Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.
With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of spying on them as they reviewed the unredacted Epstein files on DOJ computers, tracking the documents they examined.
Pressure is mounting on Israel to scrap its plans to expand settlements in the West Bank ahead of a meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.
The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.
Newly released evidence has shown that Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who was the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts until last month, praised a federal agent who shot a Chicago woman during an immigration crackdown last year.
Ukrainian forces repelled major Russian assaults in a single day in the Pokrovsk direction (Donetsk region), killing around 90 Russian soldiers.
