Peace and Justice Post

Israel’s genocidal finance minister holds significant authority over the West Bank Civil Administration, allowing him to expand illegal settlements freely

News Desk, The Cradle,

JUN 3, 2026

(Photo credit: Reuters)

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced a new and major illegal settlement project in the occupied West Bank on 3 June, which aims to see the construction of around 2,000 houses on Palestinian land. 

According to the minister, 1,006 housing units will be in a new settlement near the occupied holy city of Jerusalem.

Over 920 are planned near occupied Nablus and another 234 near the city of Hebron. “We are continuing to build the Land of Israel in practice,” Smotrich said. 

The settlements will “strengthen our hold on the land, reinforce Israel’s security, and establish clear facts on the ground that prevent the creation of an Arab terror state in the heart of the country.”

Smotrich holds significant authority over Israel’s Civil Administration in the occupied territory. 

In the summer of 2023, around six months after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government came to power, significant portions of the Civil ​Administration in the West Bank – an Israeli military body – were placed under Smotrich’s authority. 

This gave the minister free rein to swiftly expand illegal settlements. 

Smotrich’s announcement on Wednesday comes as Tel Aviv is also moving to seize private Palestinian land around an archeological site in the occupied West Bank.

The Civil Administration announced on 2 June that it has started to expropriate 320 dunams (about 80 acres) of land for the “preservation and development” of the Herodium – a massive fortress complex built between 23 and 15 BC. 

“[The expropriation] is being advanced in accordance with the law, following comprehensive professional assessments conducted by the Civil Administration’s Staff Officer for Archaeology and Staff Officer for Nature Reserves,” the administration said in a statement. 

“Their findings pointed to an urgent need to regulate the area and promote preservation efforts at the site in order to prevent damage to archaeological remains of unique historical and cultural significance,” it added. 

Since Netanyahu’s government took office in late 2022, Israeli authorities have accelerated plans for the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. 

In February, the Israeli government approved a land registration process allowing Israel to claim territory in the occupied West Bank as “state property” if Palestinians cannot prove ownership.

A few weeks later, dozens of new illegal settlements were approved.

Middle East Eye (MEE) released an investigation in May detailing the “New Nakba” that has escalated against the Palestinian communities of occupied East Jerusalem since 7 October 2023.

According to the investigation, 20,000 Palestinian-owned homes are currently under Israeli demolition orders across occupied East Jerusalem.

Israel is also moving forward with plans to steal large amounts of Palestinian-owned property near Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Tel Aviv is openly working to establish continuity between illegal settlements in order to solidify its control over the West Bank and the city of Jerusalem, and block any prospect of Palestinian statehood.

European governments are finally being forced to condemn Israel as its crimes have become impossible to ignore. But they are scapegoating National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir rather than confronting the system he represents.

By Qassam Muaddi, mondoweiss, May 30, 2026

Gathering in support of Israel in front of theAC European Parliament in Brussels in the wake of the October 7 attacks, October 11, 2023. (Photo: European Parliament Flickr Account. Creative Commons License CC-BY-4.0: © European Union 2023 – Source: EP)

The brutal treatment of activists aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla for Gaza by Israeli forces during their detention in international waters last week triggered a wave of international condemnation, including from many European and other Western countries.

Italy, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Poland, and Greece summoned Israeli ambassadors or envoys to condemn the treatment of activists detained during the interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla. The UK said it was “appalled” by the images of the activists’ detentions. These reactions, however, centered around one figure: Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who had posted a video of himself overseeing and encouraging the mistreatment of the activists.

The focus on Ben-Gvir was so singular that France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, included in his condemnation post on X a claim that other Israeli officials had rejected Ben-Gvir’s actions.

That much is true: across the Israeli political spectrum, Ben-Gvir became the convenient scapegoat to draw attention away from the entirety of Israeli politics, which differs very little from Ben-Gvir when it comes to the treatment of Palestinians. But the outrage in Israel wasn’t at the treatment itself, but rather the fact that Ben-Gvir revealed it to the world, causing an international embarrassment. The difference is that Ben-Gvir doesn’t care about the PR problem he’s created, while other Israeli officials do.

So do European politicians. That is why EU governments, in being forced to condemn Israeli conduct, have taken great pains to direct their opprobrium at a specific part of the Israeli system, rather than the system itself. They have repeatedly deployed this tactic in recent weeks, which appears to have become a common doctrine for responding to Israeli violations when they become impossible to ignore.

Two weeks ago, the European Union greenlit the sanctioning of Israeli groups and individuals implicated in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The decision, which followed years of failed attempts, sanctioned only five groups and four individuals, despite the fact that the settler movement in the West Bank, including its most violent factions, is part of official state policy, openly sponsored by ministers with public budgets.

Another example is when several European countries issued a joint statement last week condemning the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The statement, signed by France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and the Netherlands, characterized settlement expansion as “illegal” and called on Israel to halt it. It then added that the signatories “opposed” those who call for the annexation of the West Bank, including members of the Israeli government. The statement stressed the signatories’ commitment to the two-state solution.

The statement made no mention of the fact that in the past two years, the Israeli Knesset passed two bills with an overwhelming majority, one in 2024 rejecting a Palestinian state, and one in 2025 allowing the government to annex the West Bank.

A new-old pattern

This increasingly repeated pattern of individualizing Israeli policies when condemning them contrasts with the older pattern of either ignoring Israeli practices or outright justifying them as “self-defense.” But is this a new paradigm in Western politics, and will it lead to a larger change of policy toward Israel?

According to Roula Shadid, co-director of the Palestinian Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), “part of the change in Western discourse towards Israel is the global mobilization in solidarity with Palestinians since October 2023.” Shadid points to a gap between the official discourse of Western governments and the awareness expressed by solidarity movements, noting that “when we talk with diplomats and political actors, they admit that Israeli policies are more structural than they admit publicly, but they have political reasons to maintain their criticism of Israel under a certain ceiling.”

For Shadid, the fragmenting of Israeli policies, pinning them on individual ministers or settler actors, is a reflection of how Israel has fragmented Palestinian reality on the ground. “Israel has imposed a different set of conditions for Palestinians in Gaza from those in Jerusalem or in the West Bank, and Palestinian leadership is also fragmented, which makes room for Western actors to treat different issues separately,” Shadid told Mondoweiss, adding that this forecloses any treatment of Israeli policies as one coherent whole.

In Europe, particularly, governments have for many years invested in the political paradigm created by the Middle East peace process, according to Shadid. “Countries invested politically and financially in the two-state solution project, which in essence is the administration of occupation, and this makes them insist on clinging to the narrative that there is a peace process underway that needs to be saved from a few extremists,” she explained.

Shadid considers that limited condemnations of parts of the Israeli system give Western countries “the ability to continue business as usual with Israel, while containing the increasing demands and legal obligations to dissociate from violations of Palestinian rights.” She also thinks this policy is short-lived.

“Western governments might hope this moment passes, and then recycle their image and go back to business as usual,” she said. “There will be obstacles, because Israel will increase its aggression, its regional wars will continue to expose its colonial project further, and awareness will continue to rise globally about this reality, and so will pressure coming from citizens.”

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 11 May 2026

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UoyDOx5KOWM?feature=oembed& When representatives of Palestinian resistance factions arrived in Cairo in mid-March for talks with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, they were not told in advance that Nickolay Mladenov would be waiting for them.

Mladenov is no neutral broker. The former UN official now serves as director-general of US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace and its “High Representative for Gaza.”

According to Muhammad Shehada, Mladenov did not come to mediate. He came to deliver an ultimatum on behalf of Israel and the United States: Accept full unconditional disarmament or face a renewed Israeli onslaught.

On The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 7 May, Shehada said Palestinian factions saw Mladenov as “an emissary or an envoy of Benjamin Netanyahu,” the Israeli prime minister.

Citing accounts from participants, Shehada said Mladenov was “extremely condescending,” issuing a threat “that if you don’t accept my proposal, immediately, unconditionally, Israel would get a free hand in Gaza and would resume its military operations.”

A Palestinian writer and researcher from Gaza, Shehada is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

You can watch his full conversation with co-hosts Ali Abunimah and Nora Barrows-Friedman in the video above.

From the UN to the Israel lobby

Mladenov’s bias is hardly hidden. After leaving his post as UN special coordinator for the “peace process” in 2021, he immediately joined the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an offshoot of the Israel lobby group AIPAC.

His conduct in Cairo exposed what this whole process has really been about: forcing and formalizing Palestinian surrender.

In October, Israel agreed on paper to a ceasefire framework. The Palestinian resistance would ensure the return from Gaza of all living and dead Israeli prisoners of war and captives.

Israel, in turn, was supposed to stop its genocidal attack on Gaza, halt “all military operations,” pull back its forces, allow at least 600 aid trucks a day into the territory, permit 200,000 tents and 60,000 temporary homes, open the Rafah crossing and allow both an International Stabilization Force and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza – a Palestinian-run body meant to begin civilian governance – to enter the territory.

From there, negotiations on a second phase were supposed to begin.

All this was set out in Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, endorsed by the UN Security Council in November – in the face of united opposition from Palestinians who viewed the resolution as capitulating to Tel Aviv and Washington and violating fundamental principles of international law.

The Palestinian resistance nevertheless kept its side of the deal. Israel, to no one’s surprise, violated virtually all of its commitments, while the supposed mediators, especially the United States, did nothing.

As Shehada explained on the Livestream, the only item ever fulfilled was the release of Israeli captives.

Since then, Israel has continued killing Palestinians, choking off aid, blocking temporary shelters and preventing the Palestinian-run administrative committee from even entering the territory.

Yet Washington, the other so-called mediators and much of the media shifted the focus away from Israel’s violations and ongoing crimes and back onto the old colonial demand that Palestinians surrender all means to resist and defend themselves.

Palestinian factions rejected the ultimatum, infuriating Mladenov.

“Israel never fulfilled phase one of the Trump deal. How are you asking us to move to phase two when the first phase was never fulfilled?” Shehada said, summarizing the position Palestinian resistance representatives put to Mladenov.

Terms of surrender

In a recent +972 Magazine article, Shehada reports on two Arabic-language documents laying out Mladenov’s demands.

Mladenov set out a 250-day timeline ending with Palestinians handing over even personal weapons and, “only once an investigative committee verifies that Gaza is completely free of any weapons whatsoever – a very elusive process – would Israel make a limited and ‘gradual’ withdrawal over an undefined period of time to the ‘Red Line’ that would still leave it in control of about 38 percent of Gaza.”

“Rubble removal and reconstruction under Mladenov’s proposal would only begin on day 251,” Shehada adds.

The documents – reviewed by The Electronic Intifada – strip Hamas and the other factions of any governing role. They place Gaza under external control, similar to the colonial Mandate under which Britain ruled Palestine after World War I.

Israel would remain in control of Gaza deep into the process, with the final stage still preserving an indefinite Israeli “security perimeter” inside the territory.

The point is plain enough. Israel and the US want to keep using hunger, destruction, despair and blackmail to impose what Israel’s army – despite more than two years of genocide and devastation – could not impose by force.

Shehada summarized the logic clearly on Livestream. Mladenov, he said, demanded that Palestinians “become absolutely defenseless, weaponless,” and trust their lives to an occupier and its backers who have never stopped killing them.

What then is the endgame? According to Shehada, Mladenov’s proposals aim “to completely rewrite the Trump plan to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s satisfaction,” in order to render it unworkable and “give Israel an absolute free hand to do whatever it wants.”

While humanitarian relief and recovery were supposed to begin immediately in phase one, Mladenov is holding the civilian population’s most basic rights and their very survival hostage to total surrender by the resistance.

He is, according to Shehada, seeking the “destruction of everything that they [Palestinians] have that might be used as either defensive weaponry or as basic leverage in any future negotiations.”

Decommissioning vs. disarmament

Trump’s plan does not even mention disarmament. Instead it calls for “placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning.”

That language comes directly from the Northern Ireland peace process. In practice, decommissioning meant armed groups did not immediately give up their weapons, but placed them out of sight and out of use so long as the political process advanced and Britain took reciprocal steps to withdraw its forces and dismantle its repressive apparatus in the north of Ireland.

The weapons remained an insurance card if commitments were violated. Indeed, the Irish Republican Army slowed, and at crisis points suspended, its participation in decommissioning to pressure the British government to fulfill its promises.

“Hamas was saying that we can do this,” according to Shehada. “Lock all the weapons up in depots for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and then you need an agreement to end the Palestinian question, to end Israel’s apartheid.”

Actual disarmament – the final destruction of resistance weapons – would therefore be the result of a political settlement and a reciprocal process, not a precondition imposed only on one side.

As flawed and Israel-biased as it was, Shehada acknowledged that by adopting the concept of decommissioning, the Trump framework “was premised on the idea that you don’t have to surrender, you don’t have to capitulate.”

According to Shehada, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ireland and the United Kingdom support decommissioning as a mechanism for Gaza.

Netanyahu and Mladenov replaced that with demands for outright disarmament – meaning, as Shehada put it, “surrender everything you have. You have absolutely no leverage whatsoever.”

But the comparison has limits.

Northern Ireland involved a political process that at least formally recognized the rights and aspirations of all participants and established a path towards a united Ireland, the core objective of the Irish anti-colonial struggle.

With Palestine, even states backing decommissioning still start from the colonial premise that Palestinian resistance is the problem, not Zionist colonization, apartheid, siege and genocide.

Iran changes the power balance

This is why the regional dimension matters. The demand that the Palestinian – and for that matter Lebanese – resistance surrender rests on the assumption that the US and Israel still dominate the region so completely that they can dictate terms and everybody else must obey.

But the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran, and Hizballah’s formidable resistance in Lebanon, have exposed real limits to that power.

Iran has not only withstood a full-scale joint assault by the world’s and the region’s strongest and most genocidal military forces, it has arguably emerged stronger.

Shehada said Trump’s Board of Peace “began to unravel” once the US and Israel attacked Iran.

He noted that Indonesia suspended its participation and said Gaza’s factions drew a blunt lesson from the regional confrontation: “If you stand your ground, if you hit back, you strike back, you maintain steadfastness, you will get your way.”

“That lesson was immediately caught by people in Gaza,” Shehada said. It made the resistance factions “even more uncompromising on accepting the Mladenov proposal.”

Despite the catastrophic humanitarian situation Israel deliberately maintains, Washington and Tel Aviv have not secured the regional omnipotence they claim.

The existence of Palestinian weapons is not the root problem, but the consequence of the root problem: Zionist occupation, land theft, apartheid and genocide, sustained by US imperial power.

This basic truth cannot be wished away.

Any plan that begins by demanding Palestinian submission while leaving Israeli colonial power intact is a fraud.

Palestine, especially Gaza, does not need more such scams dressed up as “peace.” Its people need liberation and the restoration of all their rights.

The durable Western support for Israel even as it has perpetrated genocide since 7 October 2023 underscores that liberation will not be a gift from the likes of Mladenov, nor a reward for what Israel’s arms suppliers and financiers consider Palestinian good behavior.

As in every anti-colonial struggle, liberation will be won by Palestinians through their own efforts and sacrifices – and through the broader regional struggle to end the US imperial domination without which the Zionist colony in Palestine would disintegrate.

Israelis organize the Jewish supremacist march each year to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem in 1967

News Desk, The Cradle, MAY 14, 2026

(Photo credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers descended on occupied Jerusalem on 14 May to celebrate the so-called ‘Flag March,’ beating Palestinian residents in the Muslim Quarter of the city, damaging storefronts, and shouting anti-Arab slogans.

The event, also known as the Flag Dance, commemorates the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Even before the parade began, Zionist youths pushed and cursed Palestinian residents and activists from “Standing Together,” an Israeli-Palestinian group established to protect Palestinians during the parade.

“When we put our bodies on the line, it oftentimes reduces the violence because settlers are less willing to attack when there are Jews there or when we document what’s going on,” stated Ori Shaham, the group’s international spokesperson.

The parade has long been marked by violence, extreme racism, and hate songs directed against the Palestinian residents of the Old City.

On Wednesday, the Knesset’s Aliyah, Absorption, and Diaspora Committee held a discussion on the violence directed against Christians during the annual parade.

The committee’s chairman, MK Gilad Kariv, stated that “there is nothing more ugly and offensive to the status of Jerusalem than the ugly behavior on the sidelines of the Flag Parade.”

“Every year we know what will happen … Muslim and Christian residents will close their shops, close their homes and schools, and lock themselves in their homes so as not to be exposed to violence? Is this the way of Judaism and the Torah of Israel?”

Last month, Haaretz reported that the Authority for Jewish National Identity in the Prime Minister’s Office provided nearly $200,000 in funding to organize the parade.

The remainder of the $400,000 budget was provided by the Foundation for the Renewal of Communities in Israel, an umbrella organization for several Torah groups.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the Flag Day march to make a provocative raid on the Temple Mount, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Consortium News, Volume 31, Number 131 — Thursday, May 14, 2026

Not questioning Zionism has long been the entry ticket to the British political and media Establishment, but although public belief in the Zionist narrative is fatally damaged, prosecutions of pro-Palestinian activists continue.

Demonstration protesting Gaza genocide in Edinburgh outside the Scottish first minister’s office, July 19, 2025. (Photo from author’s website)

By Craig Murray
CraigMurray.org.uk

Unquestioning Zionism has for decades been the entry ticket to the British political and media Establishment.

Anybody who was not a fully certified and compliant Zionist would find their career limited – as Jeremy Corbyn, Alan Duncan, Robin Cook and David Mellor all found. Most others, of course, were never allowed to progress that far.

In the media there are any number of examples — Antoinette Lattouf, Emily Wilder, Katie Halper, Gabriele Nunziante and Sangita Myska — just from the top of my head. Lack of enthusiasm for Israel is career-destroying.

One consequence is that now, as the U.K. political system retches to try and vomit up a new prime minister, every single one of the contenders — Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting — has a long history of nailed-on, certified Zionism and relationship with both Israel and Labour Friends of Israel, and is a long-term recipient of Zionist lobby cash.

The media have spent the last several days since the local elections studiously ignoring the fact that support for genocide is a key factor in alienating the Labour Party’s traditional voting base — or when they do mention it, relating it only to Muslim voters. One thing we know for certain is that any probable new prime minister is not going to change Britain’s support for the genocidal zionist entity.

Zionism has long poisoned the central nervous system of the U.K. body politic.

For many years, due to its media control, this system worked seamlessly.

The media portrayed a benign image of Israel as a bastion of liberal democratic values under siege from corrupt and barbaric Arab peoples.

The genocide of Palestinians, which has been in progress almost 80 years, proceeded at a pace and by methods which rigorous media control made it possible to convince Western audiences was not really happening at all.

When a kickback against genocide came on Oct. 7, 2023, media gatekeeping made the declaration of condemnation of Hamas a ritual which had to be observed to ensure purity before you were permitted to express anything else at all.

The media united around false atrocity stories of the events of Oct. 7. Then they united around false Israeli narratives in which every Gazan hospital, clinic, school, public utility and eventually home was a secret Hamas missile base.

Zionist Narrative Fatally Damaged

At this point, something broke. There was a spectacular burst in public opinion. From being a lulling, soothing narrative of European civilisational superiority, the Zionist propaganda was revealed as obvious lies in the service of the very worst atrocities man could do to man (and child).

The media covered up the horrors and the Israeli government raced to stem the flow of images out of Gaza by murdering every journalist there, but public belief in the zionist narrative was fatally damaged.

The result of that was Western Zionist governments became scared of their own populations. In virtually every Western state, extreme authoritarian measures were adopted to limit free speech and punish pro-Palestinian protest.

This was followed by attempts to reinforce the exclusion from public life of non-Zionists by a new wave of accusations of anti-Semitism, reinforced by waves of false flag or agent provocateur organised “anti-Semitic incidents.”

Incidentally the Hasbara invented “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya” so-called terrorist group – actually an Israeli-operated Telegram account – was first “revealed” to the Western public by Joe Truzman of Israeli Washington-front organisation the Foundation for Defending Democracy (F.D.D.).

Nick Stewart of the F.D.D. has subsequently been added to the Witkoff-Kushner negotiating team with Iran and flew to Islamabad with them.

The Iranians have entirely sensibly refused to engage with this group as simply representing Israel.

That is where we are now, with extraordinary developments like the effort to jail and debar Rajiv Menon KC for contempt of court for what I had called the greatest legal speech I ever read, and the charging of thousands of peaceful citizens under terrorism laws for supporting Palestine Action.

[On Tuesday, human rights barrister Menon won his appeal against contempt of court proceedings leveled at him for a closing speech in the trial of Palestine Action activists.

On the same day, however, news outlets reported that a “terrorism connection” was added to the case, which the jury did not know about and which means four of the anti-genocide defendants found guilty in a retrial can be sentenced as terrorists.]

Those are but horrible symptoms of a wider malaise — and the fundamental shift is that the majority of the population, and above all of younger people, now realise that they are governed by a political and media class which acts in service of a Zionist project which is truly evil.

The billionaire class was already allied with the far right. As the appalling fall in living standards of ordinary people since the 2008 banking crisis has been caused by the massive and artificially wrought concentration of wealth which followed, the efforts to divert attention from the hoarders of wealth instead to scapegoat immigrants have entailed massive financial and corporate media backing for racist politicians.

Racism & Zionism Ally

This now syncs neatly with their need for support for Zionism. Zionism has found support through an easy alliance with the rampant Islamophobia that underpins much of the anti-migrant sentiment in the U.K. and rest of the Western world.

Israel’s core support now does not feel the need to hide the fact that Israel was always a deeply racist project.

Israel’s core supporters now glory in racist genocide, as the Tommy Robinson march this weekend will demonstrate and as the Israeli flags at Reform rallies show. 

On last week’s election coverage on all U.K. television channels, every single time a Green representative came on they were immediately pushed to criticise Zack Polanski’s comments on the Golders Green incident — where a certified lunatic stabbed two Jewish men after stabbing a Muslim man.

I was sad — and somewhat shocked — to hear every single Green Party representative head immediately for the Jeremy Corbyn tactic of abject apology and condemnation of “anti-Semitism.”

Only Jenny Jones then pushed back against the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Jenny Jones, The Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, member of the House of Lords. (Official Portrait, Wikipedia)

The exclusion of non-Zionists is still in force within the political and media class. It will remain in force until we change the political and media class.

Personally, the disconnect between the revulsion of the large majority of people of the Western world at the genocide in Gaza, and the people’s complete lack of political power to stop their uni-party political leaderships from supporting genocide, has fundamentally changed my view of politics.

I now fully accept that the change the Western world needs is revolutionary, not incremental.

The problem is those of the exploited classes who have reached breaking point, have so far been easily diverted down the track of racism and away from their true enemies. I fear that is a tactic not likely to fail soon.

We continue to fight with what weapons we have to hand. On May 27 at the Court of Session in Edinburgh we will continue our legal battle against the proscription of Palestine Action.

The May 27 hearing will be on our motion to suspend the proscription in Scotland pending the Scottish judicial review. Decent, caring people are still being dragged through the Scottish courts on potentially life-changing terrorism charges merely for expressing their support for Palestine Action’s attempts to stop genocide.

Many have been dragged to court again and again as their cases are continually put off, while the legal establishment havers over the proscription.

The Crown Office refuses to drop prosecutions and Police Scotland refuses to say it will not arrest people. Nobody has any certainty as to whether the law is being enforced or not.

Arrests and prosecutions appear entirely at executive whim – the very definition of arbitrary government. We seek to end this uncertainty.

The U.K. government is bringing a counter motion to sist (suspend) the judicial review pending the conclusion of the English proceedings — a straight Unionist argument that these things should be decided in London for the whole of the U.K.

I do hope you will come to the court in Edinburgh on May 27, both to witness the proceedings and to demonstrate outside and show that public revulsion at genocide is not going away, and is only increased by Israel’s illegal attacks on Iran and Lebanon.

I am afraid these proceedings are horribly expensive to keep the legal battle going. Again, please contribute if you can, but do not contribute if it causes you difficulty. If you know people who are able to afford to help and likely to be sympathetic, please do contact them and ask their assistance. We are trying to keep a lot of very good people out of prison.

You can donate here via Crowd Justice, which goes straight to the lawyers, or through CraigMurray.org.uk.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. His coverage is entirely dependent on reader support. Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Subscriptions to keep Craig Murray’s blog going are gratefully received. Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, Murray has set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

This article is from CraigMurray.org.uk.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Tags: Anti-Semitism Craig Murray Gaza Genocide Green Party Iran Israel Jenny Jones Palestine Action’ Tommy Robinson Zionism

West Bank commander boasts about high death toll and defends looser rules of engagement, including firing at unarmed Palestinians

An Israeli soldier stands on guard during an army raid at a cafe in the Rafidia neighbourhood of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on 23 April 2026 (Nasser Ishtayeh / SOPA Images via Reuters)

By Nadav Rapaport in Tel Aviv, Israel

Published date: 4 May 2026 14:13 BST | Last update:2 days 20 hours ago

Israel’s top commander in the occupied West Bank has said the army is killing Palestinians at levels “not seen since 1967”, according to Haaretz.

Avi Bluth, head of the Israeli army’s Central Command, made the remarks in a closed forum, where he also defended looser rules of engagement allowing troops to fire at unarmed Palestinians.

He acknowledged a discriminatory approach whereby Jewish Israeli stone-throwers are not targeted while Palestinians carrying out similar acts are fired at. 

“In three years, we have killed 1,500 terrorists,” he said, referring to Palestinians. 

“So how is there no intifada? Why aren’t they taking to the streets? Why is the Palestinian public indifferent? Why are there no disturbances?” Bluth, a settler who has been the Israeli army commander in the West Bank since 2024, added. 

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“The Arabs understand that ‘if someone rises to kill you, kill him first’ is part of the rules of the Middle East, and therefore we are killing like we have not killed since 1967.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed 1,081 Palestinians in the West Bank and the occupied East Jerusalem, including at least 235 children.

Bluth attributed the high number of Palestinian deaths to orders he gave, which made it easier for Israeli soldiers to open fire at civilians.

He said troops are permitted to shoot, from the knee down, at Palestinians attempting to cross the West Bank separation barrier.

“Today, there are many ‘limping memorials’ in Palestinian villages of those who tried to infiltrate and got hit, so there is a price that is paid,” Bluth said, according to Haaretz.

Preferential treatment for settlers 

Bluth admitted that his subordinates do not shoot Israelis who throw stones at army forces because of “sociological implications,” while they kill Palestinians who do the same.

He added that in 2025, Israeli forces killed 42 Palestinians accused of stone-throwing, which he described as terrorism.

When shown footage of settlers throwing stones at troops, he cited an incident in which two masked Israelis were shot, noting it caused a public outcry.

Bluth’s remarks come amid growing discontent about his actions among hilltop youth, the settler militias who terrorise Palestinians communities in the West Bank, who view him as yielding to left-wing and international pressure. 

Ex-Mossad chief says Israeli settler violence reminds him of the Holocaust

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Last week, Haaretz reported that Bluth labelled the growing numbers of settler attacks as “terror,” and criticised hilltop youth who establish outposts without coordinating it first with the army’s command.

Bluth added that the army, with the coordination of the settlers, established some 150 outposts in Area C in the West Bank in recent years, which he alleged helped prevent Palestinian “terror” and building expansion.

Last week, Knesset Member Limor Son Har-Melech, a vocal supporter of the settler militias, called Israel Defence Minister Israel Katz to immediately fire Bluth from his post over his remarks.

Meanwhile, the Israeli NGO Peace Now reported on Sunday that the Israeli government assigned some 130 million shekels to those same settler groups under the guise of curbing settler violence.

The funds were allocated towards “reducing risk situations and expanding positive responses for youth in the Judea and Samaria area,” using the Israeli name for the West Bank. 

Peace Now said the funds will, in practice, be used to strengthen the settlements and “channel millions” to their regional councils. 

“The government uses every excuse to justify pouring more and more millions into settlements. This is a programme to expand settlements under the guise of combating violence,” Peace Now statement said.

“The government is directing a significant portion of the funds to the same actors and activities that currently serve as the main supporters of the outposts and farms from which the violence originates,” the NGO added, calling on the government to stop the funds and the army and police to stop the violent acts.