“Strengthening the Golan is strengthening the State of Israel, and it is especially important at this time. We will continue to hold onto it, cause it to blossom, and settle in it,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
Since Islamist rebels overthrew the decades-long Assad family regime on Dec. 8, Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes across Syria and carried out a land incursion that stretches past the occupied Golan Heights into a previously demilitarized buffer zone.
(December 12,2024)
With the Israeli army advancing into Syria following Assad‘s fall, a group promoting settlements in Lebanon is casting its gaze eastward.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has denounced the “terrorist settler militias” responsible for violent attacks on two towns near Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli settlers set fire to Palestinian property and vehicles in what the ministry described as part of escalating daily assaults.
It attributed the settlers’ brazenness to the “glaring and unjustifiable failure” of the international community to intervene against Israeli aggression and killings in the occupied territory.
According to new data gathered by the left-wing Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, which monitors Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land in the West Bank, at least 57 Palestinian communities have been forced to flee their homes since October 7 as a result of Israeli settler attacks. Of these, seven have been partially displaced — meaning the expulsion of at least one residential cluster, located several hundred meters away from the next — and 50 have been wiped off the map entirely.
The attacks, which came amid a surge in settler violence since the war in Gaza began, targeted multiple villages, including Beit Furik, just over five miles from the city of Nablus.
The Israeli military said settlers attacked the village after troops arrived to dismantle an unauthorized farming outpost near the settlement.
The attorneys highlight three categories of potential US code violations the DOJ could investigate:
– The killing of US citizens by Israeli citizens and soldiers in recent years (including Ayşenur Eygi, Kamel Ahmad Jawad, Jacob Flickinger, Tawfiq Abdel Jabbar, Mohammad Khdour, Omar Assad, and Shireen Abu Akleh).
– Israel’s illegal settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, assisted by US citizens and organizations.
– Evidence that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes and engaged in torture – including killing thousands of civilians, forcibly displacement and starvation, unlawful confinement, torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, and mass destruction of civilian property and infrastructure.
“Of course,” the attorneys note, “U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the more than 23,000 U.S. citizens currently serving in Israel’s armed forces, along with IDF members or other Israeli officials that travel to the United States.”
(25 March 2024)
In 1971, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli army commander of the southern region who later became prime minister, prepared a plan to divide Gaza and North Sinai into five settlement areas that prevent geographic contiguity between Palestinians in the north, centre, and south.
Israel surrounds this area from the north with settlements and checkpoints and from the south with a settlement bloc in the northern Sinai desert.
Sharon named it the „Five Fingers Plan“, and the government headed by Golda Meir fully adopted it in 1972.
(September 17, 2024)
Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant remain tight-lipped about the real goals of the operation, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, as well as other ministers on the far right, declare them openly. Here, they cite a program that the “Forum of Reserve Commanders and Fighters,” spearheaded by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, proposed just a few weeks ago: ordering all residents of northern Gaza to leave within a week, before imposing a full siege on the area, including shutting off all supplies of water, food, and fuel, until those who remain surrender or die of starvation.
Other prominent Israelis, in recent months, have also called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza. “Remove the entire civilian population from the north, and whoever remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination,” Prof. Uzi Rabi, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University, elaborated in a radio interview on Sept. 15. And in August, according to a report in Ynet, government ministers had already started pressuring Netanyahu to “cleanse” northern Gaza of its inhabitants.
Three prominent Palestinian human rights groups – Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – said this week that civilians in northern Gaza are “are being punished for continuing to refuse to follow Israel’s unlawful forcible displacement orders.”
With no safe place to go, Palestinians in Gaza’s north are fearful that if they flee, they will never be able to return.
Israel’s plan to resettle Gaza by illegally transferring its own civilian population to and annexing the north “is becoming clearer with every day that passes,” the Palestinian human rights groups said.
Demonstrating that point, several Israeli lawmakers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party plan to participate in a conference titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza” to be held on Monday.
Israeli soldiers arrested the Jewish-American reporter and three other journalists at a checkpoint in the West Bank on October 8. According to one of the jailed reporters, @the_andrey_x, the soldiers blindfolded them tightly, roughed them up, drawing guns on them at one point, and hauled them off to detention in Jerusalem.
“The soldiers… illegally requested that the journalists hand in their phones, and when they refused, the soldiers pointed a gun at one of the journalists, hit him with their hands and the barrel of a gun, then dragged him out of the car and slammed him onto the concrete. When lying on the ground, they pointed 2 guns at his head. The rest of the journalists exited the car and the military raided it, confiscating phones, cameras, and personal items,” said @the_andrey_x.
Andrey recalled that in the course of abusing the journalists, “The soldiers told the female Israeli photographer that she should have been raped by Hamas.”
While Loffredo’s colleagues were released after 11 hours, the “Judea and Samaria” division of the Israeli police opened an investigation into Loffredo for supposedly “aiding the enemy in a time of war.”
According to Israel Hayom, the free daily newspaper, the Israel Land Authority announced the confiscation of the land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem.
Dan Iloz, a Likud MP, told the paper that the „expropriation of land in Jerusalem is an important step, but not enough“ and denounced Unrwa as „a hotbed for terrorism under a humanitarian guise“.
On Sunday, we woke up to the news that six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas, just before soldiers reached them in a tunnel in Gaza. Another six, added to tens of thousands of people in this land who should not have died over the past year. During this week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets. They feel angry, desperate and betrayed by their government. They have understood, perhaps for the first time, that the Israeli government does not want to return the hostages in a deal, but to continue the war indefinitely. They see that the occupation and the settlements matter more than human life – and not only of Palestinians, said B‘Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak, who addressed the UN Security Council last night (Wednesday) . B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories was invited by the Slovenian President of the Security Council to provide an expert review of the state of human rights in Israel/Palestine following the war.
Everywhere for 57 years Israel has made life impossible for Palestinians under a brutal military occupation, seeking to realize a “#GreaterIsrael”.
In agreement with the Palestinians in the oPt, an int‘l #ProtectionPresence must be immediately deployed to stop the massacres, wanton destruction and forced displacement.
Now, Palestinians in the area are increasingly fearful about what’s to come. “The settlers have always used the road belonging to the village [to get to their outpost], but now they are being more aggressive, provoking the residents,” Zawahra said. “In a few days when the academic year begins, the children will have to use this road to get to school. How can we make sure they are not attacked?”
Zawahra also explained how the latest attack has forced village residents to reevaluate what they held to be true: that there is safety in numbers. “We thought that the more people there are [when settlers enter a village], the lower the chance that they will attack. But they shot randomly. If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead.”
(23.01.2024)
The conference, under the heading “Only settlement will bring security,” is organized by a group of movements that want to resettle Gaza, led by Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan and the Nachala Settlement Movement. It is scheduled for Sunday at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem.
So far, Zohar and Katz, and Likud MKs Hanoch Milwidsky, Nissim Vaturi, Amit Halevi, Tally Gotliv, Etty Hava Atia, Moshe Passal and Ariel Kallner have all said they will attend, according to the report.
Nissim Vaturi, an Israeli lawmaker belonging to the ruling Likud party, has announced he is joining an Israeli group that is planning to create illegal settlements in northern Gaza.
He made the announced on X on Tuesday, accompanied by a picture of a poster which states „only settlement will bring security„.
(16.02.2024)
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the four targeted Israeli settlers, one of whom was also included in the US sanctions, were involved in “egregious abuses of human rights.”
“Extremist Israeli settlers are threatening Palestinians, often at gunpoint, and forcing them off land that is rightfully theirs,” he added. “This behavior is illegal and unacceptable.”
I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, find that the situation in the West Bank — in particular high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages, and property destruction — has reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security, and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East region. These actions undermine the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom. They also undermine the security of Israel and have the potential to lead to broader regional destabilization across the Middle East, threatening United States personnel and interests. For these reasons, these actions constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat. Accordingly, I hereby order:
Section 1. All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person, including any foreign branch, of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in:
(a) any foreign person determined by the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, or the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State:
(i) to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in, any of the following:
(A) actions — including directing, enacting, implementing, enforcing, or failing to enforce policies — that threaten the peace, security, or stability of the West Bank; or
(B) planning, ordering, otherwise directing, or participating in any of the following actions affecting the West Bank:
(1) an act of violence or threat of violence targeting civilians;
(2) efforts to place civilians in reasonable fear of violence with the purpose or effect of necessitating a change of residence to avoid such violence;
(3) property destruction; or
(4) seizure or dispossession of property by private actors;
(ii) to be or have been a leader or official of:
(A) an entity, including any government entity, that has engaged in, or whose members have engaged in, any of the activities described in subsections (a) or (b) of this section related to the leader’s or official’s tenure; or
(B) an entity whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order as a result of activities relating to the leader’s or official’s tenure;
(iii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iv) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person blocked pursuant to this order; or
(b) any foreign person determined by the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury:
(i) to have committed or have attempted to commit, to pose a significant risk of committing, or to have participated in training to commit acts of terrorism affecting the West Bank; or
(ii) to be a leader or official of an entity sanctioned pursuant to subsection (b)(i) of this section.
The order targets four individuals accused of directly perpetrating violence or intimidation in the West Bank, a senior administration official said, including people accused of initiating and leading a riot; setting buildings, fields and vehicles on fire; assaulting civilians and damaging property.
The State Department announced the names of the Israelis targeted by the executive order, which blocks their financial assets and bars them from coming to the US. They are David Chai Chasdai, Einan Tanjil, Shalom Zicherman and Yinon Levi.
(29.01.2024)
Speaking amid a carnival-like atmosphere at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party, extolled the virtues of creating new settlements, declaring: “God willing, we will settle and we will be victorious.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit party, told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was not present, and the audience that it was “time to return home to Gush Katif” — the name of the Israeli settlement bloc in Gaza that was evacuated in the 2005 Disengagement.
Under these circumstances, this Declaration calls not only for the denunciation of Israel’s genocidal assault but also for taking effective action to permanently prevent its repetition. We come together due to the urgency of the moment, which obliges global intellectuals to stand against the ongoing horrific ordeal of the Palestinian people and, most of all, to implore action by those who have the power, and hence the responsibility, to do so. Israel’s continuing rejection of a permanent ceasefire intensifies our concerns.
Many weeks of cruel devastation caused by Israel’s grossly disproportionate response to the October 7 attack, continues to exhibit Israel’s vengeful fury. That fury can in no way be excused by the horrendous violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel or inapplicable claims of self-defense against an occupied population.
(…)
In addition, Israel has been greenlighting settler-led violence and escalating ethnic cleansing efforts in the West Bank. Given these developments we urge national governments to embargo and halt all shipments of weapons to Israel, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, which should also withdraw their provocative naval presences from the Eastern Mediterranean; we urge the UN Security Council and General Assembly to so decree without delay.
Sullivan, the official said, “will discuss ongoing efforts to promote stability in the West Bank, including through efforts to confront terrorism, support for the Palestinian Authority Security Forces through the U.S. Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, ongoing efforts to revamp and revitalize the Palestinian Authority, and initiatives to hold extremist settlers accountable for violence against Palestinians.”
The Biden administration is holding back a shipment of more than 27,000 U.S.-made rifles intended for Israel’s national police over concerns they could end up transferred to extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank, U.S. officials said.
The U.K. is banning violent Israeli settlers from entering the country, Foreign Secretary David Cameron announced Thursday, in a bid to “make sure our country cannot be a home for people who commit these intimidating acts.”
In a post on social media, Cameron — the former British prime minister reappointed to the Cabinet last month — said “extremist settlers, by targeting and killing Palestinian civilians, are undermining security and stability for both Israelis and Palestinians.”
(November 22, 2023)
Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt where they will never return.
In diesem Beitrag Die Neuauflage der ethnischen Säuberung – Steinmeier nickt das ab hatten wir am 27. November angekündigt, eine Übersetzung des Artikels von Chris Hedges nachzuliefern. Diese Übersetzung liegt jetzt vor. Großen Dank an Susanne Hofmann, die diesen Text über schreckliche Ereignisse und Einschätzungen übersetzt hat.
Der US-amerikanische Pulitzerpreisträger und ehemalige Korrespondent der New York Times im Nahen Osten, Chris Hedges, prangert an: Israel gehe es darum, den Gazastreifen unbewohnbar zu machen. Dazu zähle die Zerstörung aller Krankenhäuser dort. Israels Botschaft sei eindeutig: Es gibt keine Sicherheit. Wer im Gazastreifen bleibt, stirbt.
(November 1, 2023)
And also just to be very clear, everything that I’ve been describing, all of these various mechanisms that the state has been using, are backed by Israeli courts, and backed by the Israeli legal system. This is not some random phenomena that is happening uniquely to a single unlucky community far from the eyes of the state. On the contrary, this is part of an ongoing Israeli state project of trying to push, to cleanse, as many Palestinians out of Area C, using all available state mechanisms in order to accomplish this goal. (…)
There are checkpoints. There are threats. And all this goes on for years. And yet somehow you managed to stay on the land and make a living and try to raise a family under these conditions. And that in and of itself is horrific and criminal and appalling, and also happens in broad daylight. Everything I’ve been talking about now and describing has been documented for years already by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human-rights organizations. But Israel never relented and never stopped because, as I said, it’s part of the state’s goal to accomplish that. What has escalated in recent weeks is that you have repeated reports of masked men showing up in the middle of the night. Armed, masked men.
Maybe they are settlers, maybe they’re soldiers, maybe they’re a mix. And they openly threaten the people in the community and tell them that they have twenty-four hours to leave, and if you say otherwise we would wipe you out.
(2 hours ago)
I have condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas in Israel.
Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets.
All hostages must be treated humanely and released immediately and without conditions. I respectfully note the presence among us of members of their families.
Excellencies,
It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.
The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.
But the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.
Israeli officials railed at UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Tuesday after he appeared to suggest the impetus for the Hamas terror group’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel was the Jewish state’s continued control of Palestinian territories.
Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights is an Israeli organization registered as a non-profit in Israel. Yesh Din is subject to Israeli law and is served by a volunteer corps and by a professional staff, lawyers and human rights experts. Yesh Din was established in 2005 and has since worked to protect the human rights of Palestinians living under Israeli armed forces’ occupation. We view the occupation as a main source of the violation of the human rights and therefore seek to end it.
Yesh Din documents, collects and disseminates reliable and updated information regarding systematic human rights violations in the OPT.
A viable Palestinian state seems even more improbable now than it may have been in 1993. In violation of international law, Israeli settlements have expanded throughout much of the West Bank, carving up Palestinian lands with new roads and jurisdictions maintained for Jewish settlers. Below ground, aquifers are being diverted to the settlements, imposing chronic water shortages on Palestinians. East Jerusalem, the putative capital of a future Palestinian state, became home to more than 200,000 Jewish settlers; many Palestinian residents there face a tacit campaign to evict them from neighborhoods where they’ve lived for generations. Israel’s entrenched military rule over millions of Palestinians shows little sign of abating, and has prompted the world’s leading human rights organizations in recent years to determine that conditions of apartheid prevail over the occupied West Bank.
(June 2017)
For half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there.
The organizations involved include Standing Together, Peace Now, Breaking the Silence, and Combatants for Peace. The activists also placed stickers reading, „Caution! Terror supporters and architects of the [judicial] coup work in this building.“
Speaking to Haaretz, the activist who was detained – Nadav Weiman – said that a day before he was brought in for questioning, a person who took over his apartment lease in Tel Aviv called him and told him that three police officers knocked on his door looking for him. According to Weiman, police called him and asked him to come in for questioning only after they didn‘t find him in his apartment.
Speaking to Israel’s public broadcasting station Kan, Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command, said that “there hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years, there is total apartheid.” According to Levin, “the IDF, which is forced to exert sovereignty there, is rotting from the inside. It’s standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes. These are deep processes.”
When asked to elaborate on the specific “processes,” Levin invoked Nazi Germany. “It’s hard for us to say it, but it’s the truth. Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews. That’s exactly what happened there, in that dark country.”
After New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that a „reassessment“ of U.S.-Israel relations is inevitable and „a necessity before [Israel] truly does go off the rails,“ in light of the judicial overhaul on Wednesday, Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu joined the chorus of detractors on Wednesday.
Eliyahu told the Ynet news site that he believed Biden was being „fed by the radical left in the United States.”
(Jun 27, 2023)
The Biden administration took its most decisive action against Israel’s settlement enterprise this month, telling Jerusalem it will not be transferring any funds to research institutes or scientific and technological projects taking place in the West Bank.
Yet despite its change of policy regarding academic institutions across the Green Line (it told Israelis officials of the decision a few weeks ago, but the news only broke on Sunday), the White House has not overturned the Trump administration’s policy that the United States no longer views Israel’s settlements as illegal.
(Jul 12, 2023)
Republican members of Congress and presidential contenders are amplifying their criticism of U.S. President Joe Biden‘s Israel policy, largely centered around Biden‘s decision to stop transferring funds to research institutes or scientific and technological projects in the West Bank.
This is despite the fact that Biden stopped short of reversing the majority of Donald Trump‘s doctrine on Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
(July 11, 2023)
Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a translator from English to English.
The settlers’ patience has paid off. After 27 years, they have managed to bring about a change in the way the system operates. (…)
In other words, the settlers will decide for themselves and the state will fall in line. Next week, the Supreme Planning Council will discuss plans for building thousands of homes in the settlements.
The Bibi-ist camp has launched a multifront counterattack after several weeks of restraint, regrouping and garnering strength. Amid optimistic reports about cracks and quarrels within the coalition, its members unleashed their bombardment: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the return of pursuing the justice system‘s legislative „reform;“ threats of execution were directed at protesting air force pilots and former PM Ehud Barak; Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron was also threatened and called as savage…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will restart the push to radically change Israel‘s judiciary after his government successfully passed the state budget, an important component of the overhaul, early on Wednesday.
In an interview with Channel 14, Netanyahu said „of course“ when asked whether the judicial overhaul, which was put on hold earlier this year amid unprecedented public opposition, would resume.
The demonstrators are protesting the government’s proposed state budget that is slated to send billions of shekels to the ultra-Orthodox communities. Protest organizers said in a statement that this “isn’t a state budget [that’s being put up for a vote], but rather raiding the public coffers that will destroy Israel’s economy for generations to come.”
„My husband and I are settlers with 20 years of experience. … So today, because I oppose regime change in Israel – I‘m a leftist?“ Ron-Moriah pondered. „I protested against the disengagement with Hilltop Youth whose religious and social doctrine is 120% contradictory to my worldview. … Today I protest against a coup attempt and I fight for the values I believe in alongside members of the left. The goal is to preserve our familiar, beloved and democratic Israel. We will argue later about construction in the [West Bank], which the fully right-wing government had agreed to freeze for the time being.“
The Israeli army said its troops were operating in the Aqabat Jaber refugee camp next to Jericho in the West Bank. The Palestinian Health Ministry said 15-year-old Mohammed Balhan was killed by army fire.
The army gave no further details.
Far-right Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir joined thousands of Israeli settlers who staged a march demanding the reopening of Evyatar, an illegal settler outpost in the occupied West Bank. CNN‘s Frederik Pleitgen reports.
The march to Eviatar, an unauthorized settlement outpost in the northern West Bank that was evacuated by the previous Israeli government in 2021, was being led by hard-line ultranationalist Jewish settlers.
Daniella Weiss, another settler leader, told Kan public radio that the ministers‘ participation in the march could be a “therapy for the government to free yourselves from the dictates of the U.S. and Europe” concerning West Bank settlement.
(…)
As such, we call on your administration to promptly:
– Ensure U.S. taxpayer funds do not support projects in illegal settlements;
– Determine whether U.S.-origin defense articles have been used in violation of existing U.S. laws, including for a purpose not authorized by Section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act (22 U.S.C. § 2754) or to commit or support gross violations of human rights
by the Israeli government in violation of Section 502B(a)(2) of the Foreign Assistance Act (22 U.S.C. § 2304(a)(2)) and the U.S. „Leahy Laws,“ Section 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act (22 U.S.C. § 2378d and 10 U.S.C. § 362).
Furthermore, we call on your administration to ensure that all future foreign assistance to Israel, including weapons and equipment, is not used in support of gross violations of human rights, including by strengthening end-use monitoring and financial tracking. We ask that you respond with a detailed plan as to how the administration plans to achieve that goal.