Palestine

Israeli settler violence targeting Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is at its highest level on record, according to the UN. Settlers are destroying mosques, dairy facilities, and attacking olive farmers in hundreds of attacks that are terrifying families and disrupting everyday life.

The Trump administration is pushing an Israeli-crafted resolution at the UN Security Council (UNSC) this week aimed at eliminating the possibility of a State of Palestine. The resolution does three things. It establishes US political control over the Gaza Strip. It separates Gaza from the rest of Palestine. And it allows the US, and therefore Israel, to determine the timeline for Israel’s supposed withdrawal from Gaza, which would mean never.

This is imperialism masquerading as a peace process. In and of itself, it is no surprise. Israel runs US foreign policy in the Middle East. What is a surprise is that the US and Israel might just get away with this travesty unless the world speaks up with urgency and indignation.

The draft UNSC resolution would establish a US-UK-dominated Board of Peace, chaired by none other than President Donald Trump himself, and endowed with sweeping powers over Gaza’s governance, borders, reconstruction, and security. This resolution would sideline the State of Palestine and condition any transfer of authority to the Palestinians on the indulgence of the Board of Peace.

This would be an overt return to the British mandate of 100 years ago, with the only change being that the US would hold the mandate rather than the United Kingdom. If it were not so utterly tragic, it would be laughable. As Marx said, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Yes, the proposal is a farce, yet Israel’s genocide is not. It is a tragedy of the first order.

Incredibly, according to the draft resolution, the Board of Peace would be granted sovereign powers in Gaza. Palestinian sovereignty is left to the discretion of the board, which alone would decide when Palestinians are “ready” to govern themselves – perhaps in another 100 years? Even military security is subordinated to the board, and the envisioned forces would answer not to the UNSC or to the Palestinian people, but to the board’s “strategic guidance”.

The US-Israel resolution is being put forward precisely because the rest of the world – other than Israel and the US – has woken up to two facts. First, Israel is committing genocide, a reality witnessed every day in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where innocent Palestinians are murdered to the satisfaction of the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Second, Palestine is a state, albeit one whose sovereignty remains obstructed by the US, which uses its veto in the UNSC to block Palestine’s permanent UN membership. At the UN this past July and then again in September, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Palestine’s statehood, a fact that put the Israel-US Zionist lobby into overdrive, resulting in the current draft resolution.

For Israel to accomplish its goal of Greater Israel, the US is pursuing a classic divide-and-conquer strategy, squeezing Arab and Islamic states with threats and inducements. When other countries resist the US-Israel demands, they are cut off from critical technologies, lose access to World Bank and IMF financing, and suffer Israeli bombing, even in countries with US military bases present. The US offers no real protection; rather, it orchestrates a protection racket, extracting concessions from countries wherever US leverage exists. This extortion will continue until the global community stands up to such tactics and insists upon genuine Palestinian sovereignty and US and Israeli adherence to international law.

Palestine remains the endless victim of US and Israeli manoeuvres. The results are not just devastating for Palestine, which has suffered an outright genocide, but for the Arab world and beyond. Israel and the US are currently at war, overtly or covertly, across the Horn of Africa (Libya, Sudan, Somalia), the eastern Mediterranean (Lebanon, Syria), the Gulf region (Yemen), and Western Asia (Iraq, Iran).

If the UNSC is to provide true security according to the UN Charter, it must not yield to US pressures and instead act decisively in line with international law. A resolution truly for peace should include four vital points. First, it should welcome the State of Palestine as a sovereign UN member state, with the US lifting its veto. Second, it should safeguard the territorial integrity of the State of Palestine and Israel, according to the 1967 borders. Third, it should establish a UNSC-mandated protection force drawn up from Muslim-majority states. Fourth, it should include the defunding and disarmament of all belligerent non-state entities, and it should ensure the mutual security of Israel and Palestine.

The two-state solution is about true peace, not about the politicide and genocide of Palestine, or the continued attacks by militants on Israel. It is time for both Palestinians and Israelis to be safe, and for the US and Israel to give up the cruel delusion of permanently ruling over the Palestinian people.

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

Despite her injury, Warda Abu Jarad has started baking cookies and bread to help provide for her family.

A woman in Gaza blinded in an Israeli air strike has opened a bakery to make ends meet and keep her hopes for the future alive, she tells Al Jazeera.

Warda Abu Jarad, 51, is one of 170,698 Palestinians who have been wounded in Gaza since Israel began its genocidal war on the territory in October 2023.

Abu Jarad explained that she lost her sight when her house was bombed by the Israeli military, causing debris to fall into her eyes.

“The smoke from the bombing blinded me completely,” she said.

Speaking from a tent in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, the mother told Al Jazeera that she was still adjusting to being blind and needs someone to guide her whenever she wants to move from one place to another.

“Even when I want to move inside the tent, I wait for someone to help me cross,” she said. “I tried to enter the tent once, hit my head and fell, … so now I feel the ground with my feet to know what’s in front of me.”

Her daughter has been her biggest support, she said.

Her blindness has been hard for her to take. “The most precious thing in life is sight. Every time I struggle to reach something I need, I start crying,” Abu Jarad said.

Despite such challenges, Abu Jarad is, like other Palestinians in Gaza, trying to rebuild her life amid the ruins, ongoing Israeli bombardment, restricted aid and grief.

“I decided to open a business to provide for my family. I opened a bakery and started to grow it. I started baking ma’amoul [filled butter cookies] and bread,” she said one month into a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

“I need to keep going because the situation here is so hard,” she added.

Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, there have been some small improvements in daily life in Gaza, but the United Nations and NGOs have warned that the amount of aid Israel is letting into Gaza remains wholly insufficient.

Israel claims it has adhered to the truce by permitting entry to 600 aid trucks each day while Hamas says the daily number is actually about 150.

On Wednesday, Israel said it had reopened the Zikim crossing to the northern Gaza Strip.

“The opening of direct crossings to the north is vital to ensure that sufficient aid reaches people as soon as possible,” the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said recently.

“All I want in life is to have my sight restored, and I want to see my daughter as a bride in her wedding dress. This is my greatest wish from God,” Abu Jarad said.

Israel has repeatedly been accused of using Palestinians as human shields in violation of international law.

The United States had evidence last year that Israeli officials discussed how their soldiers sent Palestinians into tunnels in Gaza that the Israelis believed were potentially lined with explosives, two former US officials have told the Reuters news agency.

The information was shared with the White House and analysed by the intelligence community in the final weeks of former President Joe Biden’s administration, the officials said.

International law prohibits the use of civilians as shields during military activity.

Israel’s use of Palestinians as human shields in Gaza and the occupied West Bank has been documented on multiple occasions, but Wednesday’s Reuters report is a rare acknowledgement that Washington collected its own evidence on the subject.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security information, did not provide details on whether the Palestinians referenced in the intelligence were prisoners or civilians.

Reuters could not determine whether the Biden administration discussed the intelligence with the Israeli government.

Responding to the report, the Israeli military said in a statement that it “prohibits the use of civilians as human shields or coercing them in any way to participate in military operations”.

It added that the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division is investigating “suspicions involving Palestinians in military missions”.

In May this year, seven Palestinians who had been used as human shields in Gaza, as well as the occupied West Bank, shared testimonies in a report published by The Associated Press.

In June 2024, video footage verified by Al Jazeera showed Israeli soldiers tied a wounded Palestinian man, Mujahed Azmi, to the front of a military jeep and drove him past two ambulances during a raid on the city of Jenin, in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli military claimed at the time that the soldiers involved violated protocol, while a US State Department spokesperson described reports and video of the incident as “disturbing” and “a clear violation” of Israel’s “orders and procedures”.

Israel quizzed at UN over torture allegations

Israel was questioned at the United Nations on Tuesday and Wednesday over multiple reports alleging the torture of Palestinian detainees, in particular since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

“The committee has been deeply appalled by the description we have received, in a large number of alternative reports, of what appears to be systematic and widespread torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians, including children,” the body’s rapporteur, Peter Vedel Kessing, said.

Twenty-eight Israeli officials appeared in front of a panel of 10 UN experts on torture in Geneva.

The experts asked the Israeli team: “Does Israel have a law against torture?”

The answer from the Israeli delegation was no.

“Does Israel apply the agreements it has signed against torture in Gaza and the West Bank?” the question continued, to which the answer was also no.

The committee confronted Israel with multiple reports and a long list of violations against Palestinians. The Israeli delegation denied most of them. In some instances, the delegation said, soldiers had acted in “self-defence”.

Israel has repeatedly been accused of using torture during its two-year war on Gaza.

In one instance, a video leaked from its infamous Sde Teiman military prison appeared to show Israeli soldiers raping a Palestinian detainee.

In addition, dozens of dead bodies of Palestinian detainees that have been returned to Gaza since the start of a ceasefire have exhibited signs of torture.

The UN Committee Against Torture will issue a non-binding summary of its findings on the allegations against Israel at the end of November.

Thousands of children in Gaza have been forced to take on adult responsibilities such as providing food, water and caring for family members injured by Israeli attacks. The UN says this ‘lost generation’ of children needs urgent help to get over the trauma of war.

Gaza’s Civil Defence says 35 unidentifiable bodies uncovered in Gaza City as Hamas searches for dead Israeli captives.

About 200 Hamas fighters remain trapped in Rafah tunnels as Israel refuses to grant them passage, threatening the truce.

US mediator Jared Kushner has met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the fragile US-backed ceasefire in Gaza.

Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump who helped broker the agreement, met Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday as part of US efforts to stabilise the tenuous truce.

The meeting comes a month after Washington and regional powers pushed Israel to agree to a ceasefire. The truce has partly halted two years of Israeli bombardment, which levelled much of Gaza and killed more than 69,000 people, mostly women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

The talks focused on some of the most contentious elements of Trump’s 20-point plan to end Israel’s two-year war on the Palestinian territory, according to Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian.

The officials discussed plans for the disarmament of Hamas, the deployment of international security forces and the establishment of a technocratic government in the territory that excludes Hamas, she said.

Hamas has repeatedly insisted that relinquishing its weapons is a red line.

Addressing Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Netanyahu promised that Gaza would be “demilitarised, either the easy way or the hard way”, in what was a thinly veiled threat to escalate the war.

Hamas fighters in Rafah

A key point of contention remains a group of roughly 200 Hamas fighters trapped in tunnels beneath Rafah, an area still controlled by Israeli forces. Hamas has demanded their safe passage to Gaza’s interior, but Israel has refused.

The US’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, described the proposal to grant the fighters safe passage in exchange for disarmament as “a test case” for the broader peace plan.

A Hamas official confirmed that negotiations over the issue were ongoing, saying the group was eager to resolve the dispute “to remove any pretext Israel could use to undermine the ceasefire agreement”.

However, he ruled out surrendering the fighters. Another Palestinian source speaking to Reuters warned that any Israeli attempt to forcibly extract them could risk the entire truce.

Beyond the immediate crisis, the ceasefire also requires agreement on a transitional governing council for Gaza excluding Hamas, the formation of the proposed stabilisation force, and conditions for reconstruction and disarmament. Each of these steps is expected to face resistance from both Hamas and Israel, given the political and security implications.

The proposed international force could require a United Nations mandate before deployment, and few nations have expressed willingness to participate without one. Egypt, Qatar and Turkiye are among the potential contributors.

However, the United Arab Emirates has signalled hesitation. “Under such circumstances, the UAE will probably not participate in such a force,” Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash said at the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate Forum.

Body identified as Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin with the remains of four other deceased captives still in Gaza.

Israel has received the body of a soldier held in Gaza for more than a decade after he was killed in an ambush by Hamas fighters in 2014 during the last major ground assault on the Palestinian enclave.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday the remains were handed over to Israeli forces in Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after Hamas transferred the body to the aid organisation.

Formal identification of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, 23, was confirmed by Israeli forensics teams.

At the start of a weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said holding the body for so long has caused “great agony for his family, which will now be able to give him a Jewish burial”.

“Lieutenant Hadar Goldin fell in heroic combat during Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s leader said.

The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, said the body was retrieved on Saturday from a tunnel in the Yebna refugee camp in Rafah in southern Gaza.

Goldin was killed on August 1, 2014, two hours after a ceasefire took effect and ended that year’s war between Israel and Hamas. He was part of an Israeli unit tasked with locating and destroying Hamas tunnels.

Another Israeli soldier, Oron Shaul, was also killed in the six-week war, and his body was returned earlier this year.

There are now four deceased abductees remaining in Gaza to be returned under the terms of a ceasefire that began last month. Hamas has so far released 20 living captives and 24 bodies.

For each body returned, Israel has been releasing the remains of 15 Palestinians. Ahmed Dheir, director of forensic medicine at the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, said 300 bodies have now been returned and 89 identified.

Israeli attacks continue

Israel has also released nearly 2,000 living Palestinian prisoners since the October 10 truce began. Palestinian authorities said more than 10,000 people still remain in Israeli detention.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said 241 Palestinians have been killed and 619 wounded since the ceasefire began and 528 bodies have been recovered from under rubble and at attack sites.

Despite the truce, Israel’s military continues to carry out attacks across the Gaza Strip. On Sunday, one man was killed in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, and two died in separate assaults in the north and south, the Health Ministry said.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man in the Far’a refugee camp near Tubas while Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers in several areas, according to local reports.

According to Israeli authorities, Palestinian armed groups captured 251 people during Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed at least 1,139 people.

Israel began its war in Gaza on the same day. It has killed at least 68,875 Palestinians and wounded 170,679, according to the Health Ministry.

Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinian villagers, activists, and journalists, including Reuters reporter Raneen Sawafta, near Nablus. The assault is the latest in a surge of settler violence across the occupied West Bank during the olive harvesting season, with over 760 attacks recorded in October.

Hamas says the retrieved body is that of Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin, who was reported killed in 2014.

150 students from Gaza’s al-Aqsa University have been celebrating after becoming the first class to graduate there since the start of Israel’s genocide, during which the territory’s entire education system has come under assault.

Israel’s war on Gaza has not only razed entire neighbourhoods to the ground, displaced families multiple times and decimated medical facilities, but also poisoned the very ground and water on which Palestinians depend.

Four weeks into a fragile ceasefire, which Israel has violated daily, the scale of the environmental devastation is becoming painfully clear.

In Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, what was once a lively community has become a wasteland. Homes lie in ruins, and an essential water source, once a rainwater pond, now festers with sewage and debris. For many displaced families, it is both home and hazard.

Umm Hisham, pregnant and displaced, trudges through the foul water with her children. They have nowhere else to go.

“We took refuge here, around the Sheikh Radwan pond, with all the sufferings you could imagine, from mosquitoes to sewage with rising levels, let alone the destruction all around. All this poses a danger to our lives and the lives of our children,” she said, speaking to Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim Alkhalili.

The pond, designed to collect rainwater and channel it to the sea, now holds raw sewage after Israeli air attacks destroyed the pumps. With electricity and sanitation systems crippled, contaminated water continues to rise, threatening to engulf nearby homes and tents.

“There is no doubt there are grave impacts on all citizens: Foul odours, insects, mosquitoes. Also, foul water levels have exceeded 6 metres [20ft] high without any protection; the fence is completely destroyed, with high possibility for any child, woman, old man, or even a car to fall into this pond,” said Maher Salem, a Gaza City municipal officer speaking to Al Jazeera.

Local officials warn that stagnant water could cause disease outbreaks, especially among children. Yet for many in Gaza, there are no alternatives.

“Families know that the water they get from the wells and from the containers or from the water trucks is polluted and contaminated … but they don’t have any other choice,” said Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City.

Destroyed water infrastructure

At the COP30 Climate Summit in Brazil, Palestinian Ambassador Ibrahim al-Zeben described the crisis as an environmental catastrophe intertwined with Israel’s genocide.

“There’s no secret that Gaza is suffering because of the genocide that Israel continues to wage, a war that has created nearly a quarter of a million victims and produced more than 61 million tonnes of rubble, some of which is contaminated with hazardous materials,” he said.

“In addition, the deliberate destruction of sewage and water networks has led to the contamination of groundwater and coastal waters. Gaza now faces severe risks to public health, and environmental risks are increasing,” al-Zeben added.

Israel’s attacks have also “destroyed” much of the enclave’s agricultural land, leaving it “in a state of severe food insecurity and famine with food being used as a weapon”, he said.

In September, a UN report warned freshwater supplies in Gaza are “severely limited and much of what remains is polluted”.

“The collapse of sewage treatment infrastructure, the destruction of piped systems and the use of cesspits for sanitation have likely increased contamination of the aquifer that supplies much of Gaza with water,” the report by the United Nations Environment Programme noted.

Back in Sheikh Radwan, the air hangs thick with rot and despair. “When every day is a fight to find water, food, and bread,” Mahmoud said, “safety becomes secondary.”

Despite some progress in delivering food to Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the enclave – ravaged by Israeli bombardment and racked by hunger – remains in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, the United Nations has said.

The UN and its partners have been able to get 37,000 metric tonnes of aid, mostly food, into Gaza since the October 10 ceasefire, but much more is needed, UN spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters on Friday.

“Despite significant progress on the humanitarian scale-up, people’s urgent needs are still immense, with impediments not being lifted quickly enough since the ceasefire,” Haq said, citing reports from the UN’s humanitarian service, OCHA.

Haq was critical that entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza continues to be limited to only two crossings – the al-Karara (also known as Kissufim) and Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossings.

There is no direct access to northern Gaza from Israel or to southern Gaza from Egypt, while NGO staff are being denied access, he said.

Earlier this week, the UN said it had distributed food parcels to one million people in Gaza since the ceasefire, but warned it was still in a race to save lives.

The UN’s World Food Programme stressed all crossing points into the Gaza Strip should be opened to flood the famine-hit territory with aid, adding that no reason was given for why the northern crossings with Israel remained closed.

Palestinians across Gaza continue to face shortages of food, water, medicine and other critical supplies as a result of Israeli restrictions.

Many families also lack adequate shelter as their homes and neighbourhoods have been completely destroyed in Israel’s two-year military bombardment.

Chris Gunness, the former spokesperson for UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency, said Israel is committing a war crime by blocking aid to Gaza.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Gunness noted that tens of thousands of Palestinians – mainly children – remain at risk of malnutrition. He also said that if Israel doesn’t meet its obligation “to flood the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid”, then third-party countries must act.

“Israel has made it clear that it wants to commit a genocide against the Palestinians, it wants to ethnically cleanse them, and it wants to starve them,” he said.

Captive’s body returned

The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect on October 10, after both sides agreed to a United States-brokered 20-point plan aimed at ending the war. But since it was announced, Israel has repeatedly launched attacks, killing dozens of people, with its forces remaining in more than 50 percent of the territory.

More than 220 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect, according to the Ministry of Health in the enclave.

Israel has also been carrying out a wave of demolitions in parts of Gaza under its continued control east of the so-called yellow line, where Israeli forces are stationed.

The latest demolitions on Friday included residential buildings east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, according to Al Jazeera reporters in the Strip.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed Israel received from the Red Cross the remains of one of the last six captives held by Hamas in Gaza.

The Israeli military later confirmed that a coffin containing the deceased captive’s body had “crossed the border into the State of Israel” after being delivered by the Red Cross.

It said the body was being sent to a forensic facility in Tel Aviv for identification.

At the start of the truce, Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, released all 20 surviving captives. In return, Israel freed hundreds of Palestinian political prisoners, including the bodies of slain Palestinians from Gaza, many showing signs of torture.

Of the 28 deceased Israeli captives that Hamas agreed to hand over under the deal, it has so far returned 22 – 19 Israelis, one Thai, one Nepali and one Tanzanian – excluding the latest body.

The last six deceased captives include five seized on October 7, 2023 – four Israelis and one Thai – as well as the remains of a soldier who died in 2014 during one of Israel’s previous assaults on Gaza.

Israel has accused Hamas of dragging its feet in returning the bodies of deceased captives. The Palestinian group says it continues to press for proper equipment and support to comb through vast mounds of rubble and debris – where some 10,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli bombardments are still buried.

More than 68,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s two-year war.

Former US diplomat Nabeel Khoury says Israel’s latest attack on southern Lebanon follows the same flawed logic and pattern as its assault on Gaza.

US president says Gaza ceasefire ‘working out very well’ despite deadly Israeli attacks and severe aid restrictions.

Italy is welcoming 19 children who were evacuated from Gaza by the World Health Organization. They’ll receive advanced medical treatment in several hospitals across the country.

After months of blockade and starvation in Gaza, Israel allowed a new United States venture – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) – to distribute food. Branded as a lifeline, its sites quickly became known by Palestinians and dozens of human rights groups as “death traps”.

Fault Lines investigates how civilians seeking aid were funnelled through militarised zones, where thousands were killed or injured under fire.

Through the testimonies of grieving families, a former contractor, and human rights experts, the film exposes how GHF’s operations replaced UNRWA’s proven aid system with a scheme critics say was designed for displacement, not relief. At the heart of this investigation is a haunting question: was GHF delivering humanitarian aid – or helping turn breadlines into killing fields?

Palestinians are turning to soup kitchens to feed their families as Gaza is gripped by a crippling food crisis because Israel is limiting the entry of aid trucks, despite the new ceasefire agreement.