Israel-Palestine conflict

Taybeh, occupied West Bank – Underneath a painting of Jesus and his disciples, Sandra Basir brought out what she and her husband, Roland, now keep to protect their home: a couple of fire extinguishers.

They keep them because the last time Israeli settlers set fire to a neighbour’s car outside their house, no one else came. “Civil defence – when did they even show up? After everything was already over,” Roland says.

The couple’s nightly routine in their Palestinian Christian town is now similar to the majority-Muslim rural Palestinian communities besieged by settler attacks and nighttime military raids for years. Sandra checks the doors more than once before bed. They got a dog to stay outside to alert them of any trespassers. Sandra is, by her own description, always half-awake – listening for whoever might be coming for her four small children while they sleep.

Their seven-year-old son has stopped playing outside, Sandra says, and for months, the little boy told his father not to go to work – scared he might not return. “That’s what our life has become,” says Sandra, who was on the verge of tears throughout the conversation. “A child that age should just be playing.”

For more than 20 years, Roland built up a stone quarry and concrete-block factory on the edge of town, investing an estimated $5m in the business. After employing 40 local Palestinians, he has found his life’s work snatched by marauding settlers, both armed adults and some barely teenagers.

In the past three years – and with the situation deteriorating even more severely this past year – he and his workers were frequently chased off by settlers at gunpoint, with his quarry’s heavy-machinery equipment set on fire. The most brazen attack came in March, when Roland says some 30 to 40 settlers stormed the quarry site in a coordinated mass incursion. Videos and photos show them raising Israeli flags over the grounds and performing prayers on the land. Before leaving, they smashed his office, destroyed electrical panels, and pulled cameras from the walls.

Roland documented everything on video, filed complaints with the liaison office, the police, and every institution he could reach. All his efforts to mobilise help to protect his land, however, were for naught. The settlers were back the next day, with their attacks continuing ever since.

Meanwhile, Roland showed Al Jazeera donation pages online for the settlers that he says carried out the attacks. He also alleges that stone taken from his land was registered under a settler’s name and resold.

This past week, he finally stopped trying to continue operations, leaving his stone quarry business all but abandoned.

“They’ve taken the quarry, taken the factory, taken the land,” Roland says. “What’s left for them to take? My children? My house?”

A once-safe haven now in the crosshairs

A few years ago, nobody in Taybeh thought trouble like this was coming their way.

Madees Khoury, who runs the Taybeh Brewery her family founded in 1994, lived in Taybeh through the second Intifada, the Arab Spring, and every war on Gaza – but none of it ever really touched the quaint town filled with centuries-old churches, well-built homes, and street-corner statues of Mother Mary and Jesus. “Taybeh was always safe, untouched – never, never, never did I imagine it would come to this,” says Madees.

The town is traditionally identified with biblical Ephraim – the place Jesus is said to have withdrawn to before his final journey to Jerusalem – and is the last Palestinian town left in the West Bank whose population is entirely Christian, home now to roughly 1,200 people and to the ruins of the fifth-century Church of St George, one of the oldest Christian sites in the Holy Land.

Things began to change as Israeli settlers, after driving Bedouin and herding communities from areas to the east, increasingly turned their attention to the hills around Taybeh itself, commencing attacks within the town last year. Mayor Suleiman Khourieh estimates roughly seven settler outposts now surround the town – four or five, by his count, sitting directly on Taybeh’s municipal land.

The attacks that followed mirror those taking place across the rural West Bank, with Sandra – who says her mother’s arm was broken by a settler during last year’s olive harvest – and Roland showing Al Jazeera photographs and videos of the frequent settler incursions within the town’s central confines.

Repeatedly, settlers graze cattle, sheep and camels on private agricultural land. Last year, Christian leaders say fires were deliberately set near the church and its adjoining cemetery. A couple of months ago, armed settlers set large fires along the village’s farmlands and prevented firetrucks from reaching them, according to local residents who drove to the scene.

Residents of Taybeh now face routine restrictions on accessing their farmlands and resources, including the now depopulated Ein Samiya spring. The spring supplies all the water to Taybeh Brewery and other Palestinian communities in the area, but settlers have since taken control of it.

Madees Khoury remembers one morning, in February this year, when a group of settlers walked into the centre of town claiming to search for a horse that didn’t exist – while her cousin’s actual horse and its foal, kept in a small structure on her father and uncle’s land for years, stood a few metres away. When she and her family called Israel’s Civil Administration to have the settlers removed, she says the officials who arrived instead walked in alongside them, broke open the door, and helped carry the horses out. “Instead of removing them,” she says, “the officials who came walked alongside the settlers onto my father and uncle’s private property … took the horse and the foal, and walked out.”

The newest outpost, established just last week, sits on the western edge of town, in Area B of the West Bank – nominally under Palestinian civil administration, though security in these hills has long since fallen to whoever is willing to enforce it on the ground.

On his own land in Area B, Mayor Khourieh has watched a settler take over his vineyard and its well over the past month, following the establishment of a settler outpost nearby. Sitting in his office, Khourieh described the settlers cutting his locks, bringing sheep there to graze, at one point pitching a tent by the well and furnishing it with sofas, and even bathing in the water meant for his vines.

According to the mayor, the army eventually removed the settlers’ tent, but the settlers still come back daily to water their flock from Khourieh’s own well. “We still don’t know whether I’m even allowed to go to my own vineyard or not,” says the town mayor inside his office.

Israeli officials have, at least on paper, acknowledged the problem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this year that outposts established in Area B should be evacuated. But despite reported pressure from career military officials to remove the outposts over security concerns, enforcement has frequently been blocked amid opposition from officials in Netanyahu’s far-right government. By Peace Now’s latest count, of the approximately 390 illegal outposts and farms across the West Bank, at least 21 sit in Area B.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli authorities for comment on the attacks on Taybeh, and the accusations that their response has not been sufficient, but has yet to receive a response.

Hollow protections from the state

Following attacks in the area – including the invasion of a then-empty home of a Taybeh family on August 5 – on August 9, the Israeli army declared Taybeh, along with the neighbouring village of Rammun, a closed military zone.

The order itself has confused almost everyone tasked with living under it. It bars entry to Israelis and foreigners without a specific connection to the village, and the army has offered little clarity on the terms and enforcement. “It’s unclear,” Madees Khoury says. “The whole thing was strange.”

What almost no one in Taybeh believes is that the order will actually keep settlers out. Especially in the past year, such closed military zone orders have been issued in cases where settlers are attacking local Palestinians – only for those orders to be enforced selectively to remove activists attempting to offer protective presence to local Palestinians, while doing little to remove the violent settlers themselves.

Instead, the removal of visitors adds to the town’s growing isolation.

“The decision hasn’t amounted to anything practical,” the mayor says, “because the settler is still exactly where he was.” Father Bashar Fawadleh, priest of Taybeh’s Christ the Redeemer Church, put it more bluntly: “We don’t feel that they’re actually forbidding the settlers from coming to Taybeh.”

According to Roland, the day the military zone closure was announced, settlers broke into his office at the stone quarry and smashed cabinets, equipment, and anything they could reach inside. The following morning, he tried to go back to what remains of his quarry, but settlers confronted him again. He called the police; two and a half hours later, he says, they arrived, but the settlers had already left.

‘The cross we have to carry’

Emigration of Palestinian Christians has been an issue in Taybeh and elsewhere for years, as the Palestinian Christian population has shrunk to about 40,000 in the West Bank, or just more than 1 percent of the entire population. But under the pressures of severe restrictions on land access by Israeli authorities and settlers, movement restrictions, and the threat of unchecked settler attacks, in Taybeh, the quiet of emptiness is being replaced by a quiet borne of fear.

Madees Khoury says people avoid the roads now because no one wants to risk a checkpoint that might swallow four hours of their day, or a stretch of road where a settler’s car might slow down alongside theirs.

Tourism is gone; a well-known hiking trail that begins at the brewery sees almost no visitors any more. Among a wider economic depression and skyrocketing export costs imposed by Israeli authorities, Taybeh Brewery’s revenues are down 80 percent compared with before October 2023, according to Madees Khoury.

Fifteen families have already left Taybeh in the past two years, according to Father Bashar, along with dozens of individuals who left parents behind and moved on alone, mostly to the United States and Europe.

And yet almost no one who spoke to Al Jazeera described leaving as a real option for themselves. “Where is there to go?” asks Roland Basir, reiterating a common refrain heard across the West Bank these days.

“This land is ours,” says Father Bashar. “We cannot leave it easily … we want to resist by staying rooted in this land, to be part of this land, for dignity, for security, for peace, and for justice.”

Mayor Khourieh, whose own vineyard now sits behind a settler’s fence, put it in starker terms. “We are Palestinian Christians,” he says. “We have been in this town since the Lord Christ walked in it. This is our town. We will not leave it. Even if we die, we’ll be buried in it, because it’s holy ground.”

These days, Father Bashar frames the threats to this bastion of the wider Palestinian Christian community in the context of the suffering that Jesus endured. “For me, our cause, our problems, are the cross we have to carry on our shoulders,” he says.

He pauses before offering the line he says he carries into every house he visits after a new attack: “In the midst of this cross, in the hardest time, still we have hope. Inside our hearts, we have to put hope instead of the fear.”

The United Nations human rights agency and the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates have condemned a days-long Israeli settler siege of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank village of Qusra.

The two statements were issued on Thursday, as dozens of Israeli settlers continue to besiege three Palestinian families in the Ras al-Ain area in western Qusra for a fifth night.

“These criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the Occupying Power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their homes and their land,” the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said.

The three families – comprising 15 people, including two children – have been confined to their homes with their water and power cut off since Sunday, the agency said.

“Time is running out for these three families before they are forcibly displaced,” it warned.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning the settlers for carrying out “systematic assaults that can only be described as terroristic”.

It also accused Israel of using the settlers as an “unchecked tool to implement its criminal policies” of forced displacement and annexation of the occupied West Bank.

Earlier on Thursday, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also referred to the settlers’ actions as acts of “terror”.

‘This is all a charade’

Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from the scene of the siege on Thursday, said Israeli soldiers initially tried to move the trapped families out of their homes while settlers remained camped outside.

The families refused, not trusting that the Israeli soldiers would allow them back into their homes, and were eventually grouped together in one home. Residents have watched settlers push families out and then take over their properties in the past, she reported.

Qusra has faced settler attacks for decades, Ibrahim explained, and residents tie the rise in violence to the spread of illegal settlements and the lack of accountability for attackers.

On Thursday, the Israeli military said its troops dismantled “two illegal outposts” in Qusra and a nearby village, and detained one Israeli. It said more soldiers were sent to “carry out defensive missions and patrols”.

However, Ibrahim said most Palestinians believe the Israeli army is staging its response to the settler siege for the cameras, and they expect the settlers will eventually return.

Abdel Azim Wadi, the mayor of Qusra, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army has been protecting and helping the settlers. “We saw them praying together, barbecuing together and dancing together,” he said. “They are not very interested in helping the besieged families.”

Qusra resident Abdul Kareem Hassan told Al Jazeera that he had been sleeping in his car for seven months in order to protect his home.

“This is all a charade,” he said. “If they [the Israeli army] were serious, the whole operation would not take them one hour. We’re talking about 20 settlers. If they would treat them the same way they treat Palestinians, they could finish in less than an hour.”

Another day without respite

Elsewhere in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Israeli settlers and soldiers continued their elevated campaign of violence against Palestinians, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

Israeli forces issued demolition notices for homes in Kafr Sur, the Jalazone camp and farmers’ shelters in al-Jiftlik.

In Qalqilya, soldiers detained seven relatives of a Palestinian fighter killed in a 2024 strike. Soldiers also detained three Palestinians amid a settler incursion in Burqa, east of Ramallah.

Settler attacks took place across several towns and villages, including an incident in which three Palestinians, including a child, were pepper-sprayed in their car.

Settlers also re-established a settlement near Jenin and erected a new outpost on land belonging to a town near Tulkarem.

Ein el-Hilweh, occupied West Bank – Adel Daraghmeh lies on his side on a thin mattress laid straight onto the dusty ground, one arm flung out, a sandal hanging half off his foot. “We don’t sleep, we barely drink, we barely eat,” he says weakly.

Above him, a patchwork of dark tarpaulins and old blankets is tied together between a few bent wooden poles – the only thing standing between his family and a sun pushing past 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) in the early afternoon.

They are homeless again – their home destroyed days before by an Israeli bulldozer despite a court injunction they believed protected them. Beside him, his wife, Kheirieh, sits on a chair, a small plastic cup of water cradled in both hands.

About 30 metres up a slope, a settler-built fence now cuts across the hillside, cutting Adel and his brothers off from land their flocks grazed for generations. Past the fence, on the crest of the hill, an Israeli flag flies – visible from where Adel lies. “Isn’t this a disgrace, what we are living in?” he asks, more than once, over the course of an hour.

Adel manages diabetes with daily medication, but it’s been a struggle to obtain it in recent days. “They bulldozed the medication [in the house],” says Adel. “Our things, our household goods – all gone. They destroyed us. Our phones, the solar panels – no electricity, no water.”

As the family has learned in recent weeks, as Israel gears up for fiercely contested elections in October, even an Israeli Supreme Court injunction may not stop the bulldozers from coming now.

‘Five minutes to clear the whole area’

The wreckage of the Daraghmehs’ house is still scattered: clothes, a pulverised medicine cabinet, a hollowed-out mini-fridge with its door hanging open, and split cinderblocks.

Even after their son Hilal’s home was demolished shortly before without warning, the July 28 demolition of Adel and Kheirieh’s home came as a shock. With Adel a short drive away in Tubas collecting medication, Kheirieh was home with their daughter, Hanaa, when Israeli soldiers, settlers and Civil Administration officials arrived with a bulldozer and about 10 other vehicles. “They came while I was asleep,” she says.

Kheirieh walked out to meet them with the family’s legal papers – proof, she believed, that the home was protected by an earlier Israeli Supreme Court order barring demolition until the family’s case was resolved.

The court had suspended a 2022 demolition order while a case brought forward by the family progressed.

Soldiers took the documents, read them, conferred among themselves, and handed them back.

Then the bulldozer started anyway.

“Five minutes to clear the whole area,” one of them told her, she says.

“I told him: I can’t. I can’t clear the area. I’m on my own, and I’m ill,” she says. Already sick, and now seeing the bulldozers bearing down on her home with nearly everything she owned inside, she blacked out, waking up three hours later in an ambulance.

“And before I knew it, the bulldozer had started,” she says. “The whole house – all of it. All our belongings. Gone.”

“No order, no law,” added Adel weakly from the ground. “No humanity.”

‘Discriminatory’ system

“The army and the settlers demolished … despite the existence of a court order prohibiting it,” says Tawfiq Jabareen, the lawyer representing the Daraghmeh family, referring to the initial July 2 demolition of Hilal’s home. “The prosecution claimed it was a mistake by the army, and that it would not happen again – but the demolition was repeated.”

“The law and court rulings mean nothing to the settlers,” adds Jabareen, “who try to circumvent them by every means, believing that imposing facts on the ground is stronger than any law or court ruling.”

The Daraghmehs are herders of livestock who have lived along the Ein el-Hilweh spring, in the northern Jordan Valley, for generations. Four brothers and their families live in the area. “I was born here,” Adel says. “My father was born here.”

Nearby are the illegal Israeli settlement of Maskiyot and several settler outposts established in recent years, subjecting the extended family to numerous attacks, thefts and raids.

Like herding communities across Area C of the West Bank – under complete Israeli military and administrative control – the family has spent years navigating demolition orders under a planning system that leaves Palestinians almost no legal path to build.

Adel has had his home demolished before and spent significant money to rebuild it, he explains. What’s different now, they say, is that even that limited process – a warning, a demolition order, followed by a chance to appeal – has stopped applying to them at all. No demolition order was presented for either Hilal’s home or Adel’s when they came to bulldoze them despite the court injunctions.

Soldiers, settlers and Civil Administration officials arrived together during the demolitions, according to the family and activists present.

Allegra Pacheco, chief of party of the West Bank Protection Consortium and a lawyer who has represented Palestinians before Israeli courts for decades, says the irregularity of such demolitions is no aberration in an otherwise functioning system.

“This is a continuation of the deterioration of any pretence of legal protection for Palestinians,” she says. Even the ordinary planning process was built to fail Palestinians, she argues. Under a zoning system inherited from Jordanian and British Mandate-era law, Israel changed some of the laws to the detriment of Palestinians, leaving most Palestinian areas in Area C without approved building plans, while Israeli settlements – illegal under international law – are zoned and built freely.

“The Israelis set up the system to be discriminatory and to fail Palestinians,” says Pacheco. “So people build anyway, get the stop-work order, then demolition [order] – which you can appeal. But you’re appealing to the one who made the rule to discriminate against Palestinian construction.

“There’s no way for Palestinians in general to win under the current Israeli legal framework.”

As lines blur between authorities and settlers, who exactly spearheaded the demolition – soldiers, settlers, the Civil Administration – was unclear even to the family. “They’re all the same when they come,” says Hilal. “They’re all together.”

According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), since January 2023, more than 6,200 Palestinians, including more than 3,000 children, have been forcibly displaced, including more than 2,300 people since the beginning of 2026 alone. More than 907 Palestinian structures in the occupied West Bank have already been demolished this year.

Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities and the military for comment on the events described in this article, but no response has yet been received.

‘Nothing is holding them back’

A short walk from the rubble of his parents’ home – and his own – Hilal sits under the shade of a tree beside the spring that sustained his family for generations, one that he and his flocks can no longer use.

Minutes earlier, he’d watched two settlers cool off at the spring, dousing themselves with water as one of them changed into a military uniform on the bank.

Hilal’s own remaining cattle – most of the herd already stolen, confiscated or sold – scrounge instead for whatever run-off is left once the settlers are gone. “We used to drink from this spring, and carry water on the donkey,” he says. “But they stopped us. The settlers fenced it off.”

Later, he rides his donkey across the road to what remains of his home. What had been walls and a roof is now a field of scorched rubble and gnarled metal piping, bent and knotted where the bulldozer dragged it. On his donkey, Hilal points to where each room had stood. He estimates the losses at 170,000 shekels ($57,000).

“Not a single thing I got to take – all of it is gone,” he says.

Next door, at the home of Adel’s brother, Qadri – which was previously demolished in August last year – several relatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, describe an extended family bracing for its turn.

“Nothing is holding them back now,” one son says. “They don’t even need an order any more. Of course we are scared they will come for us next.”

Prevented from rebuilding by nearby settlers and soldiers, Adel and Kheirieh now rely on relatives for help getting basic supplies. “All of our family helps each other,” says one relative, “but it is so hard when we don’t have enough, and we might be next.”

Following earlier thefts by settlers and confiscations from authorities a year and a half ago, the family had another 50 head of cattle stolen by settlers, they say.

Amid deteriorating health, an exhausted, heat-stricken Adel sits up from lying on the ground only when the topic of past weddings comes up. His hoarse voice strengthens, and he breaks into a wide smile. Softly, he begins clapping out the rhythm of a dahiyyeh – the sung, chanted line-dance of Bedouin celebrations – his wavering voice rising over the sound of his own hands.

“What beautiful times together,” he says. “Beautiful.”

Then, as if that singing expended the last of his dwindling energy, he sinks back onto the sweat-stained mattress and exhales. “Inshallah those times will return,” he says. “Inshallah.”

Gaza City, Gaza Strip – Sohair al-Bordani was displaced and living in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp, trying to take care of her four children, as war raged all around her.

And while she survived, her 10-year marriage has not. Al-Bordani, 30, explained that the arguments between her and her ex-husband had intensified since the war began in 2023, as the stress of merely existing in Gaza weighed down on them.

But al-Bordani encountered a problem. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – in which Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians – has devastated many aspects of the Palestinian enclave’s administration, including its legal system.

To get a court-ordered divorce, with the accompanying financial claims she would be eligible for, al-Bordani would have to go before a religious court and establish her case. She said that she initiated legal proceedings in February 2025. But, because of delays to the judicial process brought on by the war, the case dragged on.

And so, al-Bordani chose the speedier option available to her – khulu, a form of divorce initiated by the wife that can involve relinquishing financial rights. In her case, this meant that she returned her dowry to her ex-husband and gave up the financial support she would have been entitled to.

“I gave up everything because obtaining my rights under these circumstances had become extremely difficult,” al-Bordani said. “I only wanted to find peace and start a new life away from everything I experienced during that period.”

Legal delays

Al-Bordani’s story reflects the experience of many women in Gaza who have found themselves trapped between delayed legal cases and a war that has disrupted access to the justice system, leaving decisions that are supposed to determine their futures suspended until conditions allow courts to resume their work fully.

Some personal status cases – including divorces – have reached Gaza’s religious courts, which oversee the matters.

According to Sheikh Hassan al-Jojo, the head of the Supreme Council of Sharia Judiciary in Gaza, courts have handled more than 8,700 divorce cases from the beginning of the war in October 2023 until the end of May.

That is despite the many challenges they face, including – but not limited to – damage to court buildings and shortages of judges and other staff.

Al-Jojo also said that courts had returned to near-full judicial work, while services continued even during periods when court buildings were closed.

But he also pointed out that the courts were operating with severely limited resources. Each court – according to al-Jojo – has only one computer, while repeated power cuts, shortages of printed materials and a lack of basic office supplies continue to affect their work.

“Essential services, including marriages and divorces, and other procedures needed by citizens, did not stop,” al-Jojo said. “But the priority at this stage is to keep providing the service, rather than improving it.”

Troubling consequences

Yet divorce figures alone do not reflect the full impact of the war on families. The delays in accessing the legal system have meant that women like al-Bordani have been unable to pursue their legal rights after separation, particularly in cases involving child custody, spousal and child maintenance, and other financial payments that are typically due to the wife.

Mohammad al-Talaa, a lawyer in Gaza, says that the war has significantly affected the functioning of judicial institutions, leading to the postponement of thousands of hearings and the suspension of many cases.

He added that thousands of files and documents have been lost due to Israeli bombing and the destruction of offices, making it difficult to prove rights, particularly in civil and property-related cases.

And with regard to personal status cases, al-Talaa pointed out that the suspension of enforcement departments in courts has left women entitled to payments without that financial support, and has also affected child visitation and custody cases, leaving some parents unable to implement decisions related to maintaining contact with their children.

The problems are not just legal. Al-Talaa explained that the continued delay in divorce and separation cases has left some women trapped in marriages they want to get out of. It has also prevented them from moving on with their lives, while delays in access to financial payments they are owed have increased the burden on families, and a lack of resolution on cases involving children has led to increased psychological stress for all involved, alongside the trauma caused by the war itself.

Suad al-Naami was not willing to deal with being stuck in limbo, and decided to get a khulu divorce even if it meant giving up on the rights a court-mandated divorce would have granted her.

The 22-year-old had only been married for five months, but with disputes with her ex-husband increasing, she left.

“I never imagined my married life would begin this way,” al-Naami said. “I hoped we would have a home and a stable life, but displacement and living in a tent made everything more difficult.”

For the young woman, the promise of a new start, amid all the destruction around her in Gaza, was better than a drawn-out case.

“Giving up on my rights was not an easy matter, but I felt that entering a long legal process and waiting for years would only increase my suffering,” al-Naami said. “I only wanted to end the disputes and start over, because staying in a relationship full of problems under these circumstances would have been harder than the decision to separate itself.”

Israeli settlers have besieged three Palestinian families inside their homes in the occupied West Bank, cutting off water and electricity in a campaign residents described as an attempt to steal their land.

Security camera footage from the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, on Wednesday shows Israeli settlers surrounding one of the houses.

Trapped residents said Israeli soldiers had failed to disperse the settlers despite intervening earlier in the day.

Aisha Abu Rida, one of the residents under siege, told Al Jazeera that the siege began on Sunday, with settlers blocking all entrances to her home.

“We are surrounded by settlers, but we are steadfast, God willing. We will not leave our home, no matter what happens. Despite the water and electricity being cut off, we will remain steadfast,” she said.

“Despite their repeated attacks, which are aimed at displacing us, God willing, we will remain steadfast and stay in our homes, even if we are martyred,” she added.

‘Living in fear’

Loai Ridi, an American-Palestinian who owns a house in the village, said his brother Qusai Abu Rida and 18-year-old nephew, Ahmed, were among those trapped.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Toledo, in the United States, he said the family was relying on a temporary solar power system and leftover well water from the winter after supply lines were cut.

“He [Qusai Abu Rida] does not want to leave the home. Because if he leaves the home, the settlers will take over immediately,” Ridi said. “It’s really very, very difficult. He just told me, ‘I only have supplies for two to three days left. And if no one is able to provide us with food, I am not sure what else I can do’.”

Ridi said Israeli forces had done little to intervene when his brother had called for help on Sunday, and alleged the soldiers had knelt to pray alongside the settlers at the scene, in footage that has since circulated on social media.

“They basically did nothing,” he said.

Earlier on Wednesday, more Israeli forces arrived on the scene, dismantled the settlers’ tent and clashed with about 50 to 60 of the group before withdrawing. “They were unable to evacuate the settlers because they were not firm with them,” Ridi said. “They should have picked them up in vans and taken them away.”

The Israeli military said later on Wednesday that it would deploy an additional infantry battalion to the area, with its chief of general staff ordering continued efforts “to strengthen order and operational control” and prevent further incidents.

A day earlier, the Israeli military had said it received reports of settlers entering and seizing Palestinian homes and land in the area, describing the activity as “illegal, reprehensible and unacceptable” and disruptive to residents’ daily lives. It added that disciplinary action would be taken against security personnel filmed at the site in preceding days.

Ridi said his family was “living in fear”.

“They are being harassed and attacked by the settlers,” he said. “I cannot do anything about it.”

‘Ethnic cleansing’

Qusra sits in Area B of the occupied West Bank, nominally under Palestinian civil administration. The village has faced a string of recent attacks, including the burning of a newly built mosque last month.

In the neighbouring village of Jalud, a similar two-week siege in July forced two Palestinian families off their land before settlers took over the property.

Violence and land seizures in the occupied West Bank have intensified over the past months, with Jewish settlers emboldened by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has overseen a rapid expansion of settlement construction in the territory.

More than 500,000 Israelis live in the occupied West Bank in settlements that are considered illegal under international law, alongside roughly three million Palestinians. Israel has occupied the territory since 1967.

According to the Israeli settlement watchdog Peace Now, there are 146 illegal settlements in the West Bank and a further 390 smaller outposts.

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli rights group, said on X that while settlers commit “daily terror against Palestinian men, women, and children … neither this terror nor ethnic cleansing would be possible without the [Israeli] army’s support”.

The United Nations has also warned that the situation in the occupied West Bank has reached a “breaking point”.

According to UN figures, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, in the occupied territory so far this year. About 3,800 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have also been displaced by settler violence, demolitions and evictions.

UN’s Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Ramiz Alakbarov said on Tuesday that the UN has documented more than 1,430 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage across roughly 260 Palestinian communities in 2026, with many carried out in the presence of Israeli forces.

He also noted that Israeli authorities have also advanced or approved roughly 12,360 settlement housing units across the West Bank this year, including 5,160 in occupied East Jerusalem.

“These are interconnected steps, not isolated developments,” Alakbarov said, warning that they were reshaping the occupied West Bank, weakening Palestinian governance and advancing “de facto annexation”.

President Trump again insists the US has ‘total control’ of the strait, while Tehran is resolute that Washington must meet its demands.

Qatar says negotiations between Oman and Iran over the future of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz are making major progress.

Gaza City, the Gaza Strip – Palestinians in Gaza have reacted with a mix of scepticism and frustration to Israel’s rejection of a proposed 15-point plan aimed at ending the war and setting out a framework for the future.

The United States-backed initiative includes provisions for a phased Israeli withdrawal, the gradual disarmament of Hamas, a Palestinian-led civilian administration and steps towards humanitarian aid and reconstruction.

But on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “rejected” the plan, saying its forces will not withdraw until Hamas is “genuinely disarmed”.

For Nesma Harazin, a displaced writer from Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood, Netanyahu’s statement came as little surprise, as Israel continued ⁠⁠to carry out near-daily attacks regardless of a so-called “ceasefire” agreed with Hamas last ⁠⁠October.

“We are dealing with an Israeli occupation army that is capable of stopping these operations, but does not accept stopping them and continues to kill the Palestinian people,” said the 27-year-old.

Rather than a “real opportunity” to end Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians, Harazin said the proposal has been US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu’s plan “from a long time ago”.

Harazin’s scepticism was shared by Mehdi Ahmed, a Gaza City resident whose family home was among the few in his area to remain standing.

“We are under occupation,” said the 53-year-old. “As far as we are concerned, any ceasefire is temporary.”

Since the October “ceasefire”, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,258 people, bringing the overall number since the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023 to at least 73,386.

Ahmed warned that even if an agreement produced a period of calm, it might not last.

“Maybe we could sit here for a year without war, but I don’t think it will continue like that,” he said, arguing that the killings and the destruction in Gaza would shape future generations.

“The generations that are coming will not accept these kinds of solutions,” he said. “People who have lost their children, their parents and their families … you cannot expect them to simply forget.”

In a statement late on Sunday, Hamas said it remained committed to fully implementing the plan. It also urged mediating and guarantor countries to “assume their responsibilities” and prevent any “violations or breaches” that could obstruct the process.

The Gaza Government Media Office also blamed Netanyahu for what it described as a reversal of the negotiations and called for international pressure to prevent further escalation.

In a statement issued on Monday, the office said Netanyahu’s rejection of the 15-point document, along with demands including opposition to an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, represented “a clear and unequivocal reversal of the negotiation track”.

‘We have no one’

But Ahmed said his experience of living his “whole life under occupation” and “in hardship” had left him unconvinced that years of negotiations could produce a lasting solution.

“They have been talking about these points for three years … are we going to spend another seven years talking about the points?” he asked, saying that Palestinians had been left without sufficient regional and international support.

“We have no one standing behind us to protect us. Why?”

For Harazin, a meaningful ceasefire would have to include the withdrawal of the Israeli army and an end to attacks, as well as a clear path towards reconstruction and the return of displaced Palestinians.

But following Netanyahu’s declaration, she said she feared further displacement and greater Israeli control over Gaza.

“If the ceasefire plan is rejected, the Israeli occupation army will carry out harsher operations than what we have heard about before in Gaza,” she said.

“Perhaps they will ask us to displace again to the southern areas. There are no buildings left standing in Gaza City.”

For Ahmed, the possibility of lasting peace is closely tied to the balance of power.

“When you are weak, there are no opportunities, and there is no hope,” he said. “Hope comes when you are strong.”

‘Hope in God’

Unlike Harazin and Ahmed, Ramez Haniyeh sees the proposed plan as a genuine missed opportunity to “end the war and the genocide”.

Haniyeh, who was displaced to Nuseirat in central Gaza after his home was destroyed, said he believed the proposal could have helped end the fighting and “stop the suffering” of Palestinians in the territory.

For Haniyeh, that would mean more than simply an end to Israeli attacks.

“Withdrawal, then reconstruction, and living with dignity,” he said when asked what he expected from a ceasefire.

But he fears the rejection could instead bring another escalation.

“I expect them to create a new target bank, so that things will escalate and there will be more bloodshed in the coming period,” he said.

Haniyeh described the humanitarian and economic conditions in Gaza as deteriorating, with widespread unemployment and many people unable to afford basic necessities.

“The situation is very bad, and it is getting worse every day,” he said. “There are some food and drink items available now, but there is no one who can afford to buy them.”

Despite his pessimism, Haniyeh said his hope rests on faith.

“I have hope in God, but there is no hope that this war will end,” he said. “It will continue until God relieves us.”

Despite her doubts about the proposal, Harazin said she also had “hope in God”.

“As long as we are Muslims, World War I ended and World War II ended too, so we have hope that the war in Gaza will end.”

Gaza Health Ministry says hospitals receive bodies of two Palestinians as Netanyahu rejects Trump plan to end war.

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least one person as Palestinian health authorities have confirmed another death after a body was recovered from beneath the rubble in the war-shattered enclave.

Israeli forces shot and killed one Palestinian east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza on Saturday, the Qatar News Agency (QNA) reported, quoting medical sources.

The Gaza Ministry of Health confirmed on Sunday that hospitals had received the bodies of two Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks, including one recovered from the rubble.

At least five people, including children, were wounded in Israeli attacks in the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah on Saturday, QNA reported.

Local sources said several people were wounded when an Israeli tank opened fire on tents sheltering displaced people in Khan Younis. Among them was a woman who was critically wounded. A girl was seriously wounded by Israeli army fire in the al-Mawasi coastal area of Rafah.

Israeli artillery also shelled areas east of Khan Younis, and Israeli fire wounded several more people in the al-Mahatta area of Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said the overall death toll since Israel launched its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023 was 73,386 with 174,250 wounded.

The remains of many people killed in Israeli attacks are still buried under rubble, and those deaths are uncounted, the ministry added. Ambulance and Palestinian Civil Defence crews remain unable to reach them.

Since a “ceasefire” took effect in October, the Health Ministry has recorded 1,258 people killed by Israel, 4,139 wounded and 807 bodies recovered from the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Israel has rejected United States President Donald Trump’s 15-point plan for Gaza, telling a cabinet meeting that Israeli forces “will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed”.

The rejection follows a similar position taken last week by the US-led Board of Peace, which said an Israeli withdrawal would only proceed once Hamas’s disarmament is complete, leaving both the ceasefire’s terms and any timeline for Israel’s exit from Gaza unresolved even as casualties continue to mount.

After visiting the West Bank, the group of public figures known as “The Elders” has concluded that Israel “aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically”.

Mary Robinson, former president of the Republic of Ireland and one of the leading members of The Elders, tells host Steve Clemons that the delegation was “shocked” at how the situation has deteriorated since 2023.

“It starts with hate speech, clear talk about Jewish supremacy and annexation of the West Bank,” says Robinson, adding that the Israeli government affords “complete impunity” for settlers and soldiers grabbing land and disrupting the lives of Palestinians across the territory.

‘We’re going backwards.’ Palestinians in Gaza say Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of the US-backed 15-point plan has deepened uncertainty over an end to the war. Hamas says it remains committed to the agreement.

Umm al-Khair, Occupied West Bank — There were weddings in Umm al-Khair this week, but almost no one danced. The small Bedouin village, located in Masafer Yatta, was marrying off two of its sons. Cauldrons of slow-cooked lamb meat for mansaf – a large platter of traditional Arabic food – fed the whole community. But there was no dahiyya, the line dance and chant that normally opens a Bedouin wedding.

Residents said it did not feel right coming so soon after the first anniversary of the killing of Umm al-Khair activist and community leader Awdah Hathaleen, allegedly by Israeli settler Yinon Levi. The community continues to endure daily settler attacks, arrests and incursions by Israeli soldiers, and the threat of further demolitions by Israeli authorities looms.

During celebrations, families spread out in different areas rather than gathering in one place, wary of drawing any attention that, in the past, has brought soldiers to disrupt the celebrations.

“There is a wedding, but they are not letting us celebrate quietly,” said Tariq Hathaleen, an English teacher and community leader in Umm al-Khair.

On Thursday, the first day of the wedding, Shimon Atiya – the Israeli settler behind the illegal outpost of Havat Shorashim, established roughly 800 metres from the village in 2022, and who has been under a restraining order since July 2025 for harassing Umm al-Khair families — crashed the wedding in the only style he knows. He brought his livestock to graze in a resident’s vegetable garden, escorted by Israeli soldiers who stood by as it happened.

When villagers told the soldiers that the plot is recognised as Umm al-Khair land, they were told the maps had changed; when they asked to see the new maps, they were refused. That night, the outpost’s fence towards the village homes was torn down – a prelude to pushing the boundary further in, residents believe.

Hathaleen says the settlers’ timing was a reaction to Levi’s indictment days earlier — one of the few times an Israeli has been charged with the killing of a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank since October 2023.

Just a couple of days before, on Thursday, Hathaleen watched as buildings and vehicles in the nearby Palestinian community of Khirbet Tuba were set ablaze by settler arsonists.

“The occupation always tried very hard to erase the Palestinian Indigenous people and their history, their legacy, their heritage,” Tariq said. “This really reminds me of the Nakba, and how the Israelis destroyed Palestinian cities and villages”, he noted, even planting cactus over the ruins to bury the evidence. “Back then it wasn’t documented. Nowadays, it’s happening, but it is documented.”

Sunday marks the United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. In Umm al-Khair, the wedding felt symbolic of the threats to Indigenous Palestinians’ way of life and their basic presence on their own land.

‘They try to imitate us’

According to local Palestinians and watchdog NGOs, the threats facing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip include detentions, killings, demolitions, restrictions on movement and evictions.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed 1,100 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including 242 minors, according to the Israeli NGO B’Tselem. Israel has also demolished more than 3,000 Palestinian homes since October 2023, the vast majority due to a lack of Israeli-issued permits that Palestinians in Area C are routinely denied.

According to the latest figures from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), demolitions and settler violence displaced an average of 17 people a day this year, double the rate of the previous three years.

A June report by the West Bank Protection Consortium, which includes the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and monitors more than 200 communities it judges at risk of forcible transfer, said 96 percent of those who had been forcibly displaced were previously dependent on farming or herding. They have mostly lost access to these lands or pastures.

However, residents and watchdogs say such dispossession takes place within a system of Israeli permits, demolition orders and land policies controlled by the state alongside hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding for settlements and outposts. Israeli NGO Peace Now counts 146 illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and 390 unauthorised outposts and farms.

In 2024, the International Court of Justice found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.

Amid dispossession of their traditional grazing lands, 13 structures in Umm al-Khair were issued demolition notices last October, following demolitions in 2024 that left a third of the village homeless. The restraining order against Atiya, residents say, has done little to stop him.

Tariq argues the erasure is not only physical, but cultural also, and that it comes paired with an attempt by settlers to claim the very Palestinian identity they are displacing.

“The settlers nowadays try to imitate that lifestyle, building tents that they probably stole from Palestinians somewhere, using tractors to bring water from far away,” he said.

Young men from the hilltop outposts can be seen grazing camels, goats and sheep. All the while, Tariq observes them wearing Palestinian scarves and even attempting the Bedouin dialect when leading their own flocks.

“They know the Indigenous people of this land are the Bedouins and other Palestinians. So, they try to imitate that – to show to themselves and to the world that they are the Indigenous people of this land,” he added. “[But] this land doesn’t relate to them, because only the Indigenous people of this land know how to live in this land.”

‘We are the Indigenous people of this land’

Many outpost settlers serve as military reservists while living on the farms themselves, Tariq noted – a status that comes with state-issued weapons.

He recalled Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich publicly distributing all-terrain vehicles to South Hebron Hills outpost settlers. He also remembers the day Awdah was killed, when soldiers let Levi point out five community members for arrest.

“This is not only settler terrorism backed up by the state,” Tariq said. “It is the state’s plan, carried out by the settlers, well planned in rooms where officials sit around a table and tell them what to do.”

Yair Dvir, spokesperson for B’Tselem, said: “Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and an all-out assault on the Palestinian people. We see it on many levels: military violence and repression, home demolitions, and the funding and backing of settler militias.”

Shaina Low, a spokesperson for the NRC, described the same pattern as a coordinated strategy across the Israeli-occupied territories.

“For nearly 80 years, we’ve seen Israeli efforts to drive Palestinians from their land play out, starting with the Nakba and continuing to the present day,” she said. Low cited an acceleration of these actions since October 2023, when the genocidal war on Gaza began, that has seen expanding settlement infrastructure, rising West Bank demolitions alongside East Jerusalem evictions in neighbourhoods like Silwan. There has been an “astronomical increase” in settler violence documented, Low added.

Gaza shows the same agenda but taken to the extreme. Since the October 2025 “ceasefire”, more than 1,200 people have been killed in Gaza, on top of a cumulative death toll that has climbed past 73,000 since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

According to UN satellite analysis, roughly 81 percent of all structures in Gaza have been damaged. Even with the “ceasefire”, OCHA reports that some 59 percent of Gaza’s population faced crisis-level food shortages or worse between April and June, a share it projects will rise again by year’s end as aid funding shrinks.

Following successive campaigns of expansionism, the Israeli military now controls at least 64.9 percent of Gaza. “These policies are all working together,” Low said. “They may be different tactics, but it’s all part of the same agenda to force Palestinians from their land and increase Israeli control over the territory and expand Israeli presence.”

Still, on the eve of a day meant to mark the world’s Indigenous peoples, Tariq was resolute.

“They will try a million ways to erase the Palestinian Indigenous people, but they will fail because this land doesn’t speak their language, it doesn’t carry their colour, it doesn’t go by their ideologies,” he said.

“This is our land, and we have always been living here in harmony – with nature, the desert, the mountains, the valleys of Palestine – because we are the Indigenous people of this land, and we always will be. Their attempts are failing, and will fail. One day, we will get our freedom.”

New illegal settlement tender in West Bank deepens Israeli efforts to sever Palestinian ties to Jerusalem, officials warn.

Israeli authorities have issued a tender for 627 new housing units in the Kochav Yaakov settlement in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CRRC).

The Israel Land Authority on Thursday published the tender for the project, which will be built on land in the Ramallah and al-Bireh governorate, the commission said on Saturday.

Israel set November 30 as the deadline for construction companies to submit bids, moving the project from planning to construction just 15 months after it was first approved, it said.

CRRC slammed the expansion, saying it is designed to “deepen the separation between Jerusalem and its Palestinian surroundings”.

The illegal Israeli settlement of Kochav Yaakov sits between northern Jerusalem and the twin cities of Ramallah and el-Bireh, within a cluster of settlements Israel administers under the name “Binyamin”.

According to CRRC, the new project covers 253.7 dunams (25.37 hectares or about 63 acres) and was approved by Israeli authorities on April 27, 2025.

It says the tender marks the transition from planning to the “marketing and implementation” stage of settlement construction, with the new units expected to expand the illegal settlement’s built-up area and strengthen its links to nearby settlements and access roads. It added that the decision reflects growing investment in settlements’ economic infrastructure, not just housing.

The Israeli decision is one of several the commission has tracked this year aimed at tightening Israel’s illegal control and pressure on the Palestinian region.

According to CRRC, Israeli authorities have made 12 illegal settlement tenders in the first half of 2026, including 1,138 housing units concentrated in five main settlements, alongside a separate wave of tenders for industrial zones, offices, nursing homes and tourism facilities.

Illegal settlement expansion and settler violence have surged dramatically across the occupied West Bank this year. Palestinian monitors have recorded more than 11,000 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers across the West Bank since January 2026.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has repeatedly said Israeli settlements have “no legal validity” and constitute a “flagrant violation” of international law.

A 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion deemed Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful.

Palestinians near Bethlehem describe daily settler attacks as violence rises across the West Bank. Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh reports that with elections looming, Israel’s right-wing government has an incentive to keep settlers happy, with their votes crucial to its re-election.

Palestinian Christians are facing violence and displacement across Gaza, Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Attacks, including those targeting churches and clergy, are causing the Palestinian Christian population to shrink.

US President Donald Trump expects the conflict with Iran to end “pretty soon”, while Tehran reports that an agreement with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “on the verge of being finalised” following a route agreement between both nations.

Israeli forces have entered homes and shops in the occupied West Bank’s Qalandiya refugee camp, near Ramallah, issuing demolition threats against businesses.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said on Wednesday that eight Palestinian people were taken to hospital after suffering injuries.

Mohammad Aslan, spokesman for the committee that runs the affairs of the camp, told the AFP news agency that the Israeli army had arrested at least 20 people and took up positions on residents’ roofs.

In 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government advanced plans for the construction of an illegal 9,000-unit settlement on the grounds of Jerusalem’s former Atarot airport, adjacent to Qalandiya.

Palestinian residents have since voiced fear that raids and home demolitions could be tied to a strategy of eviction before illegal settlement construction, without any official word from Israeli authorities.

Every Palestinian born in the West Bank before the start of the occupation in 1967 has witnessed the extent to which Israel has transformed the landscape through spatial planning, military closures, and settlement, infrastructure and road construction. Sixty years on, what used to be a straightforward journey from point A to point B within the West Bank has become an arduous and frequently hazardous undertaking.

As a foreigner living in the West Bank in the 1980s and visiting it off and on ever since, this transformation revealed itself in incremental leaps and bounds, on each occasion provoking a shock of recognition mixed with consternation at how things looked the same but different.

I remember driving from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the 1980s, for example. The two cities were linked by a single highway with an Israeli army checkpoint at Qalandia refugee camp. To get to my destination would take me from 20 minutes to half an hour, at most, depending on traffic and the mood of the soldiers that day.

Fast forward to 2000. I had not visited for several years on the day I took my rental car along the old road out of Jerusalem. Ten minutes into my journey and not having taken any turns, I suddenly found myself inside an Israeli settlement, a suburb of occupied East Jerusalem.

Backtracking, I discovered that the way to Ramallah now required leaving the main highway for a lesser road. I proceeded. Yet before another 10 minutes had passed, I ended up at the entrance to another Israeli settlement, this time in the occupied West Bank, having again missed the relevant exit.

Looking back at those days, I now remember such unexpected forced deviations as annoyances that barely consumed additional time. Today, by contrast, travelling from Jerusalem to Ramallah can take an hour, or hours, as the army slows down or holds up traffic at all the available access points to Ramallah at will.

For Palestinians, the experience is 10 times worse. Ever growing in number and impact, Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement have come in various types. One class includes army checkpoints, both stationary and mobile, on West Bank arteries, makeshift earthen embankments blocking roads to villages and refugee camps, and steel gates that the army can close and open via remote control.

A second category involves access to occupied East Jerusalem and Israel, which is possible only by obtaining a permit from the military authorities. This affects Palestinians wishing to visit Islam’s and Christianity’s holy sites as well as those employed inside Israel.

And a third category of restrictions concerns West Bank Palestinians’ ability to travel abroad via the Allenby Bridge border crossing with Jordan.

Movement restrictions intensified after the October 2023 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. Their cumulative impact has been to fragment Palestinian society and the way it functions. They have disrupted the economy, in particular.

A combination of military no-go zones and settler violence has made the 61 percent of the West Bank that constitutes Area C, where most agricultural lands are located, increasingly inaccessible.

Curbs on movement have affected trade, raising the cost of commerce when transport is delayed at checkpoints and perishable goods spoil.

Imports and exports also face impediments, harming a Palestinian economy that is heavily dependent on trade with Israel and the outside world (representing roughly 67 percent of its GDP).

Restricted hours at Allenby and an untransparent, elastic definition of “dual-use” goods cause costly delays for imports, stymying development. Traders’ inability to meet their Israeli counterparts in person forces them to use intermediaries at additional expense.

Movement restrictions have created their own self-perpetuating cat-and-mouse dynamic as Palestinians find ways to circumvent them and the army imposes additional curbs, forcing people to pursue evermore inventive bypass tactics. But their clever manoeuvring may carry additional costs or even risks to their lives.

Take, for example, efforts by Palestinians – desperate to put food on the table – to illegally cross into Israel for work. Some have been shot dead when breaching Israel’s separation barrier while others have been detained.

In the months before October 2023, about 193,000 West Bank and Gaza workers were employed in Israel or Israeli settlements, mainly in construction and agriculture, contributing 20 to 25 percent to the Palestinian GDP.

Israel stopped workers from crossing the Green Line on the heels of the Hamas attack, citing security concerns, even though it has offered no evidence that Palestinian workers employed in Israel in any way played a role in the events of October 2023. Since then, the number of those permitted to go to their Israeli jobs is estimated at a mere 44,000, mostly in skilled professions.

The loss of what may be a family’s primary income has been calamitous, affecting about 750,000 people (based on an average family size of five) in a population of about 3.3 million. Meanwhile, an economic downturn has further swelled the ranks of the West Bank unemployed. Poverty rates have shot up.

Movement restrictions have also disrupted family networks, limiting participation in large gatherings, such as weddings and funerals, as extended families are spread throughout the West Bank. Curbs on movement additionally complicate access to emergency or specialised medical care and even to education. Since October 2023, Palestinian institutions of higher education have reduced in-class teaching as students have faced repeated delays – often of unpredictable length – in coming to school. Online classes can only partially compensate for this disruption.

What purpose do the myriad movement restrictions serve? Palestinians often describe their experience of navigating army checkpoints as a humiliation and a form of harassment, an effort by Israeli soldiers to both show who is boss and make the population’s life difficult. Many Palestinians see in soldiers’ conduct a way of taking revenge for the Hamas attacks.

Yet by increasing the occupation’s severity, checkpoints and other restrictions on Palestinians’ movement could well have the opposite effect of triggering greater violence and thus making Israel and its citizens, including those residing in illegal settlements, not more but less secure.

While the Israeli army might argue that a certain checkpoint at a given location and time is justified on the grounds of maintaining security, in their ubiquity and seeming arbitrariness, these restrictions have, over the years, gone far beyond what could reasonably be termed a security rationale.

A motive other than maintaining security must, therefore, be at play. It is not hard to find one when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out a two-state solution and champions annexing the occupied West Bank to Israel while some members of his cabinet, like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, openly espouse policies that would encourage West Bank Palestinians to emigrate.

Whatever the declared policy, the compounding impact of Israel’s movement restrictions has been to break up the West Bank into smaller zones that the Israeli army and intelligence apparatus can more easily penetrate and control. Palestinian politics remains vibrant in these localities (elections to West Bank municipal councils were held most recently this past April) while national politics and governance have eroded, partly as a result of obstacles to movement.

And Israel has been able to suppress, for now, armed resistance to the occupation, which has assumed an increasingly local character. The army made short work of small armed groups like the Lions’ Den, for example. These had emerged five years ago in the northern West Bank, spontaneously and largely uncoordinated between localities.

Yet even as Israel splits Palestinian society into separate enclaves, it has found no effective answer to Palestinians’ enduring aspirations to free themselves from the military occupation. To the contrary, it is sowing the seeds for further resistance through its annexationist agenda and unremittingly punitive actions.

A version of this article appeared first on Al Jazeera Arabic’s website. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Progressive advocate overcomes more than $60m in spending to defeat pro-Israel Congresswoman Haley Stevens.

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive public health advocate, has won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, overcoming more than $60m in campaign spending, mostly from pro-Israel groups, NBC has projected.

The result on Tuesday represents an enormous blow to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which led the way in the effort to defeat the pro-Palestinian El-Sayed, backing his opponent, US Congresswoman Haley Stevens, with more than $30m.

El-Sayed will face former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in November. The race is considered one of a handful of competitive Senate contests in the November midterms and could determine which party controls the chamber for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term.

If El-Sayed – who is of Egyptian descent – wins in November, he would become the first Muslim senator in US history.

Tuesday’s result in Michigan – a swing state that voted for Trump in 2024 – will have major implications for the Democrats’ policies on conflicts in the Middle East.

El-Sayed recognises Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as a genocide and argues that money spent on conflicts that benefit Israel should be invested in local communities in the US to address healthcare, housing and infrastructure problems.

More to come…

More than 100 Palestinians whose bodies were trapped beneath rubble for nearly three years have been laid to rest in Gaza City, in one of the largest mass funerals held in the enclave since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began.

Thousands of people gathered on Tuesday to bury the remains of 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families after rescue teams recovered their bodies from the site of a November 2023 Israeli attack in the Sabra neighbourhood.

According to Palestinian officials, the November 22, 2023 attack killed 308 members of the two families, including 40 children, 30 women and seven people with disabilities.

Rescue teams recently recovered more than 100 bodies from the site, allowing families to hold funeral prayers and burials. Palestinian authorities say about 157 people remain missing, either still beneath the rubble or otherwise unaccounted for.

Rows of coffins draped in Palestinian flags were carried through Gaza City as mourners gathered for the funeral. Large banners bearing photographs of the victims were displayed alongside calls for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza that began in October 2023.

‘Exceptional and painful scene’

The Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza described the funeral as one of the largest held in the territory during the war, with spokesman Mahmoud Basal posting on X that Gaza was “set for an exceptional and painful scene”.

He said the funeral procession reflected the scale of the human losses suffered by Palestinian families who have waited years to bury their relatives.

The funeral also prompted an outpouring of grief from Palestinian researchers, activists and human rights advocates, many of whom said it symbolised the suffering of families still waiting to recover loved ones buried beneath the rubble.

Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, described the funeral as potentially being “the largest funeral in Palestinian history”.

Palestinian researcher Mahmoud Hamed al-Aila said Gaza was “extracting the bodies of its children from under the rubble after years of genocide”.

“What heart can bear this pain?” he asked.

Activist Mohammed Haniyah said dozens of other bodies have decomposed or are still missing under the rubble.

Another activist, Ali Abo Rezeq, said the procession turned “massacre statistics into coffins and shrouds”, highlighting that some families searched through the rubble with their bare hands because of the shortages of heavy equipment.

Online bloggers, including Malik Al-Shanbari and Khaled Safi, viewed the funeral not merely as a burial ceremony, but as a “renewed testament to the scale of the tragedy left behind by the war”.

Ramy Abdu, chairman of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said around 200 members of the Abu Sharia family are still believed to be beneath the rubble, and that their remains may have decomposed.

The funeral also highlighted the fate of thousands of other Palestinian families who are still waiting to recover the remains of their relatives believed to be missing beneath the rubble across Gaza.

The funeral was held amid ongoing Israeli violations of a “ceasefire” agreement in October. As of Monday, continued Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,250 Palestinians and injured 4,110 others.

The so-called ceasefire deal was signed after more than two years of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which has killed at least 73,375 Palestinians and wounded at least 174,220, most of them women and children.

About 90 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure has also been damaged or destroyed during the genocide.

Meanwhile, the Assembly of Palestinian Clans and Families called on the Western-backed Board of Peace to accelerate efforts to recover bodies still trapped beneath the rubble, clear the debris and support the reconstruction of Gaza.

It said the burial of 112 Palestinians may have marked the end of the long wait for some families, but it did not end the search for thousands of others still missing.