Occupation and Israeli Violence

marwan
Opinion
June 18, 2026

In the context of Israel’s unlawful occupation and its imposition of a system of apartheid against all Palestinians, and against the backdrop of its ongoing genocide in Gaza, Israeli authorities have been recently accelerating its violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in pursuing its policy of ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank.

This policy has been implemented through the forcible displacement of Palestinians in refugee camps, Bedouin and herding communities in the West Bank, as well as the creation and expansion of settlements , acts that amount to the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer.

Palestine’s Permanent Mission to the UN on June 12 sounded the alarm over the newest largest wave of forced displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

During a briefing held by the Palestine’s Permanent Mission to the UN in Geneva, Palestine’s Permanent Representative, ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi, warned of the unprecedented deterioration of conditions in the occupied West Bank amid the upsurge of colonist attacks, colonial settlement expansion, and the ongoing military offensive on the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams, which has triggered the largest wave of forced displacement in the West Bank since 1967, alongside widespread destruction of infrastructure, homes and civilian facilities.

He stressed that the West Bank was witnessing a dangerous escalation at the political, economic and humanitarian levels due to Israel’s unbridled annexation and settler-colonialism policies, arrests, extrajudicial killings, colonist violence, and the continued withholding of Palestinian clearance revenues.

On his part, UNRWA representatives outlined the latest developments in the northern West Bank, pointing to escalating destruction and the forced displacement of more than 45,000 Palestinians, attacks on infrastructure and medical facilities, and Israeli measures aimed at demolishing the Agency’s premises in occupied Jerusalem.

Israeli authorities have been accelerating annexation through a state-driven campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities in Area C of the occupied West Bank, while committing the crime against humanity of forcible transfer.

The Israeli government has made formal annexation an explicit policy objective .

It has accelerated settlement expansion and land grabs, increased financial and logistical support to settlements, and has armed settlers, thereby enabling a brutal state-sanctioned campaign of settler violence and of forced displacement of Palestinians from Area C.

This area constitutes over 60 per cent of the occupied West Bank and has long been central to Israel’s efforts to control land and demographics, given its natural resources, vital grazing and agricultural land.

Communities in Area C have been facing growing risks of displacement and settlement expansion.

The Jordan Valley and South Hebron Hills have been areas under particular pressure where residents have faced repeated raids, demolitions and damage to infrastructure. Restrictions on access to land and essential services have also increased pressure on these communities and State -backed settler violence and home demolitions have forcibly displaced thousands of Palestinians in, emptying out over 100 villages entirely.

In the Gaza Strip , Israel’s ongoing military operations and evacuation orders despite the ceasefire have displaced roughly 90 per cent of the population (approximately 1.9 million people), with much of the civilian infrastructure destroyed to create long-term buffer zones.

Families have been displaced from their neighborhoods many times – and the last time they were uprooted, they were homeless for more than six months.

Israel’s ‘voluntary emigration’ plan from Gaza is its latest attempt to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Strip .

Israel’s defense minister has advanced plans to remove Palestinians from the Gaza Strip through “voluntary emigration”.

Israel Katz said late last May that the plans would take place “at the proper time and in the proper manner”.

Israel’s security cabinet approved a proposal by Katz in March to establish a directorate within his ministry to facilitate “migration” from the enclave.

Despite the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and wrought utter destruction on the coastal enclave, the vast majority of Palestinians there say they will never abandon their home.

Proposals for the removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have been repeatedly raised during the course of the Israeli genocide.

Though some ministers have framed the move to remove Palestinians as a voluntary option, other Israeli officials have been explicitly calling for forced expulsion, which is a war crime.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from forcibly transferring , deporting or displacing occupied people from an occupied territory while the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court names deportation by “expulsion or other coercive acts” a crime against humanity.

Ninety-two per cent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed or damaged. None of its 37 hospitals is fully functional. Aid trucks cut from 4,200 a week to 590 when Israel sealed the crossings in February, families burning trash to cook whatever arrives, children frozen to death last winter for lack of shelter materials Israel would not allow in.

The Yellow Line, the boundary of Israeli control drawn by the ceasefire, keeps moving west, swallowing water points and clinics, with Palestinians killed for approaching a line that approaches them. More than 986 Palestinians have been killed since the “ceasefire” was signed in October 2025.

Amid the expanding Israeli military incursions record levels of settler violence, and impending annexations , the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are fiercely resisting displacement , viewing it as a permanent severing from their homeland .

The writer is a Palestinian author, researcher and freelance journalist and contributed this article to the Jordan Times

marwan

Opinion

Flying Kites and The Politics of Fear

marwan
August 27, 2026

By Dr Oroub El-Abed

There is something profoundly unsettling about a military power becoming alarmed by children flying kites:

In Gaza, where childhood has already been stripped of so many of its ordinary meanings, even a kite has now entered the vocabulary of warfare. In August 2026, several kites drifted from Gaza toward Israeli communities near the border. Israel’s own military reported that the kites it recovered carried no suspicious material and posed no danger. Yet Israeli leaders responded by treating their appearance as a potential act of war. Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that a balloon would be treated like a kite and a kite like a drone, “with or without explosives.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Katz subsequently warned that those responsible could be targeted and that populations could be evacuated from areas identified as launch sites.

By 25 August, Palestinian committees in Gaza were asking parents to prevent their children from flying kites, not because kites themselves had become dangerous, but because the children holding their strings might become targets. One mother told Reuters that her ten-year-old son had always flown kites during the summer but that she would no longer allow him to do so.

The gravity of that moment

There is, of course, a history that cannot simply be erased. During Gaza’s Great March of Return beginning in 2018, incendiary kites and balloons were used by Palestinians and caused fires in agricultural fields inside Israel. Activists have examined those incendiary devices as an unusual form of anti-colonial resistance, while Israel characterised them as terrorism and a security threat. But recognising that history makes the present distinction more important, rather than less important. The kites now causing alarm were reportedly not incendiary: a children’s kite is equated with an armed drone, the category of “security threat” expands almost without limit.

Every aspect of Palestinian life has become securitised.

Even a woman in labour at a checkpoint, carrying a newborn into the world, is subjected to the same architecture of suspicion and control. A neighbourhood can be transformed overnight into a military zone following an act of resistance. And now even the sky above a displacement camp, entered only by a child’s kite, can be drawn into this expanding geography of securitisation.

Shrinking of the spaces in which Palestinians can safely live ordinary lives

Across the occupied West Bank, settler attacks have intensified. In July 2026, the UN human rights office warned of escalating settler violence, killings, destruction of property and attacks affecting Palestinian communities. OCHA has documented assaults on homes, restrictions on agricultural land, damage to livestock and olive trees, intimidation and displacement, particularly around newly established settlement outposts.

The International Court of Justice concluded in its July 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful and found its settlement policies and associated practices in breach of international law. Yet territorial expansion continues while Palestinians possess overwhelmingly unequal military and political means with which to resist it.

Historical continuity that deserves examination.

The connection between Zionists Guerrilla attacks during the British Mandate and the present, is not that history simply repeats itself. The Zionists operations continue to be inhumane, savage and far from civilised, territorial expansion remains remarkably persistent. From the depopulated villages documented by Walid Khalidi, to the history of transfer examined by Nur Masalha, to Edward Said’s insistence on recovering the Palestinian standpoint, and Rashid Khalidi’s account of a century-long colonial confrontation, Palestinian scholarship provides its own intellectual vocabulary for understanding what we are witnessing today: displacement is an unfinished process of contesting Palestinian presence on the land. The problem today is that intimidation, territorial acquisition and displacement continue to interact at a regional level as well.

Israeli military actions have extended repeatedly into Lebanon and Syria, including recent strikes in Syria, creating an increasingly dangerous geography in which borders no longer insulate neighbouring populations from Israeli military power. The language is invariably security. Yet for the people experiencing bombing, displacement, occupation or territorial encroachment, “security” looks remarkably different depending on which side of military power one inhabits.

And perhaps this is why the kite is so revealing. The kite made of plastic bags carries almost nothing. It is fragile. It is made to rise, not conquer. For a child surrounded by destroyed buildings and displacement tents, flying one may represent one of the few remaining possibilities of movement. The child’s body is confined; the kite is not.

Perhaps that is precisely why the reaction to it deserves our attention. Children cannot be asked to surrender childhood because an occupying military power has progressively widened its definition of threat. The most disturbing image coming from Gaza this week may therefore be neither a missile nor a tank: It may be a mother telling her child:

Do not fly your kite. They may see it.

That sentence should disturb the conscience of the world. Because when even a child’s kite becomes too dangerous to fly, what is being taken away is more than a toy. It is the remaining space in which a Palestinian child is permitted simply to be a child.

Dr Oroub El-Abed originally wrote this piece for Middle East Monitor and is reposted here in crossfirearabia.com. She is an Associate Professor at Bir Zeit University and specializes in refugees issues.

Opinion

Beware! Qusra and The Next Nakba

Heba
August 26, 2026

By Ramzi Baroud

If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.

The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.

While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.

Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.

The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities and expelling their inhabitants.

The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.

Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”

True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and land confiscation.

The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence — a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.

While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.

The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.

Now, back to Qusra.

Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.

They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.

The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists and journalists.

What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.

And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.

Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.

Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.

A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession — in both words and action.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversawthe mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.

Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities — one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.

And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.

The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm — and potentially a testing ground — for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply ‘happen,’ but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.

Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.

Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a ‘strategy’ is painfully redundant.

But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba — and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza — recognition is no longer enough.

The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the Strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.

It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.