Tag: palestine

In a landmark and highly controversial decision, Israel’s cabinet voted on 13 May to take full responsibility for land registration in Area C of the occupied West Bank – an area comprising around 60 percent of the territory and home to the vast majority of Israeli settlements. The move, pushed by far-right Ministers Israel Katz and Bezalel Smotrich, is widely being described by critics as a de facto annexation of Palestinian land.

Under the 1995 Oslo Accords, Area C was placed under temporary Israeli control, with an eventual transition to Palestinian Authority (PA) administration expected. That transition never materialized. Now, with the new cabinet resolution, any land registration efforts by Palestinians in Area C will be declared legally void by Israel. Israeli authorities plan to initiate formal land registration processes, conduct widespread land surveys, and potentially reclassify vast tracts as “state land,” opening them for settlement expansion.

Under international law, all Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank is illegal.

“This is a dangerous step toward realizing the messianic vision of the annexationist government,” said Israeli rights group Yesh Din, warning that the move violates international law and threatens the rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Palestinian activists, such as Ayed Jafry from the village of Sinjil, say the policy will further entrench dispossession. “We’re now dealing directly with the occupation again,” he told Middle East Eye (MEE). “This opens the door for settlers to seize land without oversight.”

According to Israeli media, the government is changing its policy from restricting land use unless permitted to broadly permitting land claims unless explicitly prohibited. Finance Minister Smotrich declared the move part of a broader campaign of “normalization and de facto sovereignty,” aiming to eliminate any prospects for a future Palestinian state.

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The organization set to administer Israel’s controversial plan to take control of humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza will use private contractors to secure hubs where Palestinians will receive 1,750 kcal meals that will cost donors a little more than a dollar each.

Details about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) strategy for Gaza are laid out in a 14-page document circulating amongst aid organizations working on Gaza and seen by Middle East Eye.

The hitherto unknown nonprofit, which was registered in Switzerland in February, has been touted as the umbrella body that will seemingly take over humanitarian operations in Gaza while inviting NGOs to “take advantage” of its “logistics, security and transparency frameworks”.

The pitch-like document offers detailed information about how the foundation, largely led by Americans and involving a mix of disaster relief, security and financial experts, will operate and how it is organized, though some details appear yet to be finalized. The document is undated.

The new details have emerged as UN agencies and international aid organizations, which have roundly rejected the plan that GHF would administer, reportedly coming under pressure from the US government to participate. Earlier this week, Amnesty Switzerland raised concerns that, based on the information available, GHF could be risking contributing to international crimes through its services. 

The Israeli operation appears to already be underway. Israel security cabinet approved its plan on Sunday with satellite evidence emerging on Wednesday suggesting that work has already begun to build the humanitarian hubs from which aid will be distributed.

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Drunk on impunity, Israel has grandiosely labeled its latest genocidal move “Operation Gideon’s Chariots” wherein, moving from siege to seizure, it plans the bloody conquest, ethnic cleansing and permanent recolonization of Gaza. 

Israel uses the rhetoric of holy war to justify unholy mass destruction — this, even as many of the Palestinian children who’ve somehow survived their savage 18 months of carnage now slowly starve to death. “We are complicit,” says one angry, grieving doctor. “It is an abomination.”

Having gotten away with so many atrocities while the international community looks away, Israel just unveiled the latest escalation of its illegal collective punishment of Gazans by finally declaring out loud, “We are occupying Gaza to stay.”

Unanimously approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Security Cabinet, the new “conquering of Gaza” formalizes Israel’s plan for the indefinite occupation, forced expulsion and incorporation into “sanitized” Israeli zones of an already long-besieged civilian population “for its own protection.”

The expansion of an onslaught that has left more than 185,000 Gazans dead, wounded or missing [according to a 2024 study by The Lancet] and millions homeless, hungry, maimed and traumatized is being ludicrously framed as a final mission to dismantle Hamas and retrieve hostages, even though Israel repeatedly failed at each before breaking a ceasefire that would have accomplished both.

“Gideon’s Chariots will begin with great force and will not end until all its objectives are achieved,” Israel thundered, again virtually ignoring the fact that permanent occupation, forced displacement and ethnic cleansing violate international law.

“No more going in and out – this is a war for victory,” said apartheid Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who urged Israelis embrace, not fear the word “occupation … A people that wants to live must occupy its land.”

But the operation’s name, Gideon’s Chariots, Merkavot Gideon, invokes the righteous Biblical warrior who led a chosen few to annihilate the Midianites, an ancient Arabian peninsula tribe. The name “layers this symbolism with menace,” [as the staff of The New Arab write], blending the concepts of divine vengeance with state-sanctioned ethnic violence, the “mythic instruments of war (with) the Israeli Merkava tanks that have long razed homes and lives in Gaza and the West Bank.”

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The Israeli military has listed the return of the remaining Israeli captives in Gaza as its least important goal in its plans for an escalated assault on the Strip, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, retrieving the hostages was placed last in a list of six objectives. Those goals include:

1. Defeating Hamas
2. Operational control over the territory
3. Demilitarizing the territory
4. Striking Hamas government targets
5. Concentrating and moving the population
6. Returning the captives

News of the Israeli military’s goals comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that retrieving the hostages was not his priority, something that’s been clear for a long time but hasn’t been explicitly stated by the Israeli leader until last week.

The Israeli military finalized plans for the expanded offensive, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariot,” on Tuesday and Wednesday after the government approved the escalation.

The purpose of the expanded assault is to achieve the full Israeli military occupation of Gaza and concentrate the entire civilian population into a tiny area of southern Gaza with the goal of forcing them to leave to achieve ethnic cleansing.

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