Tag: israel

Israeli settlers attack Palestinians, journalists at West Bank olive harvest, witnesses say

Israeli settlers attacked a group of Palestinian villagers, activists and journalists on Nov 8 who had gathered during an attempt to harvest olives near a settler outpost in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, witnesses said.

Two Reuters employees – a journalist and a security adviser accompanying her – were among those injured in the attack by the men who wielded sticks and clubs and hurled large rocks, in an area close to the Palestinian village of Beita.

The area, lying south of the West Bank city of Nablus, has in past years been a flashpoint for settler attacks, which increased across the West Bank after the war in Gaza began two years ago.

Such attacks have escalated during 2025’s olive harvest, which began in October.

As the number of such attacks has climbed, Israeli and other activists have often joined Palestinians to support them and their right to harvest their olive groves, while also documenting any violence.

Activists or local Palestinians often inform journalists of harvesting plans, so they can attend to report, particularly in flashpoint areas, such as outposts.

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Outrage over video leak of Israeli soldiers’ gang rape of Palestinian exposes rot in Israeli society

Israelis are having a meltdown over the leak of a video of Israeli soldiers gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the  notorious Sde Teiman torture camp. 

The uproar isn’t about the dozen or so Israeli soldiers who inserted a sharp object into a Palestinian prisoner’s anus and ripped his rectum apart. No, it’s over the fact that it was made public at all — and leaked by Israel’s Chief Military Advocate, no less.

On Sunday night, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the top lawyer supposedly in charge of making sure the Israeli army follows the law, was arrested after having revealed last Friday that she was the one who had leaked the infamous rape video to the media over a year ago. 

The court case against the suspected rapists — who are not even charged with rape, but “aggravated abuse” and “causing aggravated injury” — is still ongoing. Meanwhile, Tomer-Yerushalmi is now being leveled with charges such as “breach of loyalty,” “breach of trust,” “dereliction of duty,” and “disrupting investigative operations,” Israel’s Channel 12  reported in Hebrew.

In her resignation letter, the ex-Military Advocate said she approved the video leak “in an attempt to rebuff the deceitful propaganda against the law-enforcing elements in the army.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netantahu did not miss the opportunity to dramatize the matter, portraying the whole case as an attack on the nation: “This is perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment,” he railed.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the case a “blood libel,” promising that “all required sanctions” would be taken against Tomer-Yerushalmi, including stripping her of her rank.

“Anyone who falsely spreads blood libels against IDF soldiers and prefers the welfare of the Nukhba terrorists over theirs is not worthy of wearing the IDF uniform and belongs in prison,” the Defense Minister said. Although, as the Times of Israel and other news sources clarified, the Palestinian detainee who was raped by the reservists in Sde Teiman was a civilian and not a Hamas fighter.

Even still, the leak is playing to the rapists’ favor, since the nature of the leak might end up compromising the position of the prosecution. 

What’s notable about all this is the popular outrage in Israel, with widespread sympathy toward the “wronged” soldiers turning the affair into a national story — in support of their right to rape Palestinians with impunity. 

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Israel Massively Escalates Strikes on Lebanon as Hezbollah Threatens Retaliation

Israel’s long-threatened escalation of their attacks on Lebanon seems to have begun in earnest on Thursday, with massive numbers of strikes reported against several towns and villages in the country’s south.

The IDF issued evacuation warnings for at least five sites in southern Lebanon, and is claiming, as they so often do, that everything they are attacking is Hezbollah infrastructure. Early indications are that a substantial number of civilian casualties have occurred. The most recent toll has one confirmed killed and nine wounded, though those tolls are expected to rise.

This comes amid an Israeli security cabinet meeting, at which the Northern Command will reportedly present various options for the direction and scale of a military escalation in Lebanon, in spite of a ceasefire nominally having been in place for the past year.

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YouTube deletes hundreds of videos documenting Israeli war crimes

YouTube, owned by Google LLC, has deleted more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations, citing compliance with US sanctions imposed on Palestinian human rights groups cooperating with the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to an investigation by The Intercept published on 5 November.

The investigation revealed that the videos were removed after US President Donald Trump’s administration sanctioned three Palestinian organizations over their work with the ICC on war crimes cases against Israeli leaders.

The organizations sanctioned are Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The deletions, carried out in early October, erased years of archives detailing Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including footage of home demolitions, civilian killings, and torture testimonies from Palestinians. 

Among the deleted material were investigations into the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and documentaries such as ‘The Beach’, which recounts the killing of children by an Israeli airstrike as they played by the sea.

YouTube confirmed the removals were made in compliance with “trade and export laws” after Trump sanctioned the groups. 

Human rights advocates said the company’s decision effectively aided US efforts to suppress evidence of Israeli atrocities.

“It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions,” said Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

The Center for Constitutional Rights condemned the decision as an attempt to erase war crimes evidence, while Al-Haq described the move as “an alarming setback for human rights and freedom of expression.” 

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said YouTube’s action “protects perpetrators from accountability,” accusing Google of complicity in silencing victims of Israeli aggression.

Al Mezan stated that its channel was removed without warning. The three organizations warned that US-based platforms hosting similar content could soon face the same censorship, potentially erasing further documentation of Israeli war crimes.

The Intercept investigation highlighted YouTube’s bias, noting that pro-Israel material remains largely untouched while Palestinian narratives are disproportionately targeted.

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Thousands of Unexploded Bombs Dropped by Israel Have Turned Gaza into a Minefield

Mohammed Nour returned with his family from Khan Younis to Gaza City on October 13th, three days after the ceasefire went into effect, along with thousands of other Palestinians. “As soon as they announced the truce, we came back immediately,” Nour told Drop Site. “From the moment Gaza City opened, we were among the first to return, because of everything we had suffered in the south.”

The family set up a tent just behind Al-Shifa hospital in an area that—like much of the city— was filled with large mounds of rubble and debris following Israel’s concentrated aerial bombardment and shelling. “It was around 10 or 11 a.m. I told the kids, ‘Go bring some cardboard, some wood, and a bit of plastic so we can light a fire.’ We wanted to cook something for the kids to eat,” Nour said. “We had just arrived and had nothing to burn and light a fire.”

His 11-year old son, two nephews, and two other boys their age walked about 10 meters from the tent and began searching through the rubble. “As soon as one of the kids pulled a piece of wood, something exploded. The children were thrown into the air—all of them,” Nour said. “I suddenly saw people flying—I didn’t even realize they were our children. I ran toward them and found my son hanging on the fence, and my sister’s son and my brother’s son—all of them hanging there,” he added. “Their condition was terrible, terrible.”

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Israel Arrests Ex-IDF Lawyer Who Leaked Video Showing Israeli Soldiers Rape a Palestinian Prisoner

On Monday, Israeli police arrested the Israeli military’s former top prosecutor for leaking a video that showed Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in southern Israel last year.

Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned on Friday after admitting to approving the leak, something she said she did in response to the backlash over Israeli military police arresting IDF soldiers who were suspected of severely abusing the prisoner, which involved stabbing him with a sharp object that tore his rectum.

Tomer-Yerushalmi went missing on Sunday for several hours, raising concerns that her life was at risk, but she was later found unharmed. The former military prosecutor has come under a torrent of criticism for her role in leaking the video, including from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called the leak the worst public relations attack on Israel in the country’s history.

Israeli government officials have been strongly critical of the act of leaking the video, but of the horrific abuse inflicted on the Palestinian prisoner. According to Israeli media reports at the time, the prisoner was admitted to the hospital with an injury to his anus so severe that he couldn’t walk and also had severe lung injuries and broken ribs.

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Israeli Troops Advance Into Southwest Syria, Infiltrate Multiple Villages

Israeli troops have been launching operations in southwestern Syria on a fairly regular basis of late, and on Monday they carried out multiple incursions into both the Quneitra and Daraa Governorates, entering multiple villages therein.

Israeli tanks and vehicles raided the village of al-Mushayrifa and searched several homes. They went on to the village of Umm Batna and surrounded a house. It is unclear what they were doing, and the IDF has not commented.

Israeli armored vehicles operating out of the village of al-Hurriya moved against the village of Ofaniyah, also in Quneitra. There were no reports of any incidents in this operation, though again the IDF did not comment.

Further south, Israeli forces advanced into the Yarmouk Basin, in Daraa Governorate. The forces briefly entered the village of Ma’araba, though reportedly they withdrew back to the occupied Golan Heights shortly thereafter and seemingly didn’t do anything while there.

A lot of the Israeli operations of late have involved creating checkpoints along major roads, searching locals that try to pass by before packing up and leaving the area. There are sometimes detentions, though seemingly most of the detained are released shortly thereafter and their detentions are for no apparent reason.

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FBI Uses Secret Threat Category for Israeli Criminals Operating in U.S.

The FBI’s growing list of domestic threats has mutated in recent years to include every conceivable affiliation of Americans across the political spectrum: right-wing violent extremists, left-wing violent extremists, black identity extremists, and animal rights extremists. The current administration has even added nihilistic violent extremists—those who “believe in nothing”—to the laundry list. The Biden administration, for its part, aided in this exercise by vastly overstating the threat posed by Trump-aligned conservatives in the wake of January 6th. But neither Democratic nor Republican administrations have ever grandstanded about another significant threat group that the FBI secretly monitors on U.S. soil: Israeli Based Organized Crime Syndicates, or “IBOCS”. 

Leaked FBI records and court filings detail widespread money laundering, taxpayer theft, and drug smuggling enterprises operated in the U.S. by Israeli citizens connected or belonging to Israeli crime groups. Despite the trickle of prosecutions over the past 25 years, the FBI has never publicly disclosed the fact that it has designated resources allocated to investigating these criminal organizations. 

A 2020 FBI intelligence report from the “Blue Leaks” hack conducted by the hacker group Anonymous and archived by the nonprofit DDoSecrets describes IBOCS operating in Nevada and Florida embezzling money from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). IBOCS “have defrauded US Government relief programs and manipulated tax documents since at least 2015 to reduce tax liability and conceal money laundering activities, as well as have access to companies and agents, which are necessary to process PPP loan applications,” the report found. 

The report also lists instances of IBOCS committing both disaster relief and tax fraud, and notes that IBOCS are involved in money laundering, extortion, illegal gambling, fraud, and narcotics trafficking in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, according to FBI investigations.

As far back as 2009, leaked State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks detail one of the reasons why criminals belonging to or associated with Israeli crime families and syndicates have been able to operate inside America with ease: The State Department is not authorized to block their visas. The cables warn of the Israeli mafia taking on a growing role in the American trade of ecstasy, and of the loophole which prevents U.S. embassies from automatically denying Israeli crime figures travel documents. 

While the State Department has formalized powers in its foreign affairs manual to restrict visas for Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, the Italian mafia, the Hells Angels biker gangs, Outlaws, Bandidos, Mongols and two dozen Latin American gangs including Tren de Aragua, Israeli organized crime groups remain absent more than a decade after the State Department cable first warned of the Israeli mafia loophole. 

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Netanyahu greenlights death penalty bill for Palestinian prisoners

The National Security Committee in Israel’s Knesset is moving forward with a bill to impose the death penalty on Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks and operations that killed Israelis. 

According to the Israeli government’s top official on captives’ affairs, Gal Hirsch, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports the move. 

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has long called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners, thanked Netanyahu for supporting the bill in a post on social media. 

“I thank the prime minister for his support for Otzma Yehudit’s bill for the death penalty for terrorists, but the court must not have any discretion – every terrorist who goes out to murder must know that the death penalty will be imposed on him. It’s time for justice!” Ben Gvir said. 

Israeli media reports said the bill could have its first reading as soon as Wednesday. 

“The extremist and terrorist Israeli government once again proves, through this decision, that it feeds off the blood and suffering of prisoners in its jails,” said the Palestinian Center for Prisoners’ Defense. “The repercussions of this fascist step will be even more bloody and will drag the entire region into a new cycle of uncertainty whose consequences no one can predict.”

Lawmakers in the Knesset National Security Committee already voted 4-1 in favor of the bill on 28 September.

The bill – which does not apply to Israelis who kill Palestinians – requires another three votes in a full Knesset session before it is passed into law. 

At the time of the vote, Ben Gvir came under fire within Israel for pushing the execution bill at a time when Israeli captives were still held in Gaza. 

The National Security Minister threatened on 20 October to stop voting with the ruling coalition if the death penalty bill did not pass its first reading within three weeks. 

Prior to the formation of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, Ben Gvir had been demanding the death penalty for Palestinians and, at one point, even made the demand as a condition for his joining the government.

Since assuming the role of national security minister, Ben Gvir has tightened the already repressive measures against Palestinians in the Israeli prison system.

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Prosecutor Who Exposed Sde Teiman Rape Video Missing After Netanyahu Calls It ‘Israel’s Most Dangerous Attack’

Israeli police have launched a search for outgoing military prosecutor Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi, who admitted leaking a video showing Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian hostage at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility in the occupied Negev.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Yerushalmi has been missing for several hours. Police found her car abandoned near a Tel Aviv beach early Sunday morning. Israel Hayom reported that she left a farewell letter inside the vehicle, while Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, said she also left a suicide note at her home.

A senior police source told Haaretz there are serious concerns for her life.

The disappearance comes a few hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the video leak as “the most dangerous propaganda attack in Israel’s history.”

Speaking at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said the footage caused “massive damage to Israel’s image, its army, and its soldiers.” He called for an independent investigation into the leak, which has deeply shaken Israel’s political and military establishment.

The leaked video shows Israeli soldiers torturing and raping a Palestinian hostage at the Sde Teiman base, often referred to by Israeli activists as a “human slaughterhouse.” The recording, from July 2024, spread widely online, sparking outrage abroad but mainly panic within Israel’s leadership over reputational damage and the risk of international prosecution.

Following the leak, right-wing activists, including several Israeli ministers, stormed the base to show support for the soldiers, who committed the assault, denouncing their arrest and framing them as heroes.

A Haaretz investigation published Sunday revealed that Yerushalmi, who was dismissed last week by Defense Minister Israel Katz, had for months avoided launching probes into incidents in Gaza that could constitute war crimes.

Military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich reported that Yerushalmi deliberately froze several sensitive cases due to threats and incitement from Israel’s far-right circles following her involvement in the Sde Teiman affair.

“She felt threatened and stopped making decisions out of fear of personal attacks,” a senior army source told the paper.

Among the cases she ignored was the killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen in Deir al-Balah in April 2024. An internal field investigation found that the strike violated operational orders, but Yerushalmi chose not to refer it to military police.

A reserve officer told Haaretz that Yerushalmi also refused to open investigations into the killing of 15 medical staff members in Gaza in March 2024, despite documented evidence and calls from inquiry committees.

According to sources quoted by Haaretz, Yerushalmi had received direct threats at her home and workplace.

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