Tag: palestine

A United States citizen died in the West Bank Thursday, according to reports confirmed by the United States State Department.

Khamis Abdul Latif Ayyad, 41, died from smoke inhalation as a result of fires started by Israeli settlers who targeted cars and homes in his village late at night, according to the Miami Herald and a Palestinian news publication.

“We can confirm the death of a U.S. citizen in the town of Silwad in the West Bank. We offer condolences to the family on their loss and are providing consular assistance to them. We condemn criminal violence by any party in the West Bank,” a State Department spokesperson told the outlet.

According to Ayyad’s family, the fire was ignited by Israeli settlers who entered Silwad — a village located near several Israeli settlements in the central part of the West Bank — during the night and set both cars and homes on fire, the outlet noted.

A funeral for Ayyad was held Friday, and his family is awaiting an autopsy to determine his official cause of death, the outlet added.

Ayyad is the second U.S. citizen to be killed in the West Bank. Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian American, died July 11 after Israeli settlers beat him to death during violent outbreaks in the area. The violence began when “terrorists hurled rocks” at Israelis, causing minor injuries to two people, and then escalated into property damage, arson, physical confrontations, and further rock throwing, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) told Jewish News.  Musallet sustained injuries during the conflict, but was left without medical care for two hours because settlers blocked access for emergency responders, a friend told The Washington Post.

Ayyad was raised in Silwad, a small village in the West Bank, but relocated to the United States with his wife in 2008. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he and his family returned to the West Bank, according to the outlet.

Ayyad’s brother described him as a hardworking family man who was liked in his community.

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Having rendered much of Gaza uninhabitable and displacing a huge proportion of its population, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to propose a plan by which Israel will begin claiming parts of Gaza to be Israeli territory, with an eye on eventually seizing all of it. The scheme — which is said to have President Trump’s backing though also certain to trigger international condemnation — is aimed at preventing his extremist ruling coalition from splintering, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported on it.  

Under the scheme, Israel will give Gaza political and militant group Hamas a short deadline for accepting a ceasefire. After Hamas refuses to accept Netanyahu’s terms (which will likely be written to guarantee refusal) Israel will start annexing portions of Gaza, starting with the buffer zone it has created along the perimeter of the territory, before proceeding to claim more land in the north. Eventually, all of Gaza will be claimed as Israeli land, fulfilling the wishes of extremist ministers who are vital to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. 

One of those powerful coalition members is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, which seeks to move the Israeli state closer to a theocracy. Smotrich is himself a West Bank settler who has long agitated for the annexing of that territory. In May, Smotrich told a settler conference that “Gaza will be totally destroyed,” with all 2.3 million residents “concentrated” in the extreme south, where they will be “totally despairing” with “no hope” and “looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” 

Smotrich opposed Netanyahu’s decision — in the face of rising malnutrition and starvation in Gaza accompanied by growing global condemnation — to even slightly increase the flow of food and medicine into the besieged strip. So did another minister of note: Itamar Ben Gvir, who leads the National Security Ministry, called Netanyahu’s move “a capitulation to Hamas’s deceitful campaign,” and reiterated his demand that nothing at all be allowed to flow into Gaza, and for the IDF to conquer the territory and encourage the Palestinians to move to other countries. To get a sense of his extremism, consider that Ben Gvir infamously adorned his home with a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who mass-murdered 28 Muslims in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. 

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Over the past few weeks, the images coming out of Gaza have become impossible to ignore, even for Israel’s staunchest allies. Emaciated children, newborns dying from dehydration, and reports of adults collapsing from hunger made headlines around the world. More than 100 prominent humanitarian organizations signed a joint statement urging “decisive action” to end the siege, while the UN’s World Food Programme warned that a third of Gazans are going several days without eating at all. Even celebrities who haven’t said a word about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza for two years felt compelled to condemn its latest phase.

In turn, several Western governments that are usually reluctant to openly criticize Israel began to issue statements of concern, calling for an unimpeded flow of aid. Britain and France joined the chorus — the latter taking the additional step of announcing it will recognize a Palestinian state — and even U.S. President Donald Trump has now called out what he described as “real starvation” in Gaza, in a public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This past weekend, in the face of growing international pressure, Israel announced several measures ostensibly aimed at allaying the humanitarian crisis it created: a daily 10-hour “tactical pause in military activity” within the 13 percent of Gaza that remains accessible to Palestinians; the opening of “secure routes” to allow more aid trucks to enter the Strip; and the resumption of aid drops from the sky.

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It was obvious almost from the get-go what Israel was up to in Gaza. I wrote the article below in early December of 2023. Gaza was to be ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, full stop. Whether by bullets, bombs, disease, mass starvation, or expulsion, Palestinians were to be eliminated from the land, replaced by Jewish settlers. A beach blanket bingo fantasy scene would follow.

Chris Hedges writes about this today, honestly and powerfully. Caitlin Johnstone puts it bluntly in her latest, the title of which is “They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It.” It’s all so shameful and disgusting.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote in 2023, when Israel got a blank check from Biden and Blinken. Now that blank check has become a mandate from the Trump administration, complete with fantasies of a “new” Gaza, depopulated of Palestinians, featuring a fantasy Trump tower. Can the U.S. government sink any lower? I suppose it can.

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Israel is meticulously following a textbook model of instigating unrest in the occupied West Bank. The latest such provocations consisted of stripping the Palestinian-run Hebron (Al-Khalil) municipality of its administrative powers over the venerable Ibrahimi Mosque. Worse, according to Israel Hayom, it granted these powers to the religious council of the Kiryat Arba Jewish settlement, an extremist settler body.

Though all Jewish settlers in occupied Palestine can be qualified as extremists, the approximately 7,500 inhabitants of Kiryat Arba represent a more virulent category. This settlement, established in 1972, serves as a strategic foothold to justify subjecting Hebron to stricter military control than virtually any other part of the West Bank.

Kiryat Arba is infamously linked to Baruch Goldstein, the US-Israeli settler who, in February 1994, unleashed a horrific attack. He opened fire at Muslim worshipers kneeling for dawn prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque, mercilessly killing 29. This bloodbath was swiftly followed by another, where the Israeli army brutally cracked down on Palestinian protesters in Hebron and across the West Bank, murdering an additional 25 Palestinians.

Yet, the Israeli Shamgar Commission, tasked with investigating the massacre, resolved in 1994 that the Palestinian mosque, a site of profound religious significance, was to be grotesquely divided: 63% allocated to Jewish worshipers and a mere 37% to Palestinian Muslims.

Since that calamitous decision, oppressive restrictions have been systematically imposed. These include pervasive surveillance and, at times, unjustifiable, extended closures of the site, solely for exclusive settler use.

The latest decision, described by Israel Hayom as “historic and unprecedented,” is profoundly dangerous. It places the fate of this historic Palestinian mosque directly into the hands of those fanatically keen on acquiring the holy site in its entirety. 

But the Ibrahimi Mosque is merely a microcosm of something far more sinister underway across the West Bank. Israel has exploited its war in Gaza to dramatically escalate its violence, carry out mass arrests, confiscate vast tracts of land, systematically destroy Palestinian farms and orchards, and aggressively expand illegal settlements.

Though the West Bank, previously largely subdued by joint Israeli military pressures and Palestinian Authority crackdowns, was not a direct party to the October 7, 2023, assault nor the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, it has inexplicably become a major focus for Israeli military measures.

In the first year of the war, over 10,400 Palestinians were detained in Israeli army crackdowns, with thousands held without charge. Furthermore, hundreds of Palestinians have been forcibly ethnically cleansed, largely from the northern West Bank, where entire refugee camps and towns have been systematically destroyed in protracted Israeli military campaigns.

Israel’s overarching aim remains the strangulation of the West Bank. This is achieved by severing communities using ubiquitous military checkpoints, imposing total closures of vast regions, and the cruel suspension of work permits for Palestinian laborers, who are almost entirely dependent on the Israeli work market for survival.

This insidious plan also explicitly targeted all Palestinian holy sites, including the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Ibrahimi Mosque. Even when these shrines were nominally accessible, age restrictions and suffocating military checkpoints make it difficult, at times utterly impossible, for Palestinians to worship there.

In August 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that his relentless violent campaign against the West Bank was part of confronting the “broader Iran terror axis.” Practically, this statement served as a green light for the Israeli army to treat the West Bank as an extension of the ongoing Israeli genocide on Gaza. By mid-July 2025, over 900 Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli army in the West Bank, while at least 15 were murdered by settlers.

As Palestinians were pushed further against the wall, with no centralized strategy by their leadership to meaningfully resist, Israel exponentially increased its illegal settlement constructions and the brazen legalization of numerous outposts, many built illegally even by Israeli government standards.

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