Planning power, taken and used

The money that builds the structures of Palestinian dispossession in Hebron travels through a system built so it can’t be followed. On the Israeli side, one of the settlement’s main vehicles, the Zionist organization named Renewal of the Jewish Community in Hebron, reports a single revenue line and a single aggregate figure for “donations from abroad”. No donor is named. About 5.77 million shekels arrive from somewhere overseas, and the paperwork stops there. On the US side, the foundations sending it write “Foreign Grant, Middle East” on Schedule F of their 990s, naming a region instead of a recipient. In this way, a double blind spot exists: US donors don’t explicitly report where the money goes, and the Israeli recipients don’t disclose where it comes from.

That is the limit of the data. It gives you amounts and years, never the line connecting one to the other, and the Israeli figures lag because amended filings rarely reach GuideStar. What can be measured is the scale of a single conduit. The Hebron Fund (EIN 11-2623719, Brooklyn) reported $4.17 million in revenue in 2023 and roughly $29.4 million across 2011 to 2023 — tax-deductible US money raised to underwrite a radical, violent enclave of thousands of settlers planted inside a Palestinian city of hundreds of thousands. The money flowing through the US system has given it the power to wage a war to dismantle the international law that has governed Hebron since the Oslo Accords, for better or worse.

On June 10th, Israel’s Higher Planning Council of the Civil Administration stripped the Palestinian Municipality of Hebron of planning and building authority over Israeli settlement properties and several religious sites, with the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Old City of Hebron among them. The decision implements a February 2026 cabinet resolution (No. B/229) and unwinds the 1997 Hebron Protocol, under which Israel kept security control of the H2 area while planning remained in the hands of the Palestinian municipality (at least in theory). Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described the June 10th decision as the cancellation of the Hebron Agreement; the Foreign Ministry denied that it was such a drastic move. Authority now follows population rather than territory. Permits for settlers route through the Civil Administration; permits for Palestinians on the same streets stay with the municipality.

A week later, the Council used the power it had taken. On June 17, it approved a permit for two new floors, 1,027 square meters, above Valero House on al-Shalalah Street — a dormitory for the Shavei Hevron yeshiva. Settlers entered that building in September 2025, after the state allocated it to the yeshiva. Al-Shalalah is one of the few ways Palestinians have into the Old City since the army closed al-Shuhada Street to them, and a larger settlement there raises the prospect that this route will close too.

576 more units

The same session advanced 576 housing units, in Elmatan and Mitzpe Jericho — following the 2,414 units it approved on June 3 — bringing the Council’s 2026 total for settlement housing unit approvals to 6,808. Next to the Elmatan plan, in Wadi Qana, was the Palestinian community of Arab al-Khuli. Its last residents were displaced in February; in May, settlers demolished what was left.

A last appeal in Silwan

In Jerusalem, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the Sarhan family’s request for leave to appeal, thereby ending their remaining options to challenge their eviction from Batan al-Hawa. About twelve households, dozens of people, could be removed within months in favor of settlers affiliated with Ateret Cohanim — one of the Zionist NGOs that is financed through the US non-profit system. The family bought the land in 1961 under Jordanian rule and built on it. The claim against them rests on a 1970 law that lets Jews recover property lost in East Jerusalem in 1948 while denying Palestinians who lost property the same right. Over the past two years, settlers have moved into eight homes in the neighborhood, from which roughly 130 residents from 26 families were evicted, most recently in March; around 60 families there are now at risk of eviction as part of the wider campaign.

On the Hill

This week’s bills in Washington, D.C. moved on free speech with the intent to restrict resistance to imperialism. The Jewish American Security Act (HR 9211, companion to S. 4576) would expand federal antisemitism programs, with findings that echo the IHRA framing under which much criticism of Israel is treated as antisemitism. A separate bill (HR 9254) would strip the Southern Poverty Law Center of its tax exemption. During an eleven-hour markup of HR 9087, Representative Lawler withdrew an amendment that would have revived the IGO Anti-Boycott Act — extending federal anti-boycott penalties to boycotts promoted by international organizations such as the UN — after public objection.

Recent military orders

Four military orders, each shown by a photograph of the document itself, were served across the West Bank between 14 and 18 June 2026. There are three stop-work and demolition orders: one in the Qanan Nyas area of Ash-Sheikh and one in Bireen, both east of Hebron, and a third affixed to a half-built structure in the Bir al-Majaz / Bardala area of the northern Jordan Valley. The fourth seizes land at Raba, southeast of Jenin. The Israeli military orders run from the southern Hebron hills to the Jordan Valley, all issued to effectively strip the indigenous people of their lands.

Qanan Nyas / Ash-Sheikh, northeast of Hebron

Final stop-work and demolition order served in the Qanan Nyas area of Ash-Sheikh, northeast of Hebron, June 18, 2026.

Raba, southeast of Jenin

Israeli military land-seizure order covering land at Raba, southeast of Jenin, served around June 15, 2026.

Bireen, east of Hebron

Civil Administration stop-work and demolition orders were served in Bireen, east of Hebron, on June 14, 2026.

Bir al-Majaz / Bardala, northern Jordan Valley

Civil Administration order posted on a structure under construction in the Bir al-Majaz / Bardala area of the northern Jordan Valley, June 14, 2026.

Demolitions this week

Jabal al Mukabbir, Jerusalem (June 11): The municipality and Israeli forces demolished a steel and construction-materials factory built in 2011 on about five dunams, citing a lack of permit; it had employed roughly 10 workers.

Kafr ad Dik, Salfit (June 11): The Civil Administration demolished two under-construction structures — a 60-cubic-meter water cistern and the footings of a home — and a retaining wall, citing the absence of permits. It belonged to a Palestinian family of six.

Barta’a ash Sharqiya, Jenin (June 14): Six concrete structures were demolished for lack of permits, displacing eight people and affecting 51 more; one finished home had been readied for a couple due to marry in August.

Duma, Nablus (June 14): A two-story family gathering facility with a pool and cistern was demolished in Area C for lack of a permit, affecting two families who jointly owned it.

Al Karmil, Hebron (June 14): An inhabited home, animal and agricultural shelters, a water cistern, and a retaining wall were demolished south of Yatta, displacing a mother and her six children and affecting 29 more; soldiers fired tear gas and stun grenades during the operation.

2026 year-to-date data

• Home demolitions: 225 demolitions, 703 structures destroyed, 1,044 people displaced (464 children), through June 15. Same period 2025: 271 incidents, 876 structures, 1,172 displaced.

• Arrests: 4,458 arrests recorded across 165 daily reports. Same period 2025: 4,856 arrests across 168 reports.

• Settler attacks: 1,476 attacks year-to-date. Full-year 2025: 5,443 attacks.

American troops render full military honors to the departing head of the Israeli armed forces, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, during an arrival ceremony at Conmy Hall on Fort Myer, VA, Feb. 18, 2025.

A billion shekels moving towards squatter movement

The Israeli government was supposed to spend its June 11 session approving roughly NIS 1 billion ($338 million) to build out new West Bank settlements. At the last moment it pulled the item and referred it to the Security Cabinet, which is expected to take it up the following Sunday. The delay is mostly procedural; rather than a retreat on advancing the colonial project, the money, and the settlements it would fund, remain on the table.

The funding targets some 61 of the 103 settlements the cabinet has approved since December 2022. At each new “temporary site,” the Settlement Division would deliver fifteen residential caravans and two for public use; the Housing Ministry would lay the access roads, sewage, and water lines. The point of the exercise is speed. Most of these settlements have no approved planning scheme, and some have no “state land” available to plan on at all. So the government is preparing to route around its own planning rules, most likely by invoking military orders meant for projects of “national importance”. Build first, regularize later, and by the time any plan is reviewed the homes are already standing. Anyone following the history of the Zionist project will identify this, “facts on the ground”, is one of its defining characteristics.

A week earlier, ministers quietly approved, by telephone vote, another NIS 152 million to draw up plans for 69 of the same settlements, on top of NIS 1.075 billion already committed to the roads that will connect them. Since March, the running total the government has steered toward settlements has climbed from NIS 19.3 billion to roughly NIS 20.7 billion. The billion now before the Security Cabinet is one more installment in a budget being rewritten, line by line, to make the settlements permanent.

Cash in settlers’ pockets

While the infrastructure money waited, a direct subsidy went through. In early June, the Knesset passed the settlement tax benefits law, 32 to 23. Settlers of the 58 settlements now get a 7 percent income-tax break worth up to NIS 10,000 per person each year (money deposited, in effect, straight into settlers’ bank accounts) at a cost of about NIS 130 million annually through the end of 2027.

Like everything else, the law was sold as a “security measure”. To qualify, a community has to sit more than two kilometers from the Apartheid Wall and bus its children to school in armored vehicles. The Finance Committee’s own legal counsel warned that the test was “tailored for a specific purpose in a manner that may exclude other communities whose security needs are no lesser” . They essentially said the criteria were drawn to fit the settlements and little else. The settlements that qualify grew by an average of 22 percent over the past five years; they need no further inducement to grow. The subsidy is essentially rerouting a monetary reward to a political base of the West Bank settler movement.

How US Congress is advancing Zionism

In the first week of June, the House cast three votes that together mark where Congress stands on Israel and its wars. The one that matters most got the least attention.

On June 3, the House passed H. Con. Res. 86, 215 to 208, directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran. Four Republicans — Massie, Fitzpatrick, Barrett, and Davidson — crossed over to pass it, the first time either chamber has cleared a war powers measure since the aggression against Iran began.

A day later, the House rejected H. Con. Res. 84, Rashida Tlaib’s resolution to remove US forces from Lebanon, 92 to 324. Democratic leadership opposed it — Jeffries, Clark, and Aguilar said no US servicemembers were engaged in hostilities there — and steered members toward Tlaib’s narrower follow-up, H. Con. Res. 108, which carves out continued security cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces.

The more consequential vote drew the least notice. The House Armed Services Committee advanced the FY2027 defense bill, HR 8800, 44 to 12, after spending roughly twenty minutes dismissing, on a voice vote, Ro Khanna’s amendment to strip Section 224. That section would establish a US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, directing the Pentagon to designate an executive agent to integrate Israeli-origin weapons and technology into US military systems across missile defense, AI, cyber, and autonomous platforms.

Notably, on June 3, the day before the markup, Marlin Stutzman introduced H. Res. 1339, endorsing what Netanyahu, in a June 1 letter to Stutzman, called “my plan to shift the framework for US-Israel defense cooperation from aid to partnership.” Khanna argued that Section 224 tracks that language directly; the section’s authors denied any role for Netanyahu.

The effect of Section 224 is structural. It converts the relationship from annual military aid (which Congress votes on each year, and which is visible as a line item) into an embedded framework that is harder for any future Congress to unwind and less exposed to public review. There is still a chance this structural integration with the Zionist project could be defeated in Congress. But with the broader left anti-War and pro-Palestine movement reluctant to hold elected officials accountable, whatever circumvention of this provision may materialize will perhaps come from the corporations that would be projected to lose in this arrangement.

Separately, on June 5, 85 members of Congress led by Schakowsky and Pocan, urged Secretary of State Rubio to use every diplomatic tool against settlement construction in E1, the corridor whose planned roads would cut the West Bank in two.

New military orders

Military order H/03/83

On June 7, the Israeli Civil Administration amended the boundaries of a road-segment expropriation first signed in 1983, with H/03/83 — originally issued under Order 321, the 1969 military order that lets the army take land for “public needs.” Signed on May 25, 2026 by Hillel Roth, deputy head of the Civil Administration for civilian affairs, this order takes a further 0.828 dunams and gives back 0.755 along a stretch of road near Kiryat Arba, on land belonging to the Hebron-area hamlets of Khallet al-Buweira, Khallet ad-Dab’a, and Khallet as-Sansal. It’s worth noting that this order is roughly 43 years old, but the Israeli state continues to use it in various ways to advance the dispossession of Palestinians from their lands. So each military order issued should never be read as a “one off”; instead, it should be read as the first domino falling in a larger chain of events.

Confiscation orders in the north

Confiscation orders were issued East of Tubas, in Tayasir. A seizure order signed by the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank takes 41.748 dunams for declared military use, part of Firing Zone 901.

Israel continues advancement on Tulkarem

South of Tulkarem, seizure order 77/25 confiscates 30 dunams from the villages of Shufa and Kafr al-Labbad.

South Hebron

East of Yatta, in the Hebron village of al-Dirat, soldiers delivered final stop-work and demolition orders against thirteen homes and structures on June 10.

Additional orders

The Israeli states issued a seizure of roughly 2,803 dunams at Ja’ab in Jenin, beside the Tarsila settlement; an expropriation for a “security road” linking the Daniel settlement to al-Khader through Nahhalin land near Bethlehem; and a run of demolition and stop-work notices on the commercial shops near the Bizaria junction, served across Tulkarem, Jenin, and Nablus to clear the path of a settler road meant to reconnect the settlements of Homesh and Sanur. Set beside the individual takings, the scale of the campaign underneath comes into focus: a single March booklet of military orders, issued under Orders 321, 783, and 892, opened 20,002 dunams across fifteen settlement sites to confiscation, and a June 7 order handed to Tubas residents added 1,083.8 dunams to an existing army camp, in force through December 2028.

Demolitions this week

Israeli forces carried out nine demolition operations across the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the week, destroying 24 structures, displacing 30 people and affecting more than a hundred others — almost all of it, as ever, justified by the absence of a building permit that Palestinians in Area C and East Jerusalem are almost never granted.

The heaviest single blow fell on Barta’a ash Sharqiya, in Jenin. On June 8 the Civil Administration leveled ten structures there, among them a multi-storey home that had housed a family of eight; eight people were displaced and forty-five affected.

The same day, near Road 60 south of Hebron, forces brought down a two-storey house in Qalqas along with its water cistern and a livelihood structure, displacing a family of four.

In Husan, west of Bethlehem, the bulldozers took four commercial structures at the village’s western entrance the next day — a car wash, a snack shop, a tarpaulin workshop — costing five families their livelihoods and affecting 28 people, 17 of them children.

Palestinians were forced to tear down their own homes in East Jerusalem to avoid the heavier municipal fines that follow an official demolition. In Silwan’s Bir Ayoub, a family was forced to destroy their own rooftop apartment that served as a home to a child and a pregnant woman, and at least two other self-demolitions were carried out in At Tur and Sur Bahir.

The week’s largest displacement came on June 10, when a single demolition in the South Bir Nabala Bedouin community north of Jerusalem put three households comprising ten people, among them three children and a man with a disability, out of their homes at once.

Killed this week

Haitham Ezz El-Din Omar Hmeida, 18, Ramallah and al-Bireh governorate — June 4, 2026. The Israelis killed him during an Israeli military incursion into the village of Beitin, east of Ramallah, in which forces fired gas canisters, stun grenades, and live ammunition. The army has withheld his body.

Sam Fahd Abu Heikal, seven months old, Hebron governorate — June 5, 2026. Israeli forces opened fire on the car carrying him and his parents in the Tel Rumeida area of Hebron; all three were shot, and the infant died of his wounds.

Data Points 2026 Year-to-Date

• Home demolitions: 220 incidents, 680 structures destroyed, 1,029 people displaced (461 children), through June 10.

• Arrests: 4,324 arrests recorded across 158 daily reports.

• Settler attacks: 1,476 attacks year-to-date.

• Martyrs: 63 killed year-to-date, through June 11.

Supporting the work

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I recently traveled to Greece to visit family who cannot come to see me in Palestine. My family members, also visiting the country for the first time and having arrived first, were immediately struck by the ubiquitous symbols of support for Palestine across the various geographies they traversed. When I arrived, I was equally impressed, finding these public expressions of support for Palestinians and a rejection of zionism such a breath of fresh air. Of course, Bethlehem is known in part for its graffiti art, particularly on the apartheid wall. But in my previous travels around North America, cities in Europe, and southern Africa, I have never come across so many pieces of art expressing these sentiments as I did in these few days of travel. To have marched with thousands of people in Cape Town, South Africa in solidarity with Palestine, but see more graffiti for Palestine in one small city on a Greek island, was bewildering (in a good way — and no shade to the graffiti artists in Cape Town, either, but maybe step it up!).

As Palestine, zionists’ ongoing attempts to colonize it, and Israel’s genocidal aggression in Gaza have become more widely discussed in the international sphere (and, in response, suppressed), expressions of solidarity are meaningful. They are not just about ending genocide — an important enough goal on its own — but reaffirming basic moral principles. When people refuse to be cowed into a rejection of Palestinian resistance, they assert their own understanding of justice and injustice: foreign occupation, settler rule, mass murder, land seizures, imprisonment, etc, are all unjust. They cannot continue. They should be resisted. Perpetrators will face consequences here, if nowhere else. The presence of Palestine in graffiti and art across Greek cities (and cities worldwide) is also a rejection of the physical and existential absenting of Palestinians through daily slaughter, mass imprisonment, torture, systematically-constructed famine, an ongoing siege, and a bureaucracy built to facilitate our forced disappearance.

I’m sharing these photos (my own, as well as those provided by friends and family and shared with their permission) for two reasons. First, I think folks around the world will also have their hearts warmed by these casual, yet clearly substantial, images of solidarity. It is nice to get the ethos of a place even if we haven’t visited it ourselves, and there is no shortage of need for heart-warming images today. But second: graffiti, art, and the rhetorics of solidarity are important, but they are not a place where action lives. They help to make public those sentiments which folks otherwise might feel shy or intimidated to express, opening the door toward more collective and material interventions — boycotts, strikes, legal action, and much more. Whether or not your city has this much Palestine solidarity graffiti, you also have the ability to both express your support publicly and make sure your advocacy is tied to a meaningful impact on the ground in Palestine.

Enjoy.

Herodium, Bethlehem

Israel’s Higher Planning Council approved five plans totaling 2,414 housing units across the West Bank on June 3, two of which establish new settlements. In Gvaot, west of Bethlehem, 1,006 units received final approval, giving the settlement an urban character. The second, 234 units in the Hamivesher outpost, authorizes what is, in practice, a separate settlement within Hebron, roughly 800 meters north of Kiryat Arba and detached from it. The session brings 2026 approvals to 6,232 units. The increased pace of approval traces to a June 2023 decision eliminating the requirement that the defense minister sign off at each planning stage; at the same time, settler leader and Knesset Member Bezalel Smotrich was given authority and responsibility over the Higher Planning Council. Whereas defense ministers had previously held plan advancement to about four rounds a year, the council has convened weekly since November 2024, and in 2025 it advanced 27,941 units, the highest annual figure since settlement construction in the West Bank began. In recent weeks it has shifted to meeting about every two weeks and approving several hundred units per session.

Area of Herodium being taken from Palestinians

The Israeli Civil Administration also issued expropriation order H/03/26, which essentially annexes 300 dunams at the ancient Herodium (Jabal al-Fureidis) site, east of Bethlehem beside the villages of Furadis, Za’atara, and Jubet al-Dihab. The Herodium hilltop is the most iconic figure along the Bethlehem governorate skyline, as it can be seen from nearly everywhere. The order encompasses the hill itself, the excavation areas at its foot, and the surrounding Palestinian land, including privately owned Palestinian farmland. It folds in 170 dunams declared state land in March 2024 and adds 130 more. Herodium is the third archaeological site expropriated this year, after 2,068 dunams at Sebastia in February and 110 dunams at Nabi Samuel in May.

Setting the table for more land confiscation, the Knesset is advancing the “Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority Law”, which would transfer responsibility for antiquities throughout the West Bank, and potentially Gaza, from the Civil Administration to a new authority under the Ministry of Heritage, governed by the Israeli right-wing formations. The bill is written to apply in Areas A and B, where the Palestinian Department of Antiquities holds authority under the Oslo framework. The new body will be able to expropriate private lands belonging to Palestinians that have any connection to “antiquities”. This is a consequential power given that nearly all Palestinian towns and villages sit adjacent to or directly atop ancient sites. Its council would include settler regional settler representatives from the West Bank.

Killed this week

Imad Haroun Ashtiya, 27, Salem village, Nablus governorate (May 31, 2026). Imad was shot in the thigh by Israeli forces near the separation wall at al-Ram while traveling to work inside the Green Line; he died of his wounds at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.

Amjad Jawad Abd al-Fattah al-Natsheh, 30, Hebron governorate (May 31, 2026). Amjad was shot dead by Israeli soldiers near the Gush Etzion junction.

2026 data points

• Home demolitions (OCHA): 208 incidents, 634 structures destroyed, 979 people displaced (446 children), through June 1.

• Arrests: 4,144 arrests year-to-date.

• Settler attacks: 1,476 attacks year-to-date.

More Pity for Genocidaires

Wendell Steavenson’s article for The Economist1, “What I did in Gaza: an Israeli soldier’s reckoning” came out a few days ago. From many, the public response has been mockery: once again, we are subjected to the not-very-deep-or-reflective thoughts of yet another shooting and crying genocide participant. The respondents are not wrong — not even close — and my cynical prediction is that we will continue to see more of these types of articles as zionist soldiers face growing international disdain and consequences for their participation in genocide when they travel abroad.

A few months ago, while the author was in occupied Palestine carrying out this research, we met by chance in Bethlehem. I didn’t know of her or her work. It was a pleasant meeting until she explained what she was doing here and that she was carrying out an interview with a zionist soldier about his experiences in Gaza, facilitated through Breaking the Silence (BTS), which had to be anonymized to the point that even a fellow soldier in his unit would not be able to identify the interviewee. At that point, I told Steavenson that she was not engaged in investigative reporting, as anything her interviewee might offer has been revealed first and in greater detail by Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, what she was doing (and has now done) is attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of soldiers guilty of participation in a genocide. These are soldiers who are just beginning to face the deserved consequences of their actions through the advocacy of organizations like the Hind Rajab Foundation, which do not allow them to travel abroad without the potential of legal consequences. She gave no thoughtful reply. I left immediately after that. By chance, I came across her article while it was circulating on social media over the last few days.

The violence of Steavenson’s article goes much deeper than an attempt to rehabilitate one Israeli soldier, given the pseudonym “Jonathan” — and, through him, zionist society — by way of a series of anonymized recollections on his participation in war crimes. The crime of which I find Steavenson and The Economist guilty is the banal violence of framing, which serves genocide through the erasure of Palestinians and Palestinian experiences, rather than resisting it; Steavenson not only describes all of these crimes through a thoroughly zionist framing, but implements the rhetorical terms of genocidal violence herself. Despite the fact that the article is presented as a “reckoning”, implying new insights following many serious, prolonged, lethal acts of wrongdoing against a captive population of millions, every sentence of the piece is used to soften the crimes to which it alludes, placing them in a sympathetic context to explain the anonymous soldier’s actions rather than repudiate them. The dehumanization of Palestinians, inherent to Israel’s genocide, is not rejected by the piece but rather maintained and strengthened through it, encouraging its readership to see Palestinians as inhuman animals, too. Worse yet, the author allows the audience not to see Palestinians at all.

The banality of the violence in this choice of framing by Steavenson and The Economist doesn’t diminish the degree of rhetorical and symbolic violence in this article, but rather indicates its lack of originality. It is not novel to point out that Western media in general have served as stenographers for genocide in Gaza, repeating the statements of Israeli spokespeople and politicians as facts, announcing claims for which there is no evidence, and placing undeserved doubt on vital reporting by Palestinian journalists, institutions, organizations, and laypeople. But perhaps it is even more insidious to reinforce Israeli framing of this genocide while claiming to be “reckoning” with the war crimes carried out against Palestinians in Gaza, simultaneously evoking sympathy for the perpetrators while erasing the subjectivity and humanity of the victims.

For most of us who have long abandoned Western media as a source of news, this style of reporting is no surprise. Still, because this phenomenon is not likely to disappear soon and many of our communities or international allies are inundated with it or affected by it, it is important to unpack how this attitude and rhetoric operate, presented as “neutral” reporting and quietly influencing the way readers think about this genocide. One could go line by line through a piece like this to break it down, but this article will focus on a few themes across the piece: its thoroughly zionist stance and framing, its erasure and obscuration of Palestinians, and its focus on rehabilitating perpetrators of genocide.

zionist Framing as the Default

Steavenson’s first sentence reveals her framing. She writes, “Jonathan was doing national service in an infantry platoon when Hamas broke through the Gaza perimeter fence on October 7th 2023, killing 1,195 people and taking more than 200 hostages.”

Steavenson begins her article on October 7, 2023 and not a moment before. She doesn’t describe Gaza as a besieged, tiny enclave of Palestinian territory within the larger context of occupied and colonized Palestine, and she doesn’t give any hint of what might have led up to this moment in history. The only hint she provides about the conditions in Gaza at the time is in her reference to the six-meter (twenty feet) high wall enclosing the 2.3 million Palestinians there as a “perimeter fence”. For anyone who has seen the wall surrounding Gaza in person, “perimeter fence” is not the first term that comes to mind. This is particularly true for those who understand the purpose of the “fence”: enclosure, imprisonment, concentration of a population whose diet, access to basic needs, and every movement is highly controlled and scrutinized by Israeli overseers from just outside that very “fence”. This barrier, constructed under the guise of security, carries out these functions not simply out of racialized hatred, but because it supports the monetization of violence against Palestinians by Israel’s multipronged colonial management regime (permits, imports, weapons testing), serving the interest of an international capitalist class. For those who know what this structure is made to do, particularly those for whom words are a career, a more appropriate term for both the Gaza Strip and the artificial border imposed around it by Israel is “concentration camp”.

But it is not only that Steavenson does not begin with any context about Gaza or Palestine which might explain what led to October 7, 2023 — she chooses to begin her article in the settlements placed around Gaza reinforcing its enclosure, the “Gaza Envelope”. She says that there, “Hamas… kill[ed] 1,195 people”. This number reflects the data available about the total number of Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 — not the total number killed, or even expected to have been killed, by Palestinian resistance groups. It is well-known and accepted, even among Israelis, that the zionist military was responsible for the killing of some Israelis on October 7, 2023, although there is no conclusive data about this as the Israeli government has precluded any independent investigation. If Steavenson is aware of this, she does not make her audience aware, but falsely attributes all of the deaths to Hamas against even Israeli testimony.

This choice sets the tone for the rest of the article. While the piece is presented as a challenge to the dominant Israeli government, military, and media narrative of the “war”, Steavenson’s framing of the aggression against Gaza is always situated within, or placed next to, the claims propped up by these very bodies. Steavenson names BTS as her collaborators in organizing the interview with the anonymous Israeli soldier around whom she builds the narrative, and notes that BTS’s testimony is directed against “the entire system”. Nonetheless, Steavenson includes, without any commentary, the complete responses of an “IDF spokesman” no less than five times across this 3,100 word article, for a total of five paragraphs. This is a bizarre choice for an article ostensibly about revealing the crimes of this very institution. If the point of the article is to challenge hegemonic assertions that the Israeli military is not engaged in war crimes and to challenge these systems, why include the hegemonic assertions of the Israeli state?

But Steavenson and The Economist are clearly not really interested in challenging the claims of the Israeli military. Although the article quotes BTS’s executive director as saying, “It’s the entire system… It is systematic crimes that we are doing”, nowhere other than the lead up to that quote does Steavenson use the phrase “war crimes” to identify or describe the policies for which her article provides evidence. In fact, Steavenson’s descriptions tend to do the exact opposite of laying out clear arguments about war crimes — instead, the piece couches her interviewee’s anecdotes and recollections in more of his personal and societal context, softening the accounts of his personal involvement in war crimes with his reasoning for his actions. For example, Steavenson introduces the use of human shields during Israel’s invasion of Gaza as follows:

The phrasing here is important: so many dogs were being wounded or killed in the process of protecting invading Israeli soldiers from explosive devices, Palestinians were introduced as their replacement. Israeli forces could not spare any more dogs, so they replaced them with abducted Palestinians — perhaps because they are considered more replaceable than dogs, perhaps because their blood is cheaper, perhaps to inflict collective punishment on a captive population, or perhaps because they thought this policy would discourage the use of IEDs by Palestinian resistance forces. The reasoning does not matter because, despite Steavenson’s omission of this fact, the use of human shields is a war crime as established by international law. There is no explanation which would change this calculation, despite the author’s presentation. Steavenson’s omission might be read as a stylistic choice to get us into the mind of a genocidaire, but then one has to wonder: for what purpose is The Economist explaining to its audience how and why genocidaires rationalize their choices?

Steavenson’s explanation of the long history of this policy does not read as a condemnation, either. Rather, the author downplays what she has already explained is an Israeli policy which has been used “for decades”. Later, she adds: “The word ‘protocol’ belies the ad-hoc use of Palestinians as human shields. In practice, it was ‘messy and not organised’.” She immediately goes on to describe how the Palestinians who were used as human shields were treated in a variety of different ways once the soldiers were done with them. Steavenson says that most were not later arrested and imprisoned on the other side of the so-called “perimeter fence”, but released, shot and killed, or met another fate left to our imagination.

The lack of an explicit policy about what to do with the Palestinians who survived their forced tenure as human shields does not make the documented, explicitly ordered practice of using human shields “ad hoc”. Instead, it arguably raises even darker questions (which the author doesn’t mention) about what proportion of Palestinians survived being made into human shields long enough to require an explicit policy for the treatment of survivors. That Israel’s tactic of using human shields is a consistently-applied policy has already been thoroughly documented by Palestinian survivors and human rights organizations operating in Gaza. Framing this policy as “not organized” is a denial of the ubiquity of its use, which reflects consistent, routine, premeditated internal orders.

The denial of the very war crimes the author describes does not end there. Instead, it arguably reaches its peak when Steavenson applies the term Israeli forces use for the victims of their human shields policy: mosquitoes. Steavenson begins by introducing the term and its meaning, using quotation marks to indicate she is borrowing this term from Israeli forces. But after a couple of mentions, the author begins to use “mosquito” as a way of referring to these Palestinians herself, as a term she is applying and adopting as her own. The excerpt reads:

By the end of the interviewee’s recollection of his participation in the war crime of detaining a member of the local population to use as a human shield, the author has joined him in seeing these victims of a genocide, as mosquitoes. The dehumanization reaches its zenith in her own use of the term in describing the cold-blooded murder of a Palestinian, abducted, put through the horror of being a human shield for an unknowable period, surviving unthinkable conditions while captured among an invading colonial force, and finally having completed this experience. She says, “Some released mosquitoes… were later shot by soldiers.” The sentence includes a softening of and explanation for the murder she describes, not a condemnation: “many” of these Palestinian human shields “were men of military age”. Men of military age is a euphemism for “Hamas” or “members of a resistance group”. Steavenson is arguing that soldiers like Jonathan had a reason for killing the Palestinians they had tortured: after all, they could be Hamas.

By the time Steavenson is done describing what her interviewee did to these men, women, and children abducted and held as human shields, she has reduced them to insects herself. The section ends with the IDF spokesman’s paragraph-long statement that the use of human shields is strictly prohibited.

The author’s choice to describe these Palestinian human shields as mosquitoes could just be a flawed and ugly stylistic choice, if it were not for her inclusion of the unaltered IDF spokesman statement and the many other ways she asserts Israeli framing. The author does not identify any of the activities in which her interviewee took part — willful killing, the use of human shields, forced transfer, unlawful confinement, taking hostages, extensive destruction of property, and more — as war crimes, although all are war crimes. In fact, Steavenson never mentions the word “genocide”, instead solely referring to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a “war”. The prolonged forced displacement and destruction of entire neighborhoods and towns becomes the creation of “buffer zones” along the “perimeter fence”. Most importantly, there is no history to this “war”; Steavenson describes her interviewee leaving Gaza to go “home” as if home is a distinct geographical entity in Europe, and not simply another part of occupied Palestine, whose indigenous inhabitants have been largely displaced in an earlier genocidal attack. There is no acknowledgement that wherever the “home” is to which her interviewee is retreating, there are almost certainly Palestinians in Gaza who are refugees from this home. Steavenson completely erases the continuous, ongoing violence of colonialism, of which this latest genocidal aggression is only one part, and normalizes the existence of Israel outside of and away from Palestinians, on whose bones it has been built. In doing so, and in these extensive and consistent acts of omission, Steavenson reaffirms the hegemonic zionist position.

Erasing Palestinians

In omitting history, Steavenson erases Palestinians, Palestinians’ origins, Palestinian motivations for resistance and, likewise, zionist strategic goals for genocide against Palestinians. It is striking that in an article describing the crimes an Israeli soldier has carried out against Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians are eerily absent. Steavenson does not cite a single Palestinian source, name or describe a victim, or even use a hard casualty count to determine the greater harm caused by Israeli forces against Palestinians in Gaza (the closest she comes is “tens of thousands” of Palestinian martyrs). Occasionally, Palestinians are described through the use of military expressions: “mosquitoes” or “wasps”, males of “military age”, human shields — even “dirties”, a euphemism which highlights the Israeli desire to avoid naming Palestinians. At one point, Steavenson sets the context for her interviewee’s engagement for looting, made possible by the forced disappearance of Palestinians, by writing that these are “houses and flats abandoned by displaced Palestinians”. Even in an article about the crimes carried out against them, Palestinians are made into ghosts. The story takes place after the “displaced” (displaced by whom, we can’t know) have “abandoned” their homes.

This is not an oversight. Steavenson knows this history because she has spent time reporting in occupied Palestine. The absence is deliberate, because the two stories cannot coexist: the moment Gaza and the Palestinians there are returned to their history, the genocide reveals itself as continuous and structural, and the anonymous soldier’s private reckoning shrinks to nothing beside it. To keep Jonathan at the center, the Palestinians must be cleared from the frame, just as they were cleared from the homes his unit looted. When Steavenson is confronted with a choice between Palestinian history and the zionist narrative, she chooses zionism, and the erasure is the essential form that choice takes.

Two instances stand out as both intriguing and harmful. The first is one in which the author describes the injuries to which her interviewee’s fellow soldiers are subjected during the first year of genocide. She writes:

In this brief excerpt, the author includes a comment which has no real relevance other than to deny the effectiveness of Palestinian militant resistance in Gaza: “Most [injuries] were not caused by the enemy.” There is no obvious reason to note this, except perhaps to emphasize the poor training of Israeli forces — a possibility, since much of this article works to explain and assuage the cruelty of zionist war crimes. The other reason may be to claim that, on top of being “terrorists”, as she calls them, resistance fighters in Gaza are ineffective. She does this again later in the article, after her interviewee returns to Gaza for another round of destruction: “Jonathan’s unit was sent back to areas it had already cleared. The soldiers encountered fewer Hamas fighters than they had before.” Steavenson is illustrating the tedium of prolonged invasion, allegedly undisturbed by many guerrilla attacks, but she is also signaling to the audience that Israeli forces encountered less Palestinian fighters because they were finding success in their “clearing” efforts.

The myths being propped up here are important to maintaining both Israel and broader Western mythology: colonial forces are stronger, more technologically advanced, and impervious to guerrilla warfare. Indigenous resistance is both terroristic and futile. If Israeli soldiers don’t believe this, they will not be so quick to invade Gaza or Jenin, and if other countries in the West see the shortcomings of Israeli colonial mechanisms of control, including technology, they will be less interested in purchasing that technology and expertise.

Much earlier in the article, the author makes another rhetorical move of erasure. Steavenson spends a lot of time throughout this piece setting the audience up to understand and sympathize with her soldier interviewee’s participation in a genocide and various war crimes. Early on, as he sets aside his distaste for “occupation” in the wake of October 7, Steavenson encourages us to believe that Israelis and Israeli soldiers know little of Gaza. She writes, “Members of his unit knew Gaza only through stories of tunnels and kidnappers, ambushes and snipers.”

There is some important historical background that must be uncovered to explain the depth of deception here. First, while Gaza is distinct in many ways from other parts of Palestine, it shares the same history. The Palestinians who live in Gaza are part of the same nation of Palestinians who reside in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the rest of occupied Palestine, and those in exile. To suggest that Israelis do not know Gaza except through simple images of violence is to deny the basic reality that Jewish Israelis know Palestinians in their daily lives, and that Palestinians in Gaza are a part of this whole. Palestinians are Jewish Israelis’ doctors and nurses, their janitors, those who build their homes and roads, their professors and students in university, and much more. Palestinians in Gaza cannot be separated from the larger whole of Palestinians, and there can be no denying that Israelis have regular interactions with Palestinians. In addition to the presence of Palestinian citizens of Israel, this knowledge of Palestinians was also facilitated by the reality that, before October 2023, more than 120,000 Palestinians from the West Bank held permits to travel across checkpoints regularly for work, healthcare needs, religious worship, and more, often interacting with Jewish Israelis in doing so. Palestinians from Gaza also traveled to Jerusalem through this permit system for healthcare, though at a much lower rate due to increased Israeli permit restrictions.

Furthermore, until 2005, Gaza was occupied by Israel in a wholly different way than it was before October 2023, with settlements and settlers taking up significant sections of the Gaza Strip, including those northwest of Beit Lahia, west of Rafah and Khan Younis on the coast, and in central Gaza at Netzarim, to bisect the Strip. Travel in and out of Gaza for Jewish Israelis was not the way that it is today — generally, impossible. It is only in recent memory that these settlements were destroyed and the settlers forced to leave, which was followed by tighter movement restrictions and the imposition of the wall and siege on Gaza.

The author needs the audience to see value in her interviewee’s moral discomfort, and in order to do so, we must see value in his character; Steavenson wants us to believe that her soldier was a part of genocide because he didn’t know the people of Gaza except through hostage-taking and tunnels. But this is not believable. While her interviewee may be too young to have seen the process of disengagement in 2005, he must know Palestinians in real life — at the very least, because she tells us he has already invested time in Israel’s colonial management of the West Bank (“Jonathan… had served in the West Bank, which had left him uneasy about the harshness of the occupation.”). And, even if he only knew Palestinians through the avenue of his military participation, Jonathan also came to know Gaza another way before his participation in invasion: through the intelligence his military collected by surveilling Palestinians for decades to inform their invasion strategy, through the six meter walls he could see as they prepared to invade, through the bombing he heard in the first weeks after October 7 (and, no doubt, had at least heard of before — Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza before October 7, 2023 was a three day bombing campaign in September 2023). Steavenson deceives her audience in order to encourage them to buy into the reasons a zionist soldier might carry out war crimes against a captive population and to make this a compelling story of moral struggle, but in order to do so she erases the captive population and its history, time and again. In doing so, she becomes part of the erasure of this genocide in service of rehabilitating its perpetrators.

Rehabilitation, Rehabilitation, Rehabilitation

Steavenson ends her article with a discussion of Israeli forces’ experiences of PTSD, guilt, and consequences. She provides statistics on the number of Israeli soldiers who have attempted suicide and describes the increased experience of “moral injury” after participating in this genocidal aggression on Gaza — Steavenson defines moral injury as “when shame and disgust at one’s actions cause depression and anxiety”. She notes, though, that “The concept of moral injury is controversial, since it casts perpetrators as victims.”

Moral injury does not make a perpetrator into a victim, but rather, it makes a perpetrator human. People who take part in atrocities should feel ashamed. People who engage in genocide deserve consequences, including internal ones. It is a human reaction to feel bad for carrying out war crimes. More interesting than the number of attempted suicides by Israeli soldiers is how small the number is compared to the total soldiers participating in genocide (also notable that Steavenson decides to give us this specific number but not the number of Palestinians killed in the “war”).

It is illuminating that Steavenson thinks moral injury casts perpetrators as victims — it is perhaps the most clarifying sentence in the article, which explains how she has repeatedly framed her interviewee and other Israeli soldiers as victims by couching descriptions of their actions (many of which constitute war crimes) with explanations for them. Some examples: Jonathan was put off by his experience of occupation in the West Bank and did not want to participate, “[b]ut the horror of the massacres on October 7th swept away his doubts”; Jonathan took part in the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza because he was very affected by October 7 — the author includes a photo with the caption “Debris and damaged belongings are scattered inside a house in Kibbutz Be’eri, after it was attacked by Hamas militants on October 7th… Soldiers tasked with clearing houses after the attacks break down crying at the sight of Challah bread abandoned on a dining-room table”; Jonathan took part in slaughtering any Palestinian man of military age he encountered in areas with forced displacement orders because “Jonathan’s commanders said that any Palestinian male could be a threat because Hamas fighters often moved around unarmed and their scouts wore civilian clothes”; Jonathan looted displaced Palestinians’ homes because he “became numb”, “‘You become numb to it,’ Jonathan told me. ‘Everything is destroyed… There is the noise of bombing, donkeys braying, but you get used to it.’”; Jonathan and his unit took part in mass demolition campaigns of civilian infrastructure, razing entire neighborhoods because “[t]hey were given operational justifications”; as the war continued, Jonathan became disillusioned, not by his own actions but because “[h]ostages remained in captivity and Hamas had still not been destroyed”.

Moreover, the introduction of this perpetrator-as-victim dynamic through the concept of moral injury explains much of the ethos behind both the interview and the organization that set it up for Steavenson — Breaking the Silence. The interviewee describes his actions and his feelings about them at the time of the interview strikingly:

Is it cliche to point out the historical reverberations embedded in this comment, reeking of a soldier’s claims of “just doing orders” only kilometers away from the site of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem? If it is, that is only because it is just as cliche to claim one can distance themselves from the orders they carried out by placing the responsibility solely on the authority doling these commands out.

Nonetheless, this aligns perfectly with the quote Steavenson places at the top of the article from BTS’s executive director: “It’s the entire system… It is systematic crimes that we are doing”. The underlying commentary is the same as Jonathan’s: is not us, it is the system that victimizes us all. And if the system is victimizing everyone, then responsibility for changing this system lies not just with the individual perpetrator but with everyone, including the victims, as all are victims of the system — the perpetrator only has to “break the silence” to let everyone else know what’s been going on under their noses. This is the extent of BTS’s advocacy work, and the implication of Steavenson’s article — that Israelis “back home” just have no idea what is being carried out against Palestinians in Gaza. Like Steavenson’s claim that Israelis preparing to invade Gaza knew nearly nothing about the place or its people, this is false.

Yes, of course, the larger issue in Palestine is the systems — zionist settler colonialism, capitalism, imperialism. But to suggest that those carrying out the functions of those systems on the most minute levels are not responsible for their actions — worse, that they are victims of their own actions — is beyond the pale. These are people who have carried out horrendous crimes for which they deserve to be prosecuted. Anonymous revelations are not a consequence.

Steavenson has actually done something far worse than try to rehabilitate the reputations of individual Israeli soldiers. Steavenson has written genocide propaganda. By repeating disinformation, using ahistorical hegemonic zionist framing, including the claims of zionist military spokesmen without commentary, erasing history and Palestinians entirely, and attempting to rehabilitate the reputations of soldiers animating a genocide, Steavenson has taken this genocide out of history entirely, and provided a softened, anonymized version of events that attempt to make logical the actions of mass murder and destruction, and allow the audience to all but forget about the actual victims of genocide. This is only possible because of the normalized dehumanization of Palestinians and the insider status of Jewish Israelis in the Western world, a dynamic which continues at Palestinians’ peril and that of all colonized and oppressed people everywhere.

In Palestine, when there is news to report about zionist crimes, it is the Palestinian victims and their advocates — lawyers, journalists, activists, human rights monitors, etc — who report them first and most accurately. It is Palestinians who build the files and collect the media, firsthand reports, and corroborating evidence. In the case of Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza over the last few years, this has been the case from the start — and those gathering and reporting the evidence have paid for their efforts with their lives as the very forces Steavenson interviewed murdered them in targeted, intentional strikes or months-long series of assassination attempts.

There is no context in which perpetrators, like those who have testified at BTS, are expected to report all of their crimes. In cases of genocide, war crimes, and atrocities, investigations are not situated around the confessions of perpetrators, but the reported experiences of survivors. Still, in this article, Steavenson claims that “the use of human shields was first reported, based on testimony gathered by Breaking the Silence”. It is not clear whether Steavenson is referring to the use of human shields in the genocidal aggression against Gaza, in previous Israeli aggressions in Gaza, or elsewhere, but regardless, it is a false assertion. The documentation of most crimes does not begin with a confession by the perpetrator, and this is especially true in Palestine. To suggest that the world rely on the confessions of perpetrators of violence to gauge the crimes of the state directing them is nothing short of an attempt to obscure genocide, not unlike the war crimes described but not identified in this article which do not even scratch the surface of the depravity we have all witnessed, live, for three years. Like other Western journalists flown in on their editors’ dime to pontificate about crimes committed against people they do not name or cite, but help to erase, Steavenson deserves nothing but our mockery.

The colonization of Palestine and the criminalization of Palestinian advocacy in the United States moved on parallel tracks this week. In the past week, the Israeli Civil Administration issued Expropriation Order H/02/26, seizing 109.79 dunams at al-Nabi Samwil north of Jerusalem, including a mosque owned by the Islamic Waqf and the traditional tomb of the Prophet Samuel. This expropriation of an Islamic Waqf-owned holy site in the occupied West Bank extends a precedent set in September 2025 with an order covering an open area at the Ibrahimi Mosque compound in Hebron.

Israel is also pushing forward the consolidation of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, with Plan No. 1627/7. It is a planned expansion in Abu Dis, designating roughly 79 dunams for up to 950 multi-story housing units, less than 100 meters from the Abu Dis landfill to effectively displace the residents of Khan al-Ahmar, among others. The proposal is positioned to serve as the state’s “alternative location” before the High Court when Bedouin residents of the E1 corridor petition against expulsion, replicating the mechanism used against the Jahalin community during the Ma’ale Adumim expansion. Combined with the previously approved E1 construction plan, ongoing road construction that would close roughly 3% of the West Bank to Palestinian movement, and the al-Nabi Samwil expropriation, the components of an integrated displacement and annexation operation in the central West Bank surfaced together within a single week of coverage.

In Washington, a coordinated legislative push is advancing at the same time. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced S. 4576 on May 20, the “Jewish American Security Act,” which grounds federal antisemitism enforcement in Trump Executive Orders 13899 and 14188, the orders that codify the IHRA definition and its examples conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Representative John McGuire (R-VA) introduced HR 8843 on May 15, reclassifying property damage at protests as domestic terrorism. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced HR 8905, barring entry of foreign religious leaders deemed “militant adversarial mullahs,” and HR 8906, restricting “Chinese Communist and Islamist” home ownership. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced H.J.Res. 188, a constitutional amendment to restrict Congress, federal judgeships, and Senate-confirmed offices to natural-born citizens.

The broader zionist movement is advancing these two convergent agendas: physical infrastructure for severing the central West Bank, and using Palestinian organizing as the logic to strip away all kinds of civil rights and liberties and restrict political participation in the US and elsewhere.

2026 year-to-date data

• Home demolitions: 195 incidents, 598 structures destroyed, 881 people displaced (401 children), through May 25. Same period 2025: 256 incidents, 831 structures, 1,089 displaced.

• Arrests: 3,951 arrests. (Same period 2025: 4,228).

• Settler attacks: 1,476 attacks year-to-date.

Recent killings

Nasser Ali Kamel al-Saadi, 45

Killed: 26 May 2026 Location: Jenin refugee camp

Israeli forces shot Nasser Ali Kamel al-Saadi, 45, in the hip and thigh during an invasion of Jenin refugee camp. Red Crescent paramedics later recovered his body from the soldiers.

Mahmoud Ziad al-Amla, 32

Killed: 17 May 2026 Location: Beit Ula, Hebron

Mahmoud Ziad al-Amla, 32, lived in Beit Ula, west of Hebron. He was crossing the separation wall to reach work inside Israel when Israeli soldiers shot him in the head. He died several days later at Al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron after time in intensive care.

Nour al-Din Kamal Hassan Fayyad, 34

Killed: 16 May 2026 Location: Wadi Burqin, Jenin

Nour al-Din Kamal Hassan Fayyad, 34, taught at the Jenin Basic Boys’ School and lived in the nearby village of Wadi Burqin. During an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp, soldiers shot him in the thigh as he tried to enter. He went into cardiac arrest at the camp entrance; Red Crescent paramedics could not save him.

Fahd Zaidan Awais, 15 (child)

Killed: 15 May 2026 Location: Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, south of Nablus

Israeli soldiers shot Fahd Zaidan Awais, 15, on farmland outside Al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya, south of Nablus. They blocked Red Crescent paramedics from reaching him and then took his body.

Izz al-Din al-Haddad (Abu Suhaib), 59

Killed: 15 May 2026 Location: Gaza City

Izz al-Din al-Haddad, 59, took over as general commander of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades in May 2025 after Israel killed his predecessors during the Gaza war. Known as Abu Suhaib or “the Ghost of al-Qassam,” he had survived at least six Israeli assassination attempts since 2009. Two of his sons had been killed earlier in the genocide.

On the evening of 15 May 2026, an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building in central Gaza City, killing al-Haddad along with his wife and daughter.

Between 21 and 27 April 2026, Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian child in Nablus city, and Israeli settlers shot and killed three Palestinians, including one child, in two separate incidents in Al Mughayyir and Deir Dibwan in Ramallah governorate. A Palestinian woman also died of injuries sustained during an Israeli operation in Jenin Camp in 2023. This brought the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank in 2026 to 42 as of 27 April, including ten children and two women.

During the same week, at least 57 Palestinians, including seven children, were injured: 37 in settler attacks and 20 by Israeli forces, mainly during search operations and raids. According to OCHA, 70 percent of those injured by settlers (26 of 37) were hurt in two attacks, on the villages of Beit Imrin and Jalud in Nablus governorate. At least 30 Israeli settler attacks during the week, resulting in casualties, property damage, or both. The total since the beginning of 2026 has exceeded 700 incidents across more than 200 communities, averaging approximately 6 incidents per day.

Demolitions and forced displacement continued at elevated levels during the reporting period. Between 9 April and 6 May 2026, 33 demolition or confiscation incidents were recorded across the West Bank, affecting 95 structures and displacing 160 Palestinians, including 70 children, with a further 4,083 people otherwise affected. Of those incidents, 31 (94 percent) were due to a lack of building permits — which the Israeli state almost never issues to Palestinians. Jerusalem governorate accounted for 18 incidents, 43 structures, and 125 of the 160 displaced. Hebron accounted for 6 incidents and 34 displaced; Bethlehem, Salfit, Jericho, Tulkarm, and Ramallah accounted for the remainder. As of 5 May 2026, the database records 168 demolition incidents in 2026 to date, 479 structures affected, and 818 Palestinians displaced, including 375 children. According to OCHA’s 1 May report, the resulting 2026 monthly average of Palestinians displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions is the highest annual monthly average documented since the agency began maintaining records on this category in 2009. 85 schools across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are currently under pending demolition orders, serving more than 13,000 students.

al-Eizariya, East Jerusalem

Israeli forces issued notices to demolish 50 Palestinian commercial shops and facilities in the al-Mashtal area at the entrance to al-Eizariya, southeast of occupied Jerusalem. Owners were given until Sunday. This is horrendous.

Tarqumiya, west of Hebron

Israeli forces demolished a two-story home belonging to Amir Bassam al-Ja’afra in the Shaab al-Bier area of Tarqumiya, displacing a household of ten.

Jalud, south of Nablus

Israeli settlers entered the Al-Dahr area of Jalud and threw stones at Palestinian residents. A child was wounded in the head; a young man sustained contusions. IMEMC reported the incident the following day. The attacks of 21 and 27 April on Beit Imrin and Jalud accounted for 70 percent of Palestinians injured by settlers during the reporting week, including three children, with at least seven houses and four vehicles damaged.

Kharsa junction, south of Hebron

Israeli forces issued a military order confiscating land belonging to the al-Shahatit family, located opposite an existing military tower at the Kharsa junction. The order was reported by the Colonization Wall Resistance Committee and confirmed in WAFA’s dispatch the same day.

Wadi al-Rakhim, Masafer Yatta

Settlers from the Susiya settlement attacked Ahmed al-Da’ajna with stones and set fire to his vehicle and excavator after preventing him from reaching his under-construction home. Settler militias also blocked roads connecting villages in the area. Communities in Masafer Yatta have been the subject of sustained settler pressure on Palestinian herding and farming, including livestock attacks, road closures, and property destruction.

A campaign to demand access to life-giving tools

Palestinians and allies are systematically locked out of the payment platforms. PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and others refuse not only to operate in support of anything in support of Palestinians sustaining life.

We launched this campaign because Palestinians should be able to receive payments from relatives abroad, run a small online business, or accept direct support from people who want to help, without a gatekeeper deciding whether you count as a customer.

Unblock the Aid is pushing these companies to open their services to Palestinians on equal terms with everyone else. If you want to help force that change, sign up at unblockaid.org for campaign updates and ways to take action as we move forward.

Tarqumiya, west of Hebron, 20 April 2026. Palestinian families gather what remains of their belongings after the Israeli Civil Administration demolished a two-story residential building containing three apartments, along with a water cistern and a concrete retaining wall.

In the first four months of 2026, Israeli authorities demolished 447 Palestinian structures across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, displacing 776 people — including 351 children. Eighty-seven percent of this year’s demolitions were carried out for “lack of permit,” which in practice is a systemic instrument of annexation and displacement, rather than a planning matter, given that Israel approves only a tiny fraction of Palestinian building applications in Area C and East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has borne the heaviest weight with 50 demolitions that destroyed 144 structures and displaced 351 people. The year’s most concentrated operation came in Kafr ‘Aqab, where, in late January, Israeli forces opened a section of the apartheid wall to carry out the operation, demolishing more than 70 structures over three days under an operation styled “Capital Shield”. Hebron followed with 30 demolitions and 116 structures, including a nine-structure operation in Qalqas in February that displaced 29 people.

The single most acute episode of forced displacement this year came not from demolition equipment but from eviction orders. Between 22 and 25 March, Israeli police evicted 16 Palestinian families in Batn al-Hawa, a neighborhood at the heart of Silwan, just south of the Old City. The evictions are the latest chapter in a long settler campaign by the organization Ateret Cohanim, which has been central to the Batn al-Hawa eviction campaign. Since 7 October 2023, about 28 households — 160 people — have been pushed out of that neighborhood alone.

In Area C, Bedouin herding communities have remained particularly exposed and vulnerable to coordinated settler violence as well as demolition campaigns. On 15 April, the Civil Administration demolished 17 residential and agricultural structures in Az Za’ayyem Bedouin community, displacing 23 people, including 15 children. It is one of 46 Bedouin communities in the central West Bank, the UN has flagged as facing forcible transfer under an Israeli “relocation” plan. In the Jordan Valley, a single operation on 8 February in Hammamat al-Maleh (Al Meiteh) tore down 21 structures and displaced 16 people. Of the 447 structures demolished year-to-date, 31 were funded by international donors, a reminder that the Zionist entity targets not simply homes, but humanitarian aid.

Set against the longer arc, the post-2023 escalation is impossible to miss. The 1,774 structures destroyed in 2024, alongside the 4,293 people displaced that year in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone, represented the worst annual figures since OCHA began publishing this data in 2009. The 2025 figures maintained the pace, with 1,671 structures destroyed and 2,134 people displaced. By contrast, between 2009 and 2022, the West Bank averaged about 655 structures torn down per year. A single year now matches what used to take nearly three.

Where 2026 lands by year’s end will depend on factors only partly under the Israeli Civil Administration’s control. Through 28 April, demolitions are running behind 2025’s same-period pace — 447 structures destroyed against 662, and 776 displaced against 888 — though still well above every pre-2023 baseline on record. The simplest explanation is bandwidth: with Israel having waged war against Iran and continuing operations in Lebanon and Gaza, the Israeli forces that once accompanied mass West Bank sweeps are just committed elsewhere.

Aid trucks are barely entering Gaza. Community fundraising for Palestinian families in the Strip has slowed down. Prices continue to remain elevated by design. It’s important we return back to dynamics that are still animating this genocide and identify the tactics of divide and conquer, as they are some of the oldest instruments in the colonial toolkit. We should recognize that those carrying out this genocide rely heavily on Western racial tropes to do their work: images of warring clans, lawless tribes, native society that dissolves into predation the moment imperial order is withdrawn. Western coverage of Gaza throughout the genocide has rehearsed these images with near-liturgical fidelity to the zionist narrative. Aid stories in the news began not at the Israeli-controlled crossings or with the zionist siege policy but with “Arab chaos,” with “armed gangs,” and with a Palestinian street depicted as ungovernable, exploitative by nature, and turned on itself. For months, readers were told Hamas was stealing the food. The narrative was not incidental: it justified the throttling of deliveries, excused the collapse of the pipeline, and obscured the fact that the actual interceptors operated under an Israeli umbrella of influence and, by Israel’s own admission, with Israeli weapons. The mass propaganda about Hamas provided the political cover for US “aid agencies” to gun down Palestinians at food lines.

The numbers of course cut through this kind of story cleanly. Aid flow is measurable: trucks are counted at the crossing, counted again at the destination, and the gap is the loot. Overlay that ledger against the political timeline — the arming of Yasser Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces, the October 2025 ceasefire, the Hamas-led crackdown, Abu Shabab’s killing in December — and the “chaos” resolves into something far more legible: a proxy operation with a start date, an operating tempo, and an end date. When Palestinian forces dismantled the Israeli-armed militias, aid started arriving. The order Western coverage treats as absent in Gaza was restored by the very actors that coverage casts as its enemy. But people chose propaganda over objective data.

Nonetheless, it’s important to turn to objective figures to reiterate the racial dynamics and highlight Palestinians’ ability to govern themselves, even during a genocide. Two data streams tell the story of Gaza’s wartime economy. The first is the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics commodity price series, and the second is the UN’s aid-delivery tracker, which logs trucks collected at crossings, delivered to their destinations, and intercepted en route. Read together, they show a market under siege and an aid pipeline that was, for most of 2025, functionally a looting operation acting as a proxy of the broader zionist movement. These groups were financed, equipped, and provided logistical support by the Israeli government.

These armed proxies heavily manipulated market forces, which, of course, was by design. Against the pre-Oct 7, 2023 baseline prices, the five steepest price increases for basic food items in March 2026 were eggplants (+1,468%), chili pepper (+1,233%), gasoline (+1,093%), cucumbers (+904%), and the 12 kg cooking-gas cylinder (+853%). Fresh vegetables that used to be grown inside Gaza have risen between four and fifteen times: bell pepper +740%, lemons +461%, tomatoes +335%, potatoes +379%. Animal protein roughly tripled in price — veal +244%, lamb +209%, eggs +200%. The commodities that rose least are precisely the ones that dominate humanitarian aid baskets: rice +59%, bulgur +58%, sugar +40%. The split is really diagnostic. Goods that depended on Gaza’s own farms, fuel imports, and commercial supply chains — all of which Israel destroyed or blockaded with their own military, armed gangs, or the squatter gangs blocking the roads — ran away from baseline prices by factors of four, nine, and fifteen. Goods still arriving by aid truck have stabilized to pre-October 7, 2023, rates. Price, in other words, is tracking the siege itself: the steeper the climb, the more completely that commodity’s supply has been severed.

While the OCHA dataset only begins on May 21, 2025, so a clean truck count back to Oct 7, 2023 isn’t available from this source, what it does cover is damning enough. From May 2025 through April 18, 2026, 28,844 trucks were counted at crossings; 21,568 reached their destination; 7,226 — about one in four — were looted by these zionist-backed gangs. Month by month, the loot rate in summer 2025 was 66% in May, 92% in June, 88% in July, 85% in August. In August alone, 3,010 of 3,554 trucks entering Gaza never reached their destinations.

Then it stops. From October 2025, the loot rate falls to 15%, in November to 0.7%, and in December to zero. Year-to-date in 2026, of 8,247 trucks collected, 8,046 have been delivered — a 97.6% success rate, and zero logged as looted. The inflection is too sharp to be a coincidence: Palestinians and the collective government and resistant forces — including Hamas, of course — were able to bring a looting to an end.

In 2024 and 2025, the primary aid-convoy predator was the Popular Forces militia, led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a Tarabin Bedouin from Rafah, operating under the IDF’s sphere of influence. Even a Washington Post investigation cited an internal UN memo saying the gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” of Israel’s military. On June 7, 2025, France 24 reported that Israel had openly admitted arming the group; a Sky News Data and Forensics probe later recorded an IDF soldier describing the military supplying “grenades… money… vehicles… food.” Conversely, a US probe determined Hamas wasn’t involved in the looting.

On July 2, 2025, the Gazan courts gave Abu Shabab ten days to surrender on charges of treason, collaborating with hostile entities, forming an armed gang, and insurrection. He didn’t. The ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, and from that point, Hamas moved systematically against the militias. Hamas reasserted control over clan-aligned groups; Mondoweiss described it as an internal crackdown that a security source called “the largest yet,” with interrogations reportedly confirming that seized weapons had been supplied by Israel. Even neo-liberal outlets turned on the zionist propaganda. On December 4, 2025, France 24 reported that Abu Shabab had been killed near Rafah; NBC News framed it as a “blow to Israeli policy,” and an Al Jazeera investigation published weeks later named additional Popular Forces members still serving as Israeli agents inside Gaza. Abu Shabab’s own clan, the Abu Suneima family, publicly disowned him.

The timing lines up almost perfectly with the Hamas crackdown. Loot rate: 66–92% from May through September 2025, while Abu Shabab’s network was active and armed. 15% in October, the month of the ceasefire and the first Hamas sweeps. 0.7% in November. Zero from December, which was the month Abu Shabab was killed. When the militia network intercepting aid was dismantled by Palestinian resistance forces, aid started reaching people. December 2025 marked the dataset’s peak, with 4,959 trucks delivered. Since then, monthly throughput has fallen steadily — to roughly 1,700 in March — now driven by Israeli restrictions on aid requests rather than gang activity.

The bottleneck has shifted from different zionist points of control again, from the road to the crossing, and with it the pretext for preventing the arrival of aid. As long as the looting continued — carried out by armed gangs the Zionists were funding — the siege could be laundered through a story about Palestinian chaos: warring clans, lawless streets, a society supposedly incapable of feeding itself without Western supervision. Meanwhile, the price series and the truck ledger refute that story. The numbers show a market whose every distortion traces back to Western imperialist destruction and the zionist blockade, and an aid pipeline that started working the moment Palestinians dismantled the Israeli-armed gangs preying on it. It’s so important to reiterate: governance in Gaza was never the problem.

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Today, April 17, is Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. The date was chosen to commemorate the release of Mahmoud Bakr Hejazi on April 17, 1971, during the first prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestinians — in this case, the Fatah movement. The day itself is about remembering our prisoners and aligning our actions and visions of justice with their interests.

This year, as we commemorate Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, there are more than 9,600 Palestinians currently held captive in occupation prisons. Among these are 3,532 administrative detainees, all held without charge or trial under military order for renewable six-month periods. This is about 36.7% of all known Palestinian prisoners. Another 1,251 prisoners are Palestinians from the Gaza Strip are held without charge or trial according to the “Unlawful Combatants Law”, which allows for the indefinite detention of someone “who is a member of a force perpetrating hostile acts against the State of Israel or who has participated in hostile acts of such a force, either directly or indirectly”. These prisoners make up 13% of the known Palestinian prison population. This means that, among the Palestinians we know are imprisoned, about 49.7% of them have not been charged with a crime or tried, and can be held indefinitely.

These numbers do not include Palestinians disappeared from the Gaza Strip by the zionist entity or held in military camps. Those figures are unknown.

Since the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967, 326 Palestinian prisoners have been martyred inside these prisons. Of these martyrs, at least 89 have been murdered since the period between October 2023 and today.

Israeli authorities are also withholding the bodies of 97 martyred Palestinian prisoners. Prior to October 2023, only 11 martyred Palestinian prisoners’ bodies were being withheld.

Perhaps the most telling figure from the post-October 2023 period is the total number of people arrested from the West Bank and Gaza during this period: 23,000. This includes both those who are still detained and those who were subsequently released; it includes those abducted during military invasions and home raids, those kidnapped from military checkpoints, and those detained in order to pressure a family member into surrendering themselves to Israeli prisons. Among those arrested in this category are at least 1,800 children. 342 remain imprisoned. Journalists account for 240 of these arrests, 43 are still detained. One of these journalists, Marwan Harzallah, was martyred in prison. He was being held in administrative detention. His body remains held by occupation prison authorities.

This day of remembrance is marked this year by the recent closure of Defense for Children International - Palestine (DCI-P), which finally shut its doors in April 2026 after 35 years of work defending the rights of Palestinian children. This could not have come at a worse time. The closure will end the DCI-P’s many important services, including legal aid to Palestinian children, the documentation of systematic violations against their most basic rights and protections, and the organization of children’s legal representation. This forced closure was instigated by a years-long campaign against DCI-P by the Israeli government and civil society organizations, including the decision by the Israeli Defense Ministry to designate DCI-P a terror organization alongside several other Palestinian organizations in October 2021. Among the other groups designated at that time were Addameer: Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, al-Haq, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees. Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network was given the same designation in February 2021. It is noteworthy that three of the seven groups targeted by these terror designations work to support Palestinian prisoners.

As has been well-documented, Palestinian prisoners are currently facing escalated, horrific conditions of neglect, abuse, and systematic violence at the hands of occupation prison authorities. Those who have been released describe the standardization of withholding of adequate food and water including water access for bathing, medical and sanitary neglect, abuse by medical professionals, physical abuse and torture, psychological violence and torture, and rampant sexual abuse. You can read Addameer’s recent January report on the conditions in occupation prisons here, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor’s April 12 report documenting testimonies of rape and sexual violence as “de facto state policy”. This claim is not at all an exaggeration, as Ben Gvir (current zionist Minister of National Security) recently disguised himself in order to inspect occupation prisons and to monitor their “operational compliance” with his orders to escalate systemic violence against Palestinian prisoners. This comes shortly after another visit to Ofer Prison in which Ben Gvir reportedly assaulted prisoners himself, stepping on their heads.

Introduced by Ben Gvir himself, the zionist government recently passed a bill mandating the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism related” offenses which result in the death of an Israeli. This law applies exclusively to Palestinians and is set to take effect starting at the end of April. Many human rights organizations have rejected this bill on the basis that Israeli military courts almost never acquit Palestinian prisoners of a crime when they are actually charged and tried — conviction rates hover around 99%.

But the issue is not whether or not Israeli military courts will be able to justly convict Palestinians and apply a death sentence for Palestinians accused of carrying out acts hostile to the zionist state. By design, they have never and will not. Citing the rate of conviction of zionist military courts suggests that there is a chance of reformation, or — more grotesquely — that if zionist military courts had more moderate rates of conviction, they could be trusted to apply laws such as this.

The reality is that not one single Palestinian should be imprisoned by foreign occupiers, let alone tortured and brutalized by them. There is nothing zionist courts can do to make the application of their colonial laws just, because they should not be legislating anything about Palestinian existence, life, land, or access to any of these things at all. Foreign settlers have no right to impose their laws on an indigenous population whom they would like to see forcibly disappeared — a goal to which they have exercised every possible effort. These laws are fundamentally unjust because they should not exist. Not one occupation prison should exist, just as the occupation itself should not exist. The primary issue is not just that the zionist entity has no right to murder Palestinians for resisting its existence and carrying out acts that serve this effort; the most heinous crime is that the zionist entity continues at our privation, our imprisonment, our death and dispossession directly. This is the reality we must address in order to do any justice to Palestinian prisoners and act in the interest of their freedom.

Palestinians who grow up in exile in the West learn quickly that the world is occupied by zionists. These zionists are both people who reestablish zionist thought and principles with their actions (intentionally or otherwise), as well as those personally committed to zionism as a concept, but the first group is much more significant. The reason for this is simple: zionism is a normative position in the West, underpinned by Israel’s role in the capitalist-imperialist world system and entrenched and protected by shared white supremacist roots. Because of this, and because our existence is fundamentally problematic to the project of zionism, Palestinians living in exile in the West are routinely confronted with this seemingly “accepted” regime. Furthermore, those committed to the maintenance of this reality use their power to punish those who challenge this status quo.

Palestine is not present in Western media and educational channels. US news outlets do not generally discuss Palestine in any meaningful sense, and commentators who even question the validity of zionism are expelled and banished from mainstream media. In my experience, our US public school education never mentioned Palestine, except in reference to Israel. This all means that the ubiquity of zionism in the West is apparent in so many interactions; from a young age and as a Palestinian, I understood that if I wanted someone to know me as a person and appreciate my family, I would have to teach them world history they had never heard before and wouldn’t find anywhere else. By college I had carried out this process of re-education so many times, I joked about making a powerpoint. It wasn’t just that my peers didn’t know about Palestine or its history — growing up mostly in the post-9/11 period, they had been taught to normalize the mass destruction of entire communities across the Middle East and North Africa. A friend’s father once told me, in response to my thoughts and feelings about Palestine: “This is how the world works. People are conquered all the time.”

To be understood and challenge your own dehumanization, you are always making a case.1 You learn to study people closely and quickly, to analyze situations, to read between the lines. Many of us have grown up with this experience: if your fellow student is wearing a Jewish star, proceed with caution — you could certainly become friends, but you will have to teach them you are human once they know you’re Palestinian, and undoubtedly their parents will like you less once they learn your family history (though they likely won’t say it to your face). If your teacher argues in history class that the TSA should be able to strip search anyone, anytime, because “it protects us all”, she definitely thinks you’re a terrorist — but might also believe there’s a chance you can be reformed. And, if you debate this point too vehemently, it might tip her opinion one way and affect your grade (you still should). Other Muslims, especially those from immigrant families, usually “get it” and you can be friends, no powerpoint necessary. They’ve already heard about colonization from their family history, and likely know about Palestine as well.

But it is not just personal interactions that are inundated with the normalization of zionism and white supremacy (both inherently antagonistic to Palestinian existence), it is also every interaction with Western bureaucracy. One time, my family was crossing the border from Canada into the United States by car. The border officer asked my father where he was from. My father replied, “Palestine.” I cringed in the backseat. That response is not on the list of pre-approved answers to get you through the border quickly and painlessly. It is a trigger word for further interrogation and even detention. Even I knew that, at nine years old. Immediately, there were many more questions, spoken quickly to prevent the respondent from thinking too much: “Why does your passport say you were born in another country then? Where did you grow up? Why do you have a US passport? When did you come here? Why?” The interrogation ended abruptly and with a joke — the officer knew the phrase “goodbye” in Arabic, and said it with a smile — but only after we had been thoroughly questioned.

My dad — who, at this point in his life, had been harassed more times at many more airports and borders than I likely ever will — was just being honest. But honesty is dangerous for Palestinians, particularly when your erasure is normalized and you cannot guess whether the border bureaucrat questioning you may exercise their prerogative to disrupt your entire day on the basis of your identity alone. We had already been held up and searched on the way out. Even crossing the border of the country we were residing in was a reminder that our national identity is often seen as a provocation to those in positions of authority.

That border officer almost certainly did not consider himself a zionist. But in being part of a colonial border regime which treats “Palestine” as a trigger word — as something suspicious, requiring explanation, demanding justification — he was enforcing the same logics and power systems that entrench zionism: that Palestinian identity at best is inherently provisional, something to be interrogated rather than simply acknowledged, or worst, something to be eliminated.

These are minute personal indignities. It should go without saying that they do not compare to the experiences of Palestinians subjected to genocide, home demolitions, settler raids, forced displacement, mass imprisonment, torture, and slaughter. But understanding that, for Palestinians and those aligned with us, zionists control our world, helps to explain the global situation of Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestine solidarity activism. The small instances of normalized dehumanization connect directly to the normalization of continuous colonial and imperial violence in our lands and support for genocide.

zionist occupation of Palestinian life and that of our associates

A few weeks ago, while scrolling on social media I came across a video from Morgan Cooper (@mashjar_juthour on Instagram), a US citizen who lives in the West Bank with her Palestinian husband and their children. She had left the country recently and traveled with her children — in part for a holiday, and in part to be able to reach a US embassy in order to renew her family’s US passports. She describes in the video how, despite her and her children all being US citizens, they are functionally prevented from accessing any consular services in Palestine by Israel’s checkpoint and permit system. It was easier to access her own country’s embassy from outside of Palestine, in another continent entirely. She cannot access basic services that she is entitled to as a US citizen because Israel prevents her from reaching Jerusalem.

People understand that zionists control much of life in Palestine. They see (or have experienced for themselves) the hours-long waits at randomly closed checkpoints, invasions into communities and the state violence that comes with it, the sudden abductions of Palestinians into zionist prisons, and the impunity of zionist settlers’ and state forces’ arbitrary, constant murders of Palestinians. But when I saw Morgan Cooper’s video, it reminded me of how zionism affects Palestinians everywhere, and often anyone associated with us, across borders — even beyond the obvious almost eighty-year-long period of forced exile, ongoing refugeehood, genocide, and continuous colonization and destruction.

Cooper’s experience brought to mind a story I had been told only a few days before seeing her video: someone close to me, a Palestinian in exile with a “strong” Western passport, had applied for a European visa. As part of the process, they were subjected to a background check. This background check uncovered a Canary Mission profile about them, making — as is the website’s modus operandi — unverifiable claims of “antisemitism”. Their application was immediately denied. They were explicitly informed that this was the reason.

When I heard this story, I knew its ending as soon as I heard the phrase “background check” and the exasperation in the speaker’s voice. Everywhere Palestinians and their allies exist, zionists are intervening in order to make their lives harder, especially if they are vocal about their belief in a liberated Palestine. Whether we are living in Palestine or outside of it, zionists and their organizations, institutions, spokespeople, and professional mudslingers, are desperately trying to punish us out of speaking up and taking action in solidarity with Palestinians.

The visa officer who denied that application may have harbored no personal animosity toward Palestinians. More than likely, they may see themselves as simply “doing their job.” But fixation on individual intent over material impact is precisely what makes this system so difficult to name: when the effect of a bureaucratic decision is to deny a Palestinian access, mobility, and residency on the basis of their political identity and the rejection of their erasure, the person carrying it out has functioned as an enforcer of zionism. Focusing on whether the individual meant harm, rather than on the harm produced, obscures the structure — and ensures it reproduces itself unchallenged.

Happily, CAIR Chicago has launched the start of a class action lawsuit against a collection of zionist organizations dedicated to doxxing, harassment, and threats against those who express solidarity with Palestinians or a rejection of zionism. Included among CAIR’s plaintiffs are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Jewish Americans who have faced harassment, threats, and worse for the attacks leveled against them by Canary Mission, StopAntisemitism, and others. One of the plaintiffs, Laila Ali, is described in the complaint as having been doxxed and harassed by StopAntisemitism on Twitter/X and other social media platforms repeatedly, including a call for her deportation and termination from her job. Ali was eventually terminated from her position, with her former employer publicly confirming that the action was taken in response to StopAntisemitism’s attacks.

Targeting anti-zionists, especially vocal ones, is not a new phenomenon — either in Palestine or outside of it. But over the last few years, as we have been inundated with discourse about the allegedly omnipresent, ever-strengthening scourge of antisemitism alongside the reality that more folks in the Global North seem to be observing Israel’s genocidal violence with new eyes and growing disgust, these smear campaigns, intimidation tactics, and coordinated violence have brought new fervor to an old conspiracy theory. More and more, US Americans yell “ZOG!” as they observe many of their governments’ decisions, and SNL cast members feel emboldened to attempt jokes that the imperial power is being ruled by the premier of its favored colony. The truth that we are living in a world occupied by zionists is not new or a secret conspiracy. We are. But underpinning these statements is the false assumption that the zionists occupying positions of power are primarily Jewish, or that they are even zionists first and foremost, rather than dedicated capitalists, imperialists, and white supremacists.

In reality, zionists exist in all shapes and sizes. Trump is a zionist, but to suggest that he is dedicated to this or any vision of Jewish statehood is ridiculous, when the evidence clearly indicates that he is driven by his own financial interests. These interests are inherently tied to positions that sustain the US empire. The same could be said of most US politicians, whether they are personally making money off of military industrial investments or simply value Israel’s role in maintaining US imperial interests in the broader region. Likewise, the proof that much of the world is governed and shaped by zionists is everywhere — perhaps illustrated most clearly through the experiences of Palestinians, whose lives are disrupted by zionism wherever they are. The plainest example of this reality is the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the treatment of those in solidarity with the targets of this genocide.

Complicity in genocide

Most know about the extent of US complicity in this genocide. But from October 2023, governments across Europe fell in line — not only failing to obstruct genocide, but actively participating in it. Between October 2023 and May 2025, EU member states collectively sent 53 million euros worth of weapons in public funds under their Israeli trade agreement. They also continued to renew EU security research funding grants for Israel, the single non-European state which most benefits from this funding, as the zionist entity maintained a total siege on Gaza and murdered hundreds of people a day on average.

The United Kingdom has also sent a record number of arms to Israel in 2025 and participated in surveillance and intelligence sharing as it flew planes over Gaza from Cyprus. The UK government imprisoned Palestine Action activists for prolonged periods, endangered their health and safety, and proscribed their organization as a “terror group” despite the ongoing, massive public outcry and now a High Court decision which has ruled this proscription unlawful. Six of the recently acquitted Filton 24 now face retrial with a potential that they will be sentenced as terrorists — information that will be hidden from the jury. They will also be prevented from telling the jury how their actions were part of an effort to disrupt the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The judges making these decisions, the prosecutors requesting them, and the government and counter-terror officers informing the requests are all among the zionist actors influencing these activists’ lives.

It is not just governments that are complicit, either. US universities have cast aside any remnants of their association with open-mindedness or “freedom of speech” to ensure that students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing have been hunted down, beaten, arrested, and deported in some cases. They have paid out settlements to Jewish students and faculty members for having their “right” to advocate for genocide be questioned by their peers. Universities, including UC Berkeley, have handed over lists of their students and faculty to the US government to be investigated for alleged incidents of antisemitism. Those of us who still had any remnant of faith in the US academic system after the public ousting of Sami Al-Arian or Steven Salaita certainly should not have any more illusions at this point, now that we have seen the similar treatment applied to non-Palestinian scholars as well: Maura Finkelstein, Jairo Fúnez-Flores, Peyrin Kao, Sang Hea Kil, Idris Robinson, Katherine Franke, and now Aria Fani and Shirin Saeidi among others. These are all decisions that have directly altered the lives of many, many people.

The message is clear: zionism is hegemonic in Western politics, culture, education, and beyond. Any challenge will be met with the full force of law, extralegal violence, and the construction of new laws to heighten pressure against dissent. But the issue here is not “ZOG” — there is not an all-powerful Jewish individual or cabal enforcing zionism at the highest level of all of these institutions, nor is the actual leadership or low-level administrators and bureaucrats deeply committed to a project of so-called “Jewish self-determination” in Palestine. As analysis by GSC members has already shown with institutions like Human Rights Watch, those in positions of power and authority at every level in Western society are deeply committed to the status quo and personally benefit from violence and warfare. It is not that they are fervent zionists, or paid off by fervent zionists, or blackmailed by them — it is that they are benefitting, personally, institutionally, from a reality that includes zionism, and is supported by its continuation. It is not zionism that is foregrounded or most important; rather, protecting zionism is part of maintaining a geopolitical reality that protects colonial and imperial plunder throughout the region and the Global South in general.

When we say for Palestinians and those in solidarity with them, zionists occupy the world, this includes the people who carry out the actions described above on the most micro levels: administrators who fire professors and expel students because of their support for Palestine; colleagues who look away and pretend not to notice to protect their own careers; the students who engage in surveillance, file complaints, and gather thousands of signatures to punish their anti-zionist professors; staffers working in the offices of politicians who support genocide or make empty statements while remaining complicit; office managers who fire their workers for being doxxed by the likes of Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism; NGO workers who collect checks knowing that they are pushing campaigns that water down anti-zionist demands while claiming to represent Palestinians’ interests first and foremost; prosecutors building cases against Palestine solidarity activists who have organized to materially disrupt genocide; ICE officers who have abducted activists and held them imprisoned for extended periods or deported them; adults who tell young Palestinians that they should accept the loss of their homeland and massacres of their people, because that’s just “how the world works.” All of these actors, the majority of whom are not Jewish and are likely not committed to zionism on a personal level, operate in a way that makes them into the zionists altering and controlling the world for Palestinians and those associated with us. Entirely independent of the Israeli state, its government, the Mossad, Sheldon Adelson’s ghost, or any other such entity, these individuals attempt to assert zionism in the personal lives of those who speak out against it, against genocide, and for liberation and decolonization. In that way, we routinely find that our lives are disrupted by zionists — or that we should expect, at any time, that they might intervene in our lives.

A culture of white supremacy

No small part of these actions is informed by an ingrained culture of white supremacy, rather than a philosophical commitment to zionism. zionist professors, students, politicians, governments, even the corporations profiting from genocide are presumed to have the right to comfort, to be protected from being confronted with the consequences of their actions or those which they support, whether it’s photos of the families whose murder they’ve encouraged or physical damage to their weapons manufacturing plants. This right to comfort is protected through the stoking of fear: Palestinians and their allies are scary for disrupting classes, for the reminder that armed resistance to colonial domination is protected under international law, for insisting that their communities must change in order to no longer be complicit in this genocide. These are all characteristics of white supremacy, along with denial — rewriting history, denying reality, legitimizing genocidal violence, erasing the historical reality of Palestinians as a collectivity — and the fear of conflict when this denial is challenged openly. Palestinians and allies in the West who see the urgency of responding to and disrupting genocide and settler colonial violence and act accordingly confront all of these basic tenets of white supremacy and more, from within personal interactions to the culture of political organizing spaces which to interactions with the state and its representatives to penalties in the workplace. We find the evidence of this role of white supremacy not only in responses to Palestine solidarity organizing as described above, but also in the types of people who are the primary targets of zionist backlash.

It is well known that Israeli border bureaucrats have used Canary Mission and other such sites to screen visitors seeking entrance to Palestine in the past. But the use is generally deployed in an uneven, racialized manner: those with Arab names or other identifiers, Muslim names or other identifiers, those who’ve visited other Arab or Muslim countries, those who are Black or Brown — these are the primary targets against whom Canary Mission has been used as a monitoring and vetting tool at the border. These are the people most often pulled aside for secondary questioning, simply on the basis of background, name, or appearance. And these are the people who make up the vast majority of the targets of institutional and state violence in response to their rejection of complicity in genocide.

Last year, the US government confirmed it was using Canary Mission as a resource to identify student protesters for deportations based on their Palestine solidarity activism. In the United States and elsewhere, other marginalized populations are easy targets, both because many folks recognize the violence of colonialism and genocide in Palestine and empathize, and also because they often have less institutional power. This means that alongside Palestinians, it is other Arabs, Muslims, and Black and Brown communities that are also primary targets of state and institutional zionist violence for their expressions of solidarity with Palestinians.

So, yes. For Palestinians and those in solidarity with them, zionists do control our world — not because these figures are necessarily philosophically invested in zionism itself, but because they will enforce it (even unknowingly) to protect their own interests against those of us harmed by their interests (and those in solidarity). Those invested in white supremacy, in the continuation of empire and capitalism and all of their evils, are not just occupying space in our governments. They are also in charge of cultural institutions, universities, news organizations, charities, watchdog groups, NGOs, and more. They are teachers, border officers, police, TSA, bureaucrats in government offices, doctors, students, politicians. For those of us who are committed to Palestinian liberation, those people on the other side who are profiting off of genocide are always there, wielding their power however possible to prevent disruption and making life as hard as possible — getting us fired or expelled, preventing us from traveling, imprisoning us, deporting us.

Rather than dissuade us from action, zionist efforts to disrupt our lives must be opportunities to learn from each other and work together. That our lives are altered by these experiences is important to recognize because it illustrates that we see and can understand how these systems work, how they are interconnected, and why they function the way they do to support one another — whereas, having spent so long demanding our erasure or pretending we already don’t exist, those on the other side do not apprehend us. As in Palestine, having greater knowledge of your oppressor than they do of you is certainly a boon, especially when it comes to strategizing organized resistance. The important thing is not to fall into despair or allow ourselves to be contained by the illusions of justice proffered by the advocates of empire.

The Israeli army uprooted olive groves in Deir Istiya along Road 5066. At least 200 trees, some ancient, under a “security needs”.

Data from March 10 - April 8, 2026

In the weeks since Israeli forces closed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, zionists have imposed the most restrictive measures across the West Bank since the period directly after October 7, 2023. Checkpoints have multiplied, entire cities have been reduced to single entry points, and the daily rhythm of invasions, arrests, and settler attacks has quietly accelerated.

Between January 1 and April 8, 2026, the Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department recorded 5,339 violations ranging from widespread arrest campaigns to arbitrary military checkpoints and coordinated settler attacks. That averages to 54 per day. Over the most recent 30-day window, the rate climbed to 60 — an 11.5 percent increase that, on its own, understates what’s happening on the ground. Checkpoints more than doubled. Road closures rose 73 percent. And the geography of escalation shifted north, with Tulkarm, Tubas, and Nablus absorbing the sharpest spikes. This report breaks down what the numbers show.

Areas experiencing the highest pressure

Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, and Jerusalem each averaged between 5.7 and 6.7 violations per day over the past month. However, the rate of change is more significant than the absolute totals. The Israeli military has increased raids in Tulkarm, where there has been a 43 percent increase above its yearly rate, while Tubas rose by 31 percent. Nablus, already the most-affected governorate with 200 incidents in 30 days, exceeded its 2026 average by 25 percent. This escalation of zionist violence has been primarily concentrated in the northern West Bank.

The Israeli military essentially locks down the entire West Bank on a routine basis: checkpoint violations averaged 5.1 per day, compared to a yearly average of 2.2, representing a 132 percent increase. This has been accompanied by a 73 percent increase in road closures. Basically, since February 28, Israeli forces have imposed conditions equivalent to a rolling state of emergency. The Intercept reported that Nablus was reduced to a single functioning checkpoint. The Einav checkpoint into Tulkarm operates with restricted hours and entry only. Violations against places of worship rose by 50 percent, primarily due to the ongoing closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, both closed since February 28. The National Catholic Reporter described the Sepulcher closure as one of the longest in its history. For a critical analysis of the closure and Palestinian resistance to it, read the latest article by Good Shepherd Collective’s Lara Kilani here.

Invasions and arrests

As would be imagined, Israeli military invasions constitute the largest category of violations, averaging 15.2 per day. The pattern is consistent: forces enter a town, patrol, arrest residents, and withdraw. On April 8, Ramallah experienced seven separate invasions. Arrests averaged 6.6 per day. The Daily File reported that Jenin camp had been closed continuously for 443 days as of March 31, while Tulkarm camp had been effectively closed for over 400 days.

Between March 11 and April 9, 2026, Israeli forces carried out 191 separate arrest campaigns across the occupied West Bank, each incident typically leading to the abduction of one or several detainees in a single location. Ramallah led the count with 27 attacks, followed closely by Nablus at 26 and Hebron at 25. Tulkarm recorded 20 incidents, a rate that tracks its broader 43 percent spike in total violations over the same window. Jerusalem saw 17 arrests, Bethlehem 16, and Qalqilya 14. Jenin, despite being under continuous military closure for 443 consecutive days, registered 13 arrests, while Salfit and Tubas each logged 12. Jericho recorded nine, most of them occurring at the Allenby crossing as residents attempted to return from Jordan. The distribution places the heaviest arrest pressure on the central and northern West Bank, with Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, and Tulkarm accounting for 98 of the 191 incidents, or 51 percent of the total.

On April 8, Israeli forces arrested Tubas Municipality official Fawaz Anbousi following a raid on the city. On the same day, a resident of Attouf village in the Jordan Valley was detained. In Jericho, a citizen returning from Jordan via the Allenby crossing was also arrested. These incidents are representative of the daily patterns observed in the data.

Settler violence

Zionist militias, funded through the international nonprofit system, have averaged 6.2 attacks per day, an increase from the year-to-date average of 5.8. The United Nations documented over 150 attacks resulting in injuries or property damage across 90 communities since January, displacing 1,700 individuals.

On April 7, settlers entered farmland near Zabbda village in Jenin, attacked farmers, and raised an Israeli flag. On the same day in Al-Laban al-Gharbi, settlers uprooted 180 olive saplings belonging to farmer Nader Dhiyab Salem and grazed cattle on the cleared land. SANA reported that 884 trees were destroyed and 360 head of livestock were stolen during the broader reporting period.

NAD data records 14 home demolitions year to date. On April 7, Israeli authorities compelled brothers Nader and Hatem Baydoun to demolish their own homes in Silwan, East Jerusalem, to avoid substantial municipal fines. The two structures, built in 1998 and totaling 88 square meters, housed 10 family members, including children.

The 30-day data shows escalation, not a plateau. Zionist violence rates run above the yearly average in every major category except arrests and live ammunition, which dipped slightly. Checkpoint violations more than doubled. The geography shifted north, with Tulkarm, Tubas, and Nablus absorbing the sharpest increases.

Between 2013 and 2023, US-based nonprofits moved $17.65 billion to Israeli and foreign entities through the tax-exempt charitable system. In 2023 alone, $2.57 billion left the country — more than two-thirds of the annual US military aid package, with none of the restrictions. We know this because we counted it: 29,751 individual grant transactions, exposed in the IRS filings that every US nonprofit is required to submit. While the data reveals an entanglement of interests that create structural liabilities in US movement spaces, it also highlights strategic opportunities to disrupt the material resources that advance the zionist movement in Palestine.

Good Shepherd Collective maintains an open-source database of 14,653 US-based 501(c)(3) organizations identified as participants in the zionist financial ecosystem. The database is the evidentiary backbone of Defund Racism, a coalition campaign challenging the tax-exempt status of organizations that fund settlement expansion and military operations across Palestine. It is built entirely from verified IRS 990 filings available through the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File and electronically filed returns. Organizations are classified by function — direct funders, intermediaries, advocacy groups, and domestic infrastructure — and by confidence level, using grant recipient analysis, Schedule F foreign activity disclosures, and cross-references against known zionist-linked entities.

Our research unearthed two aggregate figures that matter: $2.57 billion and $9.3 billion. The first is the amount of money that actually left the United States and landed in “Israel” in 2023. We isolated this number by counting only terminal grants — grant transactions in which the recipient is an Israeli or foreign entity, rather than another US-based intermediary. Between 2013 and 2023, those terminal grants totaled $17.65 billion across 29,751 individual transactions. That figure grew from $626 million in 2013 to $2.57 billion in 2023, a 311 percent increase over the decade.

The second figure ($9.3 billion) is the total annual revenue of the ecosystem itself — the full domestic apparatus of fundraising, programming, advocacy, and lawfare operations that sustained the pipeline in 2023. Summing revenue across all 14,653 organizations for the same period produces $93.65 billion, but that number double-counts money as it moves between organizations within the ecosystem (a donation to a Jewish Federation that becomes a grant to the Central Fund of Israel appears as revenue for both). Subtracting the $13.6 billion in intra-ecosystem grants we can trace by EIN produces a de-duplicated estimate of roughly $80 billion in net revenue entering the system from outside donors and other sources between 2013 and 2023. In 2023 alone, the ecosystem generated approximately $9.3 billion in de-duplicated revenue, up from $5.3 billion a decade earlier, a 75 percent increase. In comparison, over the same period, Lockheed Martin’s revenue grew 49 percent, from $45.4 billion to $67.6 billion.

As anyone would guess, the period after October 7, 2023 accelerated these flows significantly as the broader zionist movement mobilized to animate and conceal a genocide simultaneously. Friends of the IDF reported $282 million in revenue for its fiscal year overlapping the attack, nearly triple its $89 million baseline the year prior. The Jewish National Fund’s revenue doubled to $224 million. The Jewish Federations of North America launched a $908 million Israel Emergency Campaign, the largest in their history, pushing total Federation fundraising past $3 billion in 2024. (Note: These surges are partially captured in the 2023 filing data but will be more fully reflected in 2024 filings as they become available from the IRS.)

It’s worth going back to the military-aid comparison, but maybe not for the reason you’d expect. Much of the US organizing around Palestine solidarity focuses on reducing the $3.8 billion annual military aid package. Under the 2016 Memorandum of Understanding, that money comes with a requirement: by 2028, 100 percent of it must be spent on US-manufactured defense systems. It cycles back into US factories and US paychecks, which means US politicians understand that cutting it means cutting jobs in their districts. That campaign is going nowhere. But the large NGOs keep rolling it out, “email your representatives” to “block the bombs”, because it’s an email harvesting mechanism. Organizers need to look at the data and political landscape and ask themselves: Is it even the right target?

The fact is, charitable dollars are a different problem, and they work in two directions that are arguably more beneficial to the zionist project than military aid. Nobody in Congress reviews how the Jewish National Fund spent its $224 million in revenue last year, or what Friends of the IDF did with its $282 million, nearly triple its pre-October 7 budget. Abroad, the money goes to “Israel” and stays there — building new outposts in the West Bank and sustaining the older settlements of Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva, developing infrastructure on occupied land, arming militia formations that hunt Palestinians. It’s completely unrestricted. There is no offset provision. No buyback clause. It’s turning into schools, hospitals, museums — the country’s infrastructure.

But the pipeline also does something at home: the domestic fundraising apparatus that moves this money not only creates infrastructures of oppression, surveillance, and lawfare through the likes of the Canary Mission and the ADL, but it also manifests real structural dependencies that compromise the very organizations best positioned to challenge it.

The scale of this zionist apparatus is hard to overstate. Our database identifies 14,653 US nonprofits in the funding ecosystem. The obvious players are there: Birthright Israel Foundation ($1.16 billion lifetime revenue), PEF Israel Endowment Funds ($289 million in 2023), and the Jewish Federations of North America, which alone have directed over $2 billion in Israel-linked grants over the years. The Jewish Federations of North America launched a $683 million Israel Emergency Campaign, bringing 80,000 new donors into the system and pushing total Federation fundraising to $3 billion in 2024 — roughly $1 billion more than a typical year. And it is through this analysis of financing and institutional relationships that reveals why challenging this nonprofit system never seems to be really on the table: the granting networks create structural dependency that mandates silence.

For example, Jewish Federations are community funding hubs. They collect donations from individuals and distribute them to local institutions: day schools, community centers, elder care programs, small museums, and food banks. These organizations serve real community needs and depend on Federation allocations to keep their doors open. The Federations also send hundreds of millions to Israel annually, funding everything from Birthright trips to direct grants to Israeli organizations operating and coordinating armed gangs from Nablus to South Hebron.

This is the structural problem. A local day care, food pantry, or museum that receives Federation funding has no direct involvement in settlement expansion. But its leadership knows where its funding comes from. When a campaign asks community organizations to take a public stand against charitable dollars flowing to organizations that demolish Palestinian homes or lobby against Palestinian land rights, the calculation is not just moral. It is financial. Organizations that would not otherwise align themselves with zionist political projects find themselves unable to speak up because the same donor networks fund their operations. The dependency IS the point.

However, it’s one thing for a local food pantry or day school to stay silent — those organizations aren’t responsible for building a liberation movement, and their dependency on Federation funding makes their silence, if not forgivable, at least legible. But the entanglement doesn’t stop at community institutions. The same donor-advised funds that route hundreds of millions to Birthright, the JNF, and Friends of the IDF — Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard, the Jewish Communal Fund — also fund JVP, IfNotNow, USCPR, and JFREJ. The organizations that are supposed to be challenging the pipeline are receiving money through it.

Taking a small sample from our dataset, we find that 257 funders give to two or more of these categories. Of those, 36 fund both Palestine solidarity and zionist/settler organizations simultaneously. Those 36 directed $284,167,856 (96.0%) to zionist and settler organizations and $11,719,521 (4.0%) to solidarity groups. In this subset of data, that is a ratio of $24.2 to every $1.

Nearly every shared funder tilts 90% or more toward the zionist side. Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, the Jewish Communal Fund, and Vanguard route 93–99% of their cross-category grants to zionist organizations. Palestine solidarity groups are structurally dependent on the same financial infrastructure that overwhelmingly funds the networks they exist to oppose.

The big NGOs aren’t just going to decouple from their financial lifeline. In fact, we met years ago with a coalition of D.C.-based NGO types who explicitly said they would not engage in such a campaign because it could put their own organizations at risk of losing their nonprofit licenses. And it goes without saying, the IRS will not fix this. It is an unelected bureaucracy with no political incentive to act, and it has revoked the tax-exempt status of exactly zero major Israel-linked organizations despite decades of documented compliance issues. Compare that to Canada, where the grassroots pressure forced the Revenue Agency to revoke JNF Canada’s charitable status in August 2024 after finding it funded military base construction and failed to control how donations were used in Israel. That was a CAD $241 million operation, shut down by small formations working collectively.

In the US, there is a strategic opportunity with the State Attorneys General. Unlike the IRS, they are elected. They face voters who can hold them accountable and force them to use their power to regulate state-registered nonprofits under their administration. New York AG Letitia James sued the Trump Foundation into dissolution and brought the NRA to trial under the same Executive Law §63(12) that could apply to organizations misrepresenting their charitable activities to New York donors. An AG investigation does not require congressional approval. It requires political will, and political will responds to organized constituents, public pressure, and donor scrutiny. That is a lever grassroots movements can pull. You cannot vote out the IRS commissioner. You can vote out an Attorney General, and they know it.

The violence across the West Bank, the settler attacks, and the home demolitions do not sustain themselves. It requires funding, and a significant share of that funding runs through the US tax-exempt charitable system. Every dollar that moves through a “friends of” organization to an Israeli entity operating in the West Bank, the Naqab, the Golan Heights, carries a US tax subsidy with it. US taxpayers are underwriting this, whether they know it or not.

Defund Racism is building the empirical infrastructure to change that. Our open-source database tracks the money: who gives, who receives, how much, and where it goes. The pipeline from US donors to West Bank settlements is not hidden. It is filed with the IRS every year, in black and white.

The campaign is rebooting, and when it launches, the scale of what we’re building will require a network to match. Sign up for email updates at goodshepherdcollective.org, subscribe to The Call on Substack, and follow @Shepherds4Good on social media. We need to be connected before the moment arrives … not after.

Holidays in Palestine are special in a way that is unlike holidays elsewhere in the world. In Bethlehem, a city that boasts a sizable Muslim and Christian Palestinian population, it can sometimes feel that in the years before the US-Israeli genocidal aggression on Gaza, the holidays didn’t end. For example, Christmas preparations begin at the beginning of December and festivities do not cease until after the last Christmas, celebrated by the Armenian Church in Bethlehem on January 18. This year, Ramadan began less than a month later with Lent alongside it, followed by Palm Sunday, and on their way now are Easter and Eid Al-Adha.

But holidays are not different because they feel endless — rather, they feel endless because of the myriad of sects and religions represented, and their shared, public expression. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, or none of the above — everyone in the city comes to see the Christmas tree lit up and take selfies in front of it. Everyone marvels at the Ramadan decorations scattered throughout town and lines up to purchase katayef from their local vendor. Everyone is happy to see photos of their neighbors’ beautiful, smiling faces in the Al Aqsa compound.

Unfortunately, something else that is shared is the knowledge and experience of how zionist policies work to discourage celebration, disrupt holidays, and minimize or prevent the exercise of centuries-old traditions. This is an ordeal well-known across religions and sects. As escalations against Palestinians continue everywhere, Ramadan (like Christmas) arrived with a question in the air this year: what will the zionist state do to try to disrupt this important holiday, as it does every year? This Ramadan, the answer came — at least in part — in a form that the whole world has witnessed, through the US-Israeli War on Iran.

Immediately following US-Israeli strikes on Iran about ten days into the month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities forced the closure of the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, usually packed with worshippers from all over the country during this period. This move, framed as a “security measure”, is the first time the Al Aqsa Mosque has been forced closed by Israeli authorities since October 2014 (excluding Covid-related closures), an act of collective punishment following an assassination attempt on Yehuda Glick, a far-right zionist rabbi. The mosque was also temporarily closed by Israeli forces following the occupation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 War, after which Israeli authorities took over the “security” administration of the holy site. Neither closure lasted as long as this one has.

Among the shortcomings of these closures, ostensibly informed by the lack of adequate shelters in the Old City in general and these religious sites specifically, is that Palestinian worshippers from East Jerusalem or traveling from the West Bank likely are not much safer in their own neighborhoods. Across historic Palestine, Palestinian communities are criminally underserved when it comes to the availability of public shelters or safe rooms, and those in East Jerusalem are no exception with almost nowhere safe to retreat as sirens warn of incoming rockets. In Palestinian cities, towns, and villages across the West Bank, there are also no safe rooms or shelters in general.

Israeli authorities have now extended the closure until at least April 15, 2026. While the stated reason is “public safety” in the midst of the US-Israel-imposed War on Iran, many Palestinians have expressed their doubts that this is the true motivation guiding this decision. Concerns range from the belief that this is an opportunity for zionist authorities to increase their control over the religious site to conspiracy theories that zionists may execute a false flag attack on Al Aqsa compound and/or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the midst of Iran’s missiles (or missile fragments) landing in the area. These fears are escalated by incidents of settler groups reportedly circulating AI-generated videos depicting the bombing of other Muslim holy sites such as the Dome of the Rock, and further heightened by the reality that Israel has amplified its control over important holy sites significantly this year alone, including the Ibrahimi Mosque (Tomb of the Patriarchs). All the while, Israeli politicians repeat their threats to “rebuild the Third Temple” atop al-Haram al-Sharif.

Meanwhile, special privileges have been granted to Jewish worshippers and religious leaders, in some cases. Though access to the Western Wall (Buraq Wall) has been closed, zionist authorities are allowing groups of 50 to pray in an enclosed area beside the plaza. Israeli authorities have also announced their intention to allow 50 rabbis into the Western Wall plaza on April 5 to perform a Passover blessing.

As the wartime closures extended to other religious sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall, Israeli authorities reportedly sealed off areas of the Old City, preventing non-residents from entering and imposing a series of checkpoints to inhibit access to all three of these sites. But on March 29, Palm Sunday, Christian Palestinians were also prevented from marching from the Mount of Olives through the Old City, as they have for hundreds of years. Palm Sunday is usually celebrated by as many as hundreds of thousands of Christians in Palestine — Palestinians and internationals alike.

Despite local priests holding private masses every Sunday since the closures began on February 28 in accordance with Israel’s “security” procedures, Israeli authorities prevented Catholic priests from entering the church on Palm Sunday, claiming they had informed church authorities that no mass would be allowed to take place on the holiday. This disruption has instigated a response from the international community — notably, a much more significant response than the more than twenty days of closure imposed on Palestinian Muslims for most of Ramadan and all of Eid al-Fitr celebrations.

The disruption of the mass was an attempt coordinated to prevent the small number of Palestinian Christians and international clerics from celebrating Palm Sunday in Jerusalem, even under severely restricted conditions. Though other Sunday services have not been a problem, the commemoration of the holiday was contested, revealing the farcical nature of Israeli security procedures and their application. When it comes to the celebration of Palestinian holidays — Christian or Muslim — Israeli authorities always have the same response: suppression.

The Catholic priests’ experience on Palm Sunday echoes the reality that Palestinian Muslims in Jerusalem faced following the closure of Al Aqsa. Some community members, denied access to the mosque and the community of worshippers that should be gathered there, met outside of the old city to pray taraweeh prayers on its lawns, only to be met by Israeli forces’ assaults. They returned the next day. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Jerusalem, Israeli forces disrupted prayers, reportedly storming a mosque during prayer time to abduct worshippers on the 27th day of Ramadan.

These closures and assaults on adjusted worship services in the midst of a war to which Palestinians have been subjected by foreign occupiers are exacerbated by the closures imposed throughout the West Bank, settler attacks, random abductions, state violence, home demolitions, and much more. Increased violence, arbitrary closures of towns, villages, and roadways, and pop-up checkpoints work to prevent families from visiting one another during holidays built around community.

But long before the start of this war, and even long before October 2023, Ramadan in particular and Palestinian holidays in general have been periods during which Israeli forces and the state itself escalate violence against Palestinian communities. This means that not only are the state’s attacks on Palestinian religious observance regular and ongoing, but also that Palestinian worshippers are well-attuned to finding ways to celebrate despite zionist policies and restrictions.

After being prevented from reaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for a private mass on Palm Sunday in Jerusalem this year, the priests held their mass in a nearby church instead, and later prayed for peace on the Mount of Olives. Like Muslim worshippers praying on the Old City lawns and neighborhood mosques over the last month, they found ways to commemorate Palm Sunday despite closures, uneven applications of the so-called emergency regulations, targeted attacks on their rights, and forcibly dispersed worshippers.

These acts are not just about ritual and commemoration of religious holidays — things that are important on their own. The decisions religious figures and regular people make, to exercise their faith anyway, to find alternatives that enable their worship, to make community happen on their own terms as much as it is possible — these are also acts of refusal to be bullied into submission by those who wish for Palestinian elimination and work toward this end.

In the midst of an ongoing genocide and a war for control over the greater region, the refusal of those right under the thumb of occupation to forget, or give up, or abdicate aspects of a long and rich cultural inheritance is an example for the rest of the world. It is not just refusal; it is the enactment of a cherished heritage and its preservation for the next generation. What makes it so special in Palestine is that not only is it happening all the time — it’s happening in public. And whether we are doing it ourselves or cheering it on, we embolden each other to continue doing it.

The Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department recorded 163 documented settler attacks in the last 30 days. Looking at the data, this can appear as a topline number that looks like a plateau — nearly identical to the monthly average of 165 over the past year. But flat numbers don’t mean stable conditions or a normalization of violence. When we look at how the violence is shifting across the West Bank, an entirely different story emerges.

A geographic breakdown shows that the mechanisms of indigenous erasure inherent in the zionist project are working. The Tubas governorate has seen a 160% increase over its yearly average over the last 30 days. Salfit is up 105%. Jerusalem has surged 64%. These are areas where Palestinian herding and farming communities are being systematically pressured off their land — and the pressure is intensifying.

Meanwhile, Jericho — another Jordan Valley governorate — dropped 64%. Not because the violence stopped, but because displacement has already succeeded in many Jericho-area communities. When there are fewer people left, there are fewer people to attack. The plateau isn’t normalization. It’s the statistical residue of ethnic cleansing at different stages of completion. This table outlines the communities already driven off their lands, and as such, settler militias in those areas can shift resources to other areas.

The nature of the violence tells its own story. The past week witnessed settlers releasing their own livestock onto Palestinian farmland, cutting and uprooting olive trees, stoning homes and vehicles, spraying individuals with pepper spray, and raising Israeli flags on privately owned Palestinian land. These are not random acts. They follow a pattern of agricultural destruction and economic strangulation designed to make Palestinian life in these areas untenable and force them off their lands. The data demonstrates the political intent. This is the logical outworking of zionism. The existence of the Israeli state is, in fact, premised on this sort of violence. The data — 163 attacks in 30 days across 10 governorates (an average of more than 5 per day) — reiterates this basic fact of zionism. Below is a narrative summary of a handful of attacks.

Killing of Nasrallah Abu Siyam in Makhmas

On February 18, approximately 30 masked settlers, some armed with M-16 rifles and accompanied by Israeli soldiers, raided the village of Mukhmas, located east of Jerusalem. Israelis shot and killed Nasrallah Abu Siyam, a 19-year-old Palestinian-American from Philadelphia. The bullet hit him in the thigh — severing his main artery — while he was confronting settlers who were attempting to steal sheep and goats from the village. Settlers then beat him with metal rods as he lay bleeding. Israeli soldiers on the scene did not intervene, did not arrest anyone, and blocked a Palestinian ambulance from reaching Nasrallah. Abu Siyam was eventually carried out of the village on foot, and later died from his wounds and delayed treatment.

Two Brothers Killed Defending Their Land in Qaryut

Armed settlers attacked the village of Qaryut south of Nablus on March 2, after beginning to uproot olive trees to pave a road near Palestinian homes. When residents tried to intervene, settlers opened fire. Brothers Muhammad Taha Maamer, 52, and Fahim Taha Maamer, 47, were shot and killed. Muhammad was struck in the head; Fahim in the pelvis. Three others were wounded by live fire, including a 15-year-old child shot in the shoulder. The brothers’ disabled father was trapped inside the house during the assault. Muhammad left behind six children, the youngest in third grade. Fahim also had six children, including one with hearing and speech impairments. The Israeli army later announced the shooter was an active Israeli forces reservist.

Relentless Assault on Masafer Yatta

The herding communities of Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, were attacked repeatedly throughout the period. On March 5, settlers beat three children — Muhammad al-Adra (13), Ibrahim al-Adra (11), and Hamada al-Adra (14) — in the Rahum Ali area, leading to the hospitalization of all three. Israeli forces then arrested residents who tried to intervene, including a farmer defending his crops.

On March 1, settlers under military escort attacked homes near the Palestinian village of Susya, firing live ammunition and beating residents; four Palestinians were arrested.

In Bani Na’im on February 25, armed settlers from a recently established outpost raided the home of detained citizen Khalil Hamdan al-Manasra, stole thirty sheep, killed another, punctured vehicle tires, and threatened his children at gunpoint.

On February 21, settlers in army uniforms attacked elderly farmer Mifdi Rubi and his son Majd in Atuwani while they worked their land, leaving both with wounds and bruises.

Arson, Agricultural Destruction, and Forced Displacement

On February 20, settlers set fire to eight homes between Rammun and Deir Dibwan east of Ramallah, completely destroying the structures and displacing the families within.

The village of Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah, was attacked on at least four occasions. On February 21, settlers fired live rounds at citizens’ lands, wounding a young man in the chest and a child in the foot, while others burned an agricultural room in neighboring Abu Fallah. That same day, settlers grazed livestock on Palestinian farmland, vandalizing crops and property. In Kafr Thulth south of Qalqilya on February 25, settlers invaded the Arab Al-Khouli community with livestock and forced a resident off his land at gunpoint.

Harassment of Herders in Tubas and the Jordan Valley

In the northern Jordan Valley on February 22, settlers forced approximately twenty herding families from the Al-Burj and Al-Mayta clusters in Khirbet Samra to abandon their homes and pastures. In Khirbet Yarza east of Tubas, settlers pepper-sprayed a child on March 2 and injured two citizens including an elderly man on March 4, then attacked Red Crescent medics trying to reach the wounded. By March 8, fifteen families in Khirbet Yarza dismantled their homes and evacuated after weeks of sustained attacks. In Al-Aqaba village on March 3, settlers in military uniforms raided homes and threatened residents with expulsion “within days”.

What you can do

These attacks are not spontaneous. They are sustained by a financial infrastructure that channels billions of dollars annually from the United States to settler organizations — much of it tax-deductible under the 501(c)(3) charity system. US taxpayers are subsidizing the very violence documented in this report. Disrupting that pipeline is not abstract solidarity work — it is one of the most concrete, actionable interventions available to people in the United States. Learn how at defundracism.org.

Reporting period: February 10 – March 12, 2026

From the mass displacement and erasure of Gaza’s population to the nearly 700 Palestinians driven from their homes and lands across nine West Bank communities by zionist paramilitary groups, we are watching the Israeli state tighten its grip on Historic Palestine by emptying it of its people. More than 1,700 Palestinians were displaced by lack-of-permit demolitions in 2025 alone – the highest annual total on record. The first weeks of 2026 show no meaningful decline: the current 30-day daily average stands at 1.3 incidents per day, more than 60% above the all-time average of 0.8, and the rate at which children are displaced has actually increased slightly compared to the past year. The most recent 30-day reporting period shows the material impact of zionism.

Current Trends

Daily averages by period, with trajectory comparison (30-day vs. 365-day):

While incident counts have dipped 13% in the last month compared to the annual rate (likely as a result of the diversion of military resources towards Lebanon and Iran rather than a policy change), the number of people displaced per incident remains elevated. The 30-day displaced average matches the 365-day average exactly, and the child displacement rate has risen 3.8% above the annual average. This means that even as demolitions fluctuate month to month, the current design of demolitions are targeting family homes rather than other infrastructure. In other words, the intent is to drive people from their lands. What is important to remember is that this data is only for East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It doesn’t take into account mass destruction of Gaza and the emptying of Bedouin communities in the Naqab — which, some years, face a higher rate of destruction than Palestinian communities across the West Bank.

The geographic concentration highlights: lands most coveted by the zionist movement for economic development are targeted first. Jerusalem, arguably the crown jewel of zionist projects, has the all-time record of demolitions at 2,092 (42% of the total), followed by Hebron (855), Bethlehem (380), and Nablus (306). In the past 30 days, Jenin has seen a sharp spike — with military operations to demolish homes and structures up over 150% compared to its annual rate — while Hebron’s displacement numbers surged nearly 85% above its yearly average. In Qalqiliya, only one incident was recorded in the past month but it displaced 22 people including 12 children, a figure representing over 300% of its annual monthly average.

Ramadan

On the first day of Ramadan, February 18, Israeli forces demolished a two-building residential complex belonging to the Salhab family in the Al-Harayeq area of Khirbet Qalqas, south of Hebron and adjacent to the Hagai settlement. The complex consisted of a three-story building containing six apartments and a two-story building with four apartments, housing more than 40 people. Muhammad Salhab told the Palestinian news agency WAFA that the family held official land registry documents and had filed a court appeal against the demolition order, both of which were disregarded. Israeli forces used tear gas, stun grenades, and live ammunition to force residents from their homes, and some personal belongings were lost under the rubble.

On March 12, Israeli forces returned to Qalqas and confiscated six tents that had been sheltering the same families since the demolition. According to Salhab, the tents were housing more than 40 people, most of them women and children. The sequence of homes demolished on the first day of Ramadan, then the replacement tents confiscated during Ramadan really illustrates the policy of compounding displacement designed to force families from their land. This isn’t a simple matter of hate, as some would like to frame it, but an economic model that is premised on the dispossession of the indigenous people of their lands and the capture of their resources.

On February 15, Israeli forces and the Civil Administration demolished two structures in Jayyus village, east of Qalqiliya, under the standard pretext of lacking a building permit in Area C. The first structure was a 200-square-meter residential house divided into five units, each with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, serving five families — a total of 22 people, including 12 children. The second was a 30-square-meter livestock shelter belonging to the same families. Both were demolished entirely. A 100-meter surrounding wall was also destroyed.

The affected families had received a stop-work order in August 2015 and initiated legal proceedings with JLAC (the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center), achieving no results. They subsequently retained a private lawyer on February 1, 2026, but ultimately did not successfully obstruct the demolition proceedings. Jayyus has a long history of land confiscation: the village sits along the Separation Wall, which cuts its farmers off from approximately 75% of their agricultural land, according to OCHA. The settlement of Zufin, built on Jayyus land in the late 1980s, continues to expand into confiscated village territory. Jayyus highlights that Israeli courts do not function as a nonviolent option for Palestinian to find redress to injustice, but as a mechanism of violence.

These cases follow the same logic that runs through the aggregate data: Palestinian families build on land they own, are denied Israeli permits they are structurally excluded from obtaining, exhaust legal channels that produce no relief, and are then forcibly displaced. In Qalqas, the additional step of confiscating emergency shelter during Ramadan signals that the objective is not regulatory enforcement but the permanent removal of Palestinian presence from land adjacent to Israeli settlements. The Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission noted that Israeli authorities issued 40 new demolition notices in February 2026 alone, pointing to further displacement in the weeks ahead.

As the genocide in Gaza enters its 876th day, the the broader zionist movement has been working to orchestrate a parallel crises for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank along a single logic: the destruction of the material foundations of Palestinian life.

In Gaza, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated sharply following Israel’s closure of all crossings on February 28. The closure immediately halted medical evacuations and raised acute concerns about food and fuel supplies. UNRWA, other UN agencies and the community-led structures trying to sustain life were forced to ration fuel, reduce generator hours in collective shelters, and scale back to life-saving operations only — cutting electricity and water access for displaced populations already living in extreme deprivation. At least one community kitchen in Khan Younis, serving thousands of displaced families through UNRWA’s job creation programme, was forced to shut down entirely due to shortages of food commodities and cooking supplies.

This comes against the backdrop of a total aid blockade that has been in effect since March 2025. UNRWA ran out of food at the end of April 2025 and has been prevented by Israeli authorities from directly bringing any humanitarian assistance — including food — into Gaza for over a year. The agency reports that it has enough food parcels, flour, and shelter supplies pre-positioned outside Gaza for hundreds of thousands of people, but has been blocked from delivering them. Meanwhile, since the start of the ceasefire in October 2025, the Ministry of Health has reported 618 additional Palestinian fatalities from Israeli attacks, and 853 people have sustained war-induced disabilities including amputations, spinal cord injuries, and traumatic brain injuries. Assistive devices, including prosthetics, continue to be classified by Israel as “dual-use” items, severely restricting their entry.

The situation has been compounded by the United States and Israel initiating an open war on Iran beginning February 28, which has placed both Gaza and the West Bank on the back-burner of international attention and advocacy. In the West Bank, movement between governorates has been all but blocked, in-person education — including UNRWA services — have been suspended, and access to Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan has been fully blocked.

The zionist movement has been accelerating their methods of displacement across the West Bank and activating settler cells of violence. The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture documented some $1.3 million in direct agricultural losses over a single week, the report catalogs a systematic campaign of destruction across West Bank governorates: the uprooting of hundreds of olive, almond, fig, and walnut trees; the bulldozing of cultivated land and irrigation networks; the demolition of agricultural rooms, wells, and animal shelters; the theft and killing of livestock; and the forced grazing of wheat and barley fields by settler herds. In Masafer Yatta, settlers burned 75 sheep and 50 chickens alive. In Tubas, demolition notices were issued to 11 farmers, threatening 40 dunams of greenhouse agriculture. In Nablus, two Palestinians were shot dead by settlers in Qaryut on March 3.

The Ministry links these attacks directly to Israeli cabinet decisions expanding settler authority, accelerating demolition orders, and pushing to legalize outposts — measures designed to fragment Palestinian land, displace agricultural and pastoral communities, and foreclose the possibility of territorial contiguity. Taken together, the two reports reveal a coordinated structure of dispossession operating simultaneously across the occupied territory: starvation through siege in Gaza, and the destruction of agricultural livelihood in the West Bank. In both cases, the target is the same — the capacity of Palestinians to sustain life on their own land.

The activations of settler cells across the West Bank are always in coordination with the Israeli military tearing apart the social fabric of a community. Over the last 30 days, Israeli forces arrested 992 people across the West Bank alone. That is roughly 33 arrests per day, every day, for a month. The operations followed a familiar pattern: raids between midnight and dawn, homes invaded, names and people taken. In Qalqilya on February 6, forces abducted 21 people in a single operation in Azzun, including two Palestinian security personnel. A child, Qais Zidan Skafi, was arrested in Hebron on February 5. In Jerusalem, two Al-Aqsa Mosque guards were taken on February 6.

In order to facilitate these kinds of operations, the Israeli state has redesigned the West Bank into a prison: by closing a few gates and shutting down a few roads, millions of Palestinians are restricted in various ways. Israeli forces set up 238 temporary checkpoints and maintained 50 permanent military ones. Soldiers stopped cars, checked IDs, and held people for hours. The Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem saw tightened procedures on February 5 that backed up traffic throughout the morning. On top of the checkpoints, Israeli forces closed roads 86 times. In Salfit on February 17, every entrance to the city was shut simultaneously — Iskaka bridge, Wadi al-Shaeer road, Khurbet Qais village road, and the hospital road. All of them, at once. Qalqilya’s eastern entrance and surrounding village roads were sealed on March 1. Hebron saw closures at Ras al-Joura, Lifta, Halhul, Bani Naim, Tarkumiya, and the Al-Aroub refugee camp, all on the same day.

In addition to establishing a matrix of control with roads, Israeli forces occupied 32 Palestinian homes during this period, converting them into temporary military posts inside the cities and villages. On March 2, three homes in Ya’bad belonging to Mahmoud Isa Atatrah, Saeed Abu Bakr, and Nazmi Asfour Abu Bakr were seized and used as staging points. The occupations continued the next day. In Hebron, the home of Abu Sa’id Ahmar in Al-Fawar camp was held continuously starting February 28. Families were displaced from their own houses so soldiers could use them as lookout positions.

These numbers describe a system operating at scale. Thirty-three arrests a day. Nearly ten checkpoints set up daily. Roads sealed without warning. Homes taken over and held. The data from this 30-day window does not capture an escalation or a crisis, it merely highlights how the process of violence inherent in zionism works to erase and dispossess the native population.

By Cody O’Rourke and Lara Kilani

On February 18, 2026, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) announced that from this point on, the moniker “JVP” will be used to describe its 501(c)(4), formerly identified as JVP Action. JVP has become one of the most prominent and well-resourced Palestine solidarity organizations in the United States, tripling its revenue to $11 million during the genocide. As Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues through its third year, the decision to redirect the weight of that brand, and the grassroots credibility built over three decades of organizing, toward a lobbying operation is not a minor administrative change. It is a political declaration.

In order to understand what JVP is committing to with this shift, one has to look at the actual record of the candidates it has endorsed — their votes, their reversals, their silences — and ask whether that record represents a genuine challenge to US support for zionist settler colonialism. What we found is that the politicians which JVP Action has championed have, with few exceptions, operated within a paradigm that undermines, rather than advances, Palestinian liberation: voting to affirm zionism’s right to exist, funding Israeli arms, opposing BDS, and walking back anti-zionist statements under Party pressure. As JVP bets its future on this electoral infrastructure, the question is not whether these candidates are better than their Republican counterparts, but whether calling this work anti-zionist is honest — and what it costs the broader movement when it isn’t. This piece examines what that restructuring actually means and why it matters.

State-sanctioned structures of “solidarity”

Fundamental to any consideration of this new arrangement is the distinction between the two legal categories: 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4). The original JVP is a 501(c)(3), meaning it is a federally-recognized public charity which is eligible to receive tax-deductible donations. Charities must be founded and operated according to purposes which exempt them from taxes — generally, this means work that serves public interests and benefits communities, including vulnerable people and animals. Importantly, charities also are limited in the extent to which their work can be political — legislative lobbying efforts, for example, cannot make up a “substantial” part of their work. Registered 501(c)(4)s, on the other hand, are social welfare organizations and can engage in unlimited lobbying in service of these efforts. While there are still some limits to the extent of their political and campaigning activities, 501(c)(4)s are generally much freer to participate in political advocacy efforts that influence policy, including issuing campaign endorsements. Donations to 501(c)(4)s are not tax-deductible.

Let’s consult the records

We’ve already written an immediate response following the release of JVP’s statement about “restructuring” here. The critique boils down to one main point: this shift is an effort to move JVP’s primary work into the realm of electoralism in support of the Democratic Party, turning more than thirty years of grassroots organizing into support for institutions animating the very genocide JVP purports to oppose. This decision is not about how to best support the liberation of Palestine or Palestinians.

Immediately, we received one recurring rebuttal: “Well, I’d rather support politicians who will prevent a genocide from happening than have to support genocide survivors.”

We think most people would agree with this common sense approach. We, too, would rather see a genocide be prevented altogether. However, this assertion assumes one thing that deserves reexamination: that the candidates supported or endorsed by JVP Action have, historically, acted in service of Palestinians and against zionist violence.

We can easily test this assumption by looking at the actual, applied positions of the candidates JVP Action endorsed in 2024. When we do, a pattern comes into focus that the organization itself seems not to notice and certainly doesn’t name. On every issue where liberal Democratic politics and anti-colonial frameworks sharply diverge — such as condemning indigenous resistance, funding the military infrastructure that facilitates the annihilation of Palestinians, backing BDS, even choosing between one and two state solutions — these candidates land, almost without exception, on the Democratic Party side of the line. What this produces is not anti-zionism in any meaningful sense, a term with which JVP self-identifies (and places beside the moniker JVP as a matter of practice); rather, it is a liberal mode of zionism dressed in the language of solidarity, one that actively undermines the resistance to colonialism which it claims to support.

Military and Iron Dome funding

The September 2021 vote on $1 billion in supplemental Iron Dome funding (H.R. 5323) works as a precise diagnostic. The bill passed 420-9. Among the JVP Action candidates serving at the time: Tlaib, Omar, Bush, and Pressley voted no. Ocasio-Cortez voted present. Bowman voted yes — the only “Squad” member to fund Iron Dome, explaining it was “important to many people in my district”. Pramila Jayapal, also endorsed by JVP Action, also voted yes.

The pattern was maintained in 2025. Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, and Pressley all voted against an amendment that would have cut $500 million in Iron Dome funding. Ocasio-Cortez defended the vote, arguing the amendment “does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel“.

This defensive/offensive distinction requires a lot of heavy lifting from liberal zionist conceptions of the reality in Palestine, and its implications are borne out in other proposed legislation which JVP Action has endorsed. The bill H.R. 3565, co-sponsored by JVP, other US-based Palestine aligned NGOs, and politicians including Ocasio-Cortez, Jayapal, Pressley, Ramirez, and others, is titled “To provide for a limitation on the transfer of defense articles and defense services to Israel”. This legislative effort targets specific munition categories: bunker busters, JDAMs, artillery, and white phosphorus. It leaves untouched the F-35s and Apaches that deliver them, the $3.8 billion in annual military financing that purchases them, and the Presidential Drawdown Authority that moves them outside normal legal channels entirely.

When you strip away the rhetoric shaping the bill’s presentation, it actually doesn’t activate “conditions” that stymie material support for genocide. Instead, it’s a bill that adds liberal process to the orchastration of genocide, providing the possibility to override the so-called limit on the transfer of these weapons simply by way of written assurances from Israel. There is no verification mechanism and no penalty for non-compliance in the text of the bill. This is the architecture of the Block the Bombs framework: condition the most visibly brutal weapons while explicitly preserving Israel’s “ability to defend itself” — using the very weapons whose transfer it seeks to limit — so long as the Israeli government can provide adequate written reassurances. It is a humanitarian optics intervention, not a structural challenge to US-Israeli military integration.

This is not an anti-zionist position. In fact, it is almost indistinguishable from J Street’s framework of strategic indigenous subjugation and erasure, which accepts the legitimacy of the Israeli state and its military apparatus while objecting to specific applications of force. The distinction between so-called “offensive” and “defensive” weapons does not come from Palestinian liberation movements. It comes from liberal arms-control discourse that takes the US-Israel military relationship as given, and assumes that Israeli action against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians, or anyone else, can be read as “defensive”. Endorsing candidates who hold this line while claiming an anti-zionist mandate is not a strategic compromise. Instead, it represents a contradiction that actively reinforces the architecture these candidates claim to oppose.

In contrast, in November 2025, Tlaib introduced H.Res. 876 recognizing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and calling for a complete arms embargo. Though this bill has been endorsed by a number of JVP Action’s candidates, it has not been the primary focus of any organizing campaign. Some of this can be attributed to the differences between resolutions and acts in US Congressional legislation, but the reality is that JVP Action and the larger US-based Palestine solidarity NGO network has coalesced around the Block the Bombs Act framework, which is the undeniably weaker framework in terms of its demands and potential material impact. If there was a political will among these formations to write a bill with the same demands as Tlaib’s resolution, it could have been done — it can still be done.

In other words, the $3.8 billion annual military aid package, which is the core financial architecture of US investment in Israeli settler colonialism, goes unchallenged by any active legislative campaign by JVP, or its candidates. To put it more plainly: disrupting one of the most critical mechanisms sustaining the Israeli state’s capacity for violence against Palestinians is not on the table. When the majority of an organization’s endorsed candidates, as well as the organization’s prioritized legislative campaign operate within these constraints, it cannot be considered an anti-zionist organization. Instead, we have liberal marketing that shrinks the boundaries of permissible dissent within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the $3.8 billion in military infrastructure flows uninterrupted.

Walkbacks and accommodations

Jayapal’s reversal on “racist state” is an instructive example. At Netroots Nation in July 2023, she told pro-Palestinian protesters: “We have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.” The next day, after 43 House Democrats condemned her for this statement, she walked it back: “I do not believe the idea of Israel as a nation is racist” (a central element of any anti-zionist critique). She then voted for a Republican resolution affirming Israel is “not a racist state”, directly contradicting JVP’s own published analysis. The speed of the reversal reveals something about the structural forces at work. Jayapal did not change her mind about the nature of the Israeli state in 24 hours. She responded to the disciplinary mechanisms of the Democratic Party caucus, which enforce a floor of acceptability that is solidly zionist. This is the political formation in support of which JVP is restructuring, diverting resources from a 501(c)(3) to a 501(c)(4) for this purpose.

BDS, two-state frameworks, and the political boundaries of the permissible

On BDS — considered by many to be the bare minimum of Palestine solidarity — the record among JVP Action endorsed politicians is fractured in ways that expose the lack of any coherent policy. Tlaib and Omar openly support BDS and voted against the 2019 anti-BDS resolution (H.R. 246, passed 398-17). Bush supported BDS in her campaign platform. But Pressley voted for the anti-BDS resolution, explaining that it “affirmed to my constituents raised in the Jewish faith Israel’s right to exist”. Bowman has explicitly stated that he does not support the BDS movement. JVP Action endorsed both of these candidates and used movement resources, raised with the expectation that they would be used to further Palestinian liberation, in order to support their electoral campaigns.

Think about what that means for a moment. BDS is the primary international, nonviolent strategy endorsed by huge swathes of Palestinian society, formally and informally. Formal support is recorded through the construction of the BDS National Committee some two decades ago. While JVP claims to stand against zionism, it endorsed candidates who voted to delegitimize BDS and publicly affirmed “Israel’s right to exist” — a formulation that, within the discourse of Palestinian liberation, concedes the legitimacy of the zionist project itself. This is the foundation of their electoral work up until this moment. The decision to restructure, investing further in the electoral process and lobbying for legislation, will no doubt supercharge these processes.

On this note, it is worth pointing out that just in November 2023, as Israel’s genocidal intentions in Gaza were on full display and ramping up daily, H.R. 888 affirming Israel’s so-called “right to exist”, passed with a roll call vote that provides clear insight into where JVP Action endorsed candidates fall with regard to this question. Of the 2024 JVP Action endorsed candidates in office at the time (all of them) and present for the vote, Rashida Tlaib was the only one not to vote in favor of the resolution — she voted “present”. Cori Bush was marked “not voting”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Pramila Jayapal, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, and Delia Ramirez all voted “yea” on the resolution. This is an explicit, undeniable endorsement of zionism.

The opposition of JVP Action’s candidates to BDS highlights the contradictions between JVP’s rhetoric of accountability and their Palestinian co-organizers’ priorities. JVP’s claim that accountability to Palestinian partners forms “the foundation” of their work deserves scrutiny that the organization itself has never invited. Afterall, accountability is a structural term which implies mechanisms, consequences, and the genuine possibility of being overruled. What JVP describes instead is a process of “deep listening” and “relationship-building”, language that signals deference without enforcing it. If Palestinian-led organizations were materially empowered to hold JVP accountable, the next question becomes: which of those organizations sanctioned the endorsement of candidates who voted to affirm Israel’s right to exist, who publicly opposed BDS, who walked back characterizations of Israel as a racist state within 24 hours of Democratic Party pressure? The BDS call is not a fringe position within Palestinian civil society. Rather, it is the formally adopted, consensus demand of the BDS National Committee.

For JVP to claim accountability to Palestinian partners while directing movement resources toward candidates who have actively delegitimized the most basic, milquetoast call of solidarity is a contradiction its leadership has been asked to explain publicly — and the silence of their alleged Palestinian partners on this point is itself revealing. Either those partners were consulted and agreed, which would demand its own accounting, or the accountability JVP advertises is a rhetorical architecture: language designed to confer legitimacy on decisions already made by a professional class of organizers whose primary operational constraint is not how to develop an anti-colonial praxis, but instead the contours of Democratic Party politics.

What we are willing to accept or tolerate

In a recent piece, “Palestine Solidarity in the Age of Reaction”, Steven Salaita writes: “We foreground the aftermath of liberation by what we are now willing to embrace or tolerate.” This is true of every party we engage with, both friendly and hostile. It means that if we imagine a future of liberation, we will not accept or invest in those who are willing to normalize our ongoing annihilation, or those who would use our struggle cynically, to harm others. In the case of JVP and JVP Action, it means first, understanding what we are tolerating when we allow these organizations to speak on behalf of anti-zionists and in solidarity with Palestinians. Then, it means enforcing our values by disallowing the most fundamental elements of anti-zionist thought and praxis to be cast aside — from BDS to Israel’s “right to exist”. What value is there in solidarity if it works to undermine liberation? What liberation is there in tolerating such treatment from ostensible allies?

While few people might put their faith in US electoralism and lobbying its politicians as the primary vehicle to further Palestinian liberation, the reality is that millions of dollars are being used for this very purpose under the guise of its utility. In fiscal year 2024, JVP’s 501(c)(3) brought in $11,003,649 — more than triple its pre-October 7 revenue — while JVP Action, its weaker 501(c)(4) counterpart, raised $1,069,275 in the same period. The disparity is telling. The money, the membership, the institutional weight — all of it sits in the 501(c)(3). And yet it is the 501(c)(4) that is now being handed the name, the brand, and the political direction. This restructuring is a declaration of where JVP intends to put its future: lobbying politicians and supporting electoral campaigns, regardless of what those politicians have actually done with their votes. Making this decision is one thing, but continuing to endorse and financially support politicians who have expressed their disregard for Palestinian self-determination — or their willingness to concede their own beliefs about Israel’s racist foundations under pressure — is not part of an anti-zionist effort. It is about resource capture, about limiting the demands of politicians and their need to take personal risks, and controlling the political advocacy shaping Palestine solidarity in the United States.

Like it or not, this affects other Palestine solidarity formations in the United States and elsewhere. By supporting legislation that significantly lowers the bar of risk, JVP Action and its partners in the Block the Bombs Act campaign make it less likely that politicians will engage with more meaningful legislative demands. But even for organizations which have co-endorsed JVP-led events, protests, campaigns, and more in the past — even those who disdain aspects of JVP’s wider vision or political trajectory, but value its occasional support — this decision implicates them as well.

Organizations across the Palestine solidarity ecosystem have co-sponsored JVP events, shared platforms, and lent their names to joint campaigns — not to JVP Action, but to JVP. That distinction, already thin on paper, has now been formally, and intentionally, collapsed. The credit those organizations generated (particularly the Palestinian ones), the relationships they built, the credibility they lent — all of it now flows to the JVP lobbying arm, retroactively conscripting their participation into a political project they potentially never (formally) endorsed.

For donors, the problem is also both past and future. Those who gave to JVP did so understanding their money was going toward Palestinian liberation. That framing and identity now belong to a 501(c)(4) whose primary function is electoral — one that carries with it a track record ranging, at best, being ineffectual to, at worst, constituting a form of counter-insurgency.

While the legal distinction between the two entities is real and shapes what each can do legally, this is more than a “structural adjustment”. In practice, this move allows JVP to operate as a single brand. The 501(c)(3) holds the assets; the 501(c)(4) holds the name; but donors, allied organizations, and the broader public do not experience them as separate entities any more than a consumer distinguishes between the subsidiary corporations behind a pair of Nike shoes and the Nike jacket hanging next to them. As they do with corporate models like Nike, they are buying the JVP brand. And as it is with multi-asset corporations, a brand provides synergy: the platform placements, the op-ed slots, the webinar invitations, the coalition letterheads they all work in unison and flow across all the JVP entities. All of these resources and social infrastructure belong and are utilized by the entire JVP ecosystem, not one entity.

It is worth naming this for what it is: a form of liberal praxis that privileges aesthetics over substance. The brand does the work that politics cannot. JVP can position itself as a radical anti-zionist organization, accountable to Palestinians, outside the mainstream… Meanwhile, its institutional infrastructure quietly serves the Democratic Party’s need to contain Palestine solidarity within manageable limits. The Block the Bombs Act made this visible in plain sight. A campaign built on the language of accountability, dressed in the aesthetics of an arms embargo, that left intact every meaningful mechanism of US military support for Israel. It looked like their candidates were applying pressure, but instead, their policy strategy functioned objectively to preserve Israel’s access to essential military infrastructure.

The creation of 501(c)(4)s by US-based Palestine-oriented NGOs is never primarily about Palestinians. It is about building institutional capacity within the Democratic Party — a party whose Palestine policy consensus remains anchored to the colonial designs of the Oslo Accords, selective invocations of international law that carry no enforcement mechanism, and a categorical refusal to accept that colonized people facing annihilation have the right to resist by any means available to them.

Tracing even a partial voting history of JVP endorsed candidates makes the specific stakes undeniable: this restructuring is about cultivating a professional class of “organizers” that function to materially contain and redirect Palestine solidarity. This is about keeping Palestine-related political advocacy manageable and useful to a party that continues to fund and enthusiastically support Palestinian dispossession.

This is neither acceptable nor tolerable. It does not meet the moment, respond to Palestinian needs, or foreground anti-zionism’s most basic principles. As Palestinians in Gaza face siege, famine, and annihilation — as those in the rest of historic Palestine face expanding settler violence and home demolitions, and as refugees in neighboring countries are targeted by bombing campaigns — steering money, energy, and movement infrastructure toward that same party is not a strategic choice. It is a nasty betrayal.

Israeli forces demolished another 2-story home. This is the home to the Issa brothers in al-Khader, ( Bethlehem). No prior demolition notice. Sometimes if the Civil Administration goes to issue a demolition notice, they just drive by and throw it out the window.

In 2009, there were 103 recorded demolitions of homes and infrastructure, which amounts to roughly one every three or four days. By 2024 and 2025, that figure had climbed to around 550 per year, or more than one and a half operations every single day. 2026 is projected to be seven times the amount recorded in 2009. Understandably, the absolute horrors Israel has carried out in Gaza have taken precedent within the news and discourse. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the increasing pace of demolitions have become normalized. Demolitions are not episodic events tied to specific flashpoints — they are now constantly running in the background to advance the process of zionism on the ground in Palestine.

The last 30 days of data from the West Bank and Jerusalem underscores the acute level of destructive violence in the current moment. Over this period, there were 63 demolition operations — a daily average of 2.1, higher than any full-year average on record. More than 330 people were forcibly displaced, with children accounting for nearly half of this population: 167 out of 336. On average, a rate of five children per day are losing their homes, and with it their sense of security and stability — which, of course, is the point.

Projections for 2026 are alarming: At the current pace, this year Israel is on track to execute 691 military operations and administrative demolitions. If this current trajectory holds, this will displace more than 3,300 people and destroy over 2,200 structures. If so, 2026 would surpass 2024, which set the record for displacement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 2024 was notable for a spike in people displaced per incident (averaging over 7.7 per operation), which reflected larger-scale raids during a period of heightened Israeli military activity across the West Bank that was overshadowed by the zionist extermination efforts in Gaza and the bombardment of Lebanon and a lesser extent, Syria. The ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the prospects of the US attacks on Iran, continues to bury the mass demolitions in the news.

What’s hardest to convey in a data summary is the cumulative weight of this violence. These aren’t isolated incidents scattered across the last decade. They represent a systematic, ongoing process of displacement, one that has now been running at high intensity for years, with no indication of slowing down. The data, by itself, doesn’t explain why (which is why we need frameworks of analysis and theory). But it does make clear that what is happening on the ground is happening more frequently, affecting more people, and showing no signs of slowing or reversing.

The demolition data does not exist in isolation, but instead, operates as a function of settler-colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. It runs alongside a parallel set of processes, ones that are less immediately visible but equally consequential. While Palestinian structures are being destroyed at an accelerating rate, settlement construction in the West Bank is being approved at a pace that its architects describe openly as a demographic project. In the first 55 days of 2026 alone, the Israeli Higher Planning Council approved 2,425 new settler housing units. The largest single tranche, 1,388 units, is earmarked for a new neighborhood of the settlement Kdumim (west of Nablus), positioned to draw it physically closer to the settlements of Havat Gilad and grow in ways to support the development of Yitzar and Ariel. The planning process that would once have required a defense minister sign-off at multiple stages was streamlined in 2023, when that requirement was eliminated. The result: 27,941 settlement units were advanced in 2025 alone, an all-time record.

Infrastructure investment follows the same logic. This week, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and Transportation Minister Regev broke ground on Road 45, a NIS 400 million bypass road north of Ramallah that will allow settlers to commute into Israel through the Qalandiya underpass — bypassing the checkpoint inspections that Palestinian residents must undergo. Combined with NIS 120 million already spent on the Qalandiya underpass and NIS 160 million being spent on Road 437, the total infrastructure investment in this corridor approaches NIS 680 million.

Read together, these two processes (mass demolition and mass construction) reveal the underlying mechanisms playing out across historical Palestine. In this way, we can see how zionism — a form of settler colonialism — operates not simply through violence but through the active reorganization of space and capital. Palestinian homes are demolished to produce vacancy; settler housing is approved to fill it. Infrastructure subsidies lower the cost of settlements in the West Bank compared to the western settlements in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This creates an economic force which transfers the population to make facts on the ground permanent in the eastern settlements of Ariel, Efrat and Hebron.

The bureaucratic infrastructure — planning councils, bypass road budgets, weekly approval sessions — functions as capital accumulation by dispossession: business in each of these nodes accrue billions and millions of dollars in security, surveillance, propaganda development, construction and destruction contracts. These processes are sustained by a specific political economy that links Israeli state policy to Western capital and imperial interest. The United States and European governments provide the diplomatic power, the military aid, and the investment frameworks (public and private) that make zionism financially viable at scale for the capitalist class; in return, Israel functions as a forward base for Western power in the region. This is in part why zionist territorial ambitions are tolerated so long as they align with broader strategic goals and operate at the prospects of profit.

The demolition numbers at the top of this document are not a separate phenomenon from the housing approvals and road construction budgets or from US imperialist ambitions — which Israel plays a critical role. The process of demolitions, the mechanism of settlement expansion, help visualize the zionist structures as a key part of Israel as a vassal state: not simply a client, but an active instrument of empire, performing dispossession on behalf of a geopolitical order that benefits from regional fragmentation and the erasure of Palestinian life — except for the cases in which life can be monetized. The demolitions documented in this report are not aberrations or excesses: they are the granular, daily expression of the relationship between zionist settler-colonialism and capitalism.

In the first two weeks of February 2026, the Israeli government approved a set of administrative decisions that amount to the legal scaffolding of annexation. Within the same 30-day window, settler violence in the West Bank doubled. These are not parallel developments. The policy decisions create the material conditions for the violence, and the violence clears the ground for the policy to take effect. This is how zionism perpetuates itself in material terms. Nonetheless, the sequence is worth laying out plainly.

On February 8, the Israeli security cabinet repealed Jordanian-era restrictions on land purchases in the West Bank, eliminated transaction permit requirements, and opened previously classified land registries to the public. A week later, on February 15, the full government allocated NIS 244.1 million to establish a land title settlement process in Area C, under which Palestinian landowners must prove ownership through documentation most do not and cannot possess. Land that goes unclaimed transfers automatically to the Israeli state. Area C is 3.3 million dunams. Roughly 1.9 million remain unregistered. The five-year target is 290,000 dunams. Combined with land already classified as state land, this will dispossess Palestinians from up to 83% of Area C.

Meanwhile, on the ground, settler attacks climbed from 65 incidents in the last week of January to 137 incidents in the first nine days of February. Not a single day in the 30-day reporting period passed without at least one attack. The geographic pattern is specific. Ramallah and Nablus each recorded 28 incidents. Hebron had 26. Tubas and Jericho, which cover much of the Jordan Valley, had 23 and 20 respectively. These are not random distributions. They correspond to the areas where Palestinian agricultural land is most exposed and where Bedouin and farming communities are most vulnerable to displacement.

The tactics follow a logic of accumulation. Settlers graze livestock on Palestinian cropland, destroying harvests. Squatters uproot trees: on January 27, roughly 500 olive, fig, and almond trees were cut down in the Wadi Al-Rakhim area outside Yatta. They burn equipment, like the three bulldozers, two trucks, and five vehicles torched near Awraf village on January 21. Settlers closed roads with earthen berms and stone-throwing, as at Mukmas. The last 30 days have been brutal. 15 Bedouin families in Wadi Al-Auja evacuated because the attacks would not stop. A stolen tractor in Al-Auja at the end of January. Pepper spray inside a family’s home in Yatta this past month. Foreign solidarity activists beaten at a Bedouin gathering near Al-Auja. This sort of violence is only possible when the Israeli state, the broader settler movement, and the armed forces operate in tandem — as they have.

Each of these incidents makes it harder to stay. That is the point. The new land registration process will formalize what the violence has already begun; transferring Palestinian land to the state by making it uninhabitable first.

Israeli abductions and arrests of Palestinians operate on the same axis. The Palestinian Negotiations Affairs Department documented 929 abductions over the 30-day period, averaging 32 per day. The rate rose roughly 40% from the first week to the last, peaking at 54 on February 12. Mass detention raids in the Old City of Hebron, sometimes pulling more than a dozen people at once, were routine. A 15-year-old was arrested in Kfar Numa. Thirteen residents detained in a single night in Bethlehem. Many arrests came through summons to Israeli intelligence offices, a process that functions less as law enforcement than as a system of social control — removing individuals from their communities on a rolling basis, generating compliance through unpredictability and ripping apart the fabric of communities as they use violence and intimidation to try to create collaborators.

Road closures, though smaller in absolute number (28), tripled over the period and served the same function. Iron gates sealed at village entrances. Main roads blocked between communities. Movement restricted in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Salfit. The effect is to fragment Palestinian territorial contiguity, making coordinated resistance to land seizure harder and daily economic life more precarious. The fragmentation of Palestinian lands happens at the macro level — like through colonial logic of international law (the Oslo Accords, the UN partition plans), and the micro level — road closures and the establishment of squatter communities that lay beyond the scope or enforcement of law.

The cabinet decisions from February extend Israeli administrative authority into Areas A and B as well, territory that, according to Oslo, falls under Palestinian civil control. Israeli agencies will now operate there under mandates covering archaeology, heritage, water, and environmental hazards — categories broad enough to justify demolitions anywhere. This is the dream of the settler organization Regavim and the broader zionist movement. Within this same legal arrangement, in Hebron the Palestinian municipality is losing its planning authority around the Ibrahimi Mosque. A new Israeli body will govern the Rachel’s Tomb area in Bethlehem as well, putting the already embattled Aida camp in an even more precarious position.

What is happening is a settler-colonial process operating through two channels simultaneously. The legal channel converts Palestinian land into state property through registration mechanisms designed to dispossess — essentially just building off the existing Ottoman and British systems that were in place before zionist administration. The extralegal channel — settler violence, backed by Israeli military infrastructure and arrest operations — by design drives Palestinians off the land before the paperwork arrives. Neither channel functions without the other. The policy needs the violence to empty the land. The violence needs the policy to make the seizure permanent. This is the cyclical nature of zionism.

The NIS 244.1 million budget line is what makes this different from prior escalations. It is not a declaration or a statement of intent. It is an operational expenditure, staffed by a new administration housed in the Israeli Ministry of Justice, designed to process land claims at industrial scale. This will no doubt be facilitated by the many “charities” like the Jewish National Fund and Regavim. The violence documented in Palestinians is what that process looks like before it reaches the Israeli registrar’s office.