Tag: israel

Two Israeli Soldiers Killed In Hebron Checkpoint Shooting As Netanyahu Orders West Bank Closure And Vows More Settlements

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and three others were wounded by Friday morning fire from two Palestinian gunmen at a checkpoint near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, just four days prior to the October 27 Israel election.

Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, from Ashkelon and a squad commander, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, from Hod Hasharon, were killed in the attack, the Israeli military said. The three Home Front soldiers wounded in the attack, who are part of the same battalion as the two killed, suffer from light to moderate injuries. The three are from the 775th “Ari” Battalion of the Search and Rescue Brigade of the Home Front Command.

The two Palestinian gunmen who opened fire at a checkpoint near Hebron in the West Bank this morning arrived at the Judea Junction on Route 35 in a car with Israeli license plates, armed with an M16 rifle and a pistol, Israel Today reported. The gunfight with the Israeli soldiers who responded to the attack was prolonged and lasted over 20 minutes during which both attackers were killed by the soldiers. A large amount of ammunition was found in the car the two gunmen arrived in, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said. Netanyahu said it appeared Hamas terrorists were planning “a major attack aimed at murdering innocent civilians.” Both gunmen were members of Hamas, Israeli media reported, according to Israel Today.

The Israeli Prime Minister said he had instructed the military to “impose a cordon on the city of Hebron and to prepare for a full closure of the entire West Bank starting today,” DW reported. In the Hebron neighborhood where the two shooters came from, the IDF would apply the same model used in the refugee camps in the West Bank. “We will evacuate the residents, go from house to house, remove the weapons there, and address and demolish all terrorist infrastructure,” Netanyahu said. He added that Israel is placing a siege on the city of Hebron and its neighboring city of Halhul, and would consider applying the same model in other cities as well.

Netanyahu added that an even bigger operation is going to be carried out by the IDF in Judea and Samaria. “The Defense Minister and I have seen an IDF operation in Judea and Samaria on a very broad scale, unlike anything carried out since the Six-Day War. The IDF is ready to carry it out, and we will determine the timing, but it is coming.” He gave no date.

To the settlers in the area, Netanyahu declared, “You are an example to the people of Israel. You are an example to the State of Israel. We are going to destroy the terrorist infrastructure, and we are going to build the settlement infrastructure.” He continued that the government was advancing plans to build and legalize over 100 new communities and over 100 farms.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for a large-scale military campaign in the West Bank. He said he wanted a campaign “exactly like in Gaza and Lebanon,” DW reported. Immediately he ordered the demolition of a row of what he called illegal Arab structures next to the spot where the attack took place.

The attack occurred at the end of the campaign, when the voting is due to take place in four days’ time, on October 27. According to DW, the vote is widely seen as a referendum on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The polls have predicted a very tight race between the pro-Netanyahu camp and its opponents. Netanyahu connected the attack to threats that the election-season expects from his enemies. “We warned several weeks ago about attempts by our enemies to harm us, our civilians and our soldiers ahead of the elections. That is what they tried to do here,” he said.

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Decoding Pro-Israel Buzzwords in a Time of Genocide

Nearly two years ago, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released in-depth reports documenting that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Months later, Israeli human rights groups did likewise. Support for Israel has declined steeply among Americans, but its defenders continue to maintain a siege of buzzwords against Palestinian rights.

As historian Rashid Khalidi emphasized in his book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, “language matters.” Standard terms and tropes “are the essential building blocks of a lofty and solid edifice of denial of an entire narrative, of the existence of an entire people, which is basic to the affirmation of a formidable counter-reality.”

Prominent groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and Christians United for Israel – along with allies in Congress, the Executive Branch and the punditocracy – rely on the same buzzwords to defame critics of Israel and deny its systematic crimes against Palestinian people. For instance:

** “antisemitic”
At the top in the rhetorical toolbox, a blunt instrument for smearing Israel’s critics no matter how true their accusations – and no matter the absence of evidence of bigotry against Jewish people.

** “blood libel”
A high-dudgeon epithet for equating valid condemnations of Israel with 900-year-old antisemitic craziness.

** “held to a higher standard”
A catchphrase to evade realities of Israel’s ongoing large-scale crimes against humanity and the fact that Israel uses enormous U.S. military aid to impose apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide as matters of policy.

** “homeland for the Jewish people”
In other words: Palestinians will not replace us.

** “indigenous”
So, even Jewish Americans who recently moved to Israel are indigenous, unlike Palestinians whose ancestors have been living in Palestine for the last hundreds of years.

** “Jewish and democratic state”
It can’t be oxymoronic just because it’s an oxymoron.

** “peace process”
The process of Israeli expansion that has brought war and more war, with the U.S. government functioning as “Israel’s lawyer” while arming Israel with massive quantities of weapons and continuing to make Israel (in the words of a recent Congressional Research Service report) “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.”

** “self-defense”
A term reserved for Israelis but certainly not Palestinians.

** “terrorism”
When Palestinians kill Israeli civilians but not when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians in vastly greater numbers.

** “renounce violence”
A demand routinely made of Palestinian organizations but not of the Israeli government.

** “Israel’s right to exist”
The standard gotcha question “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” can be answered with clear questions: “Do you think apartheid South Africa had a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think ethnic cleansing has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think genocide has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military had a right to exist?”

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The Normality of Evil: Reflections on the “NAZA” Documentary

Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as representing “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, shocked many people. It was later criticized in the wake of the discovery of her protagonist’s antisemitic pronouncements, unknown during his trial. The new film NAZA, documenting the inner mechanisms of the Gaza genocide brings the concept of the banality of evil front stage again. Except that this time we have the testimonies of two dozen perpetrators who, unlike Eichmann, do not face a tribunal but share their experience mostly in a casual and relaxed manner, some with pride in their accomplishment, others with remorse. They sound like normal middle-class men and women conscientiously doing their challenging hi-tech job. These Israelis embody something different from the Nazis who tried to hide their crimes from their own people, whom they feared would not support them. The new film is about the normality of evil in a society that has largely accepted the genocide taking place less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv.

The twenty-four perpetrators interviewed in the film belong to elite intelligence units that harness the power of AI and total surveillance to destroy Gaza. They are not “Arab haters,” remarks one of the interviewees. Yet he believes he killed more women and children than the fiercest Arab hater. However abhorrent the ongoing West Bank pogroms against Palestinians by Zionist squatter-settler vigilantes taking place under the sympathetic gaze and occasional assistance of the IDF—the magnitude of mass murder of civilians in Gaza is incomparably greater.

The perpetrators come from privileged classes of upscale, glittering Tel Aviv, the visual background of the entire film. Among the leitmotifs of the testimonies are the readiness to obey orders and the delight of overcoming difficult technical challenges (technodélice, as the late Jean-Jacques Salomon defined it). “It was fun (kef),” admitted one of the perpetrators.

NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The association with “Nazi” is not fortuitous; one of the perpetrators compares his experience with that of Nazis engaged in industrialized, albeit less sophisticated, mass murder in the early 1940s. When, like many young Israelis (and Jews from elsewhere), he was taken to visit Nazi extermination camps, he wondered how these Nazis could switch to normal life after killing thousands of people a day. Now, he admits, he knows. He would meet friends after a day of killing mostly women and children and enjoy his night out.

Initially, neither the Nazis nor the Zionists intended to commit genocide. In their exclusivist nationalist fantasies, German National Socialists wanted to expel the undesirables, to make the “purified,” expanded Germany great again and, in the case of the socialist Zionists in power in 1948 and 1967, when massive expulsions took place, to turn Palestine into a “Jewish state.” Both had land lust: the Nazis wanted fertile land in Eastern Europe ‘cleansed’ of most Slavs and all the Jews—while critics and political figures alike have described Israel’s territorial strategy as a pursuit of ‘a maximum of territory with a minimum of Arabs.’

From the turn of the 20th century, Zionist pioneers laid strong emphasis on breeding the intrepid and valiant New Hebrew Man who had broken with the victimhood of the past. In his eulogy for Theodor Herzl in 1904, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established and shaped the now dominant stream of Zionism, defined the new creature thus:

It was only later, faced with resistance kindled by the settler movement, that Israelis assumed the role of innocent victims, forced to defend themselves. Visits to the Nazi extermination camps are essential components of the didactic tools used to forge hard-nosed fighters. No wonder most of them called the attack on southern Israel in October 2023 “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Totally lost was the difference between powerless Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazis and the powerful Jewish state that had expelled and confined Palestinians in an open-air concentration camp in Gaza. Referring to the violence they unleash, the Israelis often use the expression ein brera (“there is no choice”), which preserves their self-image and justifies excesses. This is how the genocide has metastasized from Europe to West Asia.

The film’s protagonists explain how they use sophisticated technology to survey every telephone communication of the Palestinians. One of the phrases AI extracts from millions of conversations is “When does daddy come home?” This is how the decision is made to destroy the suspect’s home along with his wife and children. Behind their computer screens, those who determine such targets can later hear the cries of those wounded children who were waiting for their fathers a few minutes earlier.

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Far-Left, Mamdani-Backed Democrat Brad Lander Detained by Israeli Forces in West Bank While Participating in Pro-Palestinian Activist Mission — Israel Accuses Him of “Harvesting Headlines”

Democratic congressional nominee Brad Lander, the far-left former New York City Comptroller and close ally of radical Mayor Zohran Mamdani, was detained again by Israeli authorities on Wednesday.

Lander, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District, was detained on October 21 alongside dozens of international activists and rabbis while participating in an olive-harvesting mission with Palestinian farmers near the village of Nahalin, south of Bethlehem, NY Times reported.

The former New York City comptroller, who previously made headlines after being detained by federal immigration agents during a confrontation at a Manhattan immigration courthouse, was released several hours later with a warning.

Lander posted a selfie from a bus filled with others, writing: “I’ve been detained by the IDF, along with a group of rabbis & volunteers. We were simply harvesting olives in a grove near Nehalim in the West Bank. The occupation is a crime under international law. Harvesting olives isn’t a crime under any law I know.”

He later claimed he was released “with a ‘warning,’ apparently because of my public profile (I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee).”

He added that others remained in custody and should be freed immediately, framing the action as part of “state-sponsored ethnic cleansing.”

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Hegseth meets Netanyahu during secret visit to Israel; said to discuss ‘threats in region’

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a secret meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during an unannounced visit to Israel on Monday.

A spokesman for Netanyahu confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that the meeting, first reported by Axios, took place. Doron Spielman said Netanyahu met with Hegseth at the Ovda Air Force base in southern Israel, where US fighter jets and refuelers are stationed. He said they discussed “the threats in the region,” and the US-Israel partnership in dealing both offensively and defensively with those threats.

Earlier, Hegseth confirmed that he had made an unannounced trip to the Middle East, but did not specify his location or travels, saying only that he had met with US troops while in the region.

It was not clear from the initial Axios report whether other Israeli officials or military personnel were present at the meeting, though later reports indicated Defense Minister Israel Katz attended but IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir and Mossad head Roman Gofman did not.

News of Hegseth’s trip came a day after US President Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu in next week’s election — Israel’s first since the Hamas terror group’s devastating attack on October 7, 2023, which shook the country and plunged it into war in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

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Post-Genocide Israel 2026: Fragmented, Divided, Segregated Election With Few Alternatives

Israel’s 2026 election is occurring in a highly polarized and incendiary political atmosphere that recalls 1995. Then, the Oslo process had split Israeli society between an increasingly radicalized right and a peace-oriented government. As the incendiary political climate was condoned by the right-wing Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was publicly branded a traitor and assassinated by a Messianic Jewish extremist.

The analogy has its limits. In 1995 the central political question was whether Israel should negotiate with the Palestinians. In 2026, the argument is taking place after October 7, three years of war, the obliteration of Gaza, intensified West Bank settlement and displacement, and Israeli military operations involving Lebanon and Iran.

In the past 10-15 years, the country’s political center of gravity has shifted sharply toward security and military power, documented in my The Fall of Israel (2024).

Recent polls have the Netanyahu and opposition blocs tied at about 50 seats. Neither side has a reliable governing coalition, while the Israeli Arab parties held the balance – until their representation was undermined.

International media muses about the “knife-edge Israeli elections” between the incumbent Netanyahu and his rivals, tacitly suggesting that the latter offer “hope” and “change.” In reality, the Israeli vote is not a conventional left-right election, but a referendum on who controls the Israeli state after years of permanent war – and what kind of state emerges from it.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Two major blocs and the unaligned

In the 120-member Israeli parliament, the Knesset, no single party has a majority. Effectively, the rivalry is between two blocs of parties: the Netanyahu-led harsh-right and the rival bloc, led by former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, that is portrayed as centrist (though it, too, is slanted toward right).

Current polling suggests that the election may produce no clear outcome. Each major bloc attracts about 50 seats. Garnering up to 20 seats, the smaller unaligned groups are expected to have a critical role in the next government coalition. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud remains committed to military primacy, opposition to Palestinian statehood and a security-centered conception of Israeli sovereignty.

Once again, Likud’s campaign presents him as the indispensable protector of Israel in a hostile region, despite the catastrophic October 7 failure occurring under his watch. That depiction is fully misaligned with the war crimes he remains accused of.

In the absence of effective opposition alternatives, Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist-populist Yashar (“honest”) bloc, has promoted itself as a more moderate option. Yet, its leader Gadi Eisenkot is a security hawk and the architect of the Obliteration Doctrine that was first tested in Dahiya, Beirut in 2006-7 and perfected in the Gaza genocide 2023-26. Eisenkot regards Palestinian statehood as effectively “irrelevant.”

Recent reporting, however, reinforces the limits of the promised alternative: the opposition says it would curb extremist settler violence, dismantle illegal outposts and restore some cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, yet its leading figures still reject Palestinian statehood. A change of government could alter methods and international relations without changing the underlying territorial consensus.

Next come labor, far-right, religious and Arab parties, which each could attract about 7-11 seats.

Led by Yair Golan, the labor Democrats are the clearest major Jewish-Zionist force advocating a negotiated Palestinian settlement, while still maintaining a strongly security-oriented posture. For a year or two, the popular Golan has tried to consolidate and expand Israeli left. His dream is to restore the broad labor front that governed Israel until Likud’s election triumph in 1977. But that’s a tall order.

Since the mid-2010s, Israel has shifted toward the Messianic far-right, thanks to hardened domestic sentiments and billions of U.S. dollars in annual military aid and conservative American-Jewish funding. When the country is consistently rewarded for policies that international law considers crimes, this is hardly surprising.

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China urges Israel to rethink its policies

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has urged Israel to halt and reverse the establishment of settlements in the occupied West Bank, describing the Palestinian issue as the “greatest historical injustice of this century,” according to a ⁠statement released by Beijing following his meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

The two officials met on Thursday on the sidelines of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Wang said achieving peace and reconciliation in the Middle East remained a cornerstone of Chinese foreign policy, stressing that a two-state solution was the only viable path toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Citizen Lab Exposes Israeli Spyware Infecting Phones Through Ordinary Ads

Israeli mercenary spyware reached potentially hundreds of millions of devices worldwide through ordinary online advertisements that required no user interaction to deliver their payload, according to research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. [1]

The findings published Thursday, Oct. 15, said the incident is likely to be the first confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered through targeted ads [2]. The ads, loaded with the Candiru spyware, were placed by Israeli firm Discover-Tech.

What The Citizen Lab Investigation Found

During a four-month period examined by researchers, Discover-Tech ads appeared on almost 200,000 unique websites and Android and iOS applications across dozens of countries. [1] The Citizen Lab said the advertising supply chain effectively functions as a mass-profiling and infection system capable of reaching enormous populations with no user action whatsoever.

Scope Extended to Sensitive Networks, Researchers Say

According to The Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech ad impressions were also found in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and United Nations networks, the European Parliament, the European Commission and more than a dozen national governments. Ads also appeared within media organizations in eight countries, including Australia, Mexico and across Europe. The pattern suggests that the advertising infrastructure used in the campaign reached deeply into government, military and journalistic environments where surveillance would be most valuable.

Platform Access and Prior Blacklisting

Candiru’s rebrand to Integrity Labs followed a 2025 acquisition by the U.S. private equity firm Integrity Partners, which is not subject to U.S. sanctions. This corporate restructuring allowed the spyware operation to continue under a new identity while its prior entity remained on the blacklist.

Following the findings by the two research groups, Google, IAB Europe, Beeswax and other platforms disconnected Discover-Tech’s access to the digital advertising market. In November 2021, Candiru was also used to target Middle East Eye and other websites, according to the security firm ESET, in an attack that targeted links to the Middle East with a strong focus on Yemen and the surrounding conflict.

Researcher Comments and Context

“The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat,” Wolfie Cristl, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, told Reuters. The reports describe an advertising model in which commercial ad platforms can be repurposed for tracking, reconnaissance and the automated delivery of malicious exploits without any interaction from the user.

The findings add to a growing pattern of documented abuses of commercial spyware. In September 2026, suspected spyware attacks targeted the phones of at least three Turkish ministers, with Apple sending notifications warning that the devices may have been compromised [3].

In December 2025, a joint investigation by media outlets in Greece, Israel and Switzerland revealed that Predator spyware from the Intellexa Consortium, led by a former senior Israeli intelligence official, continued to be used against targets in multiple countries despite U.S. sanctions [4]. These cases point to a broader ecosystem in which commercial spyware vendors operate across borders, adapt to sanctions and find new delivery channels.

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Trump Issues Full-Throated Endorsement Of Netanyahu Ahead Of Tough Election

In what should come as no big surprise at all, President Trump has issued a whole-hearted endorsement for Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday as next Israeli prime minister.

Axios points out, “This is the first time in the history of the U.S.–Israel relations that a U.S. president explicitly and publicly endorsed a candidate in the Israeli elections.“

There’s a mere nine days to go before the country’s Oct.27 elections, and domestically Netanyahu has long been accused of prolonging and escalating conflicts in order to sell himself as the necessary ‘wartime president’.

Axios further observes that Trump’s endorsement was ‘needed’ as most polls show Netanyahu’s coalition “falling short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.“

Trump himself on Truth Social touted Bibi as “a Great Warrior Prime Minister” and a “great partner” in the war against Iran.

“If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work [in Iran] ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote.

The post is full of lavish praise about how Netanyahu ‘thrives’ under pressure and that most “normal men and women” would in the same situations “would have wilted under pressure.“

Political opponents are lambasting inappropriate ‘foreign intervention’ while Netanyahu is really soaking in and making the most of Trump’s full explicit backing:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday that Israel could face a “hostile” US president in two years, emphasizing the need to capitalize on the time remaining in US President Donald Trump’s term.

“There is a window of another two years with President Trump, and one of the questions in these elections is who will work with Trump? Who will complete the remaining work?” Netanyahu said.

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Israeli settlers attack European delegation convoy in West Bank, beat French mayor

Israeli settlers on Saturday attacked a convoy of European diplomats and beat up a visiting French mayor, in a new escalation of violence during the Palestinian olive harvest, witnesses and diplomats said.

The 78-year-old mayor said masked settlers yelled defamatory comments about France, kicked him and hit him with iron bars as he joined Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank alongside the top French and Belgian representatives in Jerusalem and Polish diplomats.

“I think that if settlers are behaving like this, there is a tolerance on the part of the Israeli government,” Bernard Baudoux, mayor of the northern French town of Aulnoye-Aymeries, told AFP after he was attacked.

“The whole world needs to know what’s happening,” he said. “For me, I’ll go back to my country and everything will be fine. Those who continue to suffer the most are those who are here.”

Baudoux, who was wearing a sash with the French tricolour, was seen collapsed on the side of the car after the attack but did not need hospital care.

The attack came just one day after settlers beat an American photographer for The Washington Post, who was in moderate condition with broken vertebrae on Saturday.

In a post on X, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, describing the attack as “appalling”.

“The Israeli authorities must arrest those responsable for these appalling acts and take them to justice. They must urgently halt this criminal violence and guarantee the safety of civilian populations, as they are compelled to do under international law.”

Israel’s foreign ministry also condemned the incident and Israeli police promised to open an investigation.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, days away from an election in which he is seeking to shore up support from the far-right, instead alleged a “smear” campaign against settlers.

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