Tag: israel

Spanish Minister Fuels Blame Toward Israel for Ceuta Crisis After Israeli U.N. Ambassador Criticizes Madrid

Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente fueled online claims blaming Israel for Spain’s migrant crisis in the North African enclave of Ceuta on Friday after Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon criticized Madrid’s handling of the border emergency, escalating an already tense diplomatic dispute between Jerusalem and Spain.

The exchange followed Danon’s criticism of Spain after Madrid declared a state of emergency and deployed military forces to Ceuta following an unprecedented surge of migrants crossing into the Spanish enclave from neighboring Morocco. Puente’s cryptic response helped fuel conspiracy theories circulating on Spanish social media alleging Israel — and in some cases the United States — was behind the crisis.

Danon accused Spain of hypocrisy as Madrid struggled to contain one of Europe’s largest recent illegal migration surges.

“Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy,” Danon wrote on X.

“Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa,” he added, referring to the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast.

Puente, one of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s most outspoken ministers on social media, reposted Danon’s remarks on X and added only: “Well, things are starting to become quite clear.”

While the minister did not elaborate, Spanish media widely interpreted the post as lending credibility to online claims blaming Israel for the migrant crisis.

Those claims spread rapidly after several Spanish politicians and commentators alleged Israel was seeking to retaliate against Sánchez’s government over its criticism of Jerusalem’s war against Hamas, while others suggested the United States also stood to benefit politically from instability in Spain. No public evidence was presented supporting those allegations.

Among those advancing similar claims were commentator Carolina Alonso, who alleged Israel was attempting to undermine Sánchez’s government through Morocco; Spanish lawmaker Gabriel Rufián, who argued the migration crisis was serving American and Israeli interests; journalist José Vizner, who questioned whether the crisis represented “revenge” against Sánchez; and commentator Rubén Gisbert, who argued Morocco’s posture toward Ceuta and Melilla shifted as Spain adopted increasingly hostile positions toward Israel.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry quickly distanced itself from Danon’s remarks.

Israeli Chargé d’Affaires Dana Erlich wrote on X that Israel was “closely monitoring the situation in Ceuta,” but stressed that “the comment made by Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. on the issue does not represent the position of the State of Israel.”

The diplomatic dispute unfolded as Spain confronted its worst migration crisis in Ceuta since 2021 after Spanish officials said roughly 49,000 migrants crossed into the North African enclave from Morocco in less than 24 hours.

Videos circulating online showed migrants swimming around border barriers, using inner tubes to reach Spanish territory, and forcing their way through land crossings as local authorities struggled to respond.

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Coordinated campaign targeting Canadian firms linked to Israel

One week ago, Juno News investigative journalist Melanie Bennet published a report on a pro-Palestinian activist network called Arms Embargo Now and its connections to Palestine Action Canada — a group that has been attacking Canadian companies it believes are linked to Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems, posting CCTV footage of its own crimes on Instagram, and claiming responsibility in the name of political aims.

On the day Bennet appeared on The Ezra Levant Show, a Toronto armoured car company called Incas, which appears on the Arms Embargo Now target map — was shot at. Palestine Action Canada had not claimed responsibility as of broadcast.

But the timing was not lost on either Melanie or Ezra. “Literally every day in Toronto, there’s another shooting,” Ezra said. “Two days ago, two Jewish delis. Yesterday, the U.S. Consulate for the second time. Today, this.”

Melanie walked through the information she’s gathered on the network she had been tracking.

Arms Embargo Now is a coalition of activist groups, including Labour for Palestine, World Beyond War, Palestinian Youth Movement and others, that has built a map of Canadian companies it claims supply Elbit Systems or its affiliates.

On the surface, the campaign involves letter-writing and complaints directed towards MPs. But it is also closely connected to Palestine Action Canada, a domestic branch of a global organization.

In the United Kingdom, Palestine Action UK was designated a terrorist organization after one of its members attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer during a so-called “direct action” campaign. At home, Palestine Action Canada has taken responsibility for attacks on a Quebec company called Devtech and an Ontario company called Don Limited in Vaughan, posting CCTV footage of itself committing the vandalism both times.

Bennet said the legal framing of these incidents matters.

Under the RCMP’s own definition, terrorism includes property damage carried out for political or social aims. Palestine Action Canada has explicitly stated political motivations for its attacks. “That is by definition domestic terrorism,” she said. “And I don’t think we’re taking this seriously enough.”

Interpol’s 2025 terrorism assessment, she noted, lists left-wing and anarchist terrorism — what it categorizes as the “red-green alliance” of Marxist and jihadist groups acting in concert — as the second largest terrorism threat category in Europe after jihadism. Europe is making arrests in this category.

Canada, she argued, has a significant blind spot. 

An access to information request of Canadian security service reporting showed no clear tracking of this kind of domestic terrorism. “Canada has a very big blind spot,” she said. “And those things tend to escalate if they’re not dealt with.”

Ezra noted that Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently convened foreign ambassadors specifically to discuss radical far-left Antifa violence, and that Canada sent the lowest-level delegate possible.

He argued the Trudeau and Carney governments have made a deliberate political calculation: naming jihadist or Antifa violence would alienate their support base, so they fund organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network to redirect attention toward an exaggerated right-wing threat instead.

“These violent people are the street teams of the left,” he said. “And if you’re even a peaceful street team on the right — like the truckers — off to jail with you.”

Melanie’s had a direct warning for Canadians. 

“When you have people who are willing to engage in violence for ideological reasons and it is not dealt with, this tends to escalate,” she said. “The last thing I would want is for somebody in one of these companies that have been shot up to actually get shot — or to start seeing violence against civilians in the street the way we’ve seen in Europe.”

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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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Section 219: More Than a Defense Provision – The Battle Over the Future of US-Israel Relations

Somewhere in the thousand-plus pages of America’s annual National Defense Authorization Act sits a provision that started out as Section 224 and later became Section 219 in the House version. On paper it looks straightforward: expand technological and defense cooperation between the United States and Israel. In practice it has turned into one of the more revealing fights in current U.S. politics. The reactions on both sides make clear that this is not really about joint research projects or sharing a few more technical papers. It has become a proxy for bigger arguments about how far American security commitments should go, what role Israel should play in Washington’s strategy, and where the Republican Party is headed on foreign policy.

The House kept the language when it passed its version of the bill. Representative Thomas Massie, a consistent America First voice, tried to strip it out. His effort never even made it to a full floor vote. That alone told you something: for now, the coalition that wants deeper strategic ties with Israel still has the numbers in the House.

What the section actually does is instruct the Defense Department to expand work with Israel in areas like artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum technology, cybersecurity, electronic warfare, drones, and joint research programs. Supporters say this is common sense. Facing serious competition from China and Russia, they argue, the United States cannot afford to go it alone on the technologies that will shape the next generation of military power. Israel has real strengths in these fields. Formalizing and deepening cooperation, they insist, does not create new combat commitments. It simply builds on relationships that have existed for years.

Opponents see a different trajectory. They worry the language is less about discrete projects and more about gradually knitting the two countries’ defense industries and military structures closer together. Once those ties become denser, they argue, American decision-makers may find their options more constrained when the next Middle East crisis arrives. Massie’s objection sits squarely in this camp. He believes the United States should stop creating new mechanisms that pull it deeper into security obligations connected to Israel

The fight is not really about one paragraph in a defense bill. It reflects deeper shifts already underway. The war in Gaza, the scale of civilian deaths, and the protests that spread across American campuses have made traditional support for Israel less automatic, especially among younger people. Inside the Republican Party a visible split has opened. Traditional conservatives still treat a wide network of allies as essential to American leadership. The America First wing wants fewer overseas commitments, fewer expensive wars, and more focus on problems at home.

So Section 219 is not just about Israel. It is about how America defines its own interests. Should Washington keep deepening alliances as the price of remaining the dominant global power, or should it start redirecting more energy and money toward rebuilding at home and competing economically with China?

The fact that opponents could not remove the section shows the old consensus still has real weight in Congress. But the intensity of the pushback shows that consensus is no longer automatic. What used to be a quiet assumption has become one of the sharper dividing lines in American foreign-policy debates.

Nothing is final yet. The bill still has to move through the Senate. If the two chambers produce different texts, a conference committee will have to work out the differences. House passage was a clear win for the provision’s backers, but the ultimate language depends on what happens next.

What is already obvious is that Section 219 has stopped being just another clause in a giant spending bill. It has become a rough test of the direction American foreign policy is likely to take. Will the United States continue leaning on ever-closer strategic partnerships, or will it gradually pull back toward a more limited, domestically focused approach?

For decades the relationship rested on a familiar mix of shared values, intelligence cooperation, technological overlap, and common adversaries. That foundation has not vanished. Israel remains a capable partner in missile defense, cyber operations, and advanced research. Supporters of the section keep returning to these practical advantages and argue that tighter cooperation is a logical response to a more competitive world.

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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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Trump Responds to Netanyahu Opposing Sale of F-35 Jets to Turkey: “Nobody Tells Me What We Should Be Selling or Not”

President Trump on Monday responded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for criticizing his plan to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, saying, “Nobody tells me what we should be selling or not.”

Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Trump on Tuesday at the White House during a visit to the United States, where he will also attend the wake for late Senator Lindsey Graham. Trump told reporters that he and Netanyahu are “pretty close” to the same page. “We have a little difference, but pretty close,” Trump said.

But he made it clear that they’re not on the same page regarding Turkey.

Earlier this month, Netanyahu appeared on CNN with Dana Bash hours after Trump said he would sell F-35s to Turkey during the NATO Summit in Ankara, overturning a ban from his first term.

“He’s not exactly a model ally of the United States,” Netanyahu said, asserting that the move “doesn’t make Turkey a friendly state to the United States.”

“It would destroy the power balance in the Middle East,” he continued. “This is not a force for peace and stability… When you give them that power, you’re going to see aggression in its wake.”

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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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