Human Rights Glance
Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.
With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.
Why are the monks walking?
Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance.
Attorneys for the Trump administration are aiming to deport Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy whose photograph in a bunny hat in snowy Minneapolis circulated globally after his detention last month by federal officials during the aggressive anti-immigration crackdown there.
Israeli forces have detained two journalists, two foreign solidarity activists and a Palestinian anti-settlement activist in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron while they were documenting attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers, according to local sources.
