#israeli-occupied-territories

Similar to IDF's current Gaza model, the defense establishment intends to destroy villages near the Israel-Lebanon border, and establish permanent military outposts in the area between the border and the Litani River

The defense establishment's perception is that all of these villages are used by Hezbollah for activities against Israel, and therefore they must be completely destroyed to prevent Hezbollah operatives from returning to the area.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday that all houses in Lebanese villages near the Israeli border will be demolished "like in Rafah and Beit Hanoun," referring to areas in the Gaza Strip where the IDF carried out widespread demolitions of homes during the war.

more than 600,000 Lebanese residents who have been evacuated will not be allowed to return to south Lebanon "until the security and safety of northern residents are guaranteed." The defense minister said that following the IDF's operation in Lebanon, Israeli troops will continue to be stationed in a "security zone" inside Lebanese territory to defend against anti-tank missiles and to maintain security control of the area south of the Litani River.

The Palestinian village of Nu'man is unique within East Jerusalem. While it lies within the city's municipal borders on the map, the vast majority of its residents haven't been granted permanent Israeli residency the way other Palestinians in East Jerusalem have. Instead, Israel considers them West Bank residents. Consequently, in Israel's view, they are illegally present in Israel when they are in their own homes.

The residents' situation has gotten even worse since the separation fence was built and a new road was paved that links the settlements east of Jerusalem to the capital. The road and the fence hemmed the village in, forcing its schoolchildren to leave the Israeli schools they attended in East Jerusalem for schools in the West Bank town of Beit Sahur.

Two weeks ago, a group of Jewish teens showed up. Some of them said they were from Har Homa, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem near the hill that separates Nu'man from the neighborhood of Umm Tuba. Others apparently came from West Bank settlement outposts.

The teens set up a large tent a few dozen meters from Nu'man's houses and cleared new paths. On the tent, they spray-painted the word "revenge" and the name of their outpost – Homat Yehuda.

On Sunday, the Palestinians said, the teens attacked a group of village residents who approached the outpost. Using clubs, stones and tear gas, they wounded four of the Palestinians, who needed medical treatment. The Palestinians responded by throwing stones as well.

Israeli activists who were present in Nu'man called the police repeatedly, but officers finally showed up only after the violence had died down. When they did, the officers arrested three Nu'man residents. Then they came back again that evening and arrested a fourth. They also went up to the outpost, and an Israeli activist who was present said they promised to see to its evacuation.

The police said one of the offenses they suspected the three of committing was being present in Israel illegally – though officially, as noted, Israel made their presence in their own homes illegal when it included them within East Jerusalem without granting them residency rights.

Umm Tuba residents, all of whom have permanent residency in Israel, have been pasturing their sheep for years in the wadi below the hill. But since the outpost was established, they said, the shepherds have suffered threats and violence from the Jewish residents.

On Monday, when the shepherds arrived at the wadi with their sheep, a large number of police officers showed up and told them to leave. One even threatened Umm Tuba's mukhtar, Aziz Abu Tir, and cursed him with expletives, residents said. "We've been neighbors of Har Homa for 30 years now, and there were never any problems," said Sameh Abu Tir, an Umm Tuba resident. "On the contrary, our children would go down and tend the sheep. But now, every time we get near, they threaten us." The mukhtar, Aziz Abu Tir, added: "It's the government's policy to pressure us. It's pure racism."

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said after Wishah’s death that the IDF has killed 260 Palestinian journalists and wounded 550 since October 7, 2023. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 129 members of the press were killed around the world in 2025, and the state of Israel was responsible for two-thirds of the deaths. The IDF has a unit that is dedicated to justifying the killing of journalists by attempting to link them to Hamas, and the IDF has previously accused Wishah of being a Hamas fighter, an allegation denied by Al Jazeera.

Israel has been constantly violating the so-called ceasefire deal it signed back in October, killing at least 736 Palestinians and wounding 2,035, according to the latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry.

An international media association has condemned what it described as a “violent assault” by Israeli soldiers who detained a CNN crew in the occupied West Bank this week.

A CNN team was reporting on the aftermath of an assault by Israeli settlers and the establishment of an illegal outpost near the Palestinian village of Tayasir on Thursday when it was detained by Israeli soldiers, the Foreign Press Association said on Saturday.

The incident is the second such event involving CNN this month.

Days ago, during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, a CNN producer was left with a fractured wrist after an “unprovoked assault” by Israeli police officers.

Violence in the West Bank has continued unabated even after the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza, and since the outbreak of the current war in the Middle East, there has been a new spate of deadly attacks by Israeli settlers.

“We have ordered an acceleration in the destruction of Lebanese homes in contact-line villages to neutralize threats to Israeli communities, in accordance with the model of Beit Hanoun and Rafah in Gaza,” Katz said, referring to border towns that were largely obliterated.

Lebanese returned to find homes, infrastructure and some entire villages destroyed. Israel said it had dismantled Hezbollah infrastructure that could have been used to launch an Oct. 7-style attack, and it continued to strike what it said were militant targets on a near-daily basis after the truce.

In the latest fighting, Israel has launched blistering air raids across Lebanon, killing more than 1,000 people — mostly outside of the border area — and displacing over a million.

1 JANUARY 2025 - 31 JANUARY 2026 246 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank incl. 57 children 231 by Israeli forces

1,981 Attacks by Israeli settlers resulting in casualties and/or property damage

38,008 Displaced Palestinians

PALESTINIAN CASUALTIES BY WEAPON JANUARY 2025 - JANUARY 2026 187 Live ammunition 41 Airstrikes (including drones) 18 Other

Settlers who raided Khirbet Humsa, a Palestinian community in the northern Jordan Valley, over the weekend, severely sexually assaulted a man in front of his family, according to witnesses. Testimonies say the settlers also beat girls and teenage girls in the community, and one of them threatened to kill the children and rape the women. Four men from the community and two female human rights activists were evacuated for medical treatment. Haaretz has learned that the Shin Bet is involved in investigating the incident.

Overnight, one Israeli operation in a town in the eastern Bekaa Valley - a focal point of the rising hostilities - saw at least 41 people killed and 40 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Three Lebanese soldiers were among the dead, and locals listed the names of civilians, including children, they said had been killed. The focus of the operation in Nabi Chit was recovering the remains of an Israeli military airman who went missing in Lebanon 40 years ago.

Witnesses told the BBC that the Israeli soldiers had arrived disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hezbollah's Islamic Health Organization. The Lebanese army chief later confirmed this to local media, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not respond to BBC requests for comment about this allegation.

Israel has cut off the entry of all food and other goods into Gaza in an echo of the siege it imposed in the earliest days of its war with Hamas. The United Nations and other humanitarian aid providers are sharply criticizing the decision and calling it a violation of international law.

“A tool of extortion,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said. “A reckless act of collective punishment,” Oxfam said. Key mediator Egypt accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon.”

Hunger has been an issue throughout the war for Gaza’s over 2 million people, and some aid experts had warned of possible famine. Now there is concern about losing the progress that experts reported under the past six weeks of a ceasefire.

Israel is trying to pressure the Hamas militant group to agree to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government describes as a U.S. proposal to extend the ceasefire’s first phase instead of beginning negotiations on the far more difficult second phase. In phase two, Hamas would release the remaining living hostages in return for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and a lasting ceasefire.

Last year, the International Criminal Court said there was reason to believe Israel had used “starvation as a method of warfare” when it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. The allegation is also central to South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide.

On Sunday, Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions, and called Israel’s decision “a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the ICC warrant.

Under the October ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, Israel agreed to allow 600 trucks of aid into Gaza a day.

However, Israel’s own figures suggest that an average of only 459 trucks a day have entered the Gaza Strip between Oct. 12, when the flow of the aid restarted, and Sunday, according to an AP analysis. COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of coordinating aid entry, provided the figures.

The family of independent UN investigator Francesca Albanese has sued the Trump administration over US sanctions imposed on her last year for her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza, saying the penalties violate the first amendment.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US district court in Washington, Albanese’s husband and minor child outlined the serious impact those sanctions have had on the family’s life and work, including the ability to access their home in the nation’s capital.

Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, is a member of a group of experts chosen by the 47-member UN human rights council in Geneva. She has been tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and has been vocal about what she has described as the “genocide” by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States, which provides military support to its close ally, have strongly denied the genocide accusation. Washington had decried what it has called Albanese’s “campaign of political and economic warfare” against the US and Israel before imposing sanctions on her in July after an unsuccessful US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post.

UG Solutions told the FT it had made a “very broad” bid to provide anything from security for trucks to work sites and storage facilities for Trump’s contentious new Board of Peace, which is tasked with overseeing a new governance framework for Gaza.

The company deployed contractors to guard militarised aid sites run by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was shut down last year after five months of operations during the devastating war between Israel and Hamas. Hundreds of starving Palestinian aid seekers were killed by Israeli troops as they travelled through military zones to GHF sites, provoking fierce international condemnation at a time when severe Israeli restrictions on aid triggered a famine in Gaza.

Work on the idea is being led by Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former reservist who is now working as an unpaid adviser to Trump’s “Board of Peace”, the US-led body tasked with rebuilding Gaza, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Another person familiar with the talks over introducing a stablecoin — in which transactions are anonymous but traceable — said the idea behind the initiative was to “dry Gaza from cash so Hamas can’t generate any”.

However, other people familiar with the discussions expressed concerns that a stablecoin could potentially also be used to further detach the economies of Gaza and the West Bank, both of which Palestinians seek as part of a future state, particularly if a Gaza-only stablecoin were not under the control of the PMA. “It will be much more difficult [to maintain economic links between Gaza and the West Bank] if they have no means of easy payment between the two, so that Gaza would be almost like a self-contained economy,” said one. “That would be a concern.”

Another potential complication of relying on a stablecoin would be the fact that Gaza suffers from frequent power cuts and Israel has long limited Gazans to using slow 2G network technology. In his comments at the “Board of Peace” last week, Tancman said that Gaza’s 2G network “will be upgraded with free high-speed access to essential services” by July.

Carlson said that according to the Bible, the descendants of Abraham would receive land that today would include essentially the entire Middle East, and asked Huckabee if Israel had a right to that land.

Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.” Huckabee added, however, that Israel was not looking to expand its territory and has a right to security in the land it legitimately holds.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has not had fully recognized borders. Its frontiers with Arab neighbors have shifted as a result of wars, annexations, ceasefires and peace agreements.

During the six-day 1967 Mideast war, Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula as part of a peace deal with Egypt following the 1973 Mideast war. It also unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Israel has attempted to deepen control of the occupied West Bank in recent months. It has greatly expanded construction in Jewish settlements, legalized outposts and made significant bureaucratic changes to its policies in the territory. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank and has offered strong assurances that he’d block any move to do so.

Palestinians have for decades called for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza with east Jerusalem its capital, a claim backed by much of the international community.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian and strong supporter of Israel and the West Bank settlement movement, has long opposed the idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian people. In an interview last year, he said he does not believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who had lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.”

Israel has encroached on more land since the start of its war with Hamas in Gaza, which was sparked by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Under the current ceasefire, Israel withdrew its troops to a buffer zone but still controls more than half the territory. Israeli forces are supposed to withdraw further, though the ceasefire deal doesn’t give a timeline.

After Syrian President Bashar Assad was ousted at the end of 2024, Israel’s military seized control of a demilitarized buffer zone in Syria created as part of a 1974 ceasefire between the countries. Israel said the move was temporary and meant to secure its border.

And Israel still occupies five hilltop posts on Lebanese territory following its brief war with Hezbollah in 2024.

“To me this isn’t just about a presidential election,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, “personally, I think that the United States has an obligation to uphold its own laws, particularly the Leahy laws.

“I think that, personally, the idea of completely unconditional aid, no matter what one does, does not make sense,” she added. “I think it enabled a genocide in Gaza, and I think that we have thousands of women and children dead … that was completely avoidable.

“So I believe that enforcement of our own laws, through the Leahy laws, which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations is appropriate,” Ocasio-Cortez concluded.

The Leahy laws are two statutory provisions, named for the former senator Patrick Leahy who introduced them in the 1990s, which prohibit the US defense department and state department from providing funds to “units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”.

But, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the state department office that leads Leahy vetting of foreign security units, while state “department officials insist that Israeli units are subject to the same vetting standards as units from any other country. Maybe in theory. But in practice, that’s simply not true.”

Matt Whitaker, the US ambassador to Nato, declined to directly answer the question, saying Israel is “one of our closest allies”.

The Gaza Health Ministry has been documenting the deaths of Palestinians from the Israeli onslaught and reporting the number of people killed. The current toll stands at 71,667 Palestinians, with hundreds of thousands injured.

The health ministry’s numbers have long been dismissed by pro-Israeli voices as “Hamas propaganda.” However, the IDF is now supporting the ministry’s figures.

The IDF says it is now reviewing the Gaza Health Ministry’s data to determine how many militants were killed. Last year, +972 Magazine obtained IDF data that showed at least 83% of the Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza were civilians.

In May 2024, at the height of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet had voted to shut Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, weeks after the Israeli parliament passed a law allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters considered to be a “threat to national security”.

In September that year, Israeli forces also stormed Al Jazeera’s offices in the occupied West Bank’s Ramallah city, confiscating equipment and documents and closing the network’s office.

In December last year, the Israeli parliament approved an extension of the 2024 law, also called the “Al Jazeera law”, for two more years.

Despite the ceasefire, there are still recurring deadly strikes. Israeli tank shelling on Thursday killed four Palestinians east of Gaza City, according to Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of the Shifa Hospital, where the bodies were taken. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.

residents say fuel and firewood are in short supply. Prices are exorbitant and searching for firewood is dangerous. Two 13-year-old boys were shot and killed by Israeli forces on Wednesday as they tried to collect firewood, hospital officials said.

News organizations rely largely on Palestinian journalists and residents in Gaza to show what is happening on the ground because Israel has barred international journalists from entering to cover the war, aside from rare guided tours.

More than 470 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the ceasefire began in October, according to Gaza’s health ministry. At least 77 have been killed by Israeli gunfire near a ceasefire line that splits the territory between Israeli-held areas and most of Gaza’s Palestinian population, the ministry says.

While Washington frames this as a roadmap for “reconstruction and prosperity”, the exclusion of Palestinians from the top decision-making body suggests they will have little say in deciding the future governance structure.

According to the White House statement, the “Founding Executive Council” sits at the apex of the pyramid. This body holds the purse strings and sets the strategic vision. It is chaired by President Trump, who retains veto power.

Advertisement The lineup of Executive Board members is:

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: Rubio is one of the most pro-Israel officials in the Trump administration. He has said that those who criticise Israel will not be granted US visas. He has also criticised the move by several Western countries to recognise Palestinian statehood as a “reckless decision” that “only serves Hamas propaganda”. US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff: Witkoff is a New York-based real estate developer and investor close to Trump. He was tasked with ceasefire talks in Gaza. Witkoff was accused of reneging on Gaza talks after he accused Hamas of blocking a deal last July. Hamas political bureau member Basem Naim accused him of “serving the Israeli position”. Jared Kushner: Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. is also a staunch supporter of Israel who previously suggested that Palestinians are incapable of self-governance. He has described Gaza as having “very valuable waterfront property”. Kushner was also the driving force of the so-called Abraham Accords, a series of deals that formalised ties between several Arab countries and Israel. Billionaire businessman Marc Rowan: Rowan is a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, which is one of the world’s largest investment firms. He has run philanthropic activities in Israel and has funded pro-Israel advocacy groups in the United States, according to media reports. He has also supported the Israeli-American Council, which works to strengthen Israeli and American Jewish communities.

Aryeh Lightstone: A key figure in the Abraham Accords and the controversial aid organisation the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), which faced severe accusations regarding aid mismanagement and coordination failures that led to the killing of hundreds of Palestinians seeking food.