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Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Hani Odeh has spent four and a half difficult years as mayor of Qusra, southeast of Nablus.

Surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements and outposts, the small Palestinian town of approximately 6,000 in the northern West Bank faces relentless settler attacks that left two residents killed last month.

Many are unable to access their agricultural fields as settlers repeatedly damage the village’s water pipes. But when his Palestinian neighbours go to the polls for municipal elections on Saturday, he will not be on the ballot.

“The resources are limited, the demands are many, there’s the settlers, the army – the problems don’t stop,” he says. “You can’t do anything for them. I’m exhausted. I just want to rest, honestly.”

Only three months ago, the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that there would be local elections on April 25 for municipalities and village councils, the first such elections in nearly five years. There have been no national elections since 2006, keeping the Fatah-ruled PA in power in the West Bank more than 17 years after its initial mandate expired.

Odeh, who will be stepping down, doesn’t believe there is much point to the vote. “It won’t change the reality,” he says, pointing out that the gate to enter Qusra has been shut by the Israeli military for two years.

Meanwhile, the PA civil servants that Odeh relies on to run Qusra receive salaries of just 2,000 shekels ($670), a fraction of what they are owed, as Israel continues to withhold tax revenues earmarked for the Palestinians.

According to the Palestine Elections Commission, 5,131 candidates are competing across 90 municipal councils and 93 village councils on April 25, with nearly a third of the electorate between the ages of 18 and 30.

Across the West Bank, many agree with Odeh, and express doubts that these elections can move the needle on anything that actually matters.

‘Sense of futility’

In the days leading up to the vote in Ramallah, there have been no campaign posters hanging along the streets. That is because Ramallah – the city where the PA is headquartered – is not holding competitive elections this Saturday. Neither is Nablus, another major city in the West Bank.

Instead, both cities are being decided through a process known as acclamation, in which a single list of candidates is elected without a formal vote. Across the West Bank, 42 municipal councils and 155 village councils will be filled this way – a majority of local administrative authorities.

Historically used in small villages where extended families agreed on candidates, the process is now being applied in major cities that are PA strongholds – such as Ramallah and Nablus – where Fatah mobilisation has discouraged challengers.

“There is definitely a sense of futility in certain places,” says Zayne Abudaka, cofounder of the Institute for Social and Economic Progress (ISEP), which regularly surveys Palestinian sentiments and views, “and I think that makes it easier for places to just not have an election.”

Fatima*, a businesswoman who runs an education centre in el-Bireh, says she hasn’t voted in an election since the last Palestinian national election 20 years ago – and she doesn’t plan to this time, either. “They will choose a new group of decisionmakers, and I believe they will do the same according to the old decisionmakers,” says Fatima. “We don’t see any difference between them. It is not fair.”

Sara Nasser, 26, a pharmacist who commutes to Ramallah for work from the village of Deir Qaddis, west of the city, says she has simply grown accustomed to elections not happening and will not vote. “It’s been since before I was aware that there were significant elections,” she says. “We’ve always lived like this.”

Some hopeful, others less so

Not everyone is so pessimistic. Iyad Hani, 20, works at a children’s store and is enthusiastic to vote for the first time in his life in el-Bireh. “Hopefully, the one coming is better than the one who left,” he says. “There should be construction in the town and fixing the streets – that’s the most important thing.”

Muhammad Bassem, who is a restaurant manager in Ramallah, is also showing up to the polls, optimistic for what change may bring. “It is the new faces that bring about change for the better – always for the better,” he says. “We want our country to be beautiful, clean and to offer plenty of comfortable employment opportunities, tourism and development.”

Others are not so sure. Amani, who is from Tulkarem but works in Ramallah as a receptionist, watches the campaigns play out on her phone, though she does not plan to vote. “Right now, they keep saying, ‘we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that,’” she says. “But I don’t know if any of it will actually yield results.”

The Tulkarem issues she is thinking of, such as inadequate waste management, no parks for children and roads in disrepair, fall squarely into the kinds of changes that local elections might have an impact on, she suggests. “I just hope that something genuinely new and positive comes out of this.”

‘There isn’t a credible setup’

Underlining the question of these specific elections is a broad disillusionment with the PA that colours nearly every conversation about Palestinian political life.

Fatima says she and her whole family are politically aligned with Fatah, the effective governing party of the PA. “We don’t hate Fatah,” she says. “We hate the decisions they are taking right now.” While she says her business has contracted 85 percent in recent years, the PA still charges her 16 percent VAT.

That same disillusionment extends even to the elections in small localities like Qusra, which Mayor Odeh calls “a family affair, not a political affair”.

“People have lost faith in the parties, lost faith in the [Palestinian] Authority, lost faith in the whole world,” he says, expecting low turnout on Saturday. While most candidates in Qusra are politically aligned with Fatah, Odeh says no candidates in Qusra’s election this Saturday are doing so officially. “If they run under political affiliations, no one will support them.”

According to the Palestine Elections Commission, 88 percent of those on the ballots this year are doing so as independent candidates.

While polling suggests roughly 70-80 percent of Palestinians distrust the PA as an institution, Obada Shtaya resists framing this simply as a PA problem, considering the PA’s hobbled finances and its shrinking autonomy in Areas A and B under Israeli occupation. Israel continues to expand settlements and military raids in the West Bank, and the PA has no power to respond, with the prospect of a Palestinian state increasingly distant.

“Pessimism, lack of hope, helplessness – it is beyond the classical distrust in the PA,” he says. “It is looking at the PA and potentially understanding that these people also don’t have much that they can do to help themselves.”

A new amendment to the local elections law, requiring all candidates to affirm their commitment to agreements signed by the PLO – widely understood as a measure to exclude Hamas and other opposition factions – now threatens to taint how people perceive these elections. “If you want to run, you need to pre-agree to things at the national level,” says Shtaya. “But this is about local service delivery. Why am I having to sign things that deal with agreements between the PA and Israel?”

Despite the many naysayers in this election, “Palestinians are thirsty for democracy,” says the pollster, including those in Gaza. What is missing is not the will, he says, but the proper architecture for it: elections announced years in advance, a functioning legislature, and accountability that extends beyond voting day.

“There isn’t a credible setup that shows people their vote makes a difference,” says Shtaya. Without that, sporadic elections take place at what he calls the surface level: real enough that some people show up, but shallow enough that not much changes underneath.

Soon to be relieved of his mayoral duties, Hani Odeh plans to open a toy shop and set up a house for himself. “Let people breathe,” he says. “We’re here. We’re not going anywhere.”

Hamas says the Israeli escalation represents the failure of the international community to uphold the truce in Gaza.

Israeli forces have killed 12 Palestinians in attacks throughout Gaza, medical sources in the enclave tell Al Jazeera, as Israel continues its daily violations of the ceasefire struck last year.

An Israeli attack on a police vehicle on Friday killed at least eight people, including three civilian bystanders, in Khan Younis. A separate attack in Gaza City also killed two police officers.

Two other people were killed in the bombing of a house in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior called on the international community on Friday to intervene and end the Israeli targeting of local police forces working to restore security in civilian areas.

It said the attack in Khan Younis came after security forces intervened to break up a fight in the area.

“The continued silence of international organisations … regarding the targeting of civilian police officers constitutes complicity with the Israeli occupation, encouraging it to commit further crimes against a civilian institution protected under international law,” the ministry said.

“We emphasise that the police force provides services to citizens in the Gaza Strip across various aspects of daily life. There is absolutely no justification for targeting it or killing its personnel.”

Israel has been systemically killing police officers in Gaza, as it allies itself with criminal gangs in the occupied territory.

During its genocidal war on Gaza, which started in October 2023, the Israeli military regularly targeted officers securing aid convoys, which led to intensified looting. That, in turn, deepened the hunger crisis that Israel imposed on the territory.

A ceasefire, brokered by United States President Donald Trump, came into effect in October of last year. That decreased the intensity of the Israeli bombardment.

But Israel has nevertheless continued its attacks on the territory, killing at least 984 people and injuring 2,235 others since the truce was announced, according to health authorities.

Just this week, Israeli strikes killed five people, including three children, on Wednesday.

The overall death toll in the war has surpassed 72,500, with more than 172,000 others injured. Thousands of missing people are believed to be dead and buried under the destroyed buildings.

The number of confirmed casualties represents more than 7 percent of the enclave’s population of two million people. The Israeli assault also turned most of Gaza’s structures into piles of rubble.

Leading rights groups and United Nations investigators have concluded that the Israeli military campaign amounts to genocide: an effort to destroy the Palestinian people.

Under the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has continued to bomb Gaza as it simultaneously attacks south Lebanon, in violation of a separate truce with Hezbollah.

Hamas on Friday called the deadly attacks in Gaza part of the Israeli government’s “unprecedented bloody, fascist approach”.

“This escalation … by the government of the war criminal Netanyahu represents a clear failure of the role of the mediators and guarantors [of the ceasefire] and the international community to quell the barbaric Zionist killing machine,” it said.

More than six months into the ceasefire, Trump has struggled to implement the 12-point plan on which the truce was based.

Israel continues to occupy most of Gaza. Reconstruction in the territory has not begun. An international security force envisioned by the agreement has not been formed.

In February, Trump convened his so-called Board of Peace that is supposed to govern Gaza through a council of Palestinian technocrats, but it is not clear when or how these forces will take over government agencies in the territory.

Three professors at Atlanta’s Emory University in the United States have filed a lawsuit over their arrests during a 2024 campus protest over Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Their lawsuit on Thursday argued that the university broke its own free-speech policies when it called in police and state troopers to aggressively disband the protest, making 28 arrests.

“The judicial system would find that Emory failed to protect its students, to protect its staff, to protect the educational mission of the university,” said philosophy professor Noelle McAfee, one of the plaintiffs.

“So this isn’t just about people’s individual rights. It’s our educational mission to train people in free and critical inquiry, to be able to learn how to engage with others, to be fearless.”

Laura Diamond, a spokesperson for Emory, responded that the university believes “this lawsuit is without merit”.

“Emory acts appropriately and responsibly to keep our community safe from threats of harm,” Diamond said in a statement. “We regret this issue is being litigated, but we have confidence in the legal process.”

The suit is just one example of how the nationwide wave of protests from 2023 and 2024 continues to reverberate on elite campuses.

There have been multiple instances where students and faculty have filed lawsuits against universities, arguing they were discriminated against because of the protests.

But the Emory suit is unusual. McAfee and her fellow plaintiffs — English and Indigenous studies professor Emilio Del Valle-Escalante and economics professor Caroline Fohlin — all remain tenured faculty members. None were convicted of any charges.

The civil lawsuit in DeKalb County State Court demands that the private university repay money the three spent defending themselves against misdemeanour charges that were later dismissed, along with punitive damages.

McAfee said she’s suing her employer “to try to get them to be accountable and to change”.

All three say they were observers on April 25, 2024, when some students and others set up tents on the university’s main quad to protest the war. They say Emory broke its own policies by calling in Atlanta police and Georgia state troopers without seeking alternatives.

McAfee was charged with disorderly conduct after she said she yelled “Stop!” at an officer roughly arresting a protester. Del Valle-Escalante said he was trying to help an older woman when he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Fohlin said that, when she protested against officers pinning a protester to the ground, she herself was thrown face-first to the ground and arrested, suffering a concussion and a spine injury. Fohlin was charged with misdemeanour battery of an officer.

Emory claimed that those arrested that day were outsiders who trespassed on school property. But 20 of the 28 people arrested were affiliated with the university.

The professors said that, after their arrests, they were targeted by threats and harassment, part of a pushback by conservatives who said universities were failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism and allowing lawlessness.

Nationwide, however, advocates say there is a “Palestine exception” in which universities are willing to curb pro-Palestine speech and protest. Palestine Legal, a legal aid group supporting such speech, said Tuesday that it received 300 percent more legal requests in 2025 than its annual average before 2023, mostly from college students and faculty.

McAfee served as president of the Emory University Senate after her arrest. The body makes policy recommendations and has helped draft the university’s open expression policy.

She said she asked then-President Gregory Fenves in fall 2024 why Emory police weren’t dropping the charges against her and others. McAfee said Fenves told her that he wanted “to see justice”.

The open expression policy was revised after 2024 to clearly prohibit tents, camping, the occupation of university buildings and demonstrations between midnight and 7am.

Whatever the policy, McAfee said students are afraid to protest at Emory, saying the university has turned its back on what Atlanta civil rights icon John Lewis called “good trouble”.

“Students know right now that any trouble is not going to be good trouble at Emory, that they could get arrested,” she said. “So students are afraid.”

As the sun sets on Israel’s Memorial Day, 12 torches, together symbolising the spirit of the nation, are lit to mark the beginning of Independence Day, the anniversary of the country’s establishment in 1948 – which led to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians.

To be selected to light one of the torches over the resting place of Theodor Herzl, the man widely credited with the creation of modern Zionism, is regarded as one of the greatest honours in Israel.

This year, among those selected to light the torch on Tuesday evening is Avraham Zarbiv, a rabbi so controversial that even the Israeli military – an organisation that admits to having killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza – has publicly distanced itself from him. A military spokesperson said last week that Zarbiv “was not selected in coordination” with the military, and was not representing it at the ceremony, despite his being an army reservist.

Obliterate

Zarbiv first came to national prominence in Israel in the early months of 2024, when the 52-year-old rabbi and state rabbinical judge was filmed throwing grenades at Palestinians in Khan Younis during a firefight.

Since then, he has recorded himself gleefully demolishing Palestinian homes – his name even becoming a verb meaning to flatten or obliterate – and has delivered sermons from the ruins of Rafah promising “victory and settlement”. Zarbiv pairs it all with the traditional mannerisms of a religious leader, punctuating his threats and violence with footage of him blowing on a traditional ram’s horn, or shofar, as well as reciting prayers and parts of the Torah.

Zarbiv has also shared footage of himself taking part in the demolition of homes in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces are accused of deploying the same scorched earth tactics as they did during Gaza’s genocide.

Speaking to Israel’s right-wing Channel 14 in January 2025, Zarbiv boasted of the destruction inflicted on Gaza.

“There are tens of thousands of dead. The dogs and the cats ate them because no one collected them,” he said. “Tens of thousands of families – they have not a piece of paper, no childhood photo, no IDs, they have nothing. No home, there is nothing. They come, they have no idea where their house is. It’s something unbelievable.”

While the army leadership itself might be seeking to distance itself from Zarbiv, the rabbi himself says that he represents his fellow soldiers.

“I am one soldier among many, I am a soldier of the Givati Brigade,” he said in an interview last week.

Illegal settlement

Last week, the Israeli organisation Kerem Navot, which monitors illegal settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, filed a complaint to Israel’s judicial watchdog after confirming that Zarbiv had built his home illegally on private Palestinian land in the Beit El settlement, accusing him of violating the ethics rules for both judges and rabbinic judges.

That had no bearing, however, on Transport Minister Miri Regev’s decision to nominate Zarbiv for the torch-bearing ceremony.

“Rabbi Zarbiv, a father of six, continues to serve in reserve duty and combines in his life in an inspiring way between the book and the sword – between Torah and the army, between study and action, and between spiritual leadership and security responsibility,” the right-wing minister said.

She continued, describing the man now accused of multiple war crimes as representative of a generation “that refuses to part with responsibility, that chooses to bear the burden and continue to build, out of great faith in the future”.

Nevertheless, in January 2025, The Hind Rajab Foundation, the Belgian-based NGO that seeks to prosecute Israeli soldiers on the basis of the video evidence they themselves frequently provide, filed an official complaint against Zarbiv with the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the foundation’s lawyers, Zarbiv’s gleeful boast of destroying 50 buildings per week in Gaza, participating in the complete destruction of entire neighbourhoods, and having publicly incited violence and hatred through his appearances on Israeli media, were clear enough breaches of the Geneva Convention and Rome Statute to deserve prosecution.

Zarbiv was not a neutral public figure being honoured for civic virtue, Dyab Abou Jahjah, cofounder of The Hind Rajab Foundation, told Al Jazeera. Rather, “he is a notorious perpetrator of grave international crimes”, Abou Jahjah said.

“His selection [for the Independence Day ceremony] is therefore not incidental – it is revealing,” Abou Jahjah added. “When an individual implicated in acts that constitute genocide is elevated in this way, it reflects the underlying logic of a state project historically rooted in the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. From that perspective, his selection is entirely consistent.”

B’tselem, the Israeli rights group, is also

among those objecting to Zarbiv’s selection.

“The government’s decision to laud Zarbiv as an ‘exemplary citizen’, after more than two years of genocide in Gaza and amid a reality of unprecedented state and settler violence in the West Bank, represents a state-level endorsement of the complete dehumanization of Palestinians and the systematic destruction of Palestinian life,” B’tselem said in a statement.

“This selection sends a clear message to the citizens of Israel and the entire world: In Israel, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes are the ‘spirit of the nation’,” the group added.

There was a time when various developments from this past week – such as the Israeli government spending hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting ultra-nationalist marches, a sanctioned settler leading army-escorted livestock raids on a Palestinian village, and the Israeli finance minister calling for the full military occupation and settlement of Gaza while speaking at once-dismantled occupied West Bank settlements – would have been met with outcry or debate in some corners of Israeli society.

This week, however, they have become routine, as United Nations experts describe Israeli policy as “ethnically cleansing the West Bank through daily attacks resulting in killing, injury, and harassment of women and children, and the widespread destruction of Palestinian homes, farmland and livelihoods”.

Against that backdrop, this past week brought intense and coordinated settler attacks on villages near Ramallah, continued Israeli strikes on civilians in Gaza, new evictions and demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem, and US-Hamas diplomatic talks in Cairo that showed some glimmers of progress – while falling well short of what either side has demanded.

Gaza: Strikes, starvation, and a partial offer on weapons

Across the Gaza Strip, Israeli air strikes, gunfire and drone attacks continued throughout the week as the humanitarian crisis worsened.

On April 14, a strike on a police vehicle on al-Nafaq Street in Gaza City killed four people, including three-year-old Yahya al-Malahi, whose father said his family had been leaving a relative’s wedding. A strike on the Shati refugee camp later the same day killed at least five more.

On April 16, brothers Abdelmalek and Abdel Sattar al-Attar were killed in Beit Lahiya in an area that witnesses said fell outside the zone under Israeli military control along the so-called “yellow line”. On April 17, brothers Mahmoud and Eid Abu Warda were shot dead by a drone while trying to get water in Gaza City’s Shujayea neighbourhood; a drone separately struck a water desalination facility in the same area, killing one more. The following day, two civilian contractors delivering water on behalf of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) were shot dead by Israeli troops in northern Gaza.

Since the October ceasefire, 777 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and at least 2,193 injured, as of April 20. Since October 7, 2023, the cumulative death toll stands at 72,553 – a figure revised upwards this week after the Gaza Ministry of Health certified an additional 196 deaths.

Meanwhile, aid access into Gaza remains severely constrained. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), United Nations and partner aid inflows declined by 37 percent between the first and second three-month periods following the ceasefire. Bakeries have scaled back production due to dwindling flour and fuel, with Palestinians reporting hours-long queues for bread.

Board of Peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov told an Egyptian news channel this week that Israeli restrictions at border crossings remain “the primary obstacle” preventing sufficient aid from reaching Gaza.

On the diplomatic front, direct US-Hamas talks in Cairo this week focused on implementing phase-one commitments before any discussion of disarmament. No official agreement has been reached.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order the military to “immediately prepare for the full occupation of the Gaza Strip” and establish Israeli settlements there if Hamas refuses to disarm entirely. Smotrich made the declaration while attending a ceremony commemorating the re-establishment of the illegal settlement of Sa-Nur, which had previously been dismantled by Israel in 2005 along with settlements in Gaza and several others in the northern West Bank.

Coordinated attacks and killings in the West Bank

The week’s most sustained violence in the West Bank took place across a cluster of villages northeast of Ramallah – Khirbet Abu Falah, al-Mughayyir and Turmus Aya – where three new illegal Jewish outposts have been established in the past two months, all on privately owned Palestinian land in Area B, which is supposed to be under limited administrative control of the Palestinian Authority. One such outpost was built on land from which the Abu Najjeh community – itself already forcibly displaced from Ein Samiya in the summer of 2023 – was recently violently expelled from.

On April 18, settlers launched simultaneous coordinated attacks on all three villages, according to local activists. In Turmus Aya, settlers arriving in more than a dozen vehicles burned a home and a car, with a military force near the outpost refusing to intervene, according to local activists. In Khirbet Abu Falah, dozens of settlers gathered at a newly established outpost before descending on Palestinian homes; soldiers subsequently raided the village themselves, according to locals. In al-Mughayyir, soldiers stopped two small children playing in the street, pushing them to the ground. They drove away before settlers on a government-supplied quad bike attacked a Palestinian driver on the nearby road.

The following morning, settlers raided a sheep pen in al-Mughayyir and stole 70 sheep. When residents pursued them, settlers fired live ammunition, activists said. Israeli military and police then escorted the Or Nachman outpost’s founder, Amishav Malt, back into the village, where he led a raid that he claimed was to recover stolen sheep – a tactic local activists say is routinely used to justify further theft. One Palestinian resident was beaten unconscious by police, according to local activists. Soldiers then enabled Neria Ben Pazi – the founder of another local illegal outpost who is internationally sanctioned by Australia, Belgium, France and Britain – to steal sheep from a restrained Palestinian resident. At least 20 military vehicles subsequently laid siege to the village entrance.

Beyond these villages, settler attacks on shepherds, farmers and residents were documented across numerous communities, including olive trees cut down in Yatma near Nablus, and the theft of livestock and crops in Jifna and several communities in Masafer Yatta. Settlers erected a barbed wire fence on the path that children from Umm al-Khair use to reach their school, blocking their safe access ever since.

On April 16, Israeli forces staged a raid on Beit Duqqu, northwest of Jerusalem, during which they shot dead 17-year-old Mohammed Rayan. Soldiers prevented ambulances from treating him, instead removing his body – denying his family proper Muslim burial rites. Four others were shot with live fire. On April 18, Israeli forces killed Mohammed Suwaiti, 25, in Khirbet Salama, southwest of Hebron, claiming he was approaching the illegal settlement of Negohot.

According to the latest OCHA humanitarian situation report, in 2026, more than 2,500 Palestinians have been displaced by demolitions, settler attacks, and evictions – including more than 1,100 children. Settler attacks now account for 75 percent of all displacement recorded this year, with March recording the highest monthly settler injury toll since documentation began in 2006.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli military for comment on the incidents reported on this week, but has yet to receive a reply.

East Jerusalem evictions

In occupied East Jerusalem, demolitions and evictions continued at an elevated pace. Israeli authorities demolished the home of 80-year-old cancer patient Abu Kamel Dweik in Silwan’s al-Bustan neighbourhood, at least the eighth demolition in the area this month.

According to OCHA, since January 2026, at least 86 Palestinian-owned structures have been demolished in East Jerusalem, displacing more than 250 people, with roughly half demolished by their owners to avoid additional fines.

In addition to further home demolitions in al-Bustan expected shortly, the extended Basha family – six households comprising 12 people, most over 60, who have lived in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter for nearly a century – now face court-ordered eviction by April 26.

The week also saw reports from Israeli media that the Netanyahu government is allocating approximately 1.2 million shekels ($400,000) to expand the ultra-nationalist Jerusalem Day marches across the country next month – yearly events marked by vulgar, racist slogans and violent attacks on Palestinian neighbourhoods.

With such funding, the marches are being expanded to several mixed Jewish-Arab cities including Lydd (Lod), where Jerusalem Day clashes in 2021 escalated into days of violence. That the state is now directly subsidising such events reflects the broader influence of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose reach over police operations has itself become the subject of a rare legal challenge.

Israel’s High Court this week ordered Ben-Gvir to reach an agreement with the attorney general to curb his political interference in police work, after his repeated alleged violations of a prior agreement not to do so. Critics say his tenure has radicalised the police’s approach toward Palestinians – a charge given weight by documented incidents of police facilitating settler attacks and, in some cases, participating directly in violence against Palestinian residents.

Video shows Israeli police confiscating and destroying footballs that were being played with by children in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, in what mosque authorities described as part of ongoing restrictions on Palestinians inside the holy site.

Some of the reservists accused of sexually assaulting a detainee have already started combat roles, reports Israeli Army Radio.

Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir has authorised five soldiers accused of sexually assaulting a Palestinian inmate in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp to return to reserve service after charges against them were dropped, according to Israeli media reports.

The soldiers, all from the Force 100 unit assigned to guard military prisons, are being reinstated despite an ongoing, internal military inquiry into their conduct.

Israeli Army Radio reported that some of the reservists have already returned to active duty, including deployment to combat roles.

An Israeli army statement, cited by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, said: “The investigation does not prevent them from continuing to serve … the command-level investigation will be completed as soon as possible.”

The reinstatement comes after Israel’s top military lawyer dropped all charges against the soldiers last month, closing a case that had been among the most divisive in Israel’s recent history.

The soldiers had been charged with aggravated assault and causing severe injury, after footage broadcast by Israeli television showed them abusing a Palestinian man in Sde Teiman. The military’s own indictment described soldiers stabbing the detainee with a sharp object near his rectum, causing cracked ribs, a punctured lung and an internal tear.

A doctor at the facility, Yoel Donchin, told Haaretz he was so shocked by the Palestinian inmate’s condition that he initially assumed it was the work of a rival armed group.

Military Advocate General Itay Offir said the indictments were scrapped partly because of “complexities in the evidentiary structure” and “difficulties” arising from the detainee’s release to the Gaza Strip.

Rights groups condemned the decision as a legal injustice, with Amnesty International calling it “yet another unconscionable chapter in the Israeli legal system’s long-standing history of granting impunity to perpetrators of grave crimes against Palestinians”.

“Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, and despite overwhelming evidence of widespread torture and abuse, including sexual violence, against Palestinians in Israeli detention centers, only one Israeli soldier has so far been sentenced over torturing a Palestinian detainee,” said the rights group in a statement.

Palestinians released from Israeli detention have reported suffering widespread abuse while in custody.

A February report by the Committee to Protect Journalists also cited dozens of formerly detained Palestinian journalists describing “routine beatings, starvation and sexual assault” in Israeli custody.

Israel has approved 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, illegal under international law, that has Palestinians terrified they will lose their land. At an inauguration event, far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich outlined plans to expand borders across Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

The new academic semester kicked off in Gaza in late March. But the mornings no longer carry the familiar vibrance of students waiting for buses, crossing cities towards universities and colleges.

That feeling has instead been replaced by the hardship of displacement.

Israel’s destructive campaign has reduced Gaza’s academic institutions to rubble, many now repurposed as crowded shelters for displaced families. With campuses gone, in-person education has largely disappeared, forcing universities to shift to online learning. But for students living in tents, struggling to secure food, water, electricity, and internet, attending a lecture, even online, has become a privilege.

Amid this chaos, a glimmer of hope has materialised.

In the densely crowded area of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, a new academic initiative is taking shape. Scholars Without Borders, a US nongovernmental organisation, has established what it calls “University City”, a makeshift academic space designed to bring students back into lecture halls.

Built from wood, metal sheets, and whatever materials could be sourced locally, the site stands as a modest reconstruction of what Gaza’s academic life once looked like.

“Despite the hardships, our mission is to bring education closer to students in a better environment,” said Hamza Abu Daqqa, the organisation’s representative in Gaza.

“We designed this space to serve multiple academic institutions and as many students as possible,” he added. “There are six halls here, accommodating up to 600 students a day. It may look simple, but it creates a sense of normal academic life, something students have been deprived of.”

The space includes internet access powered by solar panels, improvised green areas, and even a small business incubator aimed at helping students engage on their own prospects.

According to the organisation, University City operates on a rotating weekly schedule, with each day allocated to a different academic institution. This system allows multiple institutions to share the limited space, ensuring the widest possible access for students.

Given the constraints, universities prioritise courses that require in-person instruction the most, such as practical and discussion-based classes.

Gaza’s prominent universities, such as the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University, have begun using the site, alongside other colleges like the Palestine College of Nursing.

But behind this modest structure lies a far heavier reality.

A glimpse of what was lost

Across Gaza, universities have been systematically damaged or destroyed since Israel began its genocidal war in October 2023. In the south, all institutions have been rendered inoperable. A limited number of campuses in northern Gaza have been partially restored, but their capacity remains extremely restricted.

The Palestine College of Nursing, for example, has been surrounded by ruins after falling within the “yellow line” where the Israeli military continues to be based since the October ceasefire, cutting off students from their classrooms entirely.

For a generation of students, university life has simply not existed, as they instead battled to survive.

Each academic year is usually marked by new beginnings, especially for freshmen stepping into a new phase of independence and discovery. But for two consecutive years, thousands of Gaza’s students have been denied that experience.

Now, inside University City, they are encountering it for the first time.

‘It feels like a real university’

Mariam Nasr, 20, a first-year nursing student displaced from Rafah, sat in one of the makeshift halls, reflecting on what the space meant to her.

“Before the genocide, everything we needed to study was available; our homes, electricity, materials, and most importantly, safety,” she said. “But for more than two years, our lives have been completely disrupted.”

Mariam began her final year of high school just as the war started. It took more than a year to complete her exams under difficult conditions before she could finally enrol in the university.

“I always dreamed of studying medicine,” she said. “But the circumstances affected my results. My late grandfather told me that healing people isn’t limited to one path, so I chose nursing.”

Still, her degree requires in-person courses, something she had never experienced until now.

“When I saw this place, I was amazed,” she said. “It was the first time I attended classes in a space that actually feels like a university. We are all excited. It feels different; it feels real.”

For students like Mariam, their first year was spent behind screens, if they were lucky to have one in their tents, disconnected from the academic environment they had hoped for.

Amr Muhammad, 20, another first-year nursing student from al-Magahzi Camp in central Gaza, shared a similar reaction.

“I expected something much simpler, just tents and basic setups,” he said. “But this was different. Being here with other students, discussing and engaging in class makes a huge difference.”

Academia under fire and siege

The experience faced by students in this small space reflects a much larger tragedy.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s academic sector has been described by UN experts as scholasticide; the systematic dismantling of education through the targeting of institutions, students, and academic life itself. Universities have been destroyed, professors and students killed, and reconstruction efforts obstructed.

More than 7,000 university students and academics have been killed or injured by Israeli attacks, while more than 60 university buildings were completely demolished by Israeli aerial attacks or ground detonations, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and information shared by Palestinian officials.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of students have been cut off from formal education, forced into alternatives that are not able to match their former experiences.

And those alternatives, such as University City, face enormous difficulties in just getting their work started.

“All the materials you see here were sourced from inside the Gaza Strip,” Abu Daqqa said, gesturing around the site. “We had to work within what was available, with rising costs and scarcity of resources. But we were determined to create something that gives students a sense of normalcy.”

Under the October ceasefire, Israel is obliged to allow reconstruction materials to help restore shelter, essential services for Palestinians. But Israel has not adhered to that stipulation and has continued to impose restrictions, while carrying out deadly attacks across Gaza.

And for many students, reaching the University City is itself a challenge.

“I am displaced in al-Mawasi, so I’m supposed to be relatively close, but even getting here is difficult,” Mariam said. “My classes start at 9am, and I wake up at 5 just to find transportation.”

With roads damaged and fuel scarce, options for students are limited to worn-out vehicles and donkey or horse carts.

“Getting cash is frustrating. Taxis and carts only accept coins. My father barely got me eight shekels [$2.64] today, but I couldn’t find a ride,” she said. “So I walked nearly four kilometres[2.5 miles] with my friends.”

For Amr, the journey is even longer.

“I left at 6am and waited for two hours before finding a crowded vehicle,” he said. “It was the only way to get here.”

And once the day ends, the challenges resume.

“This space is only for a few hours,” he added. “The rest of the week, we go back to struggling with electricity, internet, and basic needs. We can’t even print materials or access online lectures properly.”

Students rely on shared or damaged devices, unstable connections, and limited resources, making consistent learning difficult.

“Back in the tent, I rely on my father’s old phone just to follow lectures when I can,” Mariam said. “Most days, there’s no stable internet or power. I try to hold on and keep going, but I often wish for something as simple as a steady power source and a better device like an iPad to study properly and not fall behind.”

Holding on to education

Despite everything, a scene of resilience unfolds as students continue.

Inside the halls, discussions resume, notes are taken, and a sense of academic life slowly returns, even if temporarily.

“For medical education, in-person learning is essential,” said Dr Essam Mughari, a professor at the Palestine College of Nursing. “It’s quite hard for online education to replace practical engagement.”

He described the emotional significance of meeting students again.

“After everything they’ve been through, being able to gather, interact, and learn together, it restores something vital,” he said. “We have a responsibility to support them, despite the circumstances, because tomorrow they will be in our place”

For Mariam, that determination is deeply personal.

“Some people might think it’s impossible to study in these conditions,” she said. “But I want to continue. My cousin was a nurse. An Israeli air strike levelled her family’s three-storey house in Gaza City, killing her and several others. I remember her to remind myself why I hold onto this path to heal others and serve my people.”

The University City now serves hundreds of students each day. But thousands more remain without access to similar spaces.

Scholars Without Borders says the initiative is only the beginning of a mission that is still crippled by the Israeli siege.

“Our work is ongoing,” Abu Daqqa said. “We have established dozens of makeshift schools and established this university city, but the need is far greater. This is what we were able to build under blockade,” he said. “Imagine what could be done if the truly needed resources are allowed.”

An early-morning strike hits a group of civilians in ​​Bureij camp as drones attack a tent in Khan Younis displacement site.

At least seven Palestinians have been killed, and others wounded, in Israeli strikes across the central and southern Gaza Strip.

An Israeli drone fired two missiles close to a police post in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence rescue service told the AFP news agency on Saturday.

Medical sources confirmed the early morning attack to Al Jazeera, saying the strike hit a group of civilians in the “Block 9” area of Bureij. Several people were killed and seriously wounded, they said.

Ambulance crews faced difficult conditions as they worked to transport the bodies and those injured to nearby hospitals, the sources added.

The al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza told AFP it had received six bodies and seven wounded people, including four in critical condition. The nearby al-Awda hospital said it received one fatality and two wounded people.

Separately, in the southern Gaza Strip, Nasser Medical Complex said it received three wounded people following an Israeli drone strike against a tent of displaced people in the town of Bani Suheila, located east of Khan Younis.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent on the ground also reported Israeli artillery shelling and heavy tank fire near Bani Suheila and east of Gaza City.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has killed more than 72,300 people since it began in October 2023, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, including at least 738 since the so-called ceasefire went into effect last October.

The tally includes at least 32 deaths since the start of April alone – among them Al Jazeera journalist Mohammed Wishah, who was killed in an attack west of Gaza City earlier this week.

United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday condemned Israel’s recent violence in the Gaza Strip, saying that “the unrelenting pattern of killings” reflects Israel’s “sweeping impunity”.

“For the past 10 days, Palestinians are still being killed and injured in what is left of their homes, shelters and tents of displaced families, on the streets, in vehicles, at a medical facility and a classroom,” Turk said.

West Bank raids, arrests continue

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers and forces stormed homes and villages throughout the morning, continuing an escalating campaign to expand their illegal settlements.

The Palestinian Wafa news agency reported that Israeli forces arrested seven people east of Qalqilya and separately descended upon Bir al-Basha, near the city of Jenin, where they detained various residents and interrogated them.

In al-Maniya, southeast of Bethlehem, Israeli settlers fanned out across the streets, shone spotlights inside homes and provoked residents.

Another group of settlers set fire to a house in the village of Duma in the Nablus governorate, according to village council head Suleiman Dawabsheh.

Residents managed to control the fire and prevent it from spreading, Dawabsheh said.

Israeli media outlets have reported the recent secret approval of 34 new illegal West Bank settlements, adding to 68 that have been endorsed since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government rose to power in 2022.

Various foreign governments and organisations, including the European Union, Turkiye, Sweden and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have condemned the move as a flagrant violation of international law.

Thousands of Muslims performed Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem after it reopened to worshippers following a 40-day closure by the Israeli army that barred access to Islam’s third-holiest site after the war on Iran began.

Palestinian journalist Muath Amarne said his prosthetic eye fell out after an infection while in Israeli detention, leaving him in urgent need of surgery. Amarne, who lost his left eye in 2019 after being struck by an Israeli rubber bullet, was held in prison for more than seven months.

Israeli forces raided the Muslim Youth Association in Hebron, firing tear gas at Palestinians and shutting down the group’s headquarters. Troops confiscated and destroyed equipment during the raid.

WHO driver Majdi Aslan was killed and a WHO doctor wounded, along with several other Palestinians, medical sources said.

A member of staff from the World Health Organization (WHO) has been killed in Gaza and several others injured when the Israeli army fired on their vehicle, according to sources, including an Al Jazeera correspondent.

WHO driver Majdi Aslan, 54, was killed on Monday. A doctor from the international organisation and several other Palestinians were also injured in the incident in eastern Khan Younis, according to sources at the enclave’s Nasser and Al-Aqsa hospitals.

As the world’s attention remains fixed on the United States-Israel war on Iran, Israel is continuing its attacks on the Gaza Strip, which has seen near-daily Israeli fire and strikes since a fragile ceasefire was reached in October, with more than 700 Palestinians killed since, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Monday’s incident took place in an area close to the so-called yellow line in eastern Khan Younis, reported Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud.

Israeli forces shot “indiscriminately” at people and vehicles moving along the Salah al-Din Street in the southern Gaza Strip, he said.

A commercial vehicle was transporting civilians between southern and central Gaza. It was followed by a car carrying WHO employees, said Mahmoud.

“The driver was shot in the head, and by the time he was transported to the Al-Aqsa Hospital, he was announced dead,” the correspondent reported from Gaza City. Seven or so others suffered injuries, he added.

Translation: Qamar Majdi Mustafa Aslan (54 years old), a resident of Bureij camp, who ascended after being wounded in a shooting targeting a World Health Organization vehicle on Salah al-Din Street east of Khan Younis city.

WHO did not immediately confirm that the man killed was an employee, but said in a statement emailed to Al Jazeera that “this morning, a critical security incident occurred in Gaza that is under review by relevant authorities”.

“As [a] result of this critical security incident, today’s medical evacuation from Gaza via Rafah to Egypt has been put on hold with immediate effect, until further notice,” the statement added.

WHO has been overseeing coordination between Egypt and Israel since the opening of the Rafah crossing, which has allowed small numbers of injured Palestinians desperate for medical aid to leave to seek treatment abroad.

Israel has, however, continued to limit the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged territory, also shutting the vital crossing in the early days of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Elsewhere on Monday in the southern part of Khan Younis, a Palestinian man with special needs was killed after being shot by Israeli soldiers.

To the north, a drone attack in Gaza City killed one person, Mahmoud said.

“The target was an electric bike … moving in the area that was struck by drone missiles. It killed … a 36-year-old individual who was moving … around the displacement camps,” he reported.

A child was also injured in the attack and is now in critical condition in hospital, the correspondent added.

Two Palestinians were also killed in Israeli drone strikes on the Yarmouk and Shujayea neighbourhoods, according to a medical source at al-Shifa Hospital.

Sources at Gaza hospitals have reported the deaths of eight Palestinians in Israeli air strikes outside areas under Israeli control since Sunday.

Abu Obeida says calling for the group’s disarmament amounts to an attempt to continue Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida has said that calling for the group’s disarmament amounted to an attempt to continue Israel’s genocide.

Hamas’s armed wing has rejected calls for the Palestinian group to disarm, saying that discussing the issue before Israel fully implements the first phase of the United States-brokered “ceasefire” in Israel’s war on Gaza amounts to an attempt to continue the genocide against the Palestinian people.

In a televised statement on Sunday, Obeida, who is Hamas’s armed wing spokesperson, said that raising the issue of weapons “in a crude manner” would not be accepted.

The issue of Hamas relinquishing its weapons is a major obstacle in talks to implement US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, aimed at ending Israel’s war on the besieged territory.

Since the US- and Qatar-brokered “ceasefire” took effect in October, more than 705 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Hamas has told mediators it will not discuss disarmament without guarantees that Israel will completely withdraw from Gaza, three sources told the Reuters news agency last week.

“What the enemy is trying to push through today against the Palestinian resistance, via our brotherly mediators, is extremely dangerous,” Obeida said.

He said the disarmament demands were “nothing but an overt attempt to continue the genocide against our people, something we will not accept under any circumstances”.

It was not immediately clear whether the comments amounted to a formal rejection of the US-backed plan, which includes a demand that Hamas lay down its arms.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel in October 2023, has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and injured at least 172,000 others.

Obeida urged mediators to pressure Israel to fulfil its commitments under the first phase of the Trump plan before any discussion of the second phase can take place.

“The enemy is the one who undermines the agreement,” he said.

There was no immediate comment from Israel on his remarks.

Obeida also addressed Israel’s role in the US-Israel war on Iran, condemning it for launching strikes on Iran “in the midst of the deception of negotiations, with full collusion and conspiracy with the United States”.

The US had been involved in talks with Iran over its nuclear programme in the weeks before the US and Israel launched the war on February 28.

In Iran, more than 2,000 people have been killed and at least 26,500 others injured since the war began.

Obeida also condemned Israel’s renewed offensive “against sisterly Lebanon”, which it launched on March 2 after the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel.

Israel’s assault on Lebanon has killed more than 1,400 people and displaced over 1.2 million, according to Lebanese authorities.

Obeida commended Iran, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis for their continued strikes against Israel.

Hamas’s spokesman also condemned the Israeli parliament’s passage of a new death penalty law that only applies to Palestinians, urging people in the West Bank “to seek, by every possible means, to liberate the [Palestinian] prisoners” held in Israeli jails.

The activists were protesting the alleged use of the RAF base as a departure point for US aircraft involved in the US-Israel war on Iran.

British police have arrested seven people on suspicion of supporting the banned group Palestine Action at a protest near a Royal Air Force (RAF) air base in eastern England used by United States forces.

The five men and two women arrested at a peace encampment just outside the Lakenheath airbase had gathered with other activists on Sunday to protest the alleged use of the base as a departure point for US aircraft involved in the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The Lakenheath Alliance for Peace, which organised the protest, said the seven had been arrested wearing clothing with the message: “We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action.”

Police said the protesters had been arrested “on suspicion of supporting a proscribed organisation”.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government banned Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation last year, making it a criminal offence to belong to or support the group.

In February, a court ruled the ban was “disproportionate” and interfered with the right to free speech. But the government has appealed, and the ban remains in effect in the meantime.

More than 2,700 people have been arrested and hundreds charged over rallies in support of the group, according to protest organisers Defend Our Juries.

Police said in a statement on the latest arrests that they had a duty to enforce the law “as it currently stands, not as it might be in the future”.

Two protesters were also arrested on Saturday at Lakenheath and charged with obstructing public thoroughfares, police said.

US President Donald Trump has railed against Starmer for what he calls insufficient support in the US-Israel war on Iran, straining the countries’ longtime alliance.

The United Kingdom has authorised the US to use British military bases to carry out “defensive” operations against Iran and protect the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil passes in peacetime.

Humanitarian conditions in Gaza remain dire, despite the “ceasefire” that came into effect in October.

For months, the Israeli military has violated the agreement – carrying out air strikes and limiting the entry of aid.

But the situation got worse when Israel and the United States launched their war on Iran on February 28.

The Rafah border crossing was closed again. And deliveries of food, fuel and aid were further restricted.

With the Iran war disrupting global supply chains and the United Nations warning of threats to food security, what are the implications for Palestinians in Gaza?

Presenter: Imran Khan

Guests:

Dr Mohammed Tahir – Orthopaedic surgeon who has worked extensively in Gaza

Alex de Waal – Executive director of the World Peace Foundation

Xavier Abu Eid – Political analyst and former communications director for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

Hebron, occupied West Bank – Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque is no more than 50 metres from Aref Jaber’s home, in the neighbourhood that bears his surname, reflecting his family’s long history in the Palestinian city.

The 51-year-old has taken advantage of that proximity since his childhood, regularly praying at the mosque, one of the most important Islamic sites, and a Palestinian national symbol.

But the Ibrahimi Mosque of Jaber’s childhood is not the one of today. A 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers by the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians. Instead of getting justice, Palestinians faced more restrictions in the aftermath of the attack.

Israeli settlers began establishing an illegal presence in Hebron, part of the occupied West Bank, in 1968, the year after Israel seized control of the Palestinian territory. The settlers have been working to grow their presence ever since, with increased support from the Israeli government.

After 1994, Israel began taking steps to, in effect, control the Ibrahimi Mosque – known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs – by closing off large areas in Hebron’s Old City and the southern area surrounding the mosque, then dividing it between Muslims and a few hundred Jewish settlers, granting the latter the right to pray there.

This was followed by the signing of the Hebron Agreement with the Palestinian Authority in 1997, which stipulated the division of the city into two parts: H1, under Palestinian control, comprising 80 percent of the area, and H2, under Israeli control, comprising 20 percent, but including the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Old City.

Following this series of events, settlement activity intensified in the heart of Hebron. Settlers established illegal outposts within the Old City and began gradually expanding and seizing new homes under the protection of the Israeli army.

Meanwhile, Palestinians were subjected to closures, restrictions and repressive measures aimed at forcing them to leave the Old City, thus facilitating Israeli control over the mosque.

Neighbours of the Ibrahimi Mosque

Jaber had hoped that his children would pray at the mosque daily and become familiar with it, but Israeli measures prevented this.

He explained that since 1994, the southern gate of the mosque, which residents of his neighbourhood used for access, has been closed. They have instead been forced to take alternative routes, turning a journey of 50 metres into one that now spans almost three kilometres.

Things have gotten worse since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, when Israel also ramped up its attacks in the West Bank.

Israel tightened its grip on the mosque and its surroundings, closing more of the alternative routes.

“The difficulty of reaching the mosque is compounded by the procedures at the iron and electronic gates installed at its entrances and in its vicinity,” Jaber said. “We are subjected to searches, detention, and harassment without any justification, and often young men, boys, and even women are arrested.”

The Israeli government says that the restrictions are necessary for security reasons – to protect Israeli settlers whose presence in the West Bank’s most populous city is illegal under international law.

Jaber explained how the Israeli army closes barriers and gates around the mosque and the neighbourhoods that surround it for extended periods under security pretexts. Palestinian residents are not allowed to leave their homes, even to shop, while settlers are permitted to move freely throughout the Old City.

Israeli authorities also used the justification of the current conflict with Iran to close access to the Ibrahimi Mosque for Palestinians for six days from February 28, allowing it to reopen for a limited number of worshippers on March 6.

Increased control

But these measures aren’t only aimed at restricting Palestinians in the vicinity of the mosque, but also seem to be an attempt to establish complete Israeli security control over it, with measures similar to those Israel employs at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.

In Al-Aqsa, the third holiest site in Islam, renewable expulsion orders are used to prevent the entry of worshippers deemed troublesome. Searches are also regularly conducted at the gates of Al-Aqsa, as well as detentions, confiscation of identity cards and restrictions on entry to certain parts of the mosque compound.

Israel now regularly conducts similar actions at the Ibrahimi Mosque.

The Israeli army issued orders to remove Moataz Abu Sneineh, the director of the Ibrahimi Mosque, and other employees from the mosque for 15 days in January. The Palestinian Authority said that the orders were part of “an attempt to reduce their role in the administration and supervision of the Ibrahimi Mosque’s religious and administrative affairs”.

Israeli officials have also tried to push through construction work in the mosque without the approval of Palestinian officials.

On February 9, the Israeli cabinet approved the transfer of licensing, building and municipal administration powers in Hebron from the municipality to the Israeli Civil Administration, in addition to establishing a separate settlement municipality within the city.

The change, part of an internationally condemned Israeli push to increase control over the West Bank and make Israeli settlement easier, is seen as illegitimate and dangerous to the existing status quo, threatening freedom of worship and public order, according to a statement issued by the Hebron Municipality in response to the decision.

Abu Sneineh told Al Jazeera that Israel has transformed the mosque into something resembling a “military barracks” due to the stringent measures it imposes, which “aim to reduce the number of worshippers there”.

According to Abu Sneineh, the Israeli government interfered in the authority of the Ministry of Religious Endowments, and the call to prayer was prevented from being performed dozens of times a month. Worshippers were subjected to humiliating treatment at the mosque entrance, including beatings, verbal abuse and expulsion. Abu Sneineh said the measures were part of a systematic Israeli policy aimed at transforming the mosque into a Jewish synagogue.

“Israel is trying to impose a new reality by controlling the mosque and obstructing worshippers’ access to it, whether during Ramadan or at other times. After October 2023, the measures became even more stringent to erase the Islamic identity of the place, as if it were racing against time to seize control of it,” he added.

On February 28, coinciding with the start of Israeli-American strikes on Iran, the Israeli army expelled worshippers and staff from the mosque and informed them of its closure until further notice, just as it had done at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on the same day under the declared state of emergency measures.

The director of the Youth Against Settlements group and a resident of the Old City, Issa Amro, believes that the situation at the Ibrahimi Mosque is more dangerous than at Al-Aqsa Mosque because it has suffered from temporal and spatial division since 1994.

The “arbitrary” barriers, the closure of surrounding markets and main roads leading to it, and recently the closure of checkpoints in the southern area of the city – which includes the Old City and the Ibrahimi Mosque – prevent approximately 50,000 citizens from accessing it, along with the transfer of supervisory authority of parts of the mosque to the Religious Council in the illegal Kiryat Arba settlement, are extremely dangerous steps that threaten the Palestinian identity of the site, Amro said.

“The Jewish area [of the mosque] has been expanded, and recently, residents around the mosque have been living a difficult life due to soldier violence, settler terrorism, the constant closure of barriers, and restrictions on leaving their homes. They live as prisoners in their own homes in fear of settlers and soldiers, and disturbed by the constant gatherings held by settlers in the mosque,” he added.

According to the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ) – a Palestinian research institute – approximately 40,000 Palestinians live in the H2 area, alongside about 800 Israeli settlers residing in 14 small illegal settlement outposts. These outposts are under heavy protection from thousands of Israeli soldiers deployed around the perimeter of the area and in the streets of the Old City, preventing Palestinians from leading normal lives.

The outposts are managed by the Hebron Settlements Council, which is linked to the parent settlement, Kiryat Arba, located east of the city.

A research study published by the institute in November 2025 revealed a significant increase in the forced displacement of Palestinians from the H2 area over the past two decades.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said in a 2019 report that about 35,000 Palestinians lived in Hebron’s H2 area when the Hebron Agreement was signed in 1997. Today, only around 7,000 remain. Roughly 1,000 of them live in a particularly restricted zone around the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood and Shuhada Street – formerly Hebron’s main shopping street, which is now closed to Palestinians, due to the presence of several illegal Israeli settlements.

Palestinian families in the Old City and the vicinity of the Ibrahimi Mosque are subjected to various forms of pressure, including demolition orders under the pretext of unlicensed construction, frequent arrests, settler attacks on residents and students travelling to and from school, economic restrictions, shop closures, and movement restrictions, particularly regarding access to places of worship and hospitals.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the area contains 97 various military checkpoints and barriers.

These are often closed for hours or even days at a time without prior notice, paralysing movement within the Old City and the residential areas adjacent to the mosque.

Towards full annexation

Observers see these measures in Hebron as a prelude to establishing a fait accompli in the West Bank as a whole, which has been subjected for more than two years to accelerated policies aimed at controlling the largest possible area of land and expanding settlements.

Settlement affairs researcher Mahmoud al-Saifi told Al Jazeera that Israel has sought over the past two years to solidify the annexation of the West Bank, particularly Area C, which constitutes more than 61 percent of the total area of the West Bank.

Israeli authorities have approved 54 new official settlements and 86 smaller outposts in 2025 alone, according to data from Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity.

Planning was approved or advanced for some 51,370 settlement units in the West Bank from late 2022 to the end of 2025, a figure also announced by Israeli government agencies based on data from the Higher Planning Council.

In addition, 222 kilometres of secondary and bypass roads were constructed in the two years preceding January 2025, aimed at connecting outposts to main settlements.

As a result of these policies, the Palestinian presence has dwindled in many areas, particularly the Jordan Valley, where their number has decreased to no more than 65,000.

“Israel is implementing a policy of encirclement and strangulation of small villages in the West Bank by confiscating land and preventing Palestinian construction, in contrast to the frenzied settlement wave that Smotrich called a ‘settlement revolution,’ and the accompanying bitter reality for Palestinians,” al-Saifi said.

There are now thousands of armed settlers spread throughout the West Bank, al-Saifi noted. Skilfully trained and often called settlement guards, they are essentially a rear guard force for the Israeli army, used to attack and intimidate Palestinians and seize their land.

“All Bedouin communities are located in Area C, and 47 of them have been forcibly displaced since October 2023, meaning more than 4,000 Palestinians have been displaced in just two and a half years,” al-Saifi said. “This is part of ethnic cleansing and de facto annexation on the ground.”

A general strike swept the occupied West Bank after Israel passed a death penalty law that only targets Palestinians, sparking international condemnation and protests.

London, United Kingdom – Civil rights groups and Palestine solidarity campaigners are accusing the United Kingdom of “intimidation tactics” after two young pro-Palestinian activists were recently arrested while on bail.

On Monday, 21-year-old Qesser Zuhrah was detained after sharing a social media post calling on people to take “direct action”.

Masked officers handcuffed Zuhrah at her home in Watford at dawn. Just a month ago, she was released on bail following 15 months in prison awaiting trial, during which she participated in a lengthy hunger strike.

Four days earlier, on Thursday, plainclothes police officers in south London also arrested Audrey Corno, 23, accusing her of tampering with her electronic tag in breach of bail conditions – a charge she denies.

“They just grabbed me,” Corno told Al Jazeera. “I broke down into tears. This was a complete shock and very re-traumatising.”

She was told that a month earlier, her tag had been offline for 20 minutes.

The police surprised her as they emerged from “an undercover car” that was parked “right outside my home address”, Corno said.

“I don’t know how long they had been waiting there for. I was just back from a walk with my friends,” she said. “I would have no idea how to tamper with my tag for it to stop working and then work again.”

Before their latest arrests, both Zuhrah and Corno were imprisoned over their alleged participation in separate raids on military hardware manufacturers in 2024 that were claimed by Palestine Action, the direct action group whose stated mission is to target companies associated with the Israeli war machine.

Although the High Court ruled in February that the UK’s ban on Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation was unlawful, it is still illegal to show support for the group as the government prepares for an appeal due to take place later this month.

‘Charges in connection with social media post’

Counterterrorism police on Monday said that Zuhrah’s latest charge was “encouraging or assisting” the commission of an offence, “namely criminal damage”.

“The charges are in connection with posts made on social media,” the force said.

Zuhrah was granted bail again on Tuesday. She is due to appear in court on April 17.

She is a member of the so-called “Filton 24” collective, accused of breaking into a weapons factory in Filton, Bristol belonging to Elbit Systems UK, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, in August 2024.

In Corno’s latest case, she was also released hours after being arrested for a second time.

Naila Ahmed, head of campaigns at CAGE International, said, Zuhrah’s “rearrest” is a continuation of the “active repression” targeting pro-Palestine activists across the UK.

“These laws were not misapplied or stretched beyond their intent – they were designed precisely to criminalise political speech and dissent, and that is exactly what they are doing here,” she said. “Terrorism legislation should be abolished in its entirety. It has never been a tool of public protection – it is and has always been a tool of political control, used to police those who challenge state power and silence those who speak out against injustice.”

Corno was previously accused of offences related to a June 2024 break-in at the Wooburn Green, Buckinghamshire facility of GRiD Defence Systems, which Palestine Action said supplies the Israeli military – a charge denied by the company.

She believes officials are using “intimidation tactics” because several charges against Palestine Action-linked activists have been dropped and dozens of them have been released on bail. All Filton 24 activists, for example, have been acquitted of aggravated burglary, and 23 have been freed from prison.

“This is a reaction to the acquittals and zero convictions in the Filton 24 case so far,” Corno said. “Take direct action” is not a contentious thing to say, she argued.

“Direct actionists who either are released on bail as they should be, or found not guilty, are still being heavily surveilled and heavily repressed by the state as a reminder, that although the public may find us not guilty, the state does.”

Last week, Zuhrah and other Filton 24 defendants spoke about alleged prison mistreatment and said they were planning to take legal action over medical neglect.

Campaigners supporting the group said, “We believe this is a coordinated campaign by the state to retaliate [after failing] to secure a single conviction at the first trial of the Filton 24. There is no doubt that this arrest was politically motivated, as it is unprecedented to charge people under the Serious Crime Act”.

The detentions come at a time of increasing friction between the police and Britain’s significant Palestine solidarity movement – and ahead of a march that could bring new tensions.

On Saturday, crowds of protesters are expected to gather again in London to demonstrate their support for Palestine Action as the genocide in Gaza continues. To date, thousands of peaceful protesters have been arrested for signs reading: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.

While London’s Met Police refrained from detaining protesters following the High Court’s ruling, the force recently reversed that policy, meaning mass arrests are once again likely.

Meanwhile, a court is expected on Wednesday to rule in the case of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Ben Jamal and Stop the War Coalition’s Chris Nineham, who are accused of breaching protest restrictions in January 2025.

Since Israel’s onslaught on Gaza began in October 2023, tens of thousands of Britons have rallied in support of Palestine.

According to YouGov polling, one in three Britons has “no sympathy at all for the Israeli side in the conflict” after Israel killed more than 72,000 people in two years and decimated the Gaza Strip.

The government, led by Labour leader Keir Starmer, has long been accused of cracking down on pro-Palestine solidarity because of a wave of arrests during demonstrations and due to its proscription of Palestine Action.

Human Rights Watch has said that its research found a “disproportionate targeting of certain groups, including climate change activists and Palestine protesters, undermining the right to protest freely and without fear of harassment”.

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – Every morning, Abdel Karim Salman begins his routine by heading out carrying his own phone and his wife’s phone, both completely drained of charge. He walks to a nearby charging point to plug them in and recharge them again.

Throughout the night, Abdel Karim relies entirely on the torches from the phones to light the inside of the tent he lives in with his family in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.

Abdel Karim, 28, a former civil engineer at the Beit Lahiya municipality in northern Gaza, was displaced to Deir el-Balah a year and a half ago with his wife and two children, along with about  30 members of his extended family.

His family home was completely destroyed on October 9, 2023, in the first few days of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Abdel Karim and his family have been on a difficult journey of displacement since then, with little in the way of normality, and in particular, a regular source of electricity for a bulb in his tent.

So he looks for alternatives to light up the structure, namely the phones, despite the rapid battery drain caused by keeping the torch function on.

“I charge my phone and my wife’s phone, and we use them for lighting at night, especially since my children are under five years old and they get scared if they wake up in the dark,” he says.

Abdel Karim says that the suffering caused by electricity shortages in Gaza is one of the largest “silent” forms of suffering that receives little attention.

For Abdel Karim, the charging process itself has turned into a daily, exhausting burden.

He walks between 150 and 200 metres every day to reach a charging point, paying between two and four shekels ($0.65 to $1.30) per charging session, twice a day.

“That means about eight to 10 shekels ($2.55 to $3.20) per day just for charging phones,” Abdel Karim explains, equivalent to approximately 270 to 300 shekels ($86 to $95) per month, a large amount given the lack of income among displaced families in Gaza amid the territory’s war-driven economic crisis.

“Many days and nights we sleep in darkness inside our tent. When we can’t charge the phones, they turn off, and we are unable to recharge them.”

Few options

With municipality-supplied electricity absent for two years in Gaza, several temporary alternatives have emerged, such as solar-powered lamps, but they remain unaffordable for most residents, having increased tenfold to about 300 shekels ($95) during the war.

As for solar energy systems, they are even more expensive, reaching $420 per panel, and with the additional cost of a battery – about $1,200 – and an inverter. All these items are also scarce due to severe Israeli restrictions on their entry into the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war.

For Abdel Karim, who lost his job soon after the war began, those sums are out of his reach.

Among the alternative solutions introduced during the war are private generator-based electricity systems operating on diesel fuel.

However, those are also unaffordable for many, and their services have fluctuated due to irregular fuel supplies through the crossings.

And so, with most options simply too expensive, that leaves many in Gaza in the same boat as Abdel Karim.

The impact of the power cuts is not limited to lighting or charging, but extends to every detail of daily life, especially for families with children.

“There is no refrigerator, no washing machine … even baby milk cannot be stored for more than two or three hours,” Abdel Karim explains, as he remembers his previous life, when his home was filled with electrical appliances and reliable power.

“The phone charging socket used to be right beside my bed. I could plug it in whenever I wanted. Today, that has become a dream inside this tent,” Abdel Karim adds.

He also says his children have been psychologically affected, especially his eldest son, due to the lack of any means of electronic entertainment or distraction from his grim surroundings.

“There is no TV or screen. He keeps asking for the phone all the time just to calm down, but that also needs charging. Everything is dependent on electricity.”

According to Abdel Karim, his suffering is not an exception. He believes almost all of the people in Gaza are living the same reality, noting that even families in nearby camps who tried to pool resources to buy energy systems have been unable to afford them.

“We hope God brings relief … because we are truly left without any solutions, as if we were abandoned in the desert.”

Longstanding problem

On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel, and Israel then began its war on Gaza.

More than two years on, Gaza has been decimated by Israeli attacks – on top of the more than 75,000 Palestinians killed.

But even before the war, Gaza faced daily rolling blackouts due to limited power imports from Israel and fuel shortages.

Israel, despite withdrawing its illegal settlements from Gaza in 2005, continued to control access into and out of the Palestinian enclave, and repeatedly attacked it.

And so, even in normal conditions, most households only received a few hours of electricity per day, relying on a fragile mix of imported supply and Gaza’s one power plant.

The situation escalated sharply after October 7, when Israel declared a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting electricity supply and blocking fuel imports.

Within days, Gaza’s power plant shut down due to fuel depletion, and by October 11, 2023, the territory entered a full electricity blackout, according to United Nations agencies.

With no fuel entering and transmission lines cut, homes, hospitals, water systems and communication networks lost reliable access to power, shifting to limited and increasingly unsustainable generator use.

Since then, Gaza’s electricity infrastructure has continued to deteriorate due to both fuel shortages and widespread physical destruction of the grid. Generators remain the primary alternative but are severely constrained by fuel scarcity, affecting essential services such as healthcare, water production and telecommunications.

During the time between 2025 and 2026, Gaza’s power system is widely described as effectively non-functional, with electricity access fragmented, inconsistent and largely dependent on emergency solutions rather than a stable grid.

An opportunity

The severe electricity crisis has created an indirect source of income for Jamal Musbah, 50, who runs a mobile phone charging station powered by solar energy and a generator line.

Before the war, Jamal worked as a farmer and owned two agricultural plots on the eastern borders of Deir el-Balah. Today, they have been bulldozed and fall under Israeli control.

His charging station has instead become his main source of income, supporting his eight children.

“I had an energy system consisting of six panels, batteries, and a device, which I used for pumping water and irrigating the remaining land around my house before the war,” Jamal says to Al Jazeera.

As an alternative income source after the war and the electricity blackout in Gaza, Jamal repurposed his solar system to provide basic phone charging services to residents, though this came with major challenges.

“The demand for charging was extremely high, and my batteries were exhausted within the first months, as electricity became very scarce at home,” he adds.

However, things worsened when a neighbouring house was targeted, destroying four of his six solar panels, significantly reducing his capacity and income.

At the beginning of the service, Jamal also offered food refrigeration services alongside phone and battery charging, but after the damage and battery depletion, he had to stop those services.

“We used to charge about 100 to 200 phones daily. Now we only manage 50 to 60 at most due to reduced efficiency of the solar panels,” Jamal says, attributing this also to weather conditions, clouds and the winter season, when solar efficiency drops significantly.

“In winter, you look for alternatives to solar panels and turn to generators that barely work … the electricity crisis makes you feel like you are running in a never-ending cycle of suffering.”

His charging station now operates with a small system of two panels and one battery.

People from nearby areas, including university students and displaced families, rely on it due to a lack of alternatives and the inability to afford generator-based electricity subscriptions.

“My sons are university graduates and earn their living from this station. We charge 1 to 2 shekels per phone.”

Even though Jamal is able to make some money out of the crisis, he ultimately faces the same hardships as others in Gaza do.

“Economic hardship has affected all of us … even basic services like phone charging have become a heavy burden. There are no local solutions to this crisis.”

“The only real and lasting solution is the official restoration of electricity to the Gaza Strip.”

Arrests come days after force announced U-turn, saying that despite High Court ruling, ‘terror’ ban remains in place.

London’s Metropolitan Police have arrested 18 supporters of Palestine Action, days after the force promised to resume arrests in a reversal of policy.

The protesters had sat on the steps of New Scotland Yard, the Met’s headquarters, on Saturday, holding signs that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Officers made the arrests under “terrorism” legislation.

Following the High Court’s ruling in February that banning Palestine Action as a “terrorist group” was unlawful, the force had said it would adopt a “proportionate approach” and stop arresting the group’s supporters and focus instead on gathering evidence.

But on Wednesday, Deputy Assistant Commissioner James Harman said that since any “impact of that judgement will not take effect until the government’s appeal has been considered, which could take many months”, it would resume arrests. “We must enforce the law as it is at the time, not as it might be at a future date,” he said.

As she was led away by two officers on Saturday, one woman, in footage posted to social media, can be heard saying: “I’m being arrested for holding a cardboard sign, whereas our government feels the need to sell weapons and use our airbases to commit genocide in Palestine.”

Critics say the Met’s U-turn defies the court ruling.

Palestine Action is a direct action campaign group which has targeted weapons manufacturers linked to Israel and an RAF base.

The government proscribed it as a “terrorist organisation” in July 2025, placing it alongside groups including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. The High Court called the move “disproportionate” and in breach of freedom of expression.

The government was granted a stay pending an appeal, meaning the ban technically remains in force.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who said she would fight the High Court ruling in the Court of Appeal, said in February that supporting Palestine Action was not the same as supporting the Palestinian cause.

Chief Magistrate Paul Goldspring has since ordered that hundreds of related prosecutions be paused until after that appeal is heard.

Nearly 3,000 people have been arrested for holding signs in support of the group, contributing to a 660 percent rise in UK “terrorism” arrests in the year to September 2025, Defend Our Juries said.

On the day of the High Court ruling, about 150 people held the same placards outside the court and not a single person was arrested.

The scale of the crackdown has drawn sharp international criticism, including from the UN.

When the ban was first imposed, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said it appeared “disproportionate and unnecessary”, warning it risked criminalising the legitimate exercise of free expression.

In January, US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers told the news platform Semafor that “censoring that speech does more harm than good”.

Amnesty International, which intervened in the court case, said thousands had been “arrested for something that should never have been a crime.”

Eight activists linked to the group staged a lengthy hunger strike in prison, with four held on remand for 15 months before being bailed in February. Four others remain imprisoned.

Earlier this week, Al Jazeera reported that released detainees are now pursuing legal action against the prisons over alleged mistreatment.

Defend Our Juries has called a mass sign-holding event, titled Everyone Day, at Trafalgar Square on April 11, as the government’s appeal heads to court.

Saturday’s arrests took place as the rest of the city was filled with demonstrators who came out to march against the far right.