Archiv: +972 Magazine (independent media / Israel)


26.05.2026 - 16:10 [ +972 Magazine ]

The farce of Israel’s ‘liberal’ investigative journalism

Two weeks ago, the investigative program HaMakor on Israel’s Channel 13 aired a 60-minute report on the December 2023 killing of three Israeli hostages — Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samer Al-Talalka — who were shot by Israeli soldiers in Shuja’iya, eastern Gaza City, after emerging from a hiding place carrying a white flag.

Even without intimate knowledge of the details, one thing should have been clear from the outset: When soldiers fire from inside buildings at three shirtless men carrying a white flag, kill two of them, then pursue the third, call him out of hiding, and shoot him dead, the issue is not merely “mistaken identity.” The issue is that Israeli soldiers routinely shoot innocent people. One would have to be extraordinarily naïve to believe that the single time this happened, the victims just happened to be Israelis.

05.05.2026 - 21:50 [ +972 Magazine ]

‘Extraordinarily far-reaching’ Palestine Action trial gets underway in Germany

(April 28, 2026)

In the early hours of Sept. 8, 2025, a group of activists wearing black hoodies that bore the red and white logo of Palestine Action broke into the offices of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in Ulm, southern Germany.

Once inside the compound, according to prosecutors, they damaged and partly destroyed furniture, windows, and technical equipment with axes; sprayed slogans on the walls; lit pyrotechnics; and chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “Germany finances, Israel bombs.” As visible from the activists’ own filming of the break-in, no one was harmed during the action. They remained on site and called the police, who later detained them.

Since their arrest, the five activists — Daniel Tatlow-Devally (an Irish citizen), Leandra Rollo (a Spanish citizen), Crow Tricks and Zo Hailu (British citizens), and Vi Kovarbasic (a German citizen) — have been held in pre-trial detention in separate prisons across southern Germany.

25.04.2026 - 20:26 [ +972 Magazine ]

Is Israel trying to foment civil war in Lebanon?

On April 14, the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to the United States, Nada Hamadeh and Yechiel Leiter, met in Washington with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The goal is ostensibly to extend the ceasefire while working “on longer term disarming of Hezbollah, along with a peace deal between the countries.” During the two hours in which the meeting took place, Israel bombed at least 23 towns in southern Lebanon; afterward, Leiter said that both Israel and Lebanon were united in “liberating Lebanon” from Hezbollah.

This came less than a week after one of the most violent days in Lebanese history. On April 8, Israeli warplanes ravaged large parts of the country, killing at least 303 people and wounding 1,150.

21.04.2026 - 16:55 [ +972 Magazine ]

What Israelis can learn from the nightmares of an Iranian hangman

(April 9, 2026)

Still, compared to their Iranian counterparts, Israel’s far-right lawmakers have a long way to go. The list of offenses warranting a death sentence in Iran is dizzying in its scope, including burglary, prostitution, drug trafficking, homosexuality, political dissidence, adultery, and “waging war against God.”

Under Israel’s new law, executions are to be carried out by hanging at a facility managed by the Israel Prison Service. How dull. Here, too, Ben Gvir can take inspiration from the Islamic Republic. What about a public hanging in the town square? Entertainment for the masses is not something to scoff at in these difficult times, and it’s free of charge.

And why restrict himself to only one method? The Islamic Republic has also carried out executions by firing squad, stoning, and pushing people off a cliff. Would stoning not serve as a fitting tribute to Ben Gvir’s professed commitment to Jewish tradition?

02.03.2026 - 02:39 [ Orly Noy / +972 Magazine ]

We are at war, therefore we are

For these three men — Lapid, Golan, and Bennett — no task is supposedly more urgent than replacing Netanyahu’s blood-soaked, Kahanist government, which has led the country to unprecedented depths. They understand how dangerous he is. They know the devastation another term would bring.

Yet the moment the smell of war fills the air, all these insights evaporate, replaced by automatic reverence to the Israeli war machine. It is as if the very idea that a war can be opposed simply does not exist within their cognitive framework.

08.02.2026 - 17:36 [ +972 Magazine ]

The legal fight to open Gaza to foreign press has failed. It’s time to change course

The FPA — which represents roughly 400 foreign journalists based in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories — first appealed to the Supreme Court in Dec. 2023, and again in early 2024 after its first appeal was rejected. The court has since granted the state no fewer than 10 extensions to submit its response, effectively allowing the government to sidestep the issue altogether.

This time, the court’s patience with the state appeared to have run out. Justice Ruth Ronnen pressed state representatives to clarify what concrete changes on the ground would be required for the ban on foreign media access to be rescinded. “You can no longer say it’s the same risk,” she said, referring to the ceasefire that had been in place for over three months. “You must explain what else must take place for journalists’ entry to be permitted. It’s not enough to claim security concerns without explaining them.”

Nadav replied that he could provide further details only in a closed-door session — a request the court accepted, while denying Gilad Shaer, the attorney representing the FPA, access to the information presented to them in secret. After the closed session, the court once again declined to issue a ruling, instead instructing the state to submit another update within two months.

06.02.2026 - 21:03 [ Abed Abou Shhadeh / +972 Magazine ]

What the Joint List’s revival signifies for Palestinian politics in Israel

(January 28, 2026)

This is a historic event in a volatile political moment. Even before the publication of polls gauging the Joint List’s electoral strength — predicting that it could secure 15-16 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, making it the third largest force in Israeli politics — the popular demand for unity suggests the possibility for unprecedented voter turnout in Arab society.

Israeli news outlets described the renewal of the Joint List as “drama in the political system,” and rightly so. Such a scenario would alter the balance between opposing blocs and force Zionist parties across the spectrum — from Yair Golan’s center-left Democrats to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud — to recalibrate their strategies.

16.12.2025 - 06:23 [ Em Hilton / +972 Magazine ]

After the Bondi massacre, we don’t have the luxury to grieve silently

In response to the Bondi attack, it is tempting, as many on the Jewish left have done for years, to promote the idea of safety through solidarity, according to which the strengthening of bonds between different marginalized communities is the key to each other’s protection. But as a colleague said to me recently, the pursuit of safety may be a delusion. Such sentiments feel empty in the face of an attack like Bondi. Indeed, so few of these communities enjoy any sense of safety in the unfolding era of political violence and instability.

07.12.2025 - 20:36 [ +972 Magazine ]

Legislating apartheid: How Israel entrenched unequal rule during Gaza war

For over two years, Israeli public life has been shrouded in a heavy, disorienting fog. There has been an unending churn of crises, conflicts, and anxieties at home and abroad: the shock of the Hamas attack of October 7 and Israel’s genocidal campaign of revenge on Gaza, the fight to bring back the hostages and against the state’s vilification of their families, the reckless confrontations with Iran. Together, these have left Israeli society suspended in a collective stupor, obscuring the depth of the abyss into which we are rapidly descending.

But the same cannot be said of our parliamentarians. As a disturbing new report by the Haifa-based legal center Adalah shows, they have used the chaos of the past two years to advance more than 30 new laws entrenching apartheid and Jewish supremacy — joining Adalah’s existing list of now more than 100 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens.

One of the report’s central findings is a sweeping assault on freedom of expression, thought, and protest across a wide array of arenas. It includes laws prohibiting the publication of content that includes “denial of the events of October 7,” as determined by the Knesset, and restricting broadcasts of critical media outlets that “harm state security.”

10.11.2025 - 21:28 [ Ori Goldberg / +972 Magazine ]

Both sides of the Sde Teiman leak debate reflect Israel’s moral decay

(November 7, 2025)

Over the past two years, Maj. Gen. Tomer-Yerushalmi — the official responsible for all internal investigations and legal enforcement in the Israeli army — has almost entirely refrained from probing the countless, well-documented allegations against its soldiers. The Sde Teiman guards’ crime, however, as captured in the leaked video, was apparently so blatant and grotesque that authorities had no choice but to issue indictments.

When Israeli military police arrived at Sde Teiman to arrest the suspects, however, they were met by right-wing rioters and soldiers, including several members of Knesset hiding behind their immunity. Attempting to block the arrests, they insisted that the perpetrators did nothing wrong and that their actions were merely part of the Israeli war effort.

Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked the video of the rape soon after, and it quickly spread online. Protests by right-wing Israelis in support of the abusers grew in turn. But while many around the world were aghast at what could only be described as “right to rape” protests, the discussion in Israel quickly faded in favor of daily news of “successes” on the Gazan front. The case was largely forgotten for months, until the investigation into the video’s leak was announced last week.

25.10.2025 - 23:55 [ Yuval Abraham / +972 Magazine ]

One target at a time: The logic that helped Israeli liberals commit genocide

Yet to see the past two years not only through the prism of genocide but also as a second Nakba — a sustained project of erasure aimed at destroying both a people and the space they inhabit — may bring us closer to grasping the nature of Israel’s actions. Whereas genocide is often understood as violence for its own sake, the Nakba represents violence with a purpose: the removal and replacement of a people.

And yet, as a Jewish-Israeli faced with the horrors of the past two years, I cannot help but think in Holocaust terms. The destruction of Gaza has enabled me to better understand not only the stories of the victims but also of the perpetrators — the silent majority who facilitated atrocities through their actions and the stories they tell themselves to justify it all.

25.09.2025 - 21:45 [ +972 Magazine ]

Microsoft revokes cloud services from Israel’s Unit 8200, following +972 exposé

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli army’s access to technology it was using to store vast troves of intelligence on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, the tech giant informed Israel’s Defense Ministry in a letter late last week, according to the Guardian.

The decision followed an exposé last month by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian revealing how Unit 8200, the Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare agency, was housing intercepted recordings of millions of mobile phone calls by Palestinians on Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, creating one of the world’s most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group. According to the joint investigation, this data has been used over the past two years to plan lethal airstrikes in Gaza, as well as to arrest Palestinians in the West Bank.

25.09.2025 - 21:21 [ theGuardian.com ]

Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians

The decision to cut off Unit 8200’s ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by the Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance programme.

In a joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the Guardian revealed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into Azure.

23.09.2025 - 19:40 [ +972 Magazine ]

Israel is waging a holocaust in Gaza. Denazification is our only remedy

What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation, executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis.

How is it that, despite the mounting testimonies from Gaza’s concentration and extermination camps, no mass refusal movement has taken root in Israel? That after two years of this carnage barely a handful of conscientious objectors sit in prison is truly inconceivable. Even the so-called “gray refusers” — reserve soldiers who do not oppose the war on ideological grounds but are simply exhausted and questioning its purpose — remain far too few to slow the killing machine, let alone bring it to a halt.

Who are these obedient souls who keep this system running? How can a society so deeply fractured — between the religious and the secular, settlers and liberals, kibbutzniks and urbanites, veteran immigrants and new arrivals — unite only in its willingness to slaughter Palestinians without a moment’s hesitation?

19.09.2025 - 03:05 [ +972 Magazine ]

Israel’s opposition is plotting a return to power. But it remains its own worst enemy

Yet such promises count for little at a time when Israel’s current government continues to bomb, shell, and starve Palestinians in Gaza, all while taking rapid steps toward formally annexing the West Bank. Nor has the opposition — neither its parliamentary representatives, like the Democrats, or the protest movement in the streets — shown the ability to turn growing discontent over the government’s handling of the war and abandonment of the hostages into a full-throated defense of Palestinians’ humanity.

Until they do, it is hard to imagine just how different the next government, whoever comprises it, will be when it comes to the prospect of peace and equality for all the people in this land.

26.08.2025 - 22:44 [ +972 Magazine ]

How Israelis turned atrocity denial into an art

(August 22, 2025)

Meanwhile, the reprehensible refusal by the vast majority of the Israeli media to show what is actually happening in Gaza means that when images do manage to slip through, the public response is often little more than a collective shrug of dismissal. Yet almost every time, that shrug is accompanied by “they deserved it,” as denial and justification intertwine in what may seem like a paradox but actually reflects two sides of the same coin.

09.08.2025 - 17:45 [ +972 Magazine ]

Microsoft storing Israeli intelligence trove used to attack Palestinians

Unit 8200, roughly equivalent in function to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), has transferred audio files of millions of calls by Palestinians in the occupied territories onto Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, operationalizing what is likely one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group. This is according to interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources in addition to a cache of leaked internal Microsoft documents obtained by the Guardian.

In a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, the then-head of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, won the support of the tech giant’s CEO, Satya Nadella, to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army’s mass surveillance project. According to the sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel’s intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.

03.08.2025 - 12:41 [ +972 Magazine ]

Germany’s angel of history is screaming

How can a country that professes to be a gatekeeper of international law staunchly defend a state that so flagrantly violates it? How does a country that has spent 80 years cultivating a culture of remembrance, responsibility, and moral accountability show ironclad commitment to arresting one international war criminal, while warmly welcoming another? And how can a country that utilizes the image of the ruins of Dresden to teach its schoolchildren about the dangers of dehumanization and fascism be so blind to its own complicity in an unfolding catastrophe?

28.07.2025 - 00:41 [ +972 Magazine ]

Is this Gaza’s ‘bomb the tracks’ moment?

Starving at Bergen-Belsen alongside my mother, perhaps in the same barracks, was Hanna Levy-Hass, mother of Haaretz journalist Amira Hass. Hanna was one of the few people to keep a diary throughout her time at Bergen-Belsen, which survived and was later published.

In February 1945, she wrote: “Hunger crushes the spirit. I feel my physical and intellectual strength diminishing. Things escape me, I can’t think properly, can’t grasp events, can’t realize the full horror of the situation.

“Our hunger has only become fiercer,” the diary entry went on. “Our bodies have been demolished by it, we all drag ourselves around like rags; men literally drop to the ground from exhaustion and end up dying of hunger, simple as that.”

Eighty years later, in a dispatch this week from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, +972 Magazine journalist Ruwaida Amer wrote, “For about a month now, though, I’ve lost the ability to follow the news. My focus is slipping. My body is breaking down.”

15.07.2025 - 22:40 [ +972 Magazine ]

Aid for Gaza’s starving children is right at the gates. Let it in

Israel is blocking 6,000 UNRWA trucks from entering Gaza while children die of hunger. The world can still prevent further catastrophe if it chooses to act.

11.07.2025 - 20:02 [ Washington Post ]

Israeli plans for Gaza draw criticism of ‘concentration camps’

In March, in the wake of the collapse of an earlier ceasefire, Katz had issued a warning to Gaza residents that, if they didn’t release the remaining hostages and “remove Hamas” themselves, Israel would act with “unprecedented force.” Other “options” were possible for Gaza’s population, Katz suggested, including “relocation to other countries,” while threatening “complete destruction and devastation.”

At the time, Meron Rapoport, a left-wing Israeli journalist, parsed the statements coming from prominent lawmakers and officials, as well as connected right-wing Israeli journalists, and came up with this somewhat prescient conclusion: “Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area,” he wrote on April 1, suggesting the goal was tantamount to the creation of a large “concentration camp.”

08.07.2025 - 19:29 [ +972 Magazine ]

The Western liberal’s moral collapse in Gaza

On October 24, 2023, two and a half weeks after Hamas’ attack on Israel, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported a grim new record: Israel’s bombardment of the Strip had killed 704 Palestinians in the previous 24 hours alone. The next day, Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad posted a now famous sentence on X: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

That razor-sharp turn of phrase, which has since been viewed more than 10 million times, stayed with El Akkad all the way to February 2025, when it became the title of his third book.

(…)

Faced with the existential threat that Israel’s war on Gaza poses to their self-image, one might expect Western liberals to reckon with El Akkad’s core argument. And yet, outside of the ideological pro-Israel factions who cling to dogma over truth, the self-styled progressive is more likely to acknowledge past injustice only once nothing can be done to change it — when the most they can muster is a weary shrug: “It is what it is,” or, “We had no choice.”

“One remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart,” he writes, “is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”

07.07.2025 - 17:08 [ +972 Magazine ]

Israel’s latest vision for Gaza has a name: Concentration camp

(April 1, 2025)

Connecting all these dots leads to a fairly clear conclusion: Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza — through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment — into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area. Anyone caught outside its boundaries would be killed, and buildings throughout the rest of the enclave would likely be razed to the ground.

Without mincing words, this “humanitarian zone,” as Magal so kindly put it, in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s 2 million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

06.07.2025 - 21:32 [ +972 Magazine ]

Legacy of South African Bantustans hangs over Trump deal

(February 9, 2020)

South Africa‘s Bantustans were designed to weaken and fragment the black population. Under Trump‘s plan, Palestine could face a similar fate.

03.07.2025 - 01:25 [ Orly Noy / +972 Magazine ]

The Knesset vs Ayman Odeh

On Monday, the Knesset House Committee voted to impeach Palestinian parliamentarian Ayman Odeh, head of the predominantly Arab Hadash-Ta’al list. His crime? In January, as the two-month Gaza ceasefire came into effect, Odeh tweeted: “I am happy about the release of the [Israeli] hostages and [Palestinian] prisoners. From here, both peoples must be freed from the yoke of the occupation. We were all born free.”

As I watched the committee’s hearing, I felt like my eyes were bleeding. It was physically unbearable. Knesset members from across the political spectrum — who aren’t worthy of the dust on Odeh’s shoes when it comes to humanism, morality, and democratic integrity — competed to see who could spew the vilest rhetoric against him.

No one paid attention to the Knesset’s legal adviser — who, after the obligatory lip service condemning Odeh’s “disgusting statements,” concluded that there was no legal basis for his impeachment. And it goes without saying that no one listened to Odeh’s attorney, Dr. Hassan Jabareen, who explained why the proposal was procedurally flawed, legally unsound, and morally bankrupt.

From the first sentence to the last, the hearing was a farce.

01.07.2025 - 01:40 [ +972 Magazine ]

New Israeli directive expedites ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta

(June 25, 2025)

Yunis explained that in recent years, the army focused on denying Palestinian building requests — as opposed to mandating the wholesale expulsion of Palestinian residents — as a way to mitigate international criticism. “They didn’t want the world to see that they’re carrying out ethnic cleansing, so they didn’t do big expulsions, with people being loaded onto trucks,” he told +972 and Local Call. “They’ve been trying to wear us down gradually, preventing us from working, demolishing homes, in the hope that people will become fed up and leave.”

Now, however, wholesale expulsion has become a very realistic prospect.

21.06.2025 - 09:11 [ +972 Magazine ]

‘The Hunger Games’: Inside Israel’s aid death traps for starving Gazans

The day after the massacre on Al-Rashid Street that claimed Hatem Shaldan’s life, even larger crowds gathered in the same spot, including 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Sharia, who arrived with four relatives. The few aid trucks that arrived that week gave a sliver of hope to starving families.

Abu Sharia lives with his family of nine in their partially destroyed home in southern Gaza City, the only son among six sisters. “My family didn’t want me to go at first,” he said. “But we’ve been starving for two months.”

At 10 p.m., he made his way to Al-Rashid Street, where crowds had gathered on the sand near the shore, waiting for aid trucks. People shared warnings in hushed voices: “Stay behind the trucks. Don’t run in front — you might get crushed.”

Abu Sharia was shocked by what he saw. “Elderly people, women, children, all just waiting for a chance at flour.” Then, without warning, artillery shells began falling around them.

Panic broke out. Some fled. Others, like Abu Sharia, sprinted toward the trucks. “People were being killed and wounded, but no one stopped. Everyone just kept running for the flour.”

He managed to grab a bag lying beside a dead body, but only made it a few meters before a gang of four men with knives surrounded him and threatened to kill him if he didn’t hand it over. He let it go.

Still hoping to reach another truck, he waited hours longer. Then he saw people shouting, “More aid has arrived!” The trucks rolled in, barely slowing down as crowds swarmed them. “I saw a man fall under one [truck] and get his head crushed.” With ambulances too far away to approach for fear of Israeli airstrikes, the wounded and dead were dragged away by donkey carts and tuk-tuks.