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FIFA-Backed “Board of Peace” Plan for Gaza Stadium Ignores Needs of Palestinians

By Dalia Abu Ramadan, May 7, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/07/fifa-backed-board-of-peace-plan-for-gaza-stadium-ignores-needs-of-palestinians/

How can recreational projects be proposed when even the most basic foundations of life have not yet been rebuilt?

In February, Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” struck a $50 million agreement with the football-governing body FIFA, with grand promises to build a national stadium, sports academy, and over 50 “mini-pitches.” The initiative seeks to redirect global attention away from Gaza through so-called “peace agreements” that do not exist on the ground — mere labels placed over unremoved ruins.

How can more than 50 football fields be planned while no real effort is made to establish peace first? How can sports projects be discussed in a place still under daily bombardment, where infrastructure has collapsed and conditions continue to worsen with every passing season?

The only change is that the intensity of the fighting has slightly decreased, but life has not become any easier. It is not simple to live while constantly expecting death — your own or that of your loved ones — at any moment.       

On April 28, I went out with my mother to shop when we suddenly heard a heavy bombardment. I called my father, who was also outside, and the sound was very close to us. He told us he had heard the same intense bombardment. Minutes later, people in the street began saying that a car had been targeted and completely burned, killing civilians nearby. Among the victims were four people, including Khaled Naeem Abu Nahl, a child who was killed at the door of his home.

This is one of many stories that followed the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza.

On April 29, we had an appointment with a seamstress, but we found her shop closed. My mother called her to ask where she was. The answer came as a shock: Her husband, from the Al-Shawa family in the Al-Saha area, had been killed the day before. “Didn’t you hear?” she asked. My mother hung up in disbelief. How can a simple seamstress, trying to earn a living, suddenly become a widow responsible for an entire family?

In March, a story spread that caused widespread fear, revealing a part of the tragedy we are living through in Gaza away from the rest of the world’s eyes: A father said the screams of his newborn son woke him up one night, and he found the 28-day-old baby’s face covered in blood after a large rat had bitten him on the cheek.

Since the beginning of 2026, some of the most severe crises we have been facing are the spread of rodents amid the continued failure to remove rubble, and the fact that many people are still trapped beneath the debris. Imagine life in a city reduced to ruins — a place turned into a dumping ground for waste and destroyed homes, where we struggle to survive. Rats consume whatever little furniture remains, while we live in tents surrounded by destruction, with sewage seeping from beneath them.

The World Health Organization has reported more than 17,000 cases of disease among displaced people in Gaza linked to rodents and external parasites since the beginning of this year, amid a severe deterioration in health and humanitarian conditions as a result of Israel’s ongoing aggression.

How can a life that resembles hell, deprived of the most basic necessities, be reduced to discussions about building football stadiums, while Gaza’s entire infrastructure has been destroyed? How can recreational projects be proposed in a place where even the most basic foundations of life have not yet been rebuilt?

Trump, together with FIFA President Gianni Infantino, promote projects presented as symbols of peace and prosperity, while the basic needs of people are being ignored.

Imagine building stadiums amid rubble, disease, and a toxic and dangerous environment, while this is being framed as a vision of peace and development.

“It is strange how everything has been set aside in favor of building stadiums. What about stopping the bombardment first? What about the basics?” my friend Lama said.

She points out that some things have slightly improved, such as the entry of food compared to before, yet daily shortages remain — basic items like eggs are still not consistently available. She says the image presented to the world suggests that famine has ended, while the reality on the ground is different.

Lama asks: Do they believe that building stadiums will give the world the impression that Gaza has been rebuilt and is now living in peace?

One day, I was speaking with my friend Ahed, who is about to graduate, and asked her about Trump’s idea. She laughed sarcastically and said, “Instead of building stadiums, focus on securing students in schools and universities — and provide them with transportation first.”

For a moment, and through Ahed’s words, I realized how much we have lost the true meaning of life. I was speaking about the diseases we are facing — dehydration, severe diarrhea, hepatitis, and meningitis — caused by the spread of rodents and the weakened immunity resulting from famine, effects that we are still suffering from today.

Suddenly, Ahed brought me back to another reality that is no less harsh: the destruction of universities, schools, and transportation — as if we are living between two layers of suffering at the same time.

We have forgotten the meaning of luxury; it no longer even crosses our minds. We ask for nothing more than a warm home and genuine safety. But who can truly understand how we feel, if they have not lived our reality?

This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

May 10, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza | Leave a comment

Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one.

At least 2,842 Palestinians had ‘evaporated’ … [which] civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively ‘vaporise’ human bodies

Belen Fernandez 4 May 2026 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-making-palestinians-disappear-more-ways-one

Reports of missing children and ‘evaporated’ bodies reveal a widening pattern of erasure in Gaza, where entire families are killed, lost under rubble or reduced to biological traces

n 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “dozens of children go missing each week” in the Gaza Strip “against the backdrop of the postwar chaos” – a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.

The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: “[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family’s tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out.” And then he was gone.

The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children “disappeared during the war”, with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.

Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble.

United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned back in September that the true death toll might already have been more in the vicinity of 680,000.

Speaking of disappearances, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed in February that at least 2,842 Palestinians had “evaporated” in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war – a phenomenon Gaza’s civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of US-manufactured thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively “vaporise” human bodies.

The gruesome tally was quickly eclipsed by the deranged US-Israeli war on Iran and wider regional catastrophe, which has monopolised the news for the past two months. But the topic remains as sinisterly relevant as ever.

In remarks to Al Jazeera at the time, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal outlined the process for determining the number of vaporised victims at homes targeted by Israeli strikes: “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces – blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps.”

Vaporised bodies

Upon publication of these macabre findings, the Israeli military got its panties into a genocidal bunch and issued a huffy communique to allegedly set the record straight.

Rejecting Al Jazeera’s “false claim of the evaporation of Gazan bodies”, the army insisted that it “uses only lawful munitions” and that it “strikes military targets and objectives in accordance with international law and takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian property to the extent possible.”

It’s not clear, of course, why a military that has been accused of potentially killing nearly 700,000 people – and that wipes out entire families and neighbourhoods without so much as batting an eye – took such particular offence at the whole “evaporation” matter.

Granted, disappearing bodies into thin air is a pretty good way of hiding the true extent of mass slaughter.

And while the vaporisation of Palestinian bodies may not fit the official legal definition of enforced disappearance, it is quite literally exactly that.

According to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law”.

In light of Israel’s explicit disappearing act in Gaza, however, a considerable expansion of that definition would seem to be in order.

And yet Israel is guilty of the traditional variety of enforced disappearance, as well. Last August, UN experts denounced reports that starving Palestinian civilians – including a child – were being forcibly disappeared from aid distribution sites run by the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Backed by Israel and the US, the foundation also specialised in massacring desperate folks who had gathered in search of food and other necessary items for survival.

Meanwhile, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s enforced disappearances of medical personnel, journalists and all manner of other humans have flourished since the onset of the genocide – not that this hasn’t always been par for the course.

Global pattern

For its part, the US has had a hand in enforced disappearances in a whole lot of places around the world, including by aiding and abetting bloodthirsty right-wing regimes throughout Latin America during the Cold War.

Tens of thousands were disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala and beyond as the US and its buddies nobly went about making the hemisphere safe for capitalism.

In Mexico, more than 130,000 persons have been disappeared, the vast majority of them following the launch in 2006 of the US-backed “war on drugs”, which would be more aptly characterised as a war on the poor.

But from Mexico to the Middle East, the number of disappeared hardly conveys the extent of victimisation. The families of the missing are victims, too, condemned as they are to indefinite psychological limbo in the absence of concrete information regarding the fate of their loved ones – without which it is impossible to commence the grieving process or obtain the emotional closure that is necessary to move on with one’s life.

In the case of Israel’s “evaporation” of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s hard to say whether the knowledge that your loved one has been vaporised is concrete enough to enable eventual closure. After all, there’s nothing very concrete about being forcibly vanished without a trace.

Indeed, Al Jazeera quotes Palestinian father Rafiq Badran on the almost inconceivable psychological torment that attends Israel’s sinister new spin on the theme of enforced disappearance: “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”

Now, with regional war raging as the arms industry rakes in big bucks, it has become even easier for global audiences to tune out the unique plight of the Palestinians – which means that the genocide is effectively being disappeared from the spotlight, as well.

In the end, of course, the Israeli goal is nothing less than to forcibly disappear the very idea of a Palestinian people. But unfortunately for Israel, its blood-drenched legacy will not be so easily concealed.

May 7, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel’s war on water-depriving Palestinians in Gaza of water for at least nearly two decades, if not longer

It’s part of Israel’s multi-layered manufactured misery in Gaza, long before October 2023

Eva Karene Bartlett, May 01, 2026, https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/israels-war-on-water-depriving-palestinians?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=196084075&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email EXCELLENT ILLUSTRATIONS ON ORIGINAL.

When I lived in Gaza, I documented Israel’s systematic destruction of wells & cisterns in the formerly-rich agricultual land in eastern & northern Gaza, also noting:


“(Following the Israeli December 2008/January 2009 war on Gaza) A UNDP survey following the attacks found that nearly 14,000 dunums of irrigation networks and pipelines have been destroyed, along with 250 wells and 327 water pumps completely damaged, and another 53 wells partially damaged by Israeli bombing and bulldozing. Water has been further contaminated by chemical agents used by the Israeli army during its war on Gaza…”

Palestinian farmers often had to resort to trying to irrigate their land by carting jugs of wateron donkey carts over land rutted by Israeli tanks and bulldozers (which routinely invaded to tear up farmland and destroy crops).

On top of depriving Palestinians of their ability to collect water, Israel cut off the natural flow of water to Gaza.

On top of this, Israel ensured Gaza’s coastal waters remained polluted by sewage, never allowing Palestinians to properly maintain and treat sewage, pumping into the sea being the only option to avoid having sewage flood the streets (as happened many times).

Back in 2014 when I wrote an indepth overview of the many sadistic policies Israel employed to ensure Gaza was unliveable back then, I noted:



“Damage to the coastal aquifer from over-extraction will be reversible in 2020 if no action is taken now, a 2012 UN report notes. At the moment, 95% of water in Gaza is undrinkable according to WHO standards.”

Do read the full overview:

-on how Israel has been deliberately starving Gaza since the 2000s, including by drastically limiting imports; shooting on farmers & fishers; destroying agricultural land and stealing or destroying fishing boats

-on the 2008/9 & 2012 Israeli wars on Gaza, which I documented real time from on the ground & in ambulances in northern Gaza

-on Israel attempting to quash popular unarmed resistance by firing live ammunition at protesters (long before the 2018 Great Marches)

-on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s sole power plant and crippling of their electricity, meaning we went without electricity for 14-18 hours on good days, 20 or more hours on bad days (which were the majority), and how this impacted sanitation, hospitals and personal lives

-on the Israeli bombings not reported by Western media, and not during Israel’s sociopathical wars on Gaza…and the sonic booms campaigns were terrorized the population, the sound very much like actual bombs, in relentless campaigns

-on how these, and more, contributed to stunted growth in children and other malnutrion related diseases, as well as anaemia in women, rampant diabetes, and other food and preventable water related diseases – https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/observations-from-occupied-palestine-in-gaza/

This was all 10 or 15 years prior to October 2023. Zionist propagandists’ justifications for their savagery are simply empty talking points

May 5, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israeli violence against Palestinians echoes Holocaust – ex-Mossad chief

Ongoing attacks in the West Bank pose an “existential threat” to the Jewish state, Tamir Pardo has said

28 Apr, 2026  https://www.rt.com/news/639222-israel-violence-palestinians-holocaust/

Violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank echoes attacks on Jews during the Holocaust and poses an “existential threat” to Israel, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo has said.

Israeli settlers live in communities built in the West Bank, a territory Israel captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and which Palestinians seek as part of a future state. Successive Israeli governments have backed or tolerated the settlements for security, political, and religious reasons.

Pardo spoke to local media on Monday while touring Palestinian villages that have come under settler attacks in recent months.

”My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and what I saw reminded me of the events that happened against Jews in the last century,” Pardo said. “What I saw today made me feel ashamed to be Jewish.”

His comments come amid a surge in settler violence across the West Bank, with groups carrying out repeated raids on Palestinian communities, torching homes and vehicles, vandalizing property and assaulting residents, according to witnesses and human rights organizations. In the latest incident, two Palestinians, including a 14-year-old schoolboy, were killed last week after gunmen opened fire near a school.

Attacks occur on a near-daily basis and intensified during the US-Israeli war on Iran between February 28 and April 8, rights groups said. Yesh Din recorded 378 incidents over that period, in which eight Palestinians were killed and around 200 injured.

Pardo said the settlers behind the attacks, and the Israeli government’s failure to stop them, were creating the conditions for a future October 7-style assault from the West Bank, referring to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to the attack. More than 72,000 Palestinians were killed and over 172,000 injured in Israeli airstrikes and ground offensives, according to Palestinian health authorities.

The former Mossad chief warned that the violence unfolding in the West Bank could lead to a similar event, albeit in a different and potentially more severe form given the region’s complexity, adding that Israel was “sowing the seeds” for such an outcome.

May 5, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond

1 May 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Dr Dan Steinbock 

Lebanon accuses Israel of committing ecocide in country since 2023. It is an extension of Israel’s destruction of Gaza – and its obliteration doctrine.

Israeli military aggression has “reshaped both the physical and ecological landscape” of southern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese report (which does not consider the impacts of Israel’s latest barrage of attacks this spring).

In her foreword, Lebanon’s minister for the environment Tamara el Zein notes: “The scale and intentionality of the damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide, with consequences that extend far beyond immediate destruction.”

Obliteration ecocide in Lebanon

Released by the country’s National Council for Scientific Research and presented by the environment ministry, the report accuses Israel of “ecocide” during the 2023–2024 war and subsequent escalations. It frames environmental destruction not as incidental “collateral damage” but as systematic transformation of ecosystems.

Key findings are damning. They include:

  • 5,000 hectares of forest destroyed
  • Massive agricultural losses ($118m direct infrastructure damage; much larger indirect losses)
  • Soil contamination (including high phosphorus levels)
  • Air pollution from repeated strike cycles
  • Destruction of orchards and irrigation systems

Minister el Zein characterizes this as “intentional ecological destruction” affecting food systems, public health, and long-term viability of southern Lebanon’s rural economy.

International reporting on the same dossier highlights an estimated total damage burden of over $25 billion when recovery costs and economic losses are included. The figure is a combined total from the assessments by the Lebanese report and the World Bank Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) 2025.

This framing aligns with a growing legal discourse around “ecocide” as a potential international crime, particularly where environmental damage is widespread, long-term, and strategically embedded in military operations.

It is also aligned with UN reporting on the broader Israel–Lebanon escalation confirming extensive infrastructure destruction, civilian displacement, and strikes affecting residential areas.

As the ecocide of Gaza has gone effectively unpunished by the international community, the Netanyahu government is extending the environmental devastation into Lebanon and the proximate region.

Obliteration doctrine in Gaza

In The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), related commentaries and excerpts, I define this doctrine as the lethal mix of scorched earth policy, collective punishment and civilian victimization, coupled with massive indiscriminate bombardment and systematic use of artificial intelligence (AI).

The concept is vital because it connects the dots between military strategies, aerial bombardment, lethal deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. As Professor William Schabas, a leading scholar of genocide, notes, “the Obliteration Doctrine” “adds a new term to the lexicon on genocide, notably in the application of international law and its judicial mechanisms.”

Modern warfare in Gaza is no longer just counterinsurgency but systems-level destruction of the environmental and infrastructural substrate of life—water, soil, agriculture, energy, and urban continuity.

This interpretation overlaps with empirical reporting on Gaza’s environmental collapse:

Satellite analysis shows 38–48% of tree cover and farmland destroyed
Severe contamination of soil and groundwater
Large-scale destruction of greenhouses and irrigation systems
Air pollution from sustained bombardment and debris burning

These patterns are described in independent investigations as producing conditions of near-uninhabitability in many parts of Gaza.

Warfare is no longer bounded by battlefield geography. It becomes the restructuring—or “obliteration”—of ecological systems that sustain civilian life.

Ecocide here is not merely destruction of nature, but destruction of life-support systems as purposeful strategy. It is another word for cultural genocide.

Lebanon and the Gaza template

The Lebanese report and international commentary suggest strong structural parallels between Gaza and southern Lebanon operations:…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://theaimn.net/obliteration-ecocide-from-gaza-to-lebanon-and-beyond/

May 4, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Settler pogroms in Palestine are part of Israel’s illegal expansion policy

Armed colonists burn, beat, and kill with near-total impunity – because their violence serves a larger system of land theft and expulsion

Eva Karene Bartlett, Apr 30, 2026

Almost daily, there are updates on brutal attacks by armed settlers – really, colonists – against Palestinians. The colonists shoot or ferociously beat—sometimes to the point of muder—Palestinian civilians, male and female, young and old, including entire families.

These attacks have been occurring for decades. I’ve written about them many times, including what I saw in different regions of the West Bank during my eight months there in 2007. Back then, the violence of the colonists was already horrific. Now, the attacks are exponentially more frequent. The end goal is clear – drive the Palestinians permanently off their own land.

While many rightly note the increase of such attacks since 2023, and even more so following the Israeli-US attack on Iran, the drastic increase in colonist attacks began in 2021 and has continued to increase up to the present.

In November 2021, the Israeli publication Haaretz noted a 150% rise in settler attacks from 2019. A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report posted in September 2023 likewise showed an increase in attacks from 2021 and throughout 2022. It noted, “Three settler related incidents per day occurred on average in the first eight months of 2023 compared to an average of two per day in 2022 and one per day the year before. This is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since the UN started recording this data in 2006.”

The independent human rights organization and legal center Adalah reported in October 2023 on new regulations passed by the Israeli Knesset enabling still more Jewish Israelis to acquire and carry guns, an initiative put forth by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir. This is on top of the fact that illegal Jewish colonists have already carried and used guns against Palestinian civilians for decades.

Adalah noted, “By labeling Palestinians as ‘enemies’, Ben-Gvir, who does not conceal his racist views towards Palestinians, seeks to legitimize the blanket impunity granted to both Israel’s armed forces and ruthless Jewish-Israeli vigilantes for killing and injuring Palestinians.”

Arson crimes committed by colonists in recent months include setting fire to homes and vehicles in the southern community of Susiya; to homes in the Jenin region; setting fire to and burning the emergency room of a Palestinian Medical Relief clinic in the Nablus area; torching homes and vehicles in Tayasir village east of Tubas (and slashing open the forehead of a Palestinian resident) – to list just a handful of cases. Back in 2014, colonists kidnapped and deliberately burned a young teenager alive. In 2015, they firebombed a Palestinian home and burned to death a year-old infant inside.

In February, The Cradle reported that Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, downgraded attacks by Israeli colonists against Palestinian civilians from ‘terror attacks’ to ‘serious incidents’, meaning most crimes, including the arson attacks, are only recorded as “serious incidents.”

In March, swarms of Israeli colonists raided Palestinian villages near an illegal colony between Nablus and Jenin, setting homes, vehicles, and property ablaze, according to Palestinians from the region who also said Israeli forces prevented the entry of firefighters and ambulances.

“Israeli forces’ jeeps came with the settlers. Israeli forces chased  people and opend fire on them to ensure they couldn’t fight off the settlers,” an older resident testified.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The 2021 Haaretz article also cited a senior Israeli security figure saying, “These are not attacks by bored children. You have to call things by their name. In some of the cases it’s simply Jewish terrorism.”

Complete impunity

In April 2026, Haaretz, published an article about how Palestinians who were being endlessly abused by illegal, armed, Jewish settlers’ violent incursions filed a complaint against the colonists, including with video footage of their car. He was detained and released the same day.

The next time the same Palestinians called the police when the same colonists invaded their land, the Israeli police arrested them under the pretext of allegedly “throwing stones” at the colonists. One of the Palestinians was beaten by Israeli soldiers who extinguished cigarettes on his wrist. He was interrogated about having the audacity to film the invading colonists.

Palestinian Christian human rights advocate Ihab Hassan, in an April 2026 post about Israeli colonist attacks, noted, “If a Palestinian tries to defend his home from these terrorists, he will be killed or imprisoned for life. If settlers shoot and kill Palestinians in their own homes, nothing will happen to them. What should we call a system that punishes victims and grants criminals full impunity based on religion, race, and nationality?”

Indeed, in April, Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem reported on an Israeli colonist invasion of a Palestinian village “as part of ongoing efforts to take it over,” noting, “Residents who tried to fend them off with stones came under heavy fire from a settler on military reserve duty who joined his friends as reinforcement. One of the bullets fatally hit Ali Hamadneh, 23, in the back while he was running away and posed no danger, as is evident in footage of the incident.”

B’Tselem noted that the Israeli army spokesperson later claimed that a reservist soldier carried out a “suspect-arrest procedure that included firing in the air and then firing at one of the stone-throwers.”

In March, after an Israeli colonist ran over a five year old Palestinian child, seriously injuring her, police then detained three solidarity activists, not arresting the colonist who had hit the girl……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/settler-pogroms-in-palestine-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=195969004&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

May 4, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 1)

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.

By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974

A provocative Royal Commission submission by Dr Evan Jones argues that Australia’s antisemitism debate cannot be separated from Israel, Zionism and their political influence.

Submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Part 1

General

This submission can be reduced to one word — Israel.

There you have the answer to your inquiry. Dismantle apartheid Israel and see so-called “antisemitism” disappear overnight, save for a small ineradicable but prosecutable fringe

There is really no reason for this Royal Commission at all, as the problem is self-evident. The Commission will not solve the problem that it was formally established to resolve because its agenda is diversionary. Indeed, it will compound the problem because it will, in all probability (as it is seemingly intended to do), reinforce the influence of the Australian Zionist lobby and thus the ongoing impunity of Israel.

The problem arises from the conflation of two forces.

One: Israel is a nation founded on terrorism and wilfully sustained on deep-seated racism.

We know that nation-states are perennially born of violence, expropriation and repression (Australia as a case study), but Israel is a pronounced variation on a common colonialist theme. Israel was born of naked terrorism against an entire (non-Jewish) indigenous population. It was explicitly created and has been sustained as a racist apartheid state. Its borders have never been determined, envisaging ongoing expansion (lebensraum) — “from the river to the sea” (and beyond).

Palestinian Israelis (descendants of those whom the Zionist terrorist gangs failed to expel) are second-class citizens. Palestinian non-Israelis, under Occupation and under martial law, are denied the most basic human rights. Gaza has been a concentration camp since Sharon supposedly “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005.

The sadistic murder of Gazans since October 2023 is reminiscent of the Germans’ feverish pursuit of Jews and Bolsheviks after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Israel has long undermined United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) personnel and facilities, which attempt to instil a modicum of humanity into a population long starving from Israeli blockages. Israel endorses carnage by fanatical settlers on West Bank Palestinians, murdering and destroying Palestinian livelihoods at will — for which they enjoy absolute immunity.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) murder children with pleasure. Children are imprisoned indefinitely for throwing stones. Adult prisoners are tortured and murdered. Israel wilfully murders foreign dignitaries (most recently, the Iranian National Security Council chief Ali Larijani, reputed “moderate” and skilled negotiator), which highlights that mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has put to words what has been the manifesto of all Israeli leadership: there will never be a Palestinian state (September 2025).

Long-term ethnic cleansing has now turned to genocide, ongoing in defiance of the formal “ceasefire”. Israel destroys essential infrastructure, murders aid workers and journalists — because it can. The journalist murder count is now further “totting up” in southern Lebanon.

Representative — this month (March 2026) marks the 23rd anniversary of the crushing of American Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has delivered the 21-page report, ‘Torture and genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967’, dated 19 February 2026. Albanese’s team outline the depths of depravity and inhumanity to which the Israeli regime has now sunk in its attempted destruction of the Palestinian people.

Some excerpts:

Torture has always been a central feature of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians. Yet, since October 2023, Israel has employed it on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.

Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms. Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population.

During its Mandate in Palestine, Britain used torture as one of the counterinsurgency tactics honed in Ireland and later imparted to Zionist militias; such practices, a colonial legacy, were then absorbed into the Israeli security apparatus before and after 1948 as a tool of repression and a preventive measure against Palestinian resistance. From early State-building and through decades of occupation, Israel has practised and condoned coercive violence as a structural component of its apparatus of domination.

An ecosystem of discriminatory legal frameworks and abusive operational practices has metastasized, encompassing Israeli military detention sites and prisons.

Since October 2023, torture in detention has, been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance — a clear feature of genocide. All Palestinians have been treated collectively as “terrorists” and “security threats”.

For her luminous competence, commitment and courage, Albanese was subject to comprehensive oppressive sanctions by the unhinged U.S. Trump Administration in July 2025.

Israel defies all international institutions and laws that proscribe the abuse of state power. Israel’s lobbying and propaganda regime (hasbara) is probably the most extensive of any state in history. Israeli authorities lie about the state’s forces’ actions without remorse.

The Israeli state is a parasite, receiving over US$300 billion (AU$418.7 billion) in aid from U.S. governments since 1950 (a great deal of which flows back to U.S. weapons manufacturers), supplemented by an estimated US$2 billion (AU$2.8 billion) per annum in donations from overseas Jewish “charities”, propped up at the country taxpayers’ expense. In particular, the Jewish National Fund directs funds to obliterating indigenous history in historic Palestine.

In short, the state of Israel is a pariah state, a barbaric regime, an abomination.

Two: All self-described “official” Jewish representative organisations in Australia support and lobby for Israel unreservedly. It is a full-time occupation. 

Such “representative” organisations oppose basic human rights for Palestinians under Israeli control. They socialise their children into “a love of Israel” in Jewish “faith” schools. Some of their children are currently enrolled with the IDF to kill Palestinians.

Such organisations lobby Australian governments to support Israel, inhibiting Australian governments from adopting a principled stance towards Israeli criminality. They harass media management and editorial, thus gaining privileged access to and biased coverage from media outlets that the public relies on for supposedly unbiased information and opinion. Their ridiculous defences of Israel (op-eds, letters, buying off journalists) are published with great regularity. Anti-Zionist Australian Jews (vide Louise Adler and so on) and their organisations (the recently formed Jewish Council of Australia) are pilloried, indeed “excommunicated”.

In essence, Australian Jewish “representative” organisations act as a fifth column for a foreign state against Australian national interests – naturally antagonistic to ‘social cohesion’.

One and two in combination.

The Australian Jewish community, by virtue of its “official” representatives, courageous dissenters excepted, is complicit in Israeli genocide. And not just passively but actively. There has been no mea culpa on the part of executives of the key Jewish organisations (such as ECAJ, ZFA, AIJAC). Nobody in the Jewish community that underpins these organisations has sought to overturn the leadership of these key organisations in order to reorient their agenda and priorities.

In short, Israel and the “official” Australian Jewish community are joined at the hip.

It is not unrealistic to infer that the Bondi attack (and multiple incidents simply labelled “antisemitic”) is blowback for Israel’s character and actions and its local support network. The Israeli machine thus puts the security of global Jewry at risk (indeed, its own Jewish population) and doesn’t care.

A Zionist foot soldier is published in The Sydney Morning Herald (22 March), in denial regarding the intimate connection:

‘While David Leser’s article (SMH & Melbourne Age, 20 March [2026]) raises some thought-provoking points, it falls into the trap of attributing antisemitism in Australia to the actions of the Israeli Government. No other national or ethnic group in Australia is held to account for the actions of governments in countries overseas. So why is it considered reasonable for Jews in Australia to be relentlessly discriminated against for the actions of the Netanyahu Government?’

After the Bondi Beach murders, Israeli flags were well represented among the flower collections and mourners. Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering.

This bizarre anomaly is enhanced when the Zionist Federation of Australia (as befits its name) initiated the idea of inviting the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, to Australia, subsequently legitimised and authorised by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and dragging the Governor-General into the sordid process.

Another foot soldier grasps the connection but declines to understand the implications (SMH, 9 January 2026):

‘President Herzog is the legitimate head of state of the internationally recognised democratic state of Israel, rightfully invited to commiserate with Australians after the appalling terrorist atrocity at Bondi, in which predominantly Jewish people were murdered and injured.’

One notes in passing that Israel is not a democracy but an ethnocracy — no amount of affirmation is going to change the lie and the blind spot in the letter writer’s eye. To repeat, Israel is apparently seen as the mother ship, the source of solace for those suffering, yet it is the ultimate cause of that suffering. ‘Rightfully invited’ — really?

Herzog is not a passive head of state but an active participant in Israeli barbarism. Herzog comes to Australia, spends a token moment with victim families and survivors, declines to visit the fire-bombed Orthodox (non-Zionist) Adass Israel synagogue (“for reasons of security”) and spends the bulk of his time playing Israeli politician (‘not the time for a two-state solution’, meets with ASIO and so on).  

The implication is ugly. Those murdered at Bondi are being instrumentalised (as with Netanyahu’s treatment of Hamas’ Israeli hostages) in the defence of the state of Israel and its current genocidal agenda. Appalling, no?

April 30, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, AUSTRALIA, Israel, politics | Leave a comment

Antisemitism and Israel: A challenge to the Australian narrative (Part 2)

By Evan Jones | 27 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/antisemitism-and-israel-a-challenge-to-the-australian-narrative,20974

Part 2

The Commission’s Terms of Reference

‘AND the determination of the Australian Government to respond to the attack, and the factors leading up to the attack, as a matter of urgency by addressing antisemitism within the Australian community, including since 7 October 2023.’

Investigating the factors leading up to the attack could and should have been the responsibility of the mooted and more suited Richardson review. A royal commission is not the most appropriate vehicle towards this end.

Any investigation regarding “antisemitism” in Australia has to put Israel front and centre. The “official” Jewish community, AKA the Zionist lobby, naturally wants to exclude it.

The appalling Segal Report contains no substantive reference to Israel (my dissection here and here), thus being not merely worthless but disingenuous (vide Gwenaël Velge’s summary of the counter-Segal Greenslade and Briskman report, Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out) and dangerous. Ditto the absence of any substantive reference to Israel in the most recent annual report (December 2025) of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (sic) (dissected here).

‘AND that the Australian Government has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.’

This submitter is frankly gobsmacked to find that this fraudulent “definition” has been officially adopted. The definition has been widely criticised, including by one of its originators, Kenneth Stern. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition is essentially about demonising criticism of Israel. Any proposed definition of antisemitism that attempts to delineate the terms on which one is allowed to criticise Israel without censure is automatically illegitimate.

The adoption of the IHRA definition nullifies any legitimacy that the paraphernalia of a royal commission might have and destroys any prospect of an honest analysis and a substantive functional prognosis. This adoption of the IHRA definition gives the impression that the Royal Commission, even inadvertently, will serve as yet another front for the pro-Israel lobby.

With the Royal Commission proceeding based on the IHRA definition, it can only turn into an inquisition. It can have nothing intelligent or ethical to offer about real antisemitism and can have nothing to offer in terms of genuinely dealing with it. It will be remembered as a squandering of the significant money that funds it and for the farcical theatre that is its essence.

‘AND recognising that strengthening the national consensus in support of democracy, freedom and the rule of law (social cohesion) provides the strongest defence against antisemitism and other forms of religious and ideologically motivated extremism.’

This sentence reads like it was written by AI. Who wrote this rubbish? One cannot have social cohesion as long as a particular Australian community coheres and operates actively as a fifth column in support of a foreign rogue state and influences Australian politics, both foreign and domestic, and media towards that end.

AND that hearing from the Jewish Australian community will be important to informing the recommendations of your inquiry and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions, and other sections of Australian society.’

Which ‘Jewish Australian community’? Is this obscurantism a product of naivete or of cynical contempt? Is the pro-Israel lobby running this show? Will anti-Zionist Jews and their organisations be consulted? Will anti-Zionist non-Jewish organisations (which have Jewish membership), such as the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, be consulted?

‘…and recognising concerns relating to educational and cultural institutions…’ Meaning? Which and whose concerns? Is this an oblique reference to forthcoming censorship, sackings, institutional defunding and hasbara implants as foreshadowed in the Segal Report?

To the Honourable Virginia Bell AC

We do… appoint you to be a Commission of inquiry, and require and authorise you to inquire into the following matters:

(a) tackling antisemitism by:…

This section is at the heart of the Commission’s Terms of Reference misdirection. Misdiagnosed symptoms are highlighted rather than causes.

The authorities need to cut the umbilical cord between the Australian Jewish community (including demolishing the pernicious influence of its Zionist leadership) and the criminal state of Israel.

In particular, (a)(iv) deserves comment. The ‘mental health and wellbeing of Jewish Australians’? No doubt the Commission hearings will consider the mental health of anti-Zionist Australian Jews who experience the mental anguish of seeing Jewish Israelis acting like Nazis (and supposedly in the name of global Jewry), but who also suffer the obloquy of abuse by the Australian Zionist Jewish establishment for their ethical stance.

As for the mental health of Australian Zionist Jews, tied inexplicably to a racially supremacist Israel, it is a psychopathology and to their own account — save that their aberrant mental state has the Palestinians (and now the Iranians and, once again, the Lebanese) as its ongoing victims.

Zionist Jewish University students, fresh from their “faith” schools with their “love of Israel” and now nurtured in the bosom of the Zionist Australasian Union of Jewish Students, find their “sensitivities” affected by campus protests against Israeli genocide. So as not to upset these sensitive souls, inured to the genocide of lesser ethnicities, campus protests have to be shut down.

If the Commission is concerned with shoring up the ‘mental health and wellbeing of [Zionist] Jewish Australians’, it is not an agenda that any Australian imbued with ethical sympathies (which includes anti-Zionist Jewish Australians) could have any tolerance for.

‘(b) making any recommendations to assist law enforcement, border control, immigration and security agencies…’

Is this code for inhibiting access to refugee status of people escaping Israeli onslaughts and who naturally take a dim view of Israel’s modus operandi?

‘(c) examine the circumstances surrounding the antisemitic Bondi terrorist attack…’

This was supposed to be the focus of the Richardson review, but that was merged inappropriately into the Royal Commission’s framework. Now Richardson has retired, recognising the Commission’s structured dysfunctionality. The most important subject for investigation is now without a suitable home and personnel to proceed.

‘(d) make any other recommendations… that would contribute to strengthening social cohesion…’

The means to strengthening social cohesion is to dismantle the pro-Israel lobby in Australia and for the Albanese Government to develop and sustain a principled foreign policy. By contrast, the Terms of Reference of this Commission appear to direct the Commission’s operations to enhance that lobby’s influence and to ignore and to implicitly condone the Government’s cowardice.

Methinks that the Royal Commission’s slip is showing. One gets the strong impression that one is in for more than farce. Rather, the Australian public is in for an authoritarian state run in the interests of an Australian Zionist mafia, with which the current Australian Labor Government is already in cahoots (and the Liberal Opposition even more craven).

April 30, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, AUSTRALIA, Israel | Leave a comment

With 38,000+ Dead, Women and Girls Make Up Over Half of Those Killed in Israel’s US-Backed War on Gaza: UN

“Not a single combatant among them,” said one human rights activist. “Further confirmation that over 90% of the victims are innocent civilians.”

Brad Reed for Common Dreams, Apr 17, 2026 https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-gaza-war-women

Israel’s yearslong assault on Gaza has killed more than 38,000 women and girls, according to a report released Friday by the United Nations.

In total, the UN found that at least 22,000 women and 16,000 girls have been killed in the conflict, an average of nearly 50 women and girls per day.

Sofia Calltorp, chief of humanitarian action at UN Women, said the report shows how Israel’s war on Gaza “has affected every aspect of life, with its most horrific toll seen in the scale of death.”

“Women and girls accounted for a proportion of deaths far higher than those observed in previous conflicts in Gaza,” Calltorp emphasized. “Those killed were mothers, they were daughters, sisters, and friends—deeply loved by those around them. They were individuals with lives and with dreams.”

More than 72,000 people in total have been killed since Israel launched its attack on Gaza in October 2023, after Hamas invaded Israeli territory and killed approximately 1,200 Israelis. Experts warn that the current known death toll is likely an undercount.

While Palestinian women and girls represent more than half of those who have been killed, according to the report, Israeli and US officials have persisted in claiming the US-backed assault has targeted Hamas fighters.

“Not a single combatant among them,” said Ramy Abdul, chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. “Further confirmation that over 90% of the victims are innocent civilians.”

Although a ceasefire has been in place since October 2025, the report notes that an estimated 730 Gaza residents have been killed over the last six months. Additionally, the report says the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire.

“Nearly one million women and girls have been displaced, repeatedly,” said Calltorp. “Access to water and food have been severely limited, with nearly 790,000 women and girls experiencing crisis-level or catastrophic levels of food insecurity. Extensive damage to infrastructure has made it almost impossible for women and girls in Gaza to access their basic needs, like healthcare.”

Calltorp demanded that the ceasefire deal “be fully implemented,” and that “respect for international law must be upheld” to ease the suffering in Gaza.

“Humanitarian assistance must reach those in need—at scale and without obstruction,” Calltorp said. “And women and girls must be placed at the center of response and recovery efforts.”

In addition to causing a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, Israel in recent weeks has also been waging an aerial bombing and ground invasion in Lebanon that has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 1 million. US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Israel and Lebanon came to a ceasefire agreement that is set to last for 10 days.

At the same time, Israeli settlers have been waging a campaign of increased violence against Palestinians living in the West Bank, and veteran Israeli war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai on Thursday declared that the actions of the settlers look like “ethnic cleansing.”

April 22, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Not a Ceasefire—A Reset: The Quiet Expansion of Palestinian Incarceration

April 14, 2026, ScheerPost Staff, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/14/not-a-ceasefire-a-reset-the-quiet-expansion-of-palestinian-incarceration/

While global attention drifts, the machinery of occupation does not slow—it tightens. Arrests replace releases. Silence replaces scrutiny. And behind it all, a system of incarceration continues to expand, largely out of view.

In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa sits down with scholar-activist Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi to expose what they describe as a revolving door of detention shaping daily life for Palestinians. What emerges is not simply a prison system—but an architecture of control that extends far beyond prison walls, touching every aspect of Palestinian existence.

More than 9,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli custody—a number that continues to climb even after high-profile prisoner releases.

Despite the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners during what was labeled a ceasefire in October 2025, a new wave of arrests has already erased that moment. Today, more than 9,000 Palestinians are again held in Israeli custody, according to Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, with the total constantly shifting as new detentions replace those released.

“It’s a revolving door,” she explains. “You release prisoners—and then you arrest more.”

At the center of that system is administrative detention—imprisonment without charge, without trial, and often without end. Detainees may never be told what they’re accused of, while access to lawyers, family, and even basic information is severely restricted.

Two legal systems operate side by side: one for Israeli settlers, another for Palestinians. Even children are caught in it—Palestinian minors can be prosecuted as adults under military law, stripped of protections others receive.

Inside prisons, conditions continue to deteriorate: reduced food, denied medical care, and near-total isolation since October 2023.

But the system doesn’t end at the prison gates.

Night raids, arbitrary arrests, and movement restrictions turn daily life into an extension of confinement—what Abdulhadi describes as a reality where prison becomes a condition, not just a place.

Children grow up inside it. Families are fractured by it. Entire communities are shaped around it.

And still, the cycle continues.

“The people will resist because they want to live,” Abdulhadi says. This is not a story of what has happened—but of what is still happening, in front of our very eyes.

About children who can identify military aircraft before they can read. Children who grow up navigating checkpoints, raids, and the constant threat of arrest.

“They should not be scared every night,” Abdulhadi says. “They should not have nightmares.”

April 17, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

‘This Arrogant Enemy’: Israel’s Colonial Reversion to the Noose

 April 1, 2026 SCHEERPOST,  Zarefah Baroud for Thinking Palestine

“Israel is also confronted by something older than Israel itself: namely, the willingness and ability of the Palestinian people to mobilize and resist in the face of state-sanctioned death.”

The authorities cuffed the nationalist detainees, leading them to their death at the gallows, scaffolding and rope that had borne witness to the final moments of dozens of nationalists like them. As they approached the noose with grace and a sacred conviction, they declared their final tribute to the beloved homeland: “Filasteen ‘Arabiyya!” (“Palestine is Arab”), and issued a final, unflinching indictment of her oppressors.

The families and communities of the martyrs gather outside Sijn Akka, dressed in white and adorned with henna as if they were attending a wedding, receiving the martyr’s body among eruptions of ululations and celebratory songs.

This is not a romantic tale, but rather the tradition adopted by Palestinians throughout the British Mandate for Palestine, a colonial regime that saw to the systematic annihilation of an entire generation of Palestinian nationalists.

The Spectacle of the Noose

While this scene played out on many occasions throughout the British Mandate for Palestine, it could conceivably happen tomorrow, if proposals put forward by Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, are approved by the Israeli Knesset. If this comes to pass, the “death penalty bill” — an amendment to the current Israeli penal code – will result in the execution of those who have allegedly killed Israelis for nationalist purposes (or, more reductively and disingenuously, for “anti-Semitic” reasons).

Further, recent reports have confirmed that the Knesset’s proposed legislation draft will no longer perform the death penalty via lethal injection but rather transform the execution of Palestinian detainees into a colonial spectacle. In other words, the original mode of colonial execution would be restored as the chosen method of capital punishment par excellence.

If approved, hanging will once more become a colonial spectacle, which is enacted, in the sterile and removed wording of the National Security Committee, with the aim of “cut[ting] off terrorism at its root and creat[ing] a heavy deterrent.”

It is critical that, as we discuss this pending policy, which Abdel Nasser Farawna characterizes as improbable (though not impossible), we recognize that the extrajudicial execution of prisoners has always been Israel Prison Service (IPS) policy.

Ben-Gvir has put forward his proposal at a time (the period since October 7, 2023) when the Israeli authorities have murdered detainees at an unprecedented rate. In April 2023, the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees estimated 236 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli custody after 1967, a period of 56 years. In the post-October 7 period, in contrast, almost one hundred Palestinians have died in custody, a killing rate around 10 times the historical average.

A November 2025 report produced by Physicians for Human Rights Israel suggests that this may actually be a substantial under-estimate, by virtue of the (at least) 14,000 Gazans who are still missing, presumed to be dead or abducted at the time of writing…………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/01/this-arrogant-enemy-israels-colonial-reversion-to-the-noose/

April 7, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

‘The rope is for Arabs only’: Israel’s new death penalty law for Palestinians recycles a colonial playbook

For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.

The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine.

The passing of the recent Israeli death penalty law legalizes an already existing policy of executions within a set schedule. The same colonial logic governs how Israel launches its wars: first Gaza, then Lebanon, now Iran. Resistance in this region is refusing Israel’s timetable of death.

By Abdaljawad Omar, Mondoweiss,   April 2, 2026  

The picture of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir jubilantly trying to open a champagne bottle on the Knesset floor over the passing of a death penalty law for Palestinians will be anchored in history as one of those photographs that needs no caption.

It’s the image of a country that has never truly left the colonial moment into which it was born. It didn’t simply inherit British practices, but kept them alive for over 70 years. It now reaches back to retrieve one of the darkest of these practices.

Israel’s new death penalty law, which exclusively targets Palestinians, did not come out of nowhere. It was passed down from a scaffold the British had already built on the same land, testing it on the same people under the same sky. In his study of Britain’s “pacification” of Palestine, Matthew Hughes, a military historian at Brunel University, shows how the military courts established by the British Mandate in November 1937 were built for speed above all else — a terror performed so quickly that no one had time to appeal or look away. Shaykh Farhan al-Sa’di, an elderly Qassamite revolutionary leader and one of the principal field commanders of the 1936 uprising, was captured on a Monday, tried on a Wednesday, and hanged on a Saturday. It’s the same law Israel reintroduced today.

What those courts also reveal is that British execution policy was, from the beginning, applied differently depending on who stood before the judge. Palestinians were hanged for carrying four bullets; Jews received prison sentences for firing weapons. The courts were equal on paper and unequal in practice, and everyone living under them knew it.

Bahjat Abu Gharbiyya, a Palestinian nationalist and resistance fighter who lived through the British Mandate and left some of the most detailed firsthand accounts of that period, documented this disparity plainly: in his account, the capital sentence fell on Arabs, while Jews charged with the same or graver offenses walked away with prison sentences. The rope, in practice, was for Arabs only.

The new Israeli law carries this same racism forward, entering a prison system where Palestinians make up the vast majority of political prisoners, and where the definition of who is dangerous has been stretched until it fits almost anyone who refuses to disappear quietly. The rope, as it always has been in Palestine, is for Arabs only.

There is something else that legalizing execution does, something beneath the law’s stated purpose that may be its more consequential effect. Hughes shows that in Mandate Palestine, official policy and unofficial violence never operated separately. As British courts hanged men with increasing speed and confidence, the threshold for what soldiers felt permitted to do in the field quietly fell. At Miska, a Palestinian village in the coastal area, British police tortured four captured Palestinian rebels in May 1938, killing them once interrogation was complete — not in a courtroom, but in the open.

Law and lawlessness were not opposites in that system: they fed each other. The widened application of capital punishment in the courts gave license to soldiers in the field. What we are watching in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank today follows the same pattern, pushing the boundaries of permissible conduct.

For years, Israeli forces already operated under rules that permitted the shooting and killing of unarmed persons, so long as they could nominally be deemed a threat. But Israel’s current war has expanded this category to the point that nearly everyone can now be made into a target.

A codification of existing practice

In this sense, Israel is not doing something new with this law. It is catching up with itself. The execution law is largely a shield designed to protect soldiers from even the limited threat of accountability, and to formalize what the field has already made routine. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, of the 1,260 complaints filed against soldiers for harming Palestinians between 2017 and 2021, soldiers were prosecuted in less than 1% of cases — 0.87%, to be precise. The law does not create impunity, but guarantees it. Once enshrined, it pushes the violence further, each legal expansion making extrajudicial killing easier to justify, and each unjustified killing creating pressure for new legal cover. They drive each other.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/the-rope-is-for-arabs-only-israels-new-death-penalty-law-for-palestinians-recycles-a-colonial-playbook/

April 3, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

Obscene US-Israeli murder of Iranian schoolchildren cannot be whitewashed

Western media is either silent or implicitly blaming Tehran for the strike that killed 168 girl

Eva Karene Bartlett, Substack,, Mar 05, 2026

In Iran, under ongoing US-Israeli attacks, a mass funeral took place today for 168 Iranian schoolgirls aged 7-12, killed by an Israeli airstrike on February 28.

The strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, in broad daylight, when the children were at school. Fourteen teachers were also killed in the bombing. The bombing occurred as part of US-Israeli attacks sadistically dubbed ‘Operation Epic Fury’, attacks which have to date targeted schools, hospitals, residential areas and other civilian infrastructure.

It was a scene all too familiar to Palestinians: grief-stricken parents collapsing sobbing at the site of their daughters’ murders, clutching bloodstained backpacks, pulling out schoolbooks and personal items of their slain daughters. Children’s desks covered in debris from the bombing. A child’s shoe in the rubble. Death where life had flourished.

None of this is being conveyed by Western legacy media – only ghoulish gloating over the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran and the murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and his young granddaughter and children.

On March 2, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted a photo of the graves being dug on X, noting, “These are graves being dug for more than 160 innocent young girls who were killed in the US-Israeli bombing of a primary school. Their bodies were torn to shreds. This is how “rescue” promised by Mr. Trump looks in reality. From Gaza to Minab, innocents murdered in cold blood.”

At the time of this writing, 69 of the murdered girls remain unidentified.

International media reaction: Silence

If the bombed school had been in Israel or Ukraine, news of it would have been plastered on front pages of Western media for days, with widespread demands for retaliation, or at least for justice and accountability. Back in 2016, Western media alleged Syria or Russian planes had injured Aleppo boy Omran Daqneesh. His photo went viral, for weeks, even years. A CNN news anchor fake-sobbed for the boy.

In 2017, in his Aleppo home, his father told me their home was not hit in an airstrike, but rather terrorists shelled it and used the boy in a cynical, and effective, photo op.

Footage shared on Telegram and on X clearly show horrific scenes of some of the young girls torn apart in the US-Israeli bombing of their school. But just like the untold thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel, as well as the half a million Iraqi children killed by US sanctions, these Iranian children’s lives don’t merit Western media outrage. Instead, they produce cynical reports that not only lack any semblance of empathy, but suggest that Iran is either lying about or is to blame for the murders.

Take the BBC’s report, which describes the massacre as a “reported” strike on a school, which “Iran has blamed the US and Israel” for. Casting doubt is standard for legacy media whitewashing the US and Israel’s crimes. The US is “looking into reports.” Israel is “not aware.” Just one of those mysterious unknown strikes.

The BBC then overtly blamed the Iranian government as untrustworthy, writing, “Deep mistrust of the Iranian regime, however, makes official reports difficult for many to accept, and some Iranians directly blamed the regime for the attack.”………………………………………….

Most Western media cite The US military’s Central Command (Centcom) as saying it was “looking into reports of the incident,” and the Israeli army as saying it was “not aware of any IDF operations in the area.”Ah yes, the guilty shall investigate themselves. Right.

Even if you set aside the actual culprit of the school bombing, legacy media reports are devoid of any concern for the slaughtered children: no details, no empathy, no mention that they were murdered in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The tone would be radically different were the children Israeli, Ukrainian or American. We would see names, ages, stories about them. They would be humanized – if only they were not Iranian (or Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Syrian)………………………………………………… https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/obscene-us-israeli-murder-of-iranian?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=189965341&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

March 8, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, media | Leave a comment

‘Flagrant War Crime’: Investigation Recreates 2025 Israeli Massacre, Cover-Up of 15 Gaza Aid Workers

By Democracy Now!, SCHEERPOST, 27 Feb 26

It’s been almost one year since Israeli forces killed 15 Palestinian medics and aid workers in a brutal two-hour massacre on a vehicle convoy in southern Gaza. Israeli soldiers had attempted to cover it up by burying the bodies in a shallow mass grave, and crushing the rescue vehicles with heavy machinery, but a new investigation by Forensic Architecture and Earshot has recreated a minute-by-minute accounting of what took place. Director of Earshot Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who analyzed audio from video evidence alongside witness accounts, calls the Israeli response to the attack an “obstruction of justice.” He says “there is no reason why the Israeli army, with all of its GPS coordinates, its drones in the sky, couldn’t have done this internal investigation at a way higher resolution than we can have done.”

“We’ve been able to show that the attack continues for over two hours — until 7 a.m. in the morning, where we have the last recording of the night,” says Samaneh Moafi, assistant director of research at Forensic Architecture.

Transcript……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2026/02/27/flagrant-war-crime-investigation-recreates-2025-israeli-massacre-cover-up-of-15-gaza-aid-workers/

March 2, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israeli troops fired 900+ rounds at Gaza medics – report

24 Feb, 2026, https://www.rt.com/news/632982-israel-gaza-medics-killing/

Hundreds of rounds were fired at aid workers during a March 2025 massacre at Tal as-Sultan, an independent investigation says

Israeli soldiers fired over 900 rounds at a convoy of clearly marked emergency vehicles in Rafah in 2025, killing 15 Palestinian aid workers, some of them shot at close range, an independent investigation has found.

The attack took place on March 18, 2025 in the Tal as-Sultan area of southern Gaza, where local responders had been dispatched to collect wounded civilians. Fifteen Palestinian aid workers were killed, including medics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society and members of the Civil Defense.

The victims were traveling in five ambulances and one fire truck, all clearly marked and operating with emergency lights, when they came under sustained gunfire, according to a report released on Monday by independent research agency Forensic Architecture and audio investigation group Earshot.

Investigators reconstructed the incident using audio recordings, satellite imagery, video footage, and witness testimony. Some of the victims were reportedly “shot ‘execution-style’ from close range.”

Investigators analyzed footage recovered from the phone of one of the slain paramedics and identified at least 910 gunshots during the attack, with 844 bullets fired over five and a half minutes. “During this time, at least five shooters fired simultaneously, and witness testimonies suggest as many as thirty soldiers were present in the area,” according to the report.

The report said Israeli forces later crushed the vehicles with heavy machinery and tried to bury them along with the bodies. The victims, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests, were recovered from a mass grave nearby, the researchers said.

One of the two survivors was abducted by Israeli forces, and were held without charge for 37 days at the Israeli Sde Teiman detention facility and released in poor health. He testified that soldiers confiscated and buried his phone. The other was used as a “human tool” at an Israeli military checkpoint near the site, the report added.

The Israel Defense Forces said the area was an active combat zone and that troops believed they were facing security risks. They later claimed that one vehicle may have been linked to Hamas, which was disputed by the survivors and humanitarian organizations. An internal Israeli inquiry launched in April 2025 cited “professional failures” but rejected allegations of deliberate killings or criminal conduct and recommended no criminal action against the units involved.

The UN, Red Cross, and a number of human rights groups condemned the killings.

Hundreds of medical and emergency personnel have been killed or injured since October 2023, when the IDF began its campaign in the enclave in response to a Hamas incursion into Israel that left at least 1,200 people dead and 250 taken hostage. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 72,000 people have been killed since the war began.

February 27, 2026 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

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