Tag: israel

Netanyahu: Israel Will Seize Full Control of Gaza, Defeat Hamas, Transfer Territory to Arab Governance

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Thursday that Israel “intends to” take full control of the entire Gaza Strip to eliminate Hamas and transfer authority to non-hostile Arab forces, outlining his most comprehensive vision yet for ending the war as his security cabinet met to approve the operation.

Speaking to Fox News host Bill Hemmer ahead of the critical security cabinet meeting, Netanyahu laid out his vision for completely dismantling Hamas rule and transferring Gaza to new leadership.

“We have three missions: One, to eliminate Hamas as a governing and military power in Gaza, otherwise there’s no future for anyone and we will have many more kidnappings and hostages,” Netanyahu declared. “Second, achieve the liberation of all of our hostages. And third, make sure that Gaza doesn’t pose a threat to Israel again.”

The prime minister emphasized that Israel’s goal is liberation, not occupation. “We don’t want to keep it; we want to have a security perimeter,” he said when asked about seizing control of the entire 26-mile Gaza Strip. “We don’t want to govern it. We don’t want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us, and give Gazans a good life.”

Netanyahu framed the military operation as a rescue mission for both Israelis and Palestinians. “We want to liberate ourselves, liberate the people of Gaza from the awful terror of Hamas,” he stated, describing Hamas as holding “two million Palestinian and Gazan hostages” under their tyrannical rule.

The prime minister forcefully defended Israel’s military tactics against international criticism, particularly charges of genocide. “If we are practicing genocide, we sure would be doing a very bad job of it,” Netanyahu said, citing Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s recent comments. “Because we could have basically eliminated the entire population of Gaza, but we went in the other direction.”

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AIPAC Attacks Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for Calling Israel’s Actions in Gaza Genocide

The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC is attacking Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) after she became the first Republican member of Congress to label Israel’s actions against the Palestinians in Gaza a genocide.

According to Al Jazeera, in a fundraising email to supporters on Thursday, AIPAC called Greene’s remarks “disgusting” and accused her of betraying “American values” for calling Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza a genocide, which aligns Greene with many human rights organizations and genocide scholars, including Israeli ones.

“You expect anti-Israel smears from Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar,” AIPAC said in the email, referring to two House Democrats known for their critical view of Israel. “But now, Marjorie Taylor Greene has joined their ranks – spouting the same vile rhetoric and voting against the US-Israel alliance.”

AIPAC said Greene was now the “newest member of the anti-Israel Squad” and claimed her view was a “betrayal of American values and a dangerous distortion of the truth.”

Greene has referred to Israel’s actions as genocide at least twice in posts on X. In her first post, Greene said that it’s “the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”

In another post, the Georgia congresswoman said many Americans are “against radical Islamic terrorism, but we are also against genocide.” She has also repeatedly referred to Israel as “nuclear-armed Israel,” making her one of the first members of Congress to directly acknowledge Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal.

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‘Fearing Zionism Could Die Among Democrats,’ Party Leaders Stage Phony ‘Break’ With Israel

AIPAC-funded Democrats’ phony “break” with Israel is a stopgap measure to try and avoid turning opposition to the Jewish state into a litmus test for the midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries, CNN reports.

From CNN, “Pro-Israel Democrats try breaking with Netanyahu to stop party’s shift amid Gaza crisis”:

Fearing Zionism could die among Democrats, many party leaders are explicitly breaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to try to stop anti-Israel attitudes from becoming a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries.

But privately, several tell CNN, they worry it may be too late.

Last week’s failed resolution to block new arms sales to Israel, supported by a record number of Senate Democrats, was just the start. A new letter to recognize a Palestinian state is gaining signatures in the House. Devoted allies of Israel are speaking out against its government, brushing off whatever texts and phone calls they’ve been getting from the dwindling number of party voters or donors still standing steadfast behind Israeli actions in Gaza nearly two years after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack.

It’s no longer just the far left rejecting Netanyahu’s years of identifying more with Republicans. There is also a bitter backlash among many Democratic politicians, who have felt bullied by the Israeli government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, and there’s revulsion over the images of starvation and dying children.

“We can disagree about a lot of things in the foreign policy space, but there’s no room to tolerate mass starvation,” said Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, who is Jewish and widely seen as one of the party’s future leaders in the Senate. Schatz argues there’s a conflation of opposing the Israeli government and opposing Israel’s right to exist that he calls “ridiculous” and an “intentional strategy” meant to distract.

“I think there’s a recognition that Netanyahu is making Israel and Israelis and Jews unsafe all over the world,” Schatz said. “More and more of us are saying so and voting accordingly.”

[…] Leaders of multiple Jewish and pro-Israel groups told CNN privately that they have grimly determined their best and most practical approach is essentially to quietly wait out the trauma and hope the politics turns. There’s another Israeli election next year, and while Netanyahu is now in a minority coalition, he has been counted out before.

The same is of course true among “liberal Zionist” commentators like Jon Stewart and others, as I wrote about last week.

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Trump admin drops Israel boycott conditions from disaster aid guidance after intense backlash

The Trump Administration on Monday dropped language from the Department of Homeland Security that would have denied disaster aid funding to cities and states that boycotted Israeli companies, following intense backlash from both sides of the aisle.

The DHS Standard Terms and Conditions on Monday morning, included the following statement:

“Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.”

That language has since been removed from the DHS’s most up to date version. The original post with the Israel-related language may be found here.

The removal followed intense online backlash from right-wing and left-wing advocates online, many of whom deemed it evidence of Israeli capture of the American government.

“Denying American victims of natural disasters aid if they are insufficiently supportive of Israel. Absolute insanity,” wrote podcast Krystal Ball.

“I’ve never seen someone tank their legacy so fast. This is not America first and anyone advising him on this should be fired,” musician Alexandra Lains wrote.

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Netanyahu Has Reportedly Opted For Permanent Military Occupation Of Gaza

Israel’s Channel 12 broadcaster is reporting that the Israeli government has made the decision to occupy the Gaza Strip on a permanent basis.

Correspondent Amit Segal reports Monday, “Senior official in Netanyahu’s office: The decision has been made — we’re going to occupy Gaza.”

The top official has been further quoted as saying: “If we do not act now, hostages will die of starvation and Gaza will remain under Hamas control.”

But the last days have seen conflicting reports over the status and future of the ground operation, dubbed ‘Gideon’s Chariots’. What has become clear in the last week is that negotiations are off, as Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered an expanded ground incursion in central Gaza.

With much of the Strip already decimated, and inhabitants on the verge of mass starvation, a big question has remained for Netanyahu: what’s next?

Hardline politicians in his own cabinet have called for the total removal of the Palestinian population, after President Trump months ago talked about turning the enclave into the ‘Rivera of the Mediterranean’. 

Indeed a key question remains, will Trump back a plan of permanent Israeli military occupation? This would certainly open up the likelihood of eventual annexation of the territory.

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Creating a Cover for Genocide

In July 2025, the Massachusetts legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill to make it the 38th state to follow the federal government, 45 other countries (almost all of them in the global North), and more than 50 U.S. local governments in adopting a strange definition of antisemitism.

In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a group of 35 mostly European countries, drafted what it called a working definition of antisemitism. The Alliance had been founded in 1998 to promote Holocaust education and, in its own words, to “strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.” All too sadly, right now, its definition is being used to do the opposite: it’s helping to criminalize opposition to genocide.

Is It Really About Antisemitism?

Most anti-racist organizations, like the NAACP, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Stop Anti-Asian and Pacific Islander Hate, do not, in fact, offer a specific definition of racism. Instead, they simply work to combat discrimination and fight for equal opportunity and basic human and civil rights.

Jews in the United States don’t, in fact, face the same kinds of systemic racism the people that formed the above organizations face. Unlike them, Jews tend to be disproportionately high income, highly educated professionals.

So, in the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism, not one refers to inequality or structural discrimination. Instead, they focus mostly on ideas and speech — and in particular things said about Israel. And what those examples, in fact, tend to do is turn the definition of antisemitism into a thinly veiled tool for use in prohibiting criticism of any sort of Israel.

The IHRA’s definition itself appears relatively straightforward, even if it focuses on thought and speech rather than structures of racism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

What follows, however, is a confusing and contradictory amalgam of 11 “examples of antisemitism in public life,” six of which focus on political debate that raises questions about Zionism, Israel as an ethnostate, or Israel’s actions.

Creating legal avenues to suppress what would otherwise be protected political speech about Israel is a major reason that the IHRA and its allies have felt the need to turn their definition into law. And advocates for the legal adoption of that definition claim that it’s necessary because antisemitism is on the rise in this country. But the expansive and confusing examples of antisemitism that the definition relies on actually make it impossible to know whether such a statement is, in fact, accurate. The organizations that use the IHRA definition to track antisemitism won’t tell us whether what is on the rise is actually antisemitism or simply opposition to Israel and its increasingly unnerving actions in the Middle East.

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Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state

Last week another batch of peaceful pro-Palestine protestors were arrested by British police on suspicion of terrorism offenses, including a disabled man in a wheelchair, as the UK continues its descent into authoritarianism on behalf of Israel.

If any of these protestors had their phones on them at the time of arrest, the police will most likely have scraped them for data using sophisticated spy tech software. Protestors not arrested will have been caught on mobile cameras that sit atop police vans in the UK, and their faces, perhaps even their voices, will have been captured, analyzed and cross referenced against a police database.

And in a perverse twist, this spyware technology – technology which now underpins the insidious and growing capabilities of the modern surveillance state – will most likely have been made in Israel by Israeli spies.

But it’s not just in the UK.

Spy tech developed by former Israeli spies is being used on an industrial scale by various agencies in western democracies, from police forces to national security agencies to militaries. Some has been declared illegal, some skirts legal boundaries, and much remains hidden.

The scale of usage, and the range of capabilities provided by this Israeli spy tech, is vast. From face and voice recognition software, to interception and wiretap technology, to covert location tracking, to forced data extraction from smartphones and other devices.

The tech, built by software engineers who cut their teeth writing code to enable and enforce Israeli domination over, and apartheid against Palestinians, is being sold to security services, police forces and immigration agencies across the West.

While much of the information in this article isn’t new, it hasn’t been summarized in one place before. The implications for global civil liberties of Israel’s dominance in spy tech have also not been articulated, and past media coverage has sometimes omitted the Israeli link to these companies. This article will outline the primary players, the sellers and the buyers, and also identify recent contracts, previously undocumented, between Israeli spytech and Western buyers.

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How the West Bank Is Being Annexed to Israel, with Tacit US Support

Just days ago, the Israeli parliament Knesset passed a motion for the agenda to “apply sovereignty” to the West Bank. Though largely declarative, the motion is paving the way to a wider debate on West Bank annexation in the Knesset plenum or in committees.

The motion was initiated by MKs Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism), one of the architects of Israel’s move from secular and democratic state to Jewish autocracy; Oded Forer (Yisrael Beitenu), a revisionist Zionist and hardliner; Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit), a Kahanite far-right extremist famous for her vow “Kill the Arabs”; and Dan Illouz (Likud), the Canadian-born harsh-right supporter of a Jewish neoliberal autocracy. 

The vote passed 71-13 in the Knesset. Afterwards, Illouz declared, “The message is unequivocal: Judea and Samaria are not a bargaining chip. The time has come for sovereignty.” 

Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War of 1967. It is the longest military occupation in modern history. Following the destruction of the Gaza Strip and efforts at its ethnic cleansing, the status quo is changing in the West Bank, which is being incorporated into Israel.

As I show in The Fall of Israel, this process of expansionism is historical. In early 20th century, before the British Mandate, more than nine of ten residents of Palestine were Arabs. Even today, 85% of the West Bank’s population are Arabs and only 15% are Jewish. Consequently, the “sovereign” Israel that the Netanyahu cabinet supports is predicated on ethnic cleansing. Hence, the explosion of violence against Palestinian Arabs in the area.

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In First, Ben Gvir Leads Settler Raid On Al-Aqsa Mosque Under Heavy Guard

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir led hundreds of settlers in storming Al-Aqsa Mosque complex on Sunday, were they loudly performed Jewish Talmudic prayer, under a heavy police guard, and attempted to antagonise Muslim worshippers.

Videos seen by Middle East Eye showed hundreds of settlers storming the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque where some could be seen dancing and shouting, seeking to disrupt the Muslim place of worship.

The status quo in Jerusalem has long maintained that Jewish prayer is forbidden on the raised plateau in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City, where Al-Aqsa Mosque stands.

However, over the past century, Zionist groups have repeatedly violated the fragile arrangement, launching unprecedented attacks on what’s considered one of Islam’s holiest sites. 

Residents in Jerusalem’s Old City told MEE that before and after Ben Gvir’s raid, the area had come to resemble a “military base” due to the “many checkpoints” that had been set up and the “heavy Israeli security presence”.

They said that Israeli forces severely restricted Palestinians from accessing the mosque, with only a few local residents allowed to pass. Speaking to reporters after the raid, Ben Gvir said: “The Temple Mount is for the Jews, and we will remain here forever.”

Since becoming a minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Ben Gvir has led at least 11 assaults on the mosque. Meanwhile, several other far-right politicians have advocated for the destruction of Al-Aqsa and the construction of a  temple where they claim Jewish temples once stood.

Among the hundreds of people to take part in Sunday’s raid was right-wing Likud lawmaker Amit Halevi, who has repeatedly advocated for Israel to destroy all water, food and energy sources in Gaza.

In June 2023, he tabled a bill that would divide Al-Aqsa Mosque between Muslims and Jews, a plan that would see shared access from the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock to the end of the northern border of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Palestinians fear that the incursions at Al-Aqsa, which have intensified since Israel went to war on Gaza in October 2023, are laying the groundwork for the mosque to be divided similar to how the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron was in the 1990s.

Muslims currently have limited access to that site, and just last month, Israel transferred the authority of the mosque from the Palestinian-run Hebron municipality to a settler council.

Aouni Bazbaz, the director of international affairs at the Islamic Waqf, the organisation that administers Al-Aqsa Mosque, described Sunday’s raid as “painful and regrettable”, telling MEE that it was a threat to the “historical status quo and an incitement to violence”.

“There were terrifying numbers of people [Israeli settlers] present and some were important figures,” he said. “This was part of a project. The extreme religious right seeks to undermine the status quo and to clearly follow the example of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

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Israel Preparing To Escalate Military Offensive in Gaza

The Israeli military is drawing up plans to escalate its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip that will soon be presented to Israeli political leadership, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

An Israeli official said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is pushing for the release of hostages as part of a military resolution,” and he is set to discuss the matter with his cabinet on Tuesday. According to the Haaretz report, the idea is to extend ground operations into sensitive areas, including Gaza’s central refugee camps, where Israeli captives are believed to be held.

Israeli officials are now claiming that Hamas doesn’t want a deal, even though the group has long said it is willing to release all remaining Israeli captives in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. Officials are pointing to Hamas’s denial of a claim by US envoy Steve Witkoff, who said the group was willing to disarm. Hamas responded that it would only give up its weapons if an independent Palestinian state were established.

Witkoff was in Israel on Friday and Saturday and met with family members of Israelis being held in Gaza. He told them that President Trump no longer seeks a temporary ceasefire deal but wants a comprehensive one that will free the remaining 20 living Israeli captives. However, Netanyahu hasn’t shown interest in a deal, and there’s no sign that Trump is willing to put pressure on him.

The family members of Israeli captives in Gaza want a diplomatic solution and are against military escalation. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum has criticized the reported plans for the expansion of military operations, warning that “expanding the war endangers the lives of the hostages, who are already in immediate danger of death.”

Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that the videos of two emaciated Israeli captives released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) show that Hamas “doesn’t want a deal” and vowed that he would work to “eliminate” the Palestinian group. For its part, Hamas insisted that the Israeli prisoners eat “what our fighters and our people eat” and said that the Red Cross could deliver aid to them if Israel permanently opened humanitarian corridors and halted airstrikes during aid deliveries.

Israel has been under significant international pressure to allow more aid into Gaza as Palestinians are starving to death due to its blockade. The Haaretz report said that the US and Israel appear to be moving toward expanding Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution points in north Gaza, which would require Israel to occupy more territory.

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