Ben Gvir made the comments when discussing the reduction in Israeli attacks in Gaza, though the IDF hasn’t fully stopped its strikes and continues to violate the US-backed October 2025 ceasefire deal.
“It’s no secret, I disagree with the prime minister,” Ben Gvir said on a podcast hosted by Rom Braslavski, who was previously held captive in Gaza, according to The Associated Press.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir joins pro-settlement Israelis on a march towards the Gaza Strip near Kibbutz Zikim and Israel’s border with Gaza, in southern Israel, July 19, 2026. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
“I think targeted assassinations should be carried out in Gaza, taking down 30 to 40 every night. Not just those who pose an immediate threat — there are people there who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people,” he added.
Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power party, is known as an outspoken proponent of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territory, views that he reaffirmed in the podcast interview.
“I see all of Gaza as ours,” he said. “Settlements not just in Gush Katif but throughout Gaza, encouraging as much emigration as possible, sending them to their countries, and for the terrorists, no emigration, nothing, just to kill them one by one.”
While often portrayed as a fringe figure, Ben Gvir has significant influence in the government and holds a powerful position, as he oversees police and prisons, where nearly 100 Palestinians have died since October 7, 2026, due to increasingly worse conditions, which Ben Gvir has boasted about implementing. He is now pushing a plan to create crocodile-filled moats around Israeli prisons.
Displaced Palestinians, including many children, wait in long queues to receive hot meals distributed by a charitable organization in Gaza City, Gaza on June 7, 2026.
(Photo by Moiz Salhi/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“What we are witnessing in Gaza is not a series of isolated shortages, it is a policy of attrition by design.”
The renowned humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday that the Israeli government is still restricting the entry of engine oil and generator parts to the Gaza Strip, imperiling life-saving hospital functions and other essential services in the decimated territory.
Doctors Without Borders, known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), noted that Gaza’s remaining healthcare system relies “almost entirely” on generators, “with most electricity cut by Israeli authorities and much of the electrical infrastructure destroyed.” The group said that in some Gaza facilities, its teams barely have sufficient engine oil to last a month and have been forced to “buy engine oil at the local market at exorbitant prices.”
Filipe Ribeiro, MSF’s head of mission in Palestine, said that “what we are witnessing in Gaza is not a series of isolated shortages, it is a policy of attrition by design.”
“For more than two years, we have observed Israel’s policies restricting the entry of supplies,” said Ribeiro. “These policies do not merely delay aid; they dismantle the very systems people rely on to survive.”
Israel’s continued restriction of supplies comes as the country’s military, which is armed by the United States, keeps up its deadly bombing of the strip despite a purported ceasefire deal that took effect in October 2025. Israeli attacks have killed more than 1,200 people in Gaza since the start of the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected a US-backed plan for Hamas disarmament in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Earlier this week, a group of United Nations experts condemned Israel’s recent “strikes on hospitals and shelters, the killing of police officers and UN-contracted staff, attacks on fishers, and abductions and abuses by armed groups reportedly collaborating with the Israeli military, as well as the killing of humanitarian workers, who through their work protecting and promoting fundamental human rights, are human rights defenders.”
“These restrictions have become increasingly far-reaching, also preventing the entry of routine items ranging from ointments for skin diseases to rubber seals needed for medical sterilization equipment.”
According to MSF, Israel’s sustained attacks and obstruction of supplies “extend far beyond hospitals.”
“Without engine oil, all transport services could stop, including much-needed water trucks during the peak of summer heat, ambulances, buses transporting medical staff to work, and trucks delivering humanitarian supplies,” the group said. “Bakeries and flour mills also rely on generators, meaning food production could also be affected.”
MSF characterized Israel’s continued obstruction of engine oil and spare generator parts as “one piece of a larger pattern of structural violence imposed by Israeli authorities to intentionally restrict access to vital services and supplies as part of the ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
“These restrictions have become increasingly far-reaching, also preventing the entry of routine items ranging from ointments for skin diseases to rubber seals needed for medical sterilization equipment,” the group said. “The shortages now impact virtually every aspect of life in Gaza, leaving hospitals and humanitarian organizations without basic supplies.”
Ribeiro said in a statement that “the items change, but the logic remains the same: reducing people to conditions in which life becomes untenable, and dignity is systematically stripped away through the denial of the most ordinary, most essential goods.”
“This is not bureaucracy,” he added. “It is a deliberate effort to make existence itself impossible.”
(Photo credit: X) Large fires continued to burn and spread in south Lebanon on 13 August due to continuous strikes, artillery shelling, and deliberate arson operations carried out by Israeli occupation forces illegally positioned inside the country.
The Israeli arson operations in particular are targeting forests and greenery.
Israel has been damaging the environment in Lebanon for years, increasingly so over the past several months and specifically since the latest round of fighting began – including through the spraying of toxic chemicals.
Firefighters said, as they put out the blazes caused by Israel’s attacks and arson, that the fires were sparked “deliberately” by occupation forces.
The fires escalated overnight as Israel intensified attacks, but have been raging for weeks, environmental groups have said.
Israeli occupation troops used flares in a wooded area near the southern city of Khiam, sparking large blazes.
Hussein Fakih, head of the Lebanese Civil Defense in Nabatieh, said firefighters were targeted by an Israeli drone as they were heading to put out the flames.
“Most of our missions are now related to fires. There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30–40 percent of the land has been affected by fires,” he added.
Much of the agriculture in south Lebanon, including olive groves, has been affected by the fires, sparked by Israeli occupation troops and worsened by the hot summer weather.
The fires were seen in numerous videos posted across social media.
Meanwhile, Israeli infantry forces advanced into the area between the towns of Aita al-Jabal and Beit Yahoun in the Bint Jbeil district, as Tel Aviv carried out attacks in other areas on Thursday.
Occupation troops continued to detonate civilian infrastructure in multiple southern towns and villages, including Majdal Zoun, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).
On 12 August, Israeli War Minister Israel Katz renewed his repeated vows that occupation forces “will not withdraw” from south Lebanon.
Israel’s escalation and expansion in Lebanon have escalated since Beirut violated its own laws and agreed to an unconstitutional framework deal with Israel in June, during direct talks with Tel Aviv.
The deal demands Hezbollah disarmament before any withdrawal and allows Israel to maintain its occupation.
Tel Aviv says it has established a “security zone” in the dozens of villages it has occupied since March, but Hezbollah resistance fighters remain entrenched across this area.
Someone had to organize the catering; that’s the detail that got me.
From the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, Arab states have issued a steady stream of condemnation – labeling it genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing – even as they’ve been secretly deepening their military ties with the very state carrying it out. The secrecy, however, hasn’t protected them.
That was the conclusion of a leak obtained by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – published in October 2025, months before the United States and Israel’s own war on Iran began: five CENTCOM PowerPoint presentations documenting an entity called the “Regional Security Construct” – a secretive network, operating since 2022, tying Israel to six Arab states: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, with Kuwait and Oman standing by as “potential partners.” Every one of these governments has at some point in the last three years stood up and condemned the genocide in Gaza. Every one of them has also helped keep Israel’s military machine running. It’s a staggering betrayal.
Now look at what those same states were getting up to in private. In May 2024, high-level Arab and Israeli military officials met to coordinate – at Al Udeid Air Base, the US facility located inside Qatar. Traveling the usual way – the airport at Doha, passport and diplomatic controls – would leave a paper trail, hence the Israelis bypassed formalities and instead flew directly onto the base.
The internal planning document for the meeting contained a section with the heading “MUST NOT DO”, and strictly forbade photographs and any media contact. Beneath the itinerary, a note reminded staff they should observe culinary restrictions for both Muslim and Jewish delegates: “No pork / crustaceans.” Someone still had to sort the catering for this shadowy military alliance. Mirrors, Cocteau said, are the doors through which Death comes and goes. In this case, it was the catering memo.
As Palestinians in Gaza were being bombed, the men whose governments claimed to speak for Palestine were coordinating regional air defenses with Israeli military officials down the hall – discussing radar coverage against Iran over lunch, while the genocide continued next door. By 2024, CENTCOM had linked most of the seven partners – the six Arab governments plus Israel – into a joint radar and air-defense picture focused on Iranian missiles and drones.
A detail in the slides that catches the eye: a 2025 meeting at which a Saudi representative and a US intelligence official jointly delivered an “intelligence overview” – Syria, the Houthis in Yemen, Islamic State – one of the two briefers from a kingdom with no formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
All of this elaborate scheming failed spectacularly when Doha was struck on 9 September 2025 in a sneak assassination job on Hamas officials. The complex air-defense system the Arab-Israeli network had just spent three years building amounted to nothing. The American radar was pointing in the wrong direction, since the attack didn’t come from Iran – but from Israel. Qatar’s separate air defense systems missed it too. The Trump administration reportedly leaned on Netanyahu, who apologized three weeks later.
The network’s failure wasn’t limited to Doha. On 28 February 2026, the day the US and Israel opened their war of aggression on Iran by killing its Supreme Leader, Iran’s retaliation went for the network’s jugular – ballistic missiles and drones struck the US Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain, while simultaneous strikes smashed a THAAD missile-defense radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan and a phased-array radar in Qatar, with widespread damage reported across the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Following a brief pause, hostilities resumed in early July, and on 23 July Iran’s military said it had destroyed a second radar and a Patriot system at another US base near Azraq, in Jordan. Every partner state named in the CENTCOM documents except Egypt has now had its radar coverage hit, disabled, or claimed destroyed.
On 29 July, Iran returned to Muwaffaq Salti – the same US/Jordanian base it struck earlier in February – launching ballistic missiles in what CENTCOM had the cheek to call a “surprise attack.” CENTCOM did not clarify whether it came before or after the US and Saudi Arabia struck Iran-backed militias in Iraq that same morning. Trump’s response was characteristically restrained: “We are going to beat the f**king sh*t out of them.”
Fresh strikes were hinted at for the first weekend in August but did not materialize – according to reports that came to light during the pause, Washington’s munitions stockpiles, both defensive and offensive, have been significantly depleted since the start of its war on Iran in February. The secret network that these Arab states built in collaboration with Israel and the US to guard the Gulf is in ruins. The global hegemon that built it with them is running low on ammunition.
The system is crumbling under the threat it was built to stop.
So why the secrecy? Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified the answer: it allowed everyone involved to sidestep the bitter pill of the political argument. Working covertly with Israel’s generals is more palatable than being seen as direct collaborators. But, he said, the network masks how profoundly these states distrust each other and Israel – a distrust the Qatar strike exposed. “A key member of the American effort has attacked another,” he said, “with America seen as complacent, complicit, or blind.”
Mainstream media coverage has largely framed this as merely embarrassing – hypocritical Arab leaders caught out, business as usual. Except that is not what the documents are about, and it lets the governments involved off far too lightly. The same regimes that normalized ties with Israel have essentially reduced the Palestinian cause to lip service – and the CENTCOM documents show exactly how far that abandonment extends, as The Electronic Intifada has argued. This goes way beyond leaders occasionally crossing paths with their Israeli counterparts on the sidelines of a conference. Built by the United States, this three-year-old network has its own dedicated bureaucracy – a cyber center, an encrypted messaging network, information-operations planners, even special dietary instructions and a “MUST NOT DO” slide – all of it built to hide an alliance that Israel’s genocide in Gaza had already made politically toxic.
The Palestinians are not an incidental factor; they are the reason for all the secrecy. The Gaza genocide is built into this, with each government named in these documents consciously choosing to sustain it.
Richard Edain is a teacher and writer based in the UK and Vietnam. His long-form historical journalism appears on Substack as the Ulysses Files and has been published on Antiwar.com. Contact: edainrichard@gmail.com.
Palestinians are seen as the Israeli forces placed new yellow concrete blocks at the Sanfura junction continuing to expand the area known as the “Yellow Line” despite the ceasefire in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine, on July 27, 2026. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency]
Gaza should remain “destroyed for generations to come,” said former Israeli general Giora Eiland, who advocated using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians. Eliand also urged Israel not to relinquish the territory it has seized behind the so-called Yellow Line.
Eiland, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council and former chief of the Israeli army’s Planning and Operations directorates, made the remarks during an interview with Israeli radio station 103FM. His remarks were reported this week in Hebrew-language by Israeli newspaper Maariv under the headline: “Giora Eiland without filters: ‘It is better for Gaza to remain destroyed for generations to come’.”
Discussing the US-backed Board of Peace’s 15-point proposal for Gaza, Eiland described the plan as a “very pro-Hamas interpretation” of the earlier 20-point framework and argued that Israel should refuse to surrender its territorial gains inside the besieged enclave.
Eiland was particularly adamant about Israel retaining the territory behind the so-called Yellow Line, territory which Israel has occupied inside the Gaza strip. “We must not give up [the Yellow Line] under any circumstances,” he declared.
In contravention of international law, which prohibits the annexation of territory by force, Eiland compared Gaza with Germany after the Second World War, arguing that “the enemy has lost and we need land”. He said that the Gaza strip needs not be used for Israeli settlements but should instead remain as a “security buffer” where the Israeli army can operate.
While Eiland did not explicitly use the word annexation, his demand that Israel permanently retain the territory would entrench Israeli control over most of the Gaza Strip.
Israel has progressively moved the Yellow Line deeper into Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire arrangements. By late July, Israel controlled around 70 per cent of the enclave, with yellow concrete barriers pushed further west and thousands of Palestinians displaced from newly seized areas.
In his interview, Eiland explicitly opposed Gaza’s reconstruction.
“Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt,” he told 103FM. “It is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come.”
He claimed that Palestinian despair served Israel’s interests, arguing that the greater the devastation in Gaza and the longer it remains as a visible reminder of the events of 7 October, 2023, “the better”.
The comments are consistent with Eiland’s repeated calls since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza to punish the Palestinian population through starvation and terror.
In November 2023, writing in the Hebrew-language Yedioth Ahronoth, Eiland urged Israel not to be deterred by warnings of humanitarian catastrophe and disease. “The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this,” he argued, adding that severe epidemics would “bring victory closer”.
South Africa subsequently cited Eiland’s remarks in its application accusing Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), presenting them among statements it said demonstrated genocidal intent.
Eiland is seen as the mastermind of the so-called Generals’ Plan, which proposed ordering Palestinians out of northern Gaza before imposing a complete siege on those who remained, cutting off food, water, fuel and medicine.
International humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, including deliberately depriving civilians of food, water and other objects indispensable to survival.
Israeli settlers, joined by far-right ministers and lawmakers, march from the Yad Mordehay area in southern Israel toward the Gaza border, calling for the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks in Yad Mordechai, located 10 km south of Ashkelon, Israel, on July 19, 2026. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
Products linked to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories continue to enter European markets, raising questions about how they are exported, labeled and distributed and whether existing European rules are effectively preventing settlement-linked trade.
A June 2026 report by the Global Echo Litigation Center, Importing Occupation, has drawn fresh attention to these supply chains.
It says that goods made in Israeli illegal settlements have entered European markets through systems that hide their actual place of origin.
Here is how the system works.
How widespread is the trade?
The report focuses on agricultural exports, including dates, citrus fruits, herbs, fruit and vegetables, which previous research has identified as among the most common settlement products reaching Europe.
To illustrate how the trade operates, Global Echo examined the supply chains of three major Israeli exporters: Hadiklaim, Mehadrin Ltd. and Yonatan Packing and Marketing.
It traced products from illegal settlement farms through packing facilities and Israeli ports before they entered European markets.
Because neither Israel nor the European Union publishes comprehensive data on settlement exports, the true scale of the trade has remained unclear for years.
The report says it analyzed more than 30,000 export documents accompanying more than 6,800 agricultural shipments between October 2017 and February 2026. Of the 5,900 shipments destined for Europe, 17.2% contained settlement products. For the EU specifically, the figure was 19.2%
The report says that farm products from Israeli settlements are not unusual or occasional, but are regularly part of Israel’s agricultural exports to Europe.
According to the report, exporters use what it calls a “supply chain of obfuscation” — a system designed to hide the fact that products come from Israeli settlements and make their actual origin harder to identify.
The report describes three main methods.
The first is what it calls “hiding in plain sight.” In this method, exporters may include the actual settlement location, including its postal code, but still list Israel as the country of origin, obscuring the fact that the goods were produced in a settlement.
The report says European customs authorities, rather than Israeli exporters, are responsible for checking whether a postal code belongs to a settlement. It argues that this creates gaps that allow settlement produce to enter European markets without being identified as such.
The second method involves what the report calls “sham addresses.” Exporters use addresses inside Israel instead of the actual production site, making settlement produce appear to have originated in Israel.
Illegal settlement produce is mixed with goods grown inside Israel at shared packing or storage facilities before export. Once combined, the shipment carries Israeli origin documents, making it difficult for importers and customs officials to identify which products came from settlements.
What steps have European countries taken?
European countries have taken different approaches toward products originating from Israeli settlements, ranging from national import bans to calls for stronger EU-wide restrictions.
At the European Union level, there is still no bloc-wide ban on imports from Israeli settlements. But the issue has moved closer to EU-level action. In July, the European Commission presented member states with options including a full or partial import ban, prohibitive tariffs and an import-licensing system. EU foreign ministers discussed the proposals on July 13, with a full ban receiving the most support, but no agreement was reached and further work was ordered.
The Netherlands has adopted a national ban on the import, purchase and sale of goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The measure also prohibits circumvention and is due to take effect on Sept. 22, 2026.
Ireland has also advanced legislation to prohibit imports of goods originating in Israeli settlements. The government approved the Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill 2026 in May, and the bill subsequently passed through the Irish parliament in July. Once enacted and commenced, importing settlement goods will be an offence.
Spain has already banned the import of products originating in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. Belgium has also approved a ban on imports from Israeli settlements, while supporting stronger EU-wide action.
France and Sweden have pushed for a common European approach rather than separate national measures. In an April 2026 letter to the European Commission, France and Sweden called for additional measures targeting settlement products, including tariffs and restrictions through export-licensing schemes.
Why does the system continue to function?
Global Echo argues that responsibility is divided between Israeli exporters and European authorities.
Researchers say they identified hundreds of origin certificates that appeared to relate to settlement products while claiming preferential treatment available under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
The report also questions the validity of plant health certificates and organic certifications issued for products originating in occupied territory, arguing they may not comply with EU legal requirements.
The report argues that the current system places the burden of identifying settlement postal codes on European authorities rather than Israeli exporters, creating opportunities for settlement products to avoid detection.
In 1948, with war raging in Palestine, Harry Truman found himself trapped.
On one side were Zionist lobbyists and the president’s domestic political advisers, who were urging him to support the establishment of a Jewish state in as much of Palestine as possible. On the other were his top foreign policy and national security officials, led by the secretary of state, George C Marshall. Their unanimous recommendation was to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state, which they believed would trigger war in the Middle East and endanger the future of US relations with the Arab and Muslim world.
With the exception perhaps of George Washington, no diplomatic or military leader in American history had a reputation for patriotic virtue and skilled devotion to duty comparable to that of Marshall. Truman was in awe of the secretary of state, who, as chief of staff of the US armed forces, had been hailed by Winston Churchill as “the true organizer of victory” in the second world war. After the war, it had been Marshall who launched the plan named after him to rebuild Europe.
In the mid-1940s, Marshall pushed quietly but steadily against the Zionist movement’s proposals to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. He was concerned that American support would open opportunities for the Soviet Union to exploit Arab anger, put Middle Eastern oil supplies at risk in the event of a war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and require the deployment of unavailable American troops to prevent bloodshed and instability in Palestine. These were, indeed, the strongly held views of virtually all of Truman’s most important military and foreign policy advisers.
Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the [Israel] lobby used enormous resources … to punish or reward politicians
Truman was personally and deeply moved by the suffering of Jewish survivors of the Nazi “Final Solution”, but also irritated by and at times furious with the constant hectoring to which he was subjected by campaigners for recognition of a Jewish state in Palestine, including the World Zionist Organization and a host of other Jewish delegations, friends and politicians. Despite his personal exasperation, he could not ignore them. Coming in an election year that would pit him against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York, pressures from the Zionist lobby forced him into an excruciating and embarrassing position.
With Palestine engulfed by civil war, Arab states threatening to invade and the last British soldiers about to leave the country, Truman called a meeting of his top advisers on 12 May 1948. According to Marshall’s own account of the meeting, he warned Truman against adopting the policy strongly advanced by Clark Clifford, his main political adviser, to recognize the state of Israel before it was established.
President Harry Truman shakes hands with secretary of state George Marshall in Washington DC on 29 May 1947. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Such a move, according to Marshall, would be a “transparent dodge to win a few votes”, he said, leaving the “great dignity of the office of the President … seriously diminished”. Marshall declared he would not personally be able to vote for Truman should he bow to political pressure on the issue. A shaken Truman closed the meeting by saying he agreed with Marshall.
However, within two days, exquisitely sensitive to the tenuousness of his hold on the presidency and the power of Zionist sympathizers to throw New York’s electoral votes to the Republicans, he ordered that the US recognize Israel.
Today, the influence of the groups loosely known as the Israel lobby has only become more powerful. Truman’s bind – caught between his sense of the national interest and the domestic political price of defying a powerful lobby – was something that, in the decades to come, president after president would experience.
To fast forward: Donald Trump’s decision to go to war on Iran earlier this year came after a sustained campaign by Israel to convince the US to join the disastrous operation. It also came in defiance of several of his top advisers, as well as the 45% of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That decision may be most quickly explained as yet another example of the erratic policymaking that define Trump’s two terms as president. But a closer examination of the experience of several of his predecessors reveals that this presidential decision is more the rule than the exception.
The fact is that from Truman to Trump, most American presidents have caved to the demands of Israel and its advocates. Driven by the fear of domestic political defeats, presidents have regularly rejected or abandoned foreign policies that both they and their most senior advisers believed were in the best interests of the US and at the expense of making meaningful progress in bringing a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Our new book, Israel’s Lobby, tracks the growth over decades of the most powerful foreign policy lobby in American history. Composed of a panoply of organizations, groups and individuals who advocate American policies that explicitly favor the interests of Israel, the lobby was nurtured – and has been encouraged and guided – by Israeli governments. Exploiting the fact that most voters were ignorant or uncaring on the issue, the lobby used enormous resources and concentrated attention to punish or reward politicians at every level depending on their willingness to follow lobby instructions.
Over 20 years after the Truman episode, for example, President Gerald Ford launched what he referred to as a “reassessment” of US policy in the Middle East. The initiative had been advanced by Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as a way to escape from two years of embarrassing failures to move toward a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement. Both Ford and Kissinger had become intensely dissatisfied with Israeli stonewalling.
President Gerald Ford talks with secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in Vladivostok, Soviet Union, on 23 November 1974. Photograph: Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images
The reassessment was conducted by the committee of “Wise Men” convened by Kissinger: former government officials who had served as pillars of the postwar US foreign policy establishment. The unanimous recommendation of the committee was pressure on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to achieve a comprehensive peace, in cooperation with the Soviet Union.
Clear indications that Ford intended to accept this recommendation triggered a powerful mobilization by leading Israel lobby organizations, such as the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). The lobby’s decisive achievement was a letter drafted by Aipac and delivered to Ford demanding that the president “make it clear … that the United States, acting in its own national interests, stands firmly with Israel in the search for peace in future negotiations”, signed by 76 senators.
Ford was “mad as hell” at what he believed to be an Israeli campaign to use the lobby to obstruct diplomacy. But he was cowed. To protect his chances for election the following year, Ford rejected the unanimous recommendation from the “Wise Men”, returning instead to the step-by-step process that had so infuriated him, a process of essentially buying slices of the Sinai Peninsula – seized from Egypt in 1967 – from Israel with increasing amounts of aid and then returning them to Egypt. Ford and Kissinger also vastly increased the scale and scope of US support for Israel.
That included a sweeping new collection of US political, economic, military and diplomatic commitments made in a US-Israeli Memorandum of Agreement that, along with secret annexes, was signed on 1 September 1975. Aides to Kissinger described the guarantees and concessions made to Israel in these negotiations as “mind-boggling” and “simply incredible”. In his memoir, Ford wrote bitterly about the Aipac letter signed by three-quarters of the Senate that had ruined his diplomatic plans and cast a pall on his election campaign.
Indeed, Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter. The lobby hoped Carter, who won 71% of the Jewish vote, would abandon aspirations for a comprehensive Middle East peace, but he was quick to disappoint. The president set his sights on a peace treaty resolving the core issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict. With high poll numbers and an American public that seemed ready for a commonsense, problem-solving president, Carter voiced his belief in March 1977 in the need for a “Palestinian homeland” as a key feature of the Middle East peace he wished to achieve.
The pro-Israel lobby immediately mobilized against Carter’s peace initiative. In a closely held 50-page memorandum for the president in early June, Carter’s senior adviser on domestic political affairs warned him that he would suffer serious consequences, including risks of failing to receive the renomination of his party, as a result of lobby opposition to his public consideration of a Palestinian homeland. Undeterred, Carter offered direct criticism of what he described in an Oval Office meeting as the prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s increasingly inflexible positions. His differences with Menachem Begin, who became Israel’s prime minister in May 1977, were even sharper. Meanwhile Carter began intensive communications with Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian leaders.
In October 1977, the US secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, issued a joint communique with Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, committing the superpowers to achieving “as soon as possible a just and lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Though fully expecting opposition to the president’s Middle East policy, the administration was stunned by the nearly apoplectic reaction to the US-Soviet statement by both the Israeli government and the lobby. Profoundly concerned with the political damage, Carter requested a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, in New York. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, who was present at the meeting, “Dayan in effect blackmailed the President by saying that unless he had assurances that we would oppose an independent West Bank and that we would give them economic and military aid, he would have to indicate our unwillingness in his public statements here in the United States … ‘I can go,’ said Dayan, ‘to the American Jews.’” Faced with this threat, Carter surrendered.
The next day, Vance and Dayan issued a joint statement summarizing a US-Israeli “working paper” prepared in the early hours of the morning. The statement affirmed negotiations would be dramatically scaled back and would not frame a Palestinian homeland as a central issue. The end result was a celebrated “separate peace” between Israel and Egypt that earned Carter, Begin and Sadat Nobel peace prizes, but also led to the isolation of Egypt in the Arab world and the assassination of Sadat. It also set the stage for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and settlement projects that resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, left; US president, Jimmy Carter, center; and Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin clasp hands on the north lawn of the White House after signing the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, on 26 March 1979. Photograph: Bob Daugherty/AP
It is likely, 13 years later, that President George HW Bush felt just as Carter must have felt when, faced with the Israel lobby’s ferocious opposition to his Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, he made public his frustration with its influence. In a failed effort to boost the prospects for the upcoming Madrid peace conference, Bush suspended US loan guarantees amounting to what Israel was spending on housing in occupied territories and faced ferocious opposition from the Israel lobby for doing so. In a press conference he described his exasperation.
“We’re up against very strong and effective, sometimes, groups that go up to [Capitol Hill]” Bush said. “I heard today there was something like a thousand lobbyists on the hill working the other side of the question. We’ve got one lonely little guy down here doing it.”
The lobby’s ability to thwart presidential peace initiatives was on particularly powerful display again during the Obama administration. No president before him had entered the White House with such detailed knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, such a record of personal engagement with both Jews and Palestinians, and such a sustained commitment to closer American relations with Arabs and Muslims. Fully embracing a “two-state solution” to the problem, he launched a high-profile peace initiative to be jumpstarted by a full-scale Israeli freeze on West Bank settlements.
But a storm of outrage in Israel and among leaders of Israel’s lobby in the United States, and the public feud that erupted between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, proved more costly to the former than the latter. Obama quickly reversed course, in effect replacing his peace process envoy George Mitchell, who was closely identified as friendly to the Palestinians, with Dennis Ross, a lobby insider, whose advice to ditch the effort altogether the president quickly implemented. Instead of pressing Israel to stop settlements, Obama made a personal call to Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, threatening to pull $450m in American aid to the Palestinians if Abbas did not withdraw an anti-settlement resolution put forward at the UN security council. In Obama’s address to the United Nations, general assembly, in the first year of his second term, he shifted dramatically from language used in his previous UN speeches. Instead of criticizing Israeli settlements and pressing for a two-state solution, he identified himself with Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism, opposed any UN action contrary to Israel’s insistence on direct negotiations between the parties, and condemned challenges to the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.
President Barack Obama, center, arrives with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, right, to make a statement on Middle East peace talks in the east room of the White House on 1 September 2010. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
The reason for Obama’s dramatic retreat is easily inferable from his memoir, A Promised Land, in which he complains about Aipac’s ability to cow American politicians into obeisance by invoking fears of being labelled antisemitic, and emphasized his own particular vulnerability to such threats as “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan”.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts
More recently, in Joe Biden, the Israel lobby found a president who genuinely believed the Jewish state deserved the “special relationship” with the US. The firmness of that commitment was put to the test by Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Socialized into accepting the lobby’s mantra that any “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem would encourage Arab intransigence, and remembering the political punishment Obama received for showing “tough love” to the Israelis, Biden, quashed all recommendations from his top advisers to do something meaningful to stop the Israeli onslaught on Gazan Palestinians. When he did make limited complaints about excessive civilian casualties and implemented minor delays in American resupply of Israeli armaments, the Republican Jewish Coalition responded by slamming the administration for inserting daylight into the US-Israel relationship, while Aipac sent a detailed memorandum to members of Congress defending Israeli actions as limited, necessary and designed to reduce civilian casualties.
The experience of these administrations demonstrates the wisdom and extraordinary insight of America’s first president, George Washington. In his Farewell Address, Washington warned that the American system of government could all too easily be exploited by a group with a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. In a system designed to rely on the mobilization of countervailing power to limit the effects of factions driven by self-interest or very particular points of view, Washington argued that since any faction committed to the interests of another country would not naturally find its influence checked by effective domestic opposition, it would therefore drive the United States into exaggerated and dangerous commitments abroad and implicate it in quarrels and wars contrary to the country’s interests.
In the wake of the genocide, the politics of the issue in America have changed as numerous Americans react with passion to Israeli onslaughts in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank. Biden and Kamala Harris paid heavy costs for knuckling to Israel and its lobby. Nearly a third of voters who voted for Biden in 2020 and did not vote for Harris in 2024 said that ending Israel’s violence in Gaza was the top issue influencing their voting decisions. Across both parties, support for Israel has plummeted; 60% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Israel, and a record number of Israel critics are winning congressional primaries.
But these losses have not deterred Israel or its lobby from working to reverse Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to avoid wars in the Middle East, to pursue even closer relations between the US and Israeli militaries, and to spend millions to thwart the rise of critics of the country.
To be sure, American supporters of Israel and its governments have every right to express their opinions and work to shape public policy, and the lobby is by no means the only vehicle for moneyed interests that warp American democracy. Moreover, American presidents have free will: the George W Bush administration was run by many who were in perfect ideological alignment with the Israeli right. An incompetent and gullible Trump is plainly responsible for yielding to Israeli pressure and dragging the US into the latest war.
But unless other groups are able to act freely with other interests in mind – and without the threat of antisemitism accusations – US policy in the Middle East will remain dangerously distorted. Both to secure and advance American interests abroad and to protect American freedoms at home, Americans must unite to prevent any foreign power from enjoying the influence over policy and public debate that Israel has exercised, both directly and through the faction operating on its behalf.
Eli Clifton is a co-founder and senior adviser at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
Ian Lustick is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Arab-Israeli relations and US foreign policy
What happened in the Nablus-area town of Tell lays bare a land war designed to make Palestinian permanence impossible.
Mohammad al-Ayoubi, The Cradle, AUG 4, 2026
Photo Credit: The Cradle
In the Palestinian town of Tell, southwest of Nablus, residents attempted to repel an armed settler assault. Their response was quickly used to justify collective punishment. The army sealed the roads while settlers attacked homes and property, each advancing the same campaign of dispossession. The assault on Tell exposed a campaign already underway across the occupied West Bank.
Abdullah Abu Rahma, director of popular action at the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, tells The Cradle that the violence belongs to a plan unfolding according to a set timetable:
“It is true that attacks have increased markedly in recent days in terms of the number of martyrs, the demolition of property, and restrictions on movement, but they fall within a broader plan drawn up years ago. The events in Tell gave [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu’s government the political and media pretext to accelerate what had already been planned, exploiting them as justification before its domestic audience to create the impression that its actions against the Palestinians are warranted.”
The figures bear out the scale of that campaign. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 11,074 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers during the first half of 2026. Of these, 3,488 were carried out by settlers, including assaults on villages, arson, shootings, land seizures, and the establishment of settlement outposts. The commission says settler attacks killed 17 Palestinians during that period.
The occupied West Bank is also being broken into ever smaller enclaves. As of December 2025, OCHA had documented 925 movement obstacles, including 89 permanently staffed checkpoints, 218 partial checkpoints, and 232 road gates.
An Oxfam analysis of UN data found that 1,244 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces or settlers between 2023 and the end of 2025. Nearly 46,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced over the same three years, compared with just over 13,000 during the previous 14 years combined.
For Dr Mohammad Halsa, a specialist in Israeli affairs, the violence cannot be understood as a chain of isolated reactions:
“It is one element of a comprehensive ideological agenda governing the ruling right, which views all Palestinian land as the exclusive property of Jews and considers the present moment the most suitable opportunity to move from ‘managing the conflict’ to ‘resolving it’ once and for all, thereby correcting a ‘historic mistake’ committed by Ben-Gurion in 1948 when several thousand Palestinians were allowed to remain.”
Tell and the anatomy of a land grab
Suleiman Bisharat, director of the Yabous Center, and Abu Rahma both reject the idea that Tell represents a sudden turn. They place it within a pattern of settlement violence that has intensified across the occupied West Bank since 2024.
Community activist Ahmad Ayyash goes further, telling The Cradle:
“What is happening is not ‘settler attacks under army protection,’ as it is portrayed, but attacks carried out in partnership with the army, not under its protection. The partnership between the two operates in a state of extremely close coordination. The settlers and the Israeli army are not separate actors, but two arms of the same project.”
For Ayyash, Tell may nevertheless prove significant as “a turning point in resisting attacks by settlers and the army, or the beginning of the use of new means to confront the occupation,” particularly as Palestinians face forms of violence that many communities had not previously experienced at this intensity.
Regarding one recent incident, Abu Rahma is equally direct, asserting that “what happened was self-defense, the videos show the dead were killed by army fire or by the settlers themselves, and that seizing the weapon was a fleeting moment rather than a planned act.”
Reuters reported that the confrontation began after armed settlers approached the village and that footage appeared to show a Palestinian seizing a rifle before being shot.
Erasing the resistance model
The ferocity of the Israeli response, Ayyash argues, was intended to ensure that Tell would not become a precedent for other Palestinian towns facing settler terror. The occupation could not allow a community’s defense of itself to be seen as a model capable of deterring future attacks.
“Even before 7 October, the occupation was trying to destroy the Palestinian model and the model of the resistance fighter, as previously occurred in the Nour Shams, Tulkarem, and Jenin camps, where the geography was altered, the environment sustaining the resistance was blown apart, and even memorials to the martyrs were destroyed.”
The collective punishment imposed on Tell carried a warning to other Palestinian communities: resisting settler incursions would bring the full weight of the occupation down upon them. Such resistance threatens the conditions under which settlement expansion has been allowed to proceed largely unchallenged.
Making Palestinian life impossible
Ayyash describes this process as demographic engineering, but its methods differ between Gaza and the occupied West Bank. In Gaza, he argues, the occupation has reordered daily life by controlling not only how much enters the strip, but also which goods are admitted or withheld.
Reporting in January 2026 documented shortages of beef, poultry, hygiene products, and other basic supplies caused by Israeli import restrictions. The effect reaches beyond hunger, reshaping how families obtain food and the conditions under which everyday life can continue.
In the occupied West Bank, Ayyash says, the same logic is being applied through systematic displacement. He dates the acceleration of the campaign to 2024, eight months after the war on Gaza began, and recalls advertising and media messages along bypass roads declaring, “There is no future in Palestine.”
Their purpose, he argues, was to convince Palestinians that a dignified life on their land was no longer possible and that they must look elsewhere.
The pressure has fallen especially heavily on Bedouin and herding communities. OCHA reported that settler attacks and related access restrictions displaced 6,200 Palestinians across 119 communities between January 2023 and June 2026, including more than 3,600 people from 46 communities that were completely emptied.
Ayyash says these pressures are now driving internal migration from isolated areas and villages near settlements toward Area A and the main urban centers.
Movement restrictions are compounded by settler raids, the theft of livestock and crops, and the destruction of roads and other infrastructure. This daily attrition cuts communities off from the resources needed to remain on their land. As those conditions deteriorate, targeted areas are emptied and opened to seizure.
Poll What is driving Israel’s accelerated takeover of the West Bank? A long-planned annexation strategy Settler expansion backed by the army The absence of meaningful international pressure All of the above
19 votes, 1 days and 14 hours left
Two arms of the same project
Abu Rahma describes a division of labor between the state and the settler militias. The official apparatus supplies legislation, courts, police, and military force. Settlers receive funding, transport, and weapons, while their crimes are ignored or actively enabled.
A UN inquiry published in June found that Israeli authorities had facilitated settler violence through financial, military, and legal support, with security forces frequently accompanying or protecting settlers during attacks.
The state demolishes homes and chokes Palestinian movement with checkpoints. Settlers torch property and drive residents from their land. Resistance is met with arrest and fines. Step by step, the ground is cleared for annexation.
Halsa identifies two purposes behind this constant friction. The first is to terrorize Palestinians until they leave their land voluntarily. The second is to provoke them into defending themselves, allowing a far more violent response to be justified through an inverted account in which the attackers become the victims.
The commission’s 3,488 recorded settler attacks during the first half of 2026 amount to an average of more than 19 each day, although its methodology counts a wider range of violations than OCHA’s incident-based monitoring.
By 20 July, OCHA had recorded 18 Palestinian deaths linked to settler attacks, a figure that already exceeded the total for all of 2025. What was once treated as fringe violence has become a central method of territorial control.
Outposts without pretexts
Settlement expansion does not depend on Tell or any other single confrontation. Ayyash says the occupation uses every available opportunity to accelerate construction and seize land, but requires no particular pretext. Had the events in Tell not occurred, the outposts would have expanded for another stated reason, or without one.
In the wake of the confrontation, Netanyahu pledged to accelerate settlement construction in the area. Halsa warns that “every inch that is vacated creates room for a Zionist Talmudic foothold, and the hands of the clock do not move backward.”
Extremist Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has announced plans for 763 housing units in Eli, a project expected to triple the settlement’s size. In July, Israel’s security cabinet also approved 1.3 billion shekels for 34 new West Bank settlements, including newly established sites and existing outposts slated for retroactive legalization.
An election fought over Palestinian blood
The escalation is also feeding an Israeli election campaign ahead of the vote scheduled for 27 October 2026. Halsa describes the political field as “wide open,” with ministers competing to adopt the most hardline position and turning Palestinian land and holy sites into campaign material.
Ayyash offers a more severe reading. He argues that extremism is embedded in the Israeli political mainstream and that Israeli society is aggressive and “enamored of killing and destruction,” invoking the racist maxim, “The only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
Political currents compete for votes at the expense of Palestinian lives, each seeking to appear more violent toward Palestinians and more committed to settlement expansion than the next.
That contest leaves little room for the familiar claim that a meaningful Israeli camp remains committed to peace. Bisharat cautions, however, that elections are an accelerant rather than the root cause.
The electoral contest operates within an ideological horizon reaching back to 1948, when Jewish armed groups were deployed to empty Palestinian villages through arson and the killing of civilians.
Today’s settler militias perform a comparable function for the state. Their violence may be presented as spontaneous or unauthorized, but it advances policies that the government later formalizes through military orders, planning decisions, and annexation measures.
Annexation at wartime speed
Abu Rahma says the project was already established before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, but the regional war gave Israel the space to execute it at an unprecedented pace. Plans once expected to take 10 years are now being carried out in three or four, aided by an international community that has normalized crimes against Palestinians through silence and inaction.
That rush has also alarmed parts of Israel’s own security establishment. Nearly 600 former military, intelligence, police, and diplomatic officials warned US President Donald Trump that settler violence could produce consequences “even more catastrophic” than those of 7 October.
Yet electoral and ideological calculations continue to outweigh even the national security concerns raised by figures who spent their careers defending the occupation state.
Across the occupied West Bank, supposedly temporary measures are hardening into facts on the ground. Roads remain closed long after the army arrives, while settler outposts spread across village grazing land under military protection. Cut off from their land and neighboring communities, families are pushed toward urban centers.
Holding the ground
Despite the overwhelming imbalance of force, Palestinians remain the principal obstacle to this project. In Gaza and during the intifadas of 1987 and 2000, they demonstrated an ability to frustrate displacement plans, even at an immense human cost.
Bisharat asks whether Palestinians can continue reshuffling the political deck long enough to benefit from the international shift now troubling Israel. Support for the occupation state has declined, while public backing for the Palestinian cause has risen amid the war of extermination in Gaza. The question is whether that change can be converted into pressure on the governments still arming and protecting Tel Aviv.
Halsa argues that the minimum response must combine organized, peaceful popular action, including guard groups and community gatherings, with a sustained media and diplomatic campaign capable of exposing Israel’s version of events. Tell, he says, should immediately have been followed by press conferences laying out how the confrontation unfolded and documenting the army’s role.
He also calls for Palestinian efforts to build on dissent inside Israel, including the letter signed by nearly 600 former security officials, while exploiting contradictions within the occupation state. That requires converting the shift in western public opinion into influence over international decision-making, an outcome he says Israel deeply fears.
Tell has exposed how military power, settler violence, and state policy are being used to dispossess Palestinians without a formal annexation decree.
International organizations may continue counting the dead, displaced, checkpoints, attacks, and outposts. But documentation without consequence leaves the map to be redrawn while the reports accumulate.
The outcome will be decided on the ground, where Palestinian refusal to leave remains the main barrier to Israel’s West Bank endgame.
US President Donald Trump’s government is pressuring African states to leave the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to sources close to the Hague cited in an exclusive report released by Le Monde on 4 August.
The US “is using two forms of leverage in its campaign. First, disinformation. They claim that authorities in targeted countries are themselves at risk of prosecution by the Court,” the sources said.
“Recently criticized by NGOs for its support to [Sudan’s RSF] … Chad reportedly felt vulnerable. However, the opening of such prosecutions is deemed ‘unlikely,’” they added.
The report goes on to say that the second method being used by Washington is to threaten states with the cancellation of security deals with the US.
According to Le Monde, multiple African member states of the ICC are being targeted by Washington.
“At the end of July, other African member states of the ICC received phone calls, visits and letters from the US. Uganda, for instance, received a letter on 24 July with an ultimatum telling [it] to leave [the Court] or face consequences,” one of the sources said.
Le Monde says Uganda has so far refused to capitulate.
The sources went on to tell the outlet that the west African state of Benin was approached in the same manner.
“Beninese authorities have shown their determination to resist pressure: ICC Judge Reine Alapini-Gansou, from Benin, is one of three magistrates who dared to file a complaint in New York in June against [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and Donald Trump to challenge the sanctions imposed on them by Washington,” Le Monde’s anonymous sources revealed.
The outlet writes that Trump and his government have been “waging war” against the ICC since it issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war chief Yoav Gallant – both responsible for genocide against Palestinians.
In July, heavy US-Israeli diplomatic pressure resulted in Colombia withdrawing its participation in South Africa’s genocide case against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Nicaragua had already withdrawn from the ICJ genocide case against Israel in April last year.
The new report describes US pressure on African states as being a part of Trump’s campaign to dismantle the ICC and the international rules-based order, as it is referred to.
“We will dismantle the ICC – brick by brick, if necessary,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month.
The US and Israel are not parties to the Rome Statute and are therefore not members of the ICC, whose jurisdiction extends to genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
The American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002, nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act,” authorizes a US president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free any US or allied personnel detained by the ICC.
Several ICC officials have been targeted by US sanctions.
Israeli forces killed at least 26 people in Gaza over the weekend, striking apartment blocks, tent camps and the medicine warehouses of a hospital, in the territory’s deadliest days in weeks. The killings came as US President Donald Trump threatened Iran with “decapitation” after a week of American strikes across the regio
Israel killed at least seven people on Saturday and destroyed two of the four medicine warehouses of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al Jazeera reported. Gaza Health Ministry Director-General Munir al-Bursh said the destruction “turns medicine and illness itself into a tool of war.”
Palestinians try to extinguish a burning car after an Israeli military strike in Gaza City, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026. [AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi]
The Associated Press reported that the Israeli military killed at least 17 more people, children among them, from Saturday night through Sunday, according to local hospitals. Al Jazeera counted 19 dead Sunday and put the weekend toll at 26. Among the dead were Abdullah Abu al-Teif, 33, his pregnant wife Abeer Anan, 29, and their five-year-old son Azzam, killed at the Al-Sousi Tower in western Gaza City. The Israeli military said the strikes had targeted militant operatives.
The bloodshed unfolded behind an official propaganda barrage of peace. On Thursday Trump announced a “HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas”; on Saturday he claimed the “perimeters of a deal” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz had been agreed. As he spoke, Israeli bombs fell on Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, and US bombers massed for what Trump said Sunday “would have been the biggest attack since World War II.”
Israel has attacked Gaza on 270 of the 297 days since the ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, an Al Jazeera analysis reported as of Monday. Gaza’s Health Ministry counts at least 1,250 Palestinians killed since the truce began; five Israeli soldiers have died in the same period, per the Associated Press.
The “ceasefires” are merely the framework for the permanent annexation of Gaza and the expansion of the war. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Sunday that the Israeli-held zone had reached 60 to 70 percent of Gaza, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Doron Spielman told the AP: “Disarming means physically giving up the weapons. Nothing less.”
The AP reported that Israel’s demands, according to a person with knowledge of the deal, include the freedom to keep conducting military operations in Gaza. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote in the Telegram on July 31 that “assassinations in Gaza must continue.”
The Israeli army is meanwhile in the second week of a “wide-scale military operation” Netanyahu ordered across the West Bank after settlers from the Havat Gilad outpost attacked the village of Tal on July 24. Four Palestinians of the Ramadan family and two Israelis died.
The army deployed 26 battalions and raided towns from Jenin to Hebron, Al Jazeera reported on July 28; Army Radio counted 30 settler attacks the following weekend, including two mosques set on fire and a family home in Urif that more than 150 settlers set alight—an infant survived because her grandfather pulled her from her crib.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on July 24 that Palestinian villages should “look like the refugee camps in Nablus and Tulkarem.” According to UN figures, 1,122 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 2023, at least 246 of them children.
The assault on Gaza comes as Trump threatens to destroy the Iranian government. “Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” he wrote Monday on Truth Social. In the Oval Office later that day he said, “This is the last chance for them to sign a good document,” adding that he wanted to give “every last chance before decapitation.”
The threats followed a week of American bombardment. After Trump said July 27 that US strikes were paused for mediation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles on July 28 at a base housing US troops in Jordan, and the next day the US military announced a “heavy wave of strikes” on dozens of sites across Iran—command centers, missile and drone facilities and coastal defense sites.
Iranian state media reported that a missile struck a house on Qeshm Island, killing Qeisar Jafari, a taxi driver, his wife Zahra and their two-year-old son Sina. The same day, US and Saudi warplanes struck militia sites across seven Iraqi provinces; the Popular Mobilization Forces said 20 of its fighters were killed, and two Iraqi militia officials told the AP that six Iranian advisers died.
CBS News reported Friday that the US and Israel were preparing a bombing campaign against Iranian power plants and refineries. In a Truth Social post late Saturday, Trump announced he had canceled the attack, writing that “Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries” had asked him to hold off.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wrote Sunday on X: “The @DeptofWar was ready to go—and remains ready—at levels not seen since World War 2. Locked and loaded.”
These realities render all the talk of “ceasefire” by Trump and Netanyahu moot: There is an ongoing regional war throughout the Middle East, in which people are being killed every day.
Houthi missiles and drones have struck Saudi tankers and Aramco facilities since the group declared an embargo on Saudi shipping July 20; a drone set two gas vessels ablaze at Egypt’s port of Damietta July 29. Kuwait said Saturday it destroyed hostile drones over its territory and blamed Iran; Israel killed Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon Saturday and shelled southern Syria on July 30.
Trump’s claims of peace negotiations met a flat denial from Tehran. “We are not negotiating with the United States at this time,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Monday; Iran says its only talks are with Oman, over a temporary shipping corridor through the Strait of Hormuz.
No ceasefire is in effect with Iran—the June memorandum collapsed in early July, and TheGuardian wrote Monday that the weekend reversal was thought to be Trump’s 12th cancellation of threatened strikes.
On CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona attacked the war as mismanaged: “Here’s a guy who got us into this without a strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline.” His remedy was to win it: “put some people in here that know how to do this, how to talk to the Iranians.” He did not call for an end to the war and said nothing about Gaza.
At a Senate hearing on July 21, Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan demanded that the administration win the war, telling Hegseth: “You don’t have a long-term plan to actually win this war. Win the war.”
The war is deeply unpopular: 64 percent of Americans told an AP-NORC poll published July 30 that it has not been worth fighting, and 60 percent told Quinnipiac July 29 they oppose US military action against Iran. But in Washington, the argument is over how the war should be fought, not how to end it.
(Photo credit: X) Large fires continued to burn and spread in south Lebanon on 13 August due to continuous strikes, artillery shelling, and deliberate arson operations carried out by Israeli occupation forces illegally positioned inside the country. ![Palestinians are seen as the Israeli forces placed new yellow concrete blocks at the Sanfura junction continuing to expand the area known as the "Yellow Line" despite the ceasefire in western Gaza City, Gaza, Palestine, on July 27, 2026. [Ali Jadallah - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/AA-20260727-42078631-42078619-ISRAEL_CONTINUES_ALTERING_YELLOW_LINE_BOUNDARIES_IN_GAZA-1-1.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
![Israeli settlers, joined by far-right ministers and lawmakers, march from the Yad Mordehay area in southern Israel toward the Gaza border, calling for the establishment of new Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks in Yad Mordechai, located 10 km south of Ashkelon, Israel, on July 19, 2026. [Mostafa Alkharouf - Anadolu Agency]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/AA-20260720-42018276-42018262-ISRAELI_SETTLERS_MARCH_TOWARD_GAZA_BORDER_DEMANDING_ESTABLISHMENT_OF_NEW_SETTLEMENTS-1.jpg?fit=920%2C613&ssl=1)
(Photo credit: AP)
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