many Jews, who are generally progressive and want to differentiate themselves from Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, but only performatively, without joining efforts to end real violations of Palestinian rights like occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.”

A grim truth is that no one really knows what a genuine “solution” might be for the mega-tragedy that continues to unfold in Palestine. Unhelpful from Americans is the facile prescription of a two-state solution or, for that matter, any other supposed remedy. Claiming to know what’s best for Palestinians is built into a colonial mindset that has propelled intervention in the region for more than a hundred years.

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Latest Case of “Palestine Exception” to Free Speech Is “Golden Gate Defendants”

Jury deliberations in the case of a group of San Francisco protesters dubbed the “Golden Gate Defendants” resulted in multiple misdemeanor convictions on July 2, 2026. The case stems from an organized action that took place April 15, 2024, in protest of the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza. Twenty-six people were initially arrested for blocking traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and jailed for more than 48 hours. After a majority of the 1,144 combined charges were dropped, seven people went to trial.

In spite of being found guilty of multiple misdemeanors, the Golden Gate Defendants view the outcome as a victory. Tori Porell, senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, who has been supporting the defendants, said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins “failed to secure convictions on the most serious charges” of felony conspiracy. Jury members were deadlocked on the felony charges that could have resulted in 15-year prison sentences.

Still, defendants and their allies have spent two years enmeshed in the stress of a long-drawn-out trial. Now, those charged and convicted await a sentencing hearing in August.

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The West Won’t Punish the Settlements. Its Two-State Solution Was Always a Sham

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?

What if I pointed out that that your arm regularly punched a neighbor in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.”

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonizers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints.

All of this has happened in full view of western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled.

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there.

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements.

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Congressman Outraged After Brief Detention By Gun-Wielding Israeli Settlers In West Bank Visit

A group of extremist Jewish settlers equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank, the Democratic representative has disclosed.

“We were at a village that Israeli settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.  “And these hoodlums come in with machine guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block off the road.“ Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and ​the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.“

Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them. 

Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Israel’s favorability rating among Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in May 2026, according to recent polls. 

The US lawmaker’s confrontation with extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank. 

As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.

Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.

An Oxfam analysis based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.

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The Board That Wanted a Country

This investigation is about a body whose legal personality remains contested, whose accountability framework remains opaque, and whose money has been routed through a private JPMorgan Chase account outside the official World Bank fund created for Gaza reconstruction. The Board of Peace was announced by Donald Trump in January 2026 as the vehicle for Gaza’s post-war governance and reconstruction, with Trump as chair and Tony Blair among its founding executive members. What emerges from official filings, leaked governance drafts, congressional hearing records, financial reporting, and testimony from former insiders is not simply a reconstruction body, but an attempt to privatise the governance architecture of Gaza’s future.

The timing of this story is critical because the contracts have not yet been awarded, the official World Bank fund has received no donor money, and several of the people involved in designing or executing the system sit at the intersection of government, finance, technology, Gulf capital, and post-war reconstruction planning.

The name “Board of Peace” does not necessarily refer to some peace mechanism. The entity will be best characterized as a financial, legal, and political architecture for governing 2.3 million Palestinians through a structure Palestinians did not elect, that member-state parliaments did not ratify, and that no court or auditor has yet clearly shown it can compel.

The Mandate Returns

The piece that sparked this investigation was published by Follow the Money, which reported that Tony Blair had become “Trump’s Gaza salesman in Europe,” using his institute and his contacts to lobby European policymakers into joining the Board of Peace. That reporting was important, but the framing understates the story. Blair is not merely the salesman. He is one of the architects of the governance model that European officials were later asked to legitimise.

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Israel Debated: Why Palestine Is Rewriting the Rules of Domestic US Politics

A major showdown on the House floor seemed imminent. An amendment, advanced by the Rules Committee, was poised to force a rare and telling record vote on stripping Israel of $3.3 billion in annual US military aid.

Brought forward by Republican Representative Thomas Massie and drawing support from key progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greg Casar, the measure was set to put every lawmaker’s stance on unconditional foreign assistance under a public microscope.

However, the high-stakes vote never actually happened. On June 30, the entire legislative package collapsed under the weight of Washington’s internal political warfare. In a dramatic procedural twist, a coalition of Democrats and disgruntled conservative Republicans voted down the mandatory ‘rule’ required to even begin debating the underlying State Department spending bill.

But even if the vote on Massie’s amendment had occurred, the result would have been entirely predictable. It would have been defeated, as support for Israel on both sides of the congressional aisle remains structurally entrenched – even as the American public shifts against Israeli policy in historic numbers.

According to a watershed Gallup poll published on February 27, a plurality of Americans now sympathize more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, leading by a margin of 41 percent to 36 percent. This marked the first time since Gallup began tracking the metric over two decades ago that Israel did not hold the upper hand in public sympathy.

Yet the shift is part of a broader, undeniable trend. A nationwide survey published in late June 2026 by Quinnipiac University revealed that an unprecedented 48 percent of American voters now think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel – the highest percentage recorded since the pollster first began tracking the question in 2017.

This is precisely why Massie’s amendment carries such profound weight. It is significant not because US politicians have suddenly developed a collective moral conscience, but because recent election cycles represented the first time in modern American history where Palestine factored as a major, decisive variable in how citizens cast their ballots.

For years, conventional political analysts dismissed pro-Palestinian mobilization, claiming Americans only vote based on immediate socioeconomic interests and rigid party loyalties. That assessment has since proven faulty.

The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable following the fallout of the 2024 presidential race, a reality later confirmed by those within the inner sanctums of power. In the post-election debates, senior administration insiders admitted that the handling of the Gaza genocide alienated core voter blocks.

The political cost of Washington’s complicity became undeniable after the 2024 presidential race. According to Axios, top Democratic strategists conducting the party’s post-election audit explicitly admitted to advocacy groups that internal party data proved the administration’s Gaza policy was a “net-negative” on the ballot.

This finding – disclosed during internal briefings by DNC autopsy author Paul Rivera – confirmed that the party’s unconditional backing of Israel directly fractured its base, and ultimately contributed to its loss of the elections.

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