Israel-Palestine conflict

Hebron’s economic losses surpass $3.8m as Israeli forces demolish West Bank homes and close hundreds of businesses.

Israeli forces are maintaining their siege on Hebron for the 10th consecutive day, threatening to expand their offensive and forcing more Palestinian families from their homes.

The lockdown in the occupied West Bank city was enforced after an attack on October 23 near Hebron in which two Israeli soldiers were killed.

More than 3,300 Palestinians have since been displaced or affected, with homes destroyed and businesses shut, according to the local municipality.

Mayor Yousef al-Jabari told Al Jazeera on Saturday that daily economic losses were estimated to exceed 12 million shekels ($3.8m), with more than $1.9m worth of damage to infrastructure, along with losses in the health and environmental sectors estimated at about $160,000.

He said Israeli forces have demolished 15 homes and other structures and forced 327 businesses to close. About 80,000 students have been unable to attend school for 10 days, he added.

The mayor said Hebron accounts for about 40 percent of the Palestinian economy and the siege amounts to “collective punishment”.

Palestinian families in and around the city fear the army could soon extend its attacks.

Raids and settler attacks

Israeli arrests of Palestinians in Hebron and other cities in the occupied West Bank continued on Sunday.

Israeli forces arrested 10 Palestinian teachers in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron and seized their vehicle, reported the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Video shared by Palestinian media and verified by Al Jazeera showed the Israeli military raiding a school run by the United Nations in the Shufat refugee camp in occupied East Jerusalem.

The United Nations humanitarian office, OCHA, said Israeli settlers carried out 397 attacks on Palestinians across the occupied West Bank in October, the highest monthly figure since monitoring began in 2006, Wafa said.

Between October 20 and 26, settler attacks targeted 49 Palestinian communities, mostly while Palestinians harvested olives on their land.

Nine children were among 57 Palestinians injured by settlers and Israeli forces: 34 by military gunfire and physical assaults and 23 in settler attacks.

Since the start of 2015, Israeli authorities have issued 9,518 demolition or stop-work notices against Palestinian property in the occupied West Bank, reported the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission. The Palestinian government commission added that 344 of those notices were given in the first nine months of this year.

UNRWA’s West Bank director, Roland Friedrich, said the scenes in Hebron carry “alarming echoes” of the mass displacement in the northern occupied West Bank in early 2025, when Israeli military operations emptied the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams refugee camps.

More than 34,000 Palestinian refugees from the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps remain displaced, according to UNRWA, more than a year after Israel’s “Iron Wall” operation began in January 2025. The operation destroyed more than half of the camps’ residential buildings.

OCHA’s demolition records capture only a fraction of that destruction. Between 2009 and October 2026, the agency recorded 1,399 buildings demolished in the Jenin and Tulkarem governorates, displacing 4,139 people. Those records mainly track demolitions carried out for lack of permits or as punishment, not buildings destroyed during military raids.

An investigation by the research group Forensic Architecture found evidence of deliberate, systematic destruction. Researchers verified more than 200 incidents involving the destruction of buildings and streets across four refugee camps, using armoured bulldozers, controlled demolitions and air attacks. They found that roads were widened through homes and gardens to create routes for military vehicles. The group concluded that Israel was applying tactics in the occupied West Bank similar to those it had used in Gaza.

In February 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Tulkarem and Jenin would come to resemble Jabalia and Shujayea, two of Gaza’s most devastated areas.

The raids have not stopped. Last week, Israeli forces detained four Palestinians in Tulkarem, and in the village of Burin, south of Nablus, troops converted several homes into military barracks, as they have in Hebron.

Near Jenin, the army has ordered the residents of an entire village to leave permanently. “I have sheep and cows. Our entire lives are tied to this land,” said farmer Jabri Yahya. “Last year they uprooted our olive trees, and this year they want to force us to leave. We don’t know where to go.”

Israel carried out several attacks in Gaza, including shelling the Nuseirat refugee camp.

At least four Palestinians in Gaza have been killed as Israel continues to attack the enclave, despite a so-called “ceasefire” that has been in place for over a year.

Israel carried out several attacks in Gaza on Saturday, including shelling the Nuseirat refugee camp, in which Palestinian teacher Diaa Abu al-Rous was killed, al-Awda Hospital confirmed.

Separately, another man, Arafat al-Arair, died after sustaining serious injuries days earlier when Israel struck a vehicle in the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City. A medical source at al-Shifa Hospital confirmed his death.

Meanwhile, two girls also died on Saturday from injuries sustained the previous evening when their tent caught fire at a camp for displaced people in al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis. Nasser Medical Complex confirmed their deaths. It is not clear what caused the fire.

At least six Palestinians were killed in Gaza over the past 48 hours, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health, bringing the number of people killed since the October 2025 ceasefire to 1,580.

In its daily statistical report on Saturday, the ministry said another 26 people were injured over the same period.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) warned on Friday that Israeli forces in Gaza were continuing to displace Palestinians and that their actions continued to raise concerns of ethnic cleansing.

The OHCHR said in a statement that Palestinians were increasingly being forced into a shrinking area of the territory, which has been decimated following three years of Israeli siege.

The office said Israeli forces were destroying what remained of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The Israeli military is working to expand its control over Gaza’s territory to 70 percent, following an order from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May.

Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said Israel was targeting civilians as it sought to displace Palestinians from the city.

“We have testimonies from people who have evacuated their homes in the eastern part of Deir el-Balah city, confirming that the Israeli military has adjusted the yellow demarcation line by opening fire on civilians to push them from these areas,” Abu Azzoum said.

Since a nominal “ceasefire” came into effect a year ago, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,580 Palestinians and injured 5,711 others, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Talks aimed at permanently ending Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza under United States President Donald Trump’s peace plan have stalled. Reconstruction efforts have yet to begin amid disputes between Hamas and Israel over the implementation of Trump’s plan.

Hamas says it will not fully disarm until Israel withdraws entirely from Gaza. However, Israel maintains it will not leave the territory until Hamas forfeits its weapons.

Israel’s parliament remains in deadlock.

After one of the highest voter turnouts in decades, neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance secured the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority in the October 27 polls.

Netanyahu’s camp came first, with 53 seats, five more than the main opposition bloc. The Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats but have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations.

Viewed from a distance, the results could appear startling.

The judicial reforms ushered in at the start of Netanyahu’s government term in 2022 provoked the largest street protests in Israel’s history, while the prime minister himself is still embroiled in a corruption trial dating back to 2019. Alleged failures ahead of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, that triggered Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have still to be reckoned with, despite overwhelming public pressure to do so. Moreover, the genocide has led to growing international isolation, while also providing the pretext for multiple attacks on countries across the region – the latest of which, undertaken with the United States on Iran in February, continues to roil energy markets around the world.

Nevertheless, roughly 2.38 million Israelis on Tuesday made the journey to the polls to back Netanyahu’s coalition, led by his Likud party, while some 2.21 million cast their ballots for the opposition alliance.

Between the two, little space was given to examine the multiple war crimes Israel stands accused of having carried out in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of it in ruins, or government complicity in the surging violence and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, where a United Nations commission of inquiry said on Monday that Israel had been committing crimes against humanity, including extermination, torture and rape.

Gaza did not make the ballot

Analysts said the fact that neither Gaza nor the West Bank were a deciding factor in how Israelis voted on Tuesday was largely because they already represented an area of broad agreement across both alliances.

Instead, the election was fought on largely internal issues: the power of Israel’s courts, whether members of the ultra-Orthodox minority should be exempted from military service, and whether the government’s alleged culpability in missing the warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined.

Leading Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said the issues were pitched to the Israeli public along broadly similar lines to those used by the politicians enacting the policies.

“I don’t think the problem is simply that people are uninformed or disengaged,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Many Israelis know that Gaza has been devastated, even though they are exposed to a very selective representation of that devastation. But knowing something and recognising its moral and political implications are different things,” Shenhav-Shahrabani added, providing one explanation for the absence of empathy displayed by many Israelis in the face of the widely reported suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

“Ordinary people, who love their families, care for their friends, and consider themselves decent human beings, can participate in or acquiesce to a political order that produces immense suffering for others,” he said.

For Shenhav-Shahrabani, there has been “a powerful mechanism of denial” at work. “Not necessarily denial of the facts, but denial of their meaning,” he said.

Security on the agenda

For Netanyahu’s supporters, however, this denial could be traced to something more personal.

“The Likud is a tribe, or perhaps a cult and, as far as they are concerned, Dear Leader is always right,” Israeli analyst Ahron Bregman said of the prime minister’s base, which has sustained his rule for a cumulative 19 years – roughly a quarter of Israel’s entire existence.

“For them, the enemy, straight after the Arabs, is the left, and they would vote for Netanyahu regardless of his faults,” added Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at King’s College London.

For much of this electorate, the vote was less a judgement on the government’s conduct than a choice between competing claims to political legitimacy – or as Israeli academic Roi Zur put it, a contest over “the heart and soul of democracy” and the future of Jewish and Israeli identity.

“The most important thing, I think, for turnout among Netanyahu’s supporters is the understanding, or the belief, that the alternative coalition would be weaker on security,” said Zur, an expert on voter behaviour who teaches at Essex University.

What Netanyahu had been particularly successful in doing, he continued, was creating “this campaign of fear and the belief that he is the only one who can deal with this situation, that he is the only strong enough prime minister”.

“The idea that Netanyahu is the only and the strongest leader that can lead Israel through these recent times and the post-October 7 war.”

War and occupation, according to Shenhav-Shahrabani, were not choices to be made on the ballot paper.

Instead, they had become the prism through which, over decades, Israelis had come to view “security, citizenship, and the very meaning of democracy”.

“That is why replacing Netanyahu, important as it may be, would not by itself resolve the deeper problem.”

Gaza City— Mohammed Hamad, 14, was on his way home from school in Deir el-Balah on October 17 when an Israeli strike targeted the road he was travelling along.

He had finished classes at the makeshift school and was walking home through the al-Baraka neighbourhood with his 10-year-old brother, Abdullah. Mohammed was killed in the strike along with another man. Abdullah survived.

Mohammed was Riyad Hamad’s third child, an eighth-grade student among the top pupils in his class. His loss is difficult for the 44-year-old father to comprehend.

“He was not just my son, he was my friend,” Hamad told Al Jazeera from his family tent in Deir el-Balah. “He was doing so well. May God have mercy on him.”

The family has struggled to come to terms with the death of a boy whose schoolwork and achievements had been a source of pride.

“Mohammed used to ask me: ‘How am I with you?’ I swear, I never asked him for anything more,” he said.

The loss has also left a deep mark on Abdullah, who now fears losing his father, too.

“He has become very afraid of going to school. They used to go together every day and come back together. Now he cannot come to terms with having to go on his own,” Hamad said.

“We are living in fear. When I go out into the streets, I swear I am afraid. Even when I am walking or sitting in a car, my heart is filled with fear … Why should our children have to live with this constant fear and anxiety, even until the last moment?

“Enough is enough. The child is supposed to bury his father, not the father bury his child. They have turned the order of things upside down.”

The gradual return of children to school – even in makeshift classrooms and tents – had offered families in Gaza some hope of restoring a sense of normality after years of disruptions.

But Israeli air raids and sniper fire have continued, despite a ceasefire being established last October for Gaza. Since then, Israel has killed at least 1,574 Palestinians and injured 5,687 in Gaza, according to the enclave’s Ministry of Health.

The academic year resumed in Gaza on September 19, after nearly three years of disruptions caused by Israel’s war – and with it came more Israeli strikes.

Ten children aged from six to 16 and a teacher were killed between October 18 and 24. In a statement last Sunday, the Ministry of Education said that two girls were wounded during morning assembly at Muradiya School in Jabalia on October 21. Five students were also injured, some critically, in an attack on the Islamic University campus in Gaza City on Sunday.

The ministry called for urgent international action to protect students, schools and universities in Gaza.

The risks are particularly high for schools located near the so-called “Yellow Line”, a point that divided Gaza’s territory between Israeli and Palestinian control as part of the October 2025 “ceasefire” agreement. The line has moved westward to give Israel control of more than 65 percent of Gaza, according to the United Nations, up from the 53 percent agreed upon a year ago

At least 66 Palestinian children have been killed close to the Yellow Line, and pupils and teachers travelling near this zone remain in mortal danger from Israeli snipers and bombs.

On October 21, Suad Abd Rabbo, a fourth-grade student, went to school carrying her bag and books. Not long afterwards, her older sister rushed home shouting that Suad had been shot.

“I ran out barefoot,” Suad’s mother, Aliaa Abd Rabbo, recalled. “When I saw her, I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. She was bleeding, crying and screaming.”

The bullet struck Suad above the knee and lodged in a sensitive area close to her nerves and tendons. She was rushed to hospital, where doctors warned that trying to remove it could cause paralysis. They operated on Suad but were still unable to extract the bullet, which remains in her leg.

Abd Rabbo remembers when Suad came round from the anaesthesia after surgery and started reciting a passage she had been preparing for a school dictation exercise.

“‘O symbol of generosity and resilience … When I feel tired, I sit under an olive tree in the yard of our home, and feel rested after the exhaustion,” her mother recalled her saying.

Suad has since been discharged from hospital and has returned to her tent, where she remains unable to walk or move around. She needs surgery abroad to fully recover, but with Israel tightly controlling exit and entry from Gaza, her prospects of proper treatment are remote.

“Suad is now deeply frustrated. She cries and asks: ‘Why did this happen to me? Why was I targeted? What did I do?’” Abd Rabbo said.

Israeli tanks, military vehicles and cranes regularly open fire close to their tent in northern Gaza, particularly after sunset. Families often have to lie flat on the ground for hours to avoid the stray bullets that ricochet through the camp.

“My heart hurts when I send the girls to school. I told my husband I regret coming back from the south,” Abd Rabbo said about their return home to Jabalia after fleeing to Deir el-Balah during the war.

Another girl was also injured on the same day as Suad as students at Muradiya School were preparing for assembly at about 10:30am, Naim Aloush, the school’s principal, said.

“The girls had formed two lines … one suddenly screamed and fell to the ground … another girl standing nearby was struck by a bullet in her side,” she told Al Jazeera.

Teachers rushed to the girls and found that Suad had been shot while the second pupil, Amina Khader, a fifth-grade student, sustained a minor injury to her abdomen.

Aloush said the shooting sent fear through the school, with parents rushing to collect their children.

Pupils who had witnessed the incident were left terrified, and the school saw a marked increase in absenteeism in the days that followed.

The principal sees this incident as part of wider dangers facing the school in the al-Ghubari area, west of Jabalia al-Balad, consisting of 20 educational tents and serving about 1,000 pupils in the surrounding community, close to the Yellow Line.

Aloush said stray bullets or projectiles – from Israeli artillery, quadcopter drones and snipers – still regularly hit the school.

“Education is under fire, and our whole lives are under fire. At any moment, there can be gunfire. It is not light … it comes down like rain,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Every day, I come to school with my hand over my heart, afraid that one of my pupils or a member of the teaching staff might be hit.”

Amina, the other child injured along with Suad, has been left deeply traumatised by the incident, her father, Khaled Khader, said.

Khader said he rushed to the school after hearing that Amina had been injured and carried his daughter to a nearby clinic.

“There was terror, absolute terror. My daughter was in shock. She broke down, started screaming and collapsed,” Khader told Al Jazeera.

“Thank God she is safe … but the psychological impact of what happened will take years to overcome.”

Amina has since been afraid to return to school. Her family tried taking her back once, but she left early, unable to bear the sound of the gunfire.

“She is now afraid of the school itself. She keeps dreaming about her classmate lying there with blood running from her,” Khader said.

He said the incident had also left him afraid for the rest of his children and his wife, with Israeli air raids, random gunfire and shelling continuing to affect streets near the school.

“We are confused about what to do. Do we keep our children away from school and deprive them of their education, or do we send them out, knowing that they could be targeted at any moment?” Khader said. “A student needs stability to be able to learn. But we have no stability, and there are no alternatives.”

For more than two years, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri has been barred from occupied East Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, unable to pray or deliver sermons at the holy site.

And with his latest exclusion order extending the ban until April 2027, the Palestinian preacher – the head of the Higher Islamic Council in Jerusalem – is among those facing Israeli restrictions at the site – the third holiest in Islam and a Palestinian national symbol.

Sabri has faced repeated exclusion orders since August 2024. The latest order, issued on October 20, prevents Sabri from praying or delivering sermons at Al-Aqsa until April 2027.

At the same time, far-right Jewish religious activists have increasingly been allowed to pray at the site under Israeli police protection, going against a longstanding status quo and opposition from ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious authorities.

The restrictions began after Israeli police detained Sabri in August 2024 over a sermon in which he mourned the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel.

Sabri, one of the most prominent Palestinians in East Jerusalem, has faced repeated Israeli interrogations.

Palestinians say this is part of a campaign against them at Al-Aqsa. The Wadi Hilweh Information Center, a Palestinian human rights monitoring group, says Israeli authorities have issued more than 1,000 exclusion orders barring Palestinians from Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City since the beginning of 2026, including against religious figures and Islamic Waqf employees.

The centre reported an increase in exclusion orders ahead of Jewish holidays, documenting more than 40 issued over five days in early September.

Sabri told Al Jazeera that the latest extension was the fifth time Israeli authorities have issued an exclusion order against him.

He described the decision as unjust, illegal, inhumane and uncivilised, saying it was intended to silence those speaking out about Al-Aqsa.

Sabri said that he would continue defending Al-Aqsa despite the restrictions, describing the mosque as an integral part of his Islamic faith.

“These measures are aimed at diminishing the Palestinian presence at the mosque, while simultaneously allowing settlers to carry out incursions in large numbers,” Sabri said. “Such actions represent an aggressive policy targeting the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Islamic presence within it.”

Prohibited activities

Ibrahim al-Natsheh was released by Israeli police earlier this month after spending a week in detention after he was arrested while attending funeral prayers for his cousin at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

He told Al Jazeera that officers took him to a police room and handed him a six-month exclusion order barring him from East Jerusalem’s Old City. He said no specific charge was brought against him.

According to al-Natsheh, the order warns that he could face arrest and further penalties, including a fine or imprisonment, if he enters the prohibited area.

Al-Natsheh said he has received so many exclusion orders that he has lost count. He said the restrictions began about nine years ago, following an Israeli crackdown on Islamic study circles at the mosque.

Palestinian students, teachers and activists associated with the activities have faced arrests and exclusion orders.

“The orders banning us from the mosque provide no specific reason; they simply cite ‘disturbing the peace’, even though we are there solely to pray,” al-Natsheh told Al Jazeera. “Ahead of the Jewish holidays, they sent a message to me and a group of other worshippers, warning us not to approach the mosque or else we will be arrested.”

Even when he is not subject to a formal exclusion order, al-Natsheh said, Israeli police have prevented him from entering Al-Aqsa. He also alleged that officers have repeatedly arrested him at Al-Aqsa’s gates and severely beaten him while in detention.

“The path to the mosque has become incredibly difficult; it is swarming with soldiers and settlers,” he said. “We are denied the ability to reach it with any ease, and if we try, we face arrest and beatings with batons. It is deeply painful to witness what is happening to Al-Aqsa now.”

Al Jazeera has reached out to Israeli authorities for comment, but has yet to receive a response.

Diminishing Waqf role

Al-Aqsa Mosque has seen an escalation in Israeli restrictions and violations throughout 2026.

After the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 28, Israeli authorities closed Al-Aqsa to most worshippers for 40 days, reopening the compound on April 9.

Meanwhile, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Jerusalem Governorate, almost 28,000 visits by Israeli settlers were recorded at Al-Aqsa between July and September.

Ma’rouf al-Rifai, an adviser to the Jerusalem Governorate, told Al Jazeera that during recent Jewish holidays, Israeli restrictions on Muslim worshippers had intensified.

These measures included closing the mosque for periods of time, preventing noon prayers on at least one occasion, and restricting access for residents of the Old City during visits to the site by Israeli settlers and Jewish religious activists.

Al-Rifai said the Islamic Waqf Department faces mounting constraints on its role in managing the mosque’s affairs.

He said Israeli police have prevented Waqf officials from accompanying Jewish groups when they entered the site, curtailed the authority of mosque guards, and arrested or barred several employees from the compound.

As a result, he said, fewer than 15 guards are now on duty during the morning shift, compared with approximately 50 previously.

He pointed out that the closure of the mosque for 40 days during the war with Iran took place without consulting the Waqf or providing prior notification, which he said demonstrated the Waqf’s diminishing role in the mosque’s administration.

“Settler incursions have undergone a shift over the past three years; they now include Jewish prayers and religious rituals, the raising of Israeli flags, and attempts to bring in sacrificial offerings,” al-Rifai said.

These changes have undermined longstanding arrangements at the compound, under which the Waqf manages Muslim religious affairs while Israeli police oversee security and access.

According to al-Rifai, Israeli authorities have prevented the Waqf from carrying out restoration work at the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall and restricted maintenance of the compound’s trees and gardens. He said the committee responsible for restoration work at Al-Aqsa has been unable to carry out its duties for years.

He warned of efforts to alter the status quo at Al-Aqsa Mosque, pointing to several proposals and developments, including demands to allow Jewish visitors into the compound on Saturdays, plans advanced by Israeli politicians to divide access to parts of the site between Muslims and Jews, and an Israeli police recruitment drive for volunteers tasked with escorting Israeli incursions at the site.

Al-Rifai said these developments represented a further erosion of the Waqf’s authority and warned that they could eventually transform the arrangements governing worship and access at the holy site.

Israeli forces and settlers have escalated pogroms and raids across the occupied West Bank, attacking and injuring Palestinians, restricting their movement, carrying out arrests and demolishing homes.

This comes as a military offensive and siege on the Hebron governorate entered its seventh day – an operation that has displaced or besieged hundreds of Palestinian families and kept tens of thousands of students out of classrooms.

In the Qalandiya refugee camp just north of occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli forces carried out a raid that triggered clashes on Thursday. Two children were wounded, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.

It said its teams treated a 15-year-old boy who was shot with live ammunition in both legs, and a child, aged 12, who was injured by live-bullet fragments. Both were taken to hospital.

In a separate incident, Israeli soldiers and settlers beat disabled Palestinian Mohammad Ahmad Ayesh Thawabta in the village of al-Maniya, southeast of Bethlehem, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

In the northern West Bank, Israeli forces detained 13 Palestinians, including three brothers, in raids before dawn on Thursday, the Palestinian Prisoners Media Office and local sources said. Most of the raids were in the Nablus governorate, where soldiers searched homes and harassed families.

Hebron offensive

In Hebron, Israeli forces continued raids and closures that began last week after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a gun attack. Both Palestinian suspects were also killed.

Hebron Governor Khaled Dudin said on Thursday that 537 families, comprising 3,361 people, have been forced from their homes, Wafa reported.

They include 232 infants, 326 older people, 147 pregnant or breastfeeding women and 213 people with chronic illnesses. Municipal figures put the total number affected, including those under siege, at about 5,000 people from 780 families.

Dudin said the offensive has disrupted education for about 262,000 students across 589 schools in the governorate this week, forcing schools to move to remote learning. Officials estimated daily economic losses at 10 million to 12 million shekels ($3.2m to $3.9m).

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said Israeli forces detained 110 Palestinians in the governorate from Friday to Wednesday. Soldiers beat two men in Dura and Wad al-Saman and arrested two brothers while they were ploughing their land east of Yatta, it said. Israeli forces also raided homes in Taffuh and Halhul, and settlers attacked vehicles at the city’s closed northern entrance, it added.

Memorials demolished

In nearby Masafer Yatta, armed settlers attacked US journalist Jasper Nathaniel and two activists in the village of Umm al-Khair on Wednesday. Russian activist Adele Shoko said on X that the settlers beat and threatened them and stole their equipment and Nathaniel was pepper-sprayed and arrested.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Israeli forces are still operating in Hebron, blocking access and imposing tight restrictions on movement across the governorate.

They are “disrupting Palestinians’ access to livelihoods, education and healthcare. Most displaced families are staying with relatives,” OCHA said, calling for the prevention of further forced displacements and demolitions.

Israeli forces also demolished memorials to Palestinians in several parts of the Hebron governorate on Thursday. In Dura, south of Hebron city, soldiers fired a heavy barrage of tear gas before bulldozing a mural bearing the images of several of the town’s dead, including Bajis Abu Atwan, who was killed in the 1970s.

The targeting of memorials “appears to be a new pattern recently adopted by Israeli forces across all West Bank governorates – though at a higher rate here in Hebron”, Al Jazeera’s Muntasir Nassar said, reporting from Dura.

Israeli military and settler attacks across the West Bank have intensified since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman rejects ‘disinformation campaign’ amid allegations by some Israeli politicians of voting interference.

As Israel awaits the final results of its highly contested elections, some political figures have sought to drag Qatar into the fray with claims of voting interference – an accusation Doha rejects.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and media outlets associated with it have, without evidence, accused Qatar of sending money to Arab parties in Israel for get-out-the-vote drives.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman on Thursday categorically denied the allegations of interference or funding of any activities aimed at influencing the election results.

“We reject the accusations made by certain Israeli politicians and their contacts in the media, who have launched yet another disinformation campaign aiming to drag Qatar into Israeli political disputes following this week’s elections,” Majed al-Ansari said in a post on X.

The unsubstantiated Israeli claims, which the spokesperson described as “ridiculous and dangerous in equal measure”, are the latest in a long-running campaign against Qatar.

Netanyahu has previously boasted about attacking Qatar in September 2025 during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza while Israeli influence experts and political advisers also worked on a secret campaign targeting Qatar in the weeks after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel.

“[Some Israeli politicians] accuse Qatar of buying off Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli political left and now, in this latest campaign, the Arab vote. If these claims were to be believed, Qatar would apparently own all of Israel,” al-Ansari said.

Partial results indicated that Netanyahu’s bloc would not secure a majority in the Knesset in Tuesday’s parliamentary elections. Those results showed the two Arab lists securing a record number of seats in the new parliament, but the main parties have rejected the idea of partnering with them.

Despite the latest claims, Dean Livine, the acting director for Israel’s Central Elections Committee, has rejected allegations of foreign interference in the elections. “The Knesset elections were conducted lawfully. The integrity of the elections at polling stations was rigorously safeguarded,” he wrote in a letter to an MP and fellow committee member.

“The repeated invocation of Qatar in Israeli electoral rhetoric reveals an excessive obsession with our country among certain Israeli political and media figures,” al-Ansari said, adding that Qatar should “not be used as a scapegoat for the political failures of certain Israeli politicians”.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman said some Israeli politicians, instead of shifting attention onto Qatar, “would be better off focusing on their own voters, improving people’s everyday lives, and undoing the damage they’ve created in the region”.

He reiterated that Qatar has “no involvement” in Israel’s political or electoral competition.

“These are internal Israeli matters in which we do not interfere, and we will not accept any attempt to draw Qatar into its domestic political disputes.”

Qatar is a key mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and played a central role in talks to halt Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Doha is also leading mediation efforts between Washington and Tehran to end the United States-Israel war on Iran.

Al-Ansari said the latest accusations would not distract Doha from its “important role as a mediator, our diplomatic and humanitarian efforts, our support for the Palestinian people, or our commitment to a just and comprehensive peace and regional stability.”

Video footage posted online showed several men, some of them armed, beating Nathaniel and Andrey X.

Russian activist Adele Shoko has said that Israeli settlers attacked her alongside two of her colleagues in the Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, in the Masafer Yatta area of the occupied West Bank, according to social media posts.

Shoko said on social media platform X that she, US journalist Jasper Nathaniel, and Israeli-Russian activist Andrey X were beaten and threatened by armed settlers who stole equipment and personal items.

“Jasper and I were also beaten. Jasper was then pepper-sprayed and arrested,” Shoko wrote, adding that Nathaniel was taken away by Israeli forces.

Shoko said Andrey X suffered a concussion and lost consciousness multiple times during the incident before being detained by authorities.

“Andrey was severely beaten and lost consciousness several times in front of police. Despite this, he was denied hospital treatment. He was put in an ambulance – but instead of being taken to hospital, he was taken to a police station. He is still there, arrested and being denied medical care,” she wrote.

Video footage Shoko posted online showed several men, some of them armed, beating Nathaniel and Andrey X. Further video showed Israeli authorities leading away Nathaniel while he shouted that he had just been beaten up.

The assault follows an October 16 incident in Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, where masked Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers harvesting olives, setting trees on fire and throwing stones using slingshots.

Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, who was covering the attack, was beaten, robbed, and hospitalised, while a Palestinian man was shot in the leg by Israeli soldiers who arrived on the scene and fired live ammunition and tear gas.

Levine, who was wearing a protective vest marked “PRESS”, said settlers repeatedly kicked and beat her on the ground before stealing her passport, phone, and camera equipment. Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray condemned the “unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job”, while several US lawmakers called for an investigation and an end to settler violence in the region.

No clear winner has emerged from Israel’s election, with nearly 90 percent of ballots counted and both major political blocs falling short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.

The Israeli Central Elections Committee said on Wednesday that it had counted more than five million votes as of 9pm local time (19:00 GMT). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc is on course to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, while the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot is expected to secure 48 seats.

Projections from Tuesday’s voting also showed that the Arab parties – the Joint List and Ra’am – could hold a record combined 19 seats.

Final election results could come as early as Thursday evening, though no clear winner is expected to emerge.

More than 500,000 special double-envelope ballots remain to be counted, potentially changing the seat distribution. These include votes cast by soldiers, diplomats and others voting away from their registered polling stations.

The vote – the first since the October 7, 2023, attacks and the Gaza genocide – was widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s premiership. The 77-year-old appears far from defeated, despite lacking a clear majority.

Netanyahu will remain caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed. President Isaac Herzog will begin consulting party leaders about forming a new administration next week, once the official election results are released.

Herzog has urged all parties to avoid another vote that would stall the formation of a government. But coalition building is the norm in Israel, and no party has ever won an outright majority in the country’s history.

Ahead of the vote, Eisenkot ruled out forming a minority government with Arab-led parties. Netanyahu has also rejected such a prospect.

As Netanyahu’s bloc is set to be the largest, analysts predict that he will form a unity government that could include Eisenkot. However, such an outcome is far from certain.

Eisenkot said in a post on X on Wednesday that his opposition alliance was now focused on the “heavy task entrusted to us – bringing change to Israel and establishing a Zionist mobilisation government”.

“This is the will of the people who expressed no confidence in the government of October 7th and the shirking, and in the bloc of shirkers in general. A bloc that is at the low point of two decades.”

Amid record turnout among Arab voters, Netanyahu’s Likud party accused Arab parties of stealing the election.

“The elections in the State of Israel were stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism and the elimination of the Jewish state through serious criminal offences of bribery, threats, violence, forgeries, and the use of prohibited software to mobilise voters,” the party said in a statement.

“The Likud party is transferring to the police, the Shin Bet, and the Central Elections Committee hundreds of testimonies and pieces of evidence regarding election theft in many Arab polling stations,” it said.

Israel’s predominantly Arab Joint List political alliance said in a statement published late on Wednesday by Turkish news agency Anadolu that preliminary figures showed Arab voter turnout played a decisive role in keeping Netanyahu and his coalition short of a parliamentary majority, while cautioning that the final results were yet to be announced.

Voters answered incitement and intimidation at the ballot box, it said, rejecting a “government of butchers” and its policies of home demolitions, racism and war crimes.

The Joint List said its electoral support reflected demands for political unity and a force capable of defending Arab citizens’ rights without concessions.

It pledged to work to remove Netanyahu’s government and prevent its return, saying it was ready to cooperate towards an alternative government.

Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen said the alliance could back an anti-Netanyahu government from outside, but would not join it.

Khalil returned to Columbia University to discuss memoir detailing his arrest and detention by ICE agents.

Pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil says campus advocacy has shifted public perception and encouraged a generation of leaders to question their views on Israel, speaking as he returned to Columbia University for the first time since his arrest.

The 31-year-old Columbia graduate, who became a figurehead of the campus movement that swept the United States in 2024, returned to campus on Tuesday to discuss his new memoir, No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention, marking his first visit since his arrest on March 8, 2025.

“The American public is finally changing, is finally looking at the Palestinian as an equal human,” he told the AFP news agency in an interview.

While Khalil described the event, attended by about 100 people, as a “victory”, he accused university leadership of seeking “to erase me, to erase any Palestinian voices on campus”.

Some Jewish groups on social media opposed his return to campus. In response, a Columbia spokesperson said the university is “committed to rigorous debate, inquiry, and respectful dialogue across differing perspectives”.

“Columbia supports the right of faculty members to organize academic events,” the statement carried by US media read. “An invitation to speak does not signify university endorsement of a speaker’s views.”

Khalil helped lead student demonstrations at Columbia in 2024, which became the epicentre of nationwide campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. He was later arrested by immigration authorities at the height of a federal crackdown on foreign student activists and held for three months without criminal charge, despite holding permanent US residency.

He has repeatedly slammed the university for its handling of the demonstrations, which included authorising the New York Police Department to clear protesters from the Manhattan campus.

“They chose brutality. They chose repression,” Khalil told AFP.

Columbia maintained at the time that the demonstrations presented a safety threat. Khalil also accused the university of failing to protect him from harassment prior to his detention.

Despite the personal toll, Khalil credited Palestinian student advocacy with driving broader political shifts in the United States, pointing to gains by progressive candidates.

“Also, we can see on the ground that we have more progressive candidates being elected into US Congress and positions of power,” he said, citing candidates like Dr Abdul El-Sayed, running for the US Senate in Michigan, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Khalil was released from immigration custody on June 20, 2025, though the Trump administration continues to seek his deportation.

“A big part of my fight is like fighting for normalcy,” he said. “To go back to being the young father who would go to the park with his son and wife, and no one would bother them.”

Despite the ongoing legal battle, he expressed resolve over his public role.

“My fight is not only about whether I get to stay in this country,” Khalil said. “It is about whether, you know, people in this country can speak their minds.”

Record-breaking voter turnout in Palestinian-Israeli communities around 80 percent, early indications show.

Israel’s Arab parties are projected to win 18 seats in the Israeli parliament, exit polls indicate, after voting among Palestinian citizens of Israel surged to their highest levels in decades.

Exit polling data from Tuesday’s vote suggested that the leading Arab-led parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, are set to hold a record number of seats in the 120-member Knesset. Updated exit polling indicated that the opposition bloc led by former Israeli military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party and the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party were tied at 51 seats each.

Early indications put voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel at around 80 percent, historic numbers that break 1999 records, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Tuesday.

The leader of Ra’am, or the United Arab List, Mansour Abbas, said he hopes the final election results will allow the anti-Netanyahu bloc, including his party, to win the 61 seats required to form a government.

“With the numbers we have now, there is no government,” Abbas told Israel’s Channel 12.

Abbas, whose Ra’am party currently holds five seats in the Knesset and joined the coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022, added that both main blocs reached out to his party before and after the election.

‘Arabs can’t be kept outside’

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador, said creating a government might prove difficult for parties such as Eisenkot’s – which earlier exit polls had put narrowly ahead – because they promised not to form coalitions with Arab parties during the campaign.

“There’s a price to pay,” Pinkas said, because the “Arabs can’t be kept outside and only being considered and co-opted when you need their votes”.

He added that the Arab-led lists will make demands that a Jewish-led coalition government may not support.

Netanyahu and his far-right coalition made last-ditch efforts on Tuesday to get their supporters to the polls, warning of surging voter turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel, a tactic Arab politicians denounced as racist and inflammatory.

Cars flying Netanyahu’s Likud party flags drove through Jerusalem blaring the Islamic call to prayer and urging supporters to cast their ballots because “Arabs are voting”, witnesses said.

In social media posts, the embattled prime minister highlighted long queues at polling stations in Arab communities and published an image that he said showed Arab voters, including women wearing the niqab, a veil that covers the lower half of the face, waiting to vote.

“If we don’t wake up now, we’ll find ourselves with a government of Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi,” he said, referring to two leading Palestinian members of the Knesset.

Overall voter turnout was also historic, reaching its highest level since 1999 with 77.7 percent casting ballots in Tuesday’s election, the Central Elections Committee reported. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 21 percent of the country’s population of 10 million and have traditionally voted at lower rates than Jewish Israelis.

‘Existential moment’

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, called the election “an existential moment for Palestinian-Israelis”.

She noted the record turnout among what has emerged as a key voting bloc, which drew “even [voters] who would usually boycott elections, who didn’t believe it would amount to any kind of influence, that it would change their reality, that it would alter the systemic discrimination that they face”.

The Knesset has passed more than 100 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also face discrimination in receiving state funds, Odeh said.

Al-Bureij, Gaza Strip – A Sack of Flour, an 11-minute documentary by the emerging filmmaker Mona Abu Qass, draws on her personal experience to examine Israel’s use of starvation against Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal war on the enclave.

The film is one of five documentaries by Palestinian women screened Monday at the opening of the second Gaza International Women’s Film Festival, which also marked the official launch of the Gaza Cinema Academy.

The event took place at the site of the al-Nakheel Hall in al-Bureij, central Gaza, under the slogan “Women Creating Life from Death”. The hall is destroyed, like the majority of buildings in Gaza, after three years of Israel’s war, which has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians.

The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to find food in Gaza, the dangers at aid distribution points and the lives lost while trying to obtain flour.

Through Abu Qass’s own experiences, A Sack of Flour explores how the trauma of hunger continues to affect families even after food becomes available again.

Those experiences have renewed relevance as Israeli restrictions on goods entering Gaza and cuts to food assistance have caused shortages and fears of a return to famine.

“The idea for the film stems from a personal experience and a true story,” Abu Qass told Al Jazeera. “It documents daily life in Gaza, weighed down by bombardment, destruction, siege, hunger, and loss.”

“I want to capture details that reveal suffering and people’s determination to hold on to their life,” she added. “I seek to show reality as people experience it and help viewers understand what the war has done to their relationships, dreams, and hopes.”

Highlighting struggles of the disabled

Another film, Beyond Silence, by emerging filmmaker and journalist Raghda al-Buhaisi, explores wartime struggles in Gaza for people with disabilities through the story of a deaf artist who never learned to read, write or communicate through sign language. His art studio in southern Gaza’s Rafah was destroyed by Israel, and his parents and several family members were killed.

After being displaced to Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, another family took him in and set up a modest studio by the roadside. His paintings reflect loss and displacement, expressing what words cannot through colour and line.

“I want to highlight the additional challenges people with disabilities face during war, including displacement, family loss, and the destruction of livelihoods,” al-Buhaisi told Al Jazeera. “Art can cross barriers of language and silence, turning an individual experience of pain into a visual message that conveys Gaza’s suffering to the world.”

Alongside those films were three others by emerging Palestinian women filmmakers – Soso: The Lifeline, Remnants of Light, and Dandana. The films document life in Gaza and the suffering brought by war.

Soso: The Lifeline follows an orphaned child and his donkey, who help people survive in Gaza. Remnants of Light follows a filmmaker struggling with the loss of her family and home, while Dandana tells the story of a mother whose eight children were killed, and who turns to Palestinian songs with her surviving family to cope with her grief.

The five documentaries were produced through a filmmaking diploma programme that began in March and brought together 25 young Palestinian women.

Preserving Gaza’s stories

Festival director Ezzedine Shallah said the films draw on experiences women and girls lived through during the war, offering visual testimony to daily life and giving women space to tell their stories in their own voices.

“Though their subjects differ, the films turn individual pain into broader human stories, revealing war’s psychological and social scars,” he told Al Jazeera. “They preserve stories that might otherwise never reach the screen, transforming suffering into cinematic testimony and bringing Gaza’s stories to audiences beyond its borders.”

The festival, which runs until October 31, features 73 films from 24 countries and offers a broader platform for filmmakers from Gaza and beyond.

But even with events like the festival, filmmaking in Gaza comes with formidable challenges. The destruction of cultural institutions, scarce equipment, limited funding, power and internet outages, and the pressures of war and displacement have severely restricted opportunities for film production. Women filmmakers also struggle to access training, production opportunities and international festivals.

Filmmaker Rima Mahmoud, a co-founder of the festival, said that war and the Israeli siege on Gaza – which predates 2023 – have hindered young women’s filmmaking, pushing some to use simple methods, self-fund projects and document Gaza’s reality even with the difficulties.

“Despite limited resources, these films deserve international exposure,” Mahmoud said. “Their makers need technical and financial support, translation, and partnerships with festivals and platforms.”

Resisting attempts at erasure

Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri, based in Lebanon and another co-founder of the festival, said the films help young women tell their own stories, resist erasure and preserve collective memory, while building skills and accessing work in Gaza or through digital platforms.

The academy has also developed a filmmaking diploma in cooperation with al-Quds Open University and accredited by the Palestinian Ministry of Education.

Masri said that the academy is also now trying to help directors reach international festivals.

“We are seeking agreements with distributors to screen these films in educational and cultural institutions outside Palestine, and through international platforms and festivals focused on women’s and human rights,” she said.

“This would bring the voices of Palestinian women to a global audience, shed light on their human experiences and artistic creativity, strengthen the presence of Palestinian cinema internationally, and open new horizons for young female directors to reach global screening platforms and film festivals,” Masri added.

BREAKINGBREAKING,

The official results are due to be published on November 4, more than a week after the vote.

Exit polls following what many pundits and voters have billed as the most pivotal election in Israel’s history indicate no clear winner in the hard-fought contest.

According to exit polls, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc is projected to secure 50 seats, while the bloc led by opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot is expected to win 52 or 53 seats. Sixty-one seats are needed to form a majority government. Arab parties are projected to collectively win 18 seats.

Polling stations closed at 10pm (20:00 GMT) local time. Preliminary results are expected on Wednesday, followed by a final tally on Friday. The official results are due to be published on November 4, eight days after the vote.

Exit polls are based on interviews with voters immediately after they have cast their ballots. The interviews help project the election’s outcome and have in previous elections tended to anticipate the results closely.

Voter turnout in the Israeli election reached 74.3 percent as of 8pm (18:00 GMT), according to data released by the Central Elections Committee. By comparison, turnout in the 2022 election was 70.63 percent.

Polls predicted a tight race between incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party and a former army chief.

Israel’s Central Elections Committee rejected a request by Netanyahu’s Likud Party to extend voting hours.

The election is the first since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza three years ago, following Hamas-led attacks on the country, and is widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s handling of the events on October 7, 2023 and the conflicts that followed.

Almost 45 percent of Israelis had cast a ballot by mid-afternoon, but questions have been raised about possible voter suppression in Arab towns.

Almost 45 percent of Israeli voters had cast a ballot by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee, marking the highest election turnout by 2pm (12:00 GMT) in 50 years.

The figure was 6 percent higher than at the same time in the last elections in 2022.

Mitchell Barak, a pollster and former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Al Jazeera that voter turnout “is really high and that’s good”.

“I think … it will probably pass its historic peak in ‘73 – when Israel was also involved in a huge war – so draw what conclusion from that you will,” he added.

The election is largely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s handling of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks and the wars that followed, the most intense period of combat for Israel since the 1973 surprise military campaign by Egypt and Syria.

“Those numbers are going to help the incumbent parties,” Barak said, “as the 3.25 percent threshold a party needs to get into the Knesset remains, the number of votes you need to meet that threshold increases dramatically.”

Israeli officials noted that several polling stations had faced exceptionally long lines, which were attributed to high voter turnout despite rainy and blustery weather in parts of the country, and a flood warning in some areas.

Arab vote

In a message more than five hours after polls opened, Netanyahu urged supporters to vote, saying turnout was high among his opponents on the left and among Palestinian citizens of Israel, about a fifth of the population.

“We need it to be high too. You all need to stream to the polls,” he said. “This is a fateful moment.”

Netanyahu had repeatedly warned supporters of the prospect of high turnout among Palestinian citizens in Israel ahead of the vote, seeking to mobilise his base under the slogan “the right or Palestine”.

Those voters were casting ballots in “unprecedented” numbers, Palestinian candidate Ahmed Tibi said.

Netanyahu and his main rival Gadi Eisenkot have ruled out partnering with Arab parties, citing a lack of shared values, although some possible scenarios envision them propping up a minority government to ensure Netanyahu is removed from office.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has filed a complaint with the country’s election commission warning that widespread delays could be suppressing the vote among Israeli Palestinians.

Though delays could be a result of high voter turnout, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in its complaint to the Central Elections Committee that delays had been reported in at least 18 communities. It asked the committee to investigate “whether these delays are deliberate.”

The ACRI also reported “a large presence” of police and National Guard officers at a polling station in the Negev Desert, raising concerns that officers were using crowd control as a pretext to prevent people from entering to vote.