I met the Israeli settlers Biden placed sanctions on. They’re bad – but part of a rotten system

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Written by Zak Witus Zak Witus

Published: 04 March 2024 04 March 2024

I saw settlers attack Palestinian shepherds with dogs, destroy their crops, and steal their homes – all under the aegis of rightwing Israeli leaders

2023 was the worst year on record for settler violence. Settlers attacked Palestinians and their property in more than 1,200 separate incidents. They killed at least 10 Palestinian people. They torched dozens of houses. And this was all before the Hamas attacks of 7 October. In the aftermath of the deadly violence, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and hundreds held hostage, Ben-Gvir explicitly ordered Israeli law-enforcement officers not to enforce the law in cases of Jewish nationalist violence. The Israeli military drafted and armedthousands of settlers, issuing them guns, uniforms and the protection of the state.

These policies have enabled settlers and Israeli armed forces to forcibly remove at least 198 Palestinian households (1,208 people, among them 586 children) from more than a dozen villages in the two months of November and December. As Yesh Din succinctly put it: “Settler violence is the policy of the Israeli government.”

It isn’t just this current government that’s the problem. During my months in the West Bank in 2022, the “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was in power, and it presided over what was, at the time, a record-setting year for settler violence. Since 1967, when Israel initially occupied the West Bank, every single Israeli government has made a choice to maintain Israel’s military presence there and enable the settlement enterprise.

Settler violence is not a glitch in the system. It is a feature. While the state pursues a slow and steady strategy of dispossession by issuing demolition orders, night raids of villages and onerous checkpoints, settlers like Levi and Federman use vigilante violence and illegal construction to more quickly and directly achieve the same goals.

The US, UK and France imposing sanctions on these individuals sends a strong message to the Israeli government, and settlers across the West Bank, that the international community will no longer tolerate this level of violence. But, truthfully, it is not enough. The leader of Zanuta, Fayez al-Tal, said in an interview after the sanctions were made public, that he hopes that Biden’s executive order will extend to officials such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Human rights leaders around the world agree that this would be a helpful next step, one that the administration is reportedly considering.

But targeting individuals, even powerful ones, fails on a basic level: it leaves intact the structures which allow Jewish Israelis to militarily, economically and legally dominate Palestinians in the West Bank. For the sake of both nations who live in the land between the river and the sea, we must uproot that system of Jewish supremacy in order to sow the seeds of a shared future for all Palestinians and Israelis.

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Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians, UN rights expert says

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Written by Nina Lakhani | The Guardian Nina Lakhani | The Guardian

Published: 27 February 2024 27 February 2024

Exclusive: UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri says denial of food is war crime and constitutes ‘a situation of genocide’

“The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation – and the wasting and stunting of children – is torturous and vile. It will have a long-term impact on the population physically, cognitively and morally … All things indicate that this has been intentional,” said Fakhri, a law professor at the University of Oregon.

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We started a group chat to help fellow doctors in Gaza. Then it went quiet

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Written by Simon Fitzgerald and Osaid Alser Simon Fitzgerald and Osaid Alser

Published: 25 February 2024 25 February 2024

Shortly after our communications were interrupted with the doctors and nurses in Khan Younis, we read Israeli spokespeople in the news leveling new accusations against Nasser hospital, as they have leveled accusations against one hospital after another in Gaza. This time they have justified the assault by alleging that Israeli hostages had been held in there. It’s almost impossible to refute every accusation that has been made, but it’s clear the intended and actual result of this campaign has been the systematic destruction of the healthcare infrastructure for Palestinians in Gaza, and that has been repeated from north to south.

The UN’s international court of justice has found plausible evidence of genocide in Gaza. While our clinical records may one day be entered as evidence in front of justices in The Hague in line with the Convention on the Prevention and Prosecution of the Crime of Genocide, it will probably not come in time to relieve the suffering of survivors.

It will not treat the wounded, nor bury the dead. It will not return the hundreds of dead healthcare workers to their families, communities and patients.

Our moral obligation as fellow physicians is to support our colleagues in Gaza in their attempts to treat their patients with the care and dignity that all human beings deserve. Without immediate and dramatic action by influential actors on the world stage to end the violence in Gaza, it’s hard to see how that will be possible.

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Rugs, cosmetics, motorbikes: Israeli soldiers are looting Gaza homes en masse

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Written by Oren Ziv | +972 Magazine Oren Ziv | +972 Magazine

Published: 23 February 2024 23 February 2024

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Rule 52. Pillage is prohibited.

Soldiers describe how stealing Palestinian property has become totally routine in the Gaza war, with minimal pushback from commanders.

Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza have not been shy about posting videos on social media gleefully documenting their wanton destruction of buildings and humiliation of Palestinian detainees. Some of these clips were even exhibited in South Africa’s presentation at the International Court of Justice last month as evidence of genocide. But there is another war crime being readily documented by Israeli soldiers that has garnered less attention and condemnation despite its prevalence: looting. 

In November, the Palestinian singer Hamada Nasrallah was shocked to discover a TikTok of a soldier playing the guitar that his father had bought him 15 years earlier. Other videos uploaded to social media in recent months show Israeli soldiers boasting about finding wristwatches; unboxing someone’s collection of soccer shirts; and stealing rugs, groceries, and jewelry. 

In a Facebook group for Israeli women comprising nearly 100,000 users, someone wondered what to do with the “gifts from Gaza” that her partner, a soldier, had brought back for her. Sharing a photo of cosmetic products, she wrote: “Everything is sealed except for one product. Would you use these? And does someone know the products or are they only in Gaza?” 

Indeed, since the start of Israel’s ground invasion in late October, soldiers have been taking whatever they can get their hands on from the homes of Palestinians who have been forced to flee. More than an open secret, the phenomenon has been widely — and uncritically — reported in the Israeli media, while rabbis from the Religious Zionist movement have been answering soldiers’ questions about what is permissible to loot according to Jewish law. 

Soldiers who returned from fighting in Gaza confirmed to +972 Magazine and Local Call that the phenomenon is ubiquitous, and that for the most part their commanders are allowing it to happen. “People took things — mugs, books, each one the souvenir that does it for him,” said one soldier, who admitted that he himself took a “souvenir” from one of the medical centers that the army occupied.

Read more at +972 Magazine