Tag: ethnic cleansing

Uganda Approves Deployment of Troops to Gaza for Trump’s Ceasefire Plan

The Ugandan parliament voted on Tuesday to approve deploying soldiers to the Gaza Strip as part of the International Stabilization Force (ISF) envisioned by President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan.

Ugandan Defense Minister Kiryowa Kiwanuka told parliament ahead of the vote that Trump’s emissaries approached Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in July to ask for a contribution of soldiers to the ISF. He said senior military officials immediately began working with the U.S. Embassy in Kampala on details of the prospective deployment.

“Following the invitation by His Excellency Donald Trump … the President of the Republic of Uganda, ​is ready to deploy in the Gaza Strip the desired ​Uganda ⁠People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) contingent,” Kiwanuka said.

The Ugandan constitution gives the president authority to deploy UPDF forces outside Uganda, but only with the approval of parliament. Kiwanuka told lawmakers that deployment to Gaza was urgently needed “to protect civilians and allow for increased humanitarian access in the parts affected directly by the conflict.”

The defense minister said President Museveni believes deployment to Gaza would be in line with Uganda’s past support for peacekeeping missions, and would advance the goal of worldwide peace and stability.

“Uganda’s participation as part of the ISF will aid in preventing further conflicts in the region, thus contributing to broader international security by reducing risks of renewed armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, preventing extremist groups from exploiting instability and sabotaging the ceasefire implementation process,” Kiwanuka said.

The Associated Press (AP) noted there was some resistance from opposition lawmakers, including concerns that participating in the Gaza ISF could jeopardize Uganda’s membership in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Uganda is roughly 80 percent Christian, but it joined the OIC in 1974 during the reign of dictator Idi Amin Dada, who was nervous about being overthrown and wanted to consolidate Muslim support for his regime. Amin was driven into exile about five years later, ending one of the most brutal regimes in African history.

Opposition lawmaker Hassan Kirumira said in a parliamentary speech that the “big question” was: “On which side is our army going to fight?”

The ISF concept remains somewhat nebulous, with only five countries committed to providing troops so far: Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania. Egypt and Jordan have additionally volunteered to assist with training Palestinian police officers for Gaza.

The largest firm commitment to date came from Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, who pledged “a significant number of troops – up to 8,000 or more, if necessary.”

On Friday, the “Board of Peace” established by President Trump’s ceasefire plan announced its first construction plan, a base that would accommodate 150 personnel from the ISF. The base will be constructed on territory directly controlled by Israel, about a mile from the Israeli border, which would make it easy to evacuate the ISF personnel in the event of an emergency. The first group to occupy the base will be a contingent of Moroccan troops.

According to the UK Guardian, the contract for base construction was awarded to a Louisiana-based firm called Arkel International. A Board of Peace official said none of the contracts for Gaza have been finalized yet.

The Guardian said earlier contract plans portrayed the 150-person base as “first phase” of an ambitious project to construct a 5,000-person base in Gaza for the ISF. The initial small base will be rudimentary, but the larger base would be heavily fortified.

President Trump last week announced a deal had been struck for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to disarm, while Israel begins withdrawing its forces from Gaza, which would clear the way for the ISF to take over.

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Huge Uptick In Israeli Airstrikes On Gaza Since Trump Hailed ‘Historic’ Hamas Deal

Middle East regional media has reported a huge uptick in Israeli military attacks in the Gaza Strip since President Trump announced a “historic” agreement which Hamas finally signed on to. 

The agreement would result in a phased complete disarmament of Hamas and the handing over of governance to newly proposed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) – a body designed to replace both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

However, fighting has persisted, with Al Jazeera reporting that at least 19 Palestinians killed on Saturday in Israeli attacks and that the total deal toll from the weekend is now 26 people, including women and children.

Israel continues to express skepticism in the face of Washington’s recent optimism:

Despite Hamas agreeing to a phased disarmament, Israel’s government says it has “serious security concerns” about the plan, and there has been strong resistance from Israeli politicians to the deal.

The continued bombardment of Gaza, contributing to Israel’s continued breaches of October’s “ceasefire” agreement, will likely threaten Trump’s peace plan and exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation for Palestinians in the enclave.

Reuters had on Sunday reported an entire day of fresh IDF bombardment on Gaza.

“Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza for a second straight day on Sunday, killing at least 18 Palestinians, medics said, ​despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of a breakthrough in efforts to implement last year’s ceasefire agreement,” Reuters wrote.

“From dawn, Israeli warplanes hit Gaza City in the north, the central city of Deir ‌al-Balah and the southern area of Khan Younis, causing the biggest daily death toll in weeks, according to Palestinian health officials,” it added. 

Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen issued the Netanyahu government’s view on Sunday: “In the deal we signed with the United States, our stance is that Hamas must be dismantled. This is the first thing ⁠that must happen.” 

Cohen expressed that Israeli is “very skeptical” that Hamas would actually disarm. And PM Netanyahu’s office said: “The most important concern for Israel is that nothing can happen ​before Hamas completely and truly disarms.”c

So while the US and regional leaders are busy celebrating and hailing the plan, the proverbial devil will be in the details and in the process – and needless to say a lot could go wrong.

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The Machine That Hunted Palestinians in the 1970s Is Hunting Their Allies Today

Locked up in a cell in Madrid since his arrest on July 10, 2026, the well-known left-wing philanthropist Fergie Chambers is waiting to learn whether Spain will hand him to Washington. According to a US indictment, his crime was moving $7.5 million – money he raised, his family says, after selling his stake in Cox Enterprises and walking away from a quarter-billion-dollar inheritance – some of which funded legal defense for activists and humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza. He has been denied bail and, his supporters say, denied contact with the outside world. Stella Schnabel, his partner, has said he faces “political persecution,” telling the Irish Times: “Fergie is being jailed because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and those suffering genocide in Gaza.” Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian surgeon who now serves as rector of the University of Glasgow, has said Chambers’ funding was vital to the care of wounded children in Gaza.

Six days later, on July 16, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before representatives of more than 60 governments and gave the arrangement a name: a coordinated push against what he called “far-left political terrorism,” with intelligence sharing at its center, backed by border controls he defended as public safety and financial disruption dressed as counterterrorism.

This machinery, of course, is nothing new. In 1969, Switzerland, Britain, France and West Germany were among the founding members of a secret intelligence-liaison forum called the Club de Berne, joined eventually by the United States and Israel. By 1971 a daily communications channel had been set up between the member states, code-named Kilowatt. Aviva Guttmann’s research into declassified Swiss archives shows what became of this secret channel.

Mossad’s European Murder Spree

Mossad’s infamous campaign of assassinations began after the killing of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Palestinian Black September group. Teams of killers were sent across Europe after anyone linked, rightly or wrongly, to the attack. Zwaiter, Hamshari, and Boudia were among them.

Palestinian Wael Zwaiter had no proven link at all to the Munich attack when he was shot dead in the stairwell of his Rome apartment in October 1972 – indeed the PLO’s deputy chief at the time said that he was “energetically” against terrorism. Two months later, a bomb concealed inside Mahmoud Hamshari’s telephone blew up and killed him in his Paris apartment; the evidence for his personal involvement, historians now note, came almost entirely from Mossad’s own dubious assessments. The following June, Mohammed Boudia – an Algerian theater director whom Western intelligence cables described as an active militant – was blown up in his car, an assassination Le Monde reported the same day, June 29, 1973, while openly questioning what French authorities had known.

Whether the three men were guilty of wrongdoing or not – and it seems two of them were probably innocent – none were ever charged, tried, or given the chance to answer the allegations against them. They were killed on the strength of intelligence assessments that were, by the researchers’ own account, sometimes wrong and never tested in open court. These assassinations were state-sanctioned murder – and in each case, the assassins were aided and abetted directly by Western intelligence.

These three were not the only ones. Mossad’s Operation Wrath of God consisted of 10 missions in total, eight of them carried out in Europe, most using intelligence its Kilowatt partners supplied. None of the men killed were ever tried in a court. They were found, and then killed.

A continent turned into a hunting ground, with no right of appeal.

According to Aviva Guttmann, Kilowatt was set up to fix a gap: Mossad needed European intelligence to identify, track, and locate its targets in the first place. So in October 1971, Israel suggested opening a dedicated encrypted channel to share intelligence on Palestinian activity in Europe, and Western agencies agreed. The arrangement ran both ways. Mossad fed disinformation to its European partners about its own operations, leading French, Italian and other states to dismiss assassinations on their own soil as unsolved rather than face the reality of what an allied service had done in their backyards.

In a display of their political bias, Western agencies, however, continued to supply intelligence to Mossad long after press reporting had made clear exactly who was behind the killings. As Guttmann says, the assassination campaign would likely not have been possible without their continued cooperation.

Guttmann’s own research records that Golda Meir’s instruction remained that no innocent bystanders were to be hurt – the explosive charge for each hit calibrated carefully enough that a target could be killed while the blast stayed contained to his room. Compare that caution to Palestine today, where a single strike on Salah Shehade’s Gaza City home in 2002 killed at least 11 civilians alongside him, including eight children – a ratio of collateral death that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s, when the target was living on a street in Rome or Paris.

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Two More Israeli Soldiers Kill Themselves Amid Crisis Driven by Horrors of Genocide

Two more Israeli soldiers killed themselves over the past two days, bringing renewed scrutiny to what experts say is a worsening mental health emergency inside the Israel Defense Forces during 33 months of genocidal war on Gaza and enduring stigma around seeking treatment.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, two female IDF troops – a combat soldier and an intelligence officer – died by suicide this week. Israeli Military Police said they are investigating both deaths, which bring the number of active duty IDF troops who have killed themselves this year to at least 16. Haaretz said that at least nine former IDF soldiers have also committed suicide after completing their military service in 2026.

The latest deaths underscore what military officials, mental health professionals, and veterans have increasingly described as one of the most severe psychological crises the Israeli military has faced in decades.

Earlier this year, Haaretz reported that Israeli military suicides reached 21 in 2024 and 22 in 2025 – the highest annual totals in roughly 15 years. Israel’s oldest daily newspaper also found that the military had reduced the number of mental health officers available to soldiers despite unprecedented demand for psychological services.

The crisis has been exacerbated by repeated troop deployments since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack – itself the cause of tremendous trauma and some suicides by survivors – and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, which has been characterized by what prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague say are crimes against humanity and war crimes, and what a United Nations panel of experts said is a genocide.

More than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza, some of them reportedly executed at close range.

IDF troops and Israeli and international medical workers have described the deliberate and indiscriminate shooting of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, some of whom were reportedly executed. Former Palestinian prisoners and Israeli troops and doctors have also reported torture and sexual abuse of detainees, and of civilians including children and even a toddler. Such carnage and abuse has taken a toll on the perpetrators as well as their victims.

A persistent stigma surrounding mental health treatment also discourages many soldiers from seeking the care they need. Some fear being viewed as weak or worry that treatment could adversely affect their military service or relationships, despite ongoing efforts to de-stigmatize the issue.

A senior IDF commander told the Israeli public broadcaster Kan last year that “most of the suicides resulted from the complex reality created by the war,” adding, “War has consequences.”

Earlier this year, Reuters reported that the IDF had recorded a nearly 40% increase in post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops since September 2023, with 60% of the 22,300 people being treated for war wounds experiencing PTSD. The news agency cited an Israeli parliamentary committee’s finding that 279 soldiers had attempted to kill themselves in the period from January 2024 to July 2025, and that IDF combat soldiers comprised 78% of all suicides in Israel in 2024.

Some observers – especially Palestine defenders – have little sympathy for IDF soldiers who kill themselves, pointing to the widespread crimes being committed in Gaza and throughout illegally occupied Palestine, including apartheid, settler colonization, and ethnic cleansing.

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The Death Count Trap: Why Tallying Victims Won’t Stop Israel’s Genocide

The words ‘killed’, ‘injured’, ‘maimed’, and the like often lose a great part of their meaning when they are repeated so relentlessly.

Take, for example, a headline like: “13 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Others Wounded.” Though many of us can still feel a deep sense of sadness over such a tragedy, the news itself becomes less shocking over time.

According to figures produced by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Israel has killed and wounded a total of over 250,000 Palestinians since the start of the genocide in 2023.

The tally is updated daily because the killing never stops.

On July 23, six Palestinians were killed in Gaza. A day earlier, 13 were killed, and the day before that, nine others were killed, and so on.

It is this “and so on” that makes us lose our sense, over time, of what these tragedies actually entail. These are innocent people who are burned alive in their tents, bombed in their cars, or killed while attempting to enjoy a brief moment of respite from the scorching heat on the beach.

Among the nine killed on July 21, an entire family, including four young children, was wiped out in a single strike. As reports of Israel’s daily harvest of Palestinian lives in Gaza multiply, journalists too often neglect to humanize those killed.

A photo circulating on social media showed three of those children: a boy wearing a T-shirt that read ‘Santa Monica Beach’; his bespectacled sister in a pink shirt, proudly holding a certificate of achievement from her school; and their youngest sister, posing gently.

These three represent every single Palestinian child killed since the start of this genocide. According to UN and international estimates, over 21,000 children have been killed in Gaza, with tens of thousands more maimed or buried under the rubble.

Though the daily routine of killing makes the tragedy feel less shocking for those merely hearing the numbers, it becomes infinitely more tragic for those who must bear it directly. In Gaza, not a single family has been spared the loss of loved ones, making the grief compound day after day.

There are no words to describe the collective pain of Gaza.

What makes the tragedy even more unbearable is that the entire world knows what has transpired and continues to transpire in Gaza, yet fails to do anything about it. We keep track of the numbers, we point to Israel’s barbarity, we decry the failure of international institutions, and we shake our heads in despair.

Yet the outcome remains unchanged: the death toll rises, and new statistics are generated daily to remind us of the magnitude of the crisis.

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Israel’s violence engulfs occupied West Bank

Israel has intensified its assault on the occupied West Bank. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 1,111 Palestinians, at least 243 of them children, have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 65 of them since the beginning of 2026.

Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property has surged to record levels. OCHA documented more than 1,800 attacks in 2025 that resulted in casualties or property damage across about 280 communities in the West Bank—an average of five incidents a day, the highest daily rate since records began in 2006. Attacks are up more than 50 percent in the first six months of this year.

The latest clash was provoked by armed settlers on Friday night, in which two Israelis and four Palestinians were killed. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) arrested dozens of people around the village of Tell near the West Bank city of Nablus. Troops carried out mass raids in Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarem and the southern West Bank, setting up checkpoints and closing gates across the West Bank. The IDF said it was bolstering its forces in the West Bank by five companies and cancelling weekend leave for troops.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu backed the settlers, pledging he would take “powerful action” in response, including demolishing the home of the family of one of the Palestinians involved and accelerating the approval of construction of more Israeli settlements in the area. In so doing, he acknowledged that settler violence, far from being the work of a “few bad apples” is nothing short of a state-backed policy in pursuit of ethnic cleansing.

Last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced plans for $400 million in funding for the construction of dozens of new illegal settlements in the West Bank, as Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government rushes to expand its control of land in the West Bank and drive out Palestinians before elections scheduled for October.

This comes amid an unprecedented surge in Israeli settlement activity. According to the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR), the number of new settlement outposts—illegal even under Israeli law—has soared in recent years. The number has jumped from around eight a year between 2012 and 2022 to 32 in 2023, then 62 in 2024, reaching 86 in 2025.

Armed settlers, protected by the Israeli military, continued their pogroms over the weekend, rampaging through more than a dozen villages across the northern West Bank. Hundreds of Israelis hurled stones, set fire to homes, two mosques and several vehicles, wounded more than a dozen Palestinians. They sprayed graffiti claiming “revenge” over the killing of an Israeli, and setting up another four illegal outposts.

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Israel’s Ghoulish Settlers Eye Up Gaza, As Netanyahu Kills Trump’s Board of Peace

On Sunday evening (July 19), a group of some of the most repulsive, ghoulish people on the face of the earth marched towards the perimeter fence separating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world to declare their intention to re-colonize Gaza, to re-establish three Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when, under Ariel Sharon, 21 settlements in total were abandoned, occupied, at the time, by 8,000 Israeli settlers.

These fanatical Israeli settlers, on what was billed as the “March of Thousands”, although only a few hundred people attended, were led by the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government — Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who is in charge of Israel’s prisons, which, for Palestinians, have become a gulag of torture facilities since October 7, 2023, and Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, and also the minister in charge of settlement affairs within the Defense Ministry, who has played a huge role in the ever-growing, and ever more violent expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Speaking at the rally, Ben Gvir said, “If someone had said three years ago that we would control 70% of the Gaza Strip, no one would have believed it. So today I say: there will be Jewish settlement throughout Gaza. We are returning home. Gaza is ours.”

Smotrich, meanwhile, warned that a change of government in the forthcoming elections in October, could “roll back all the Zionist and national settlement revolution” undertaken over the last four years.

The two men were accompanied by more than two dozen ministers and legislators, as well as the 80-year old settler fanatic Daniella Weiss, who told the crowd, “They ask me, ‘What will happen to the Arabs in Gaza?’ There will be no Arabs in Gaza, unequivocally.”

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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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