#israeli-occupied-territories + #israel

As diplomatic efforts to strengthen the deal have stalled, three soldiers described to AP a sense of confusion in the embattled territory, with a lack of clarity on rules of engagement around the yellow line. Some commanders paid lip service to the agreement, the soldiers said, while privately voicing desire for the war in Gaza to continue. Sometimes, troops were too far away or acted too quickly to recognize who they were shooting, one soldier said — a concern echoed in comments from a whistleblower group of veterans.

When the ceasefire went into effect, Israel withdrew troops to a buffer zone demarcated by a yellow line, giving it control of just over half the strip. Under the agreement, Israeli forces are meant to complete a fuller withdrawal, though there’s no timeline for that. The U.S.-backed diplomat overseeing the truce says progress is deadlocked over the central sticking point of disarming Hamas, upon which all other issues — including Israeli withdrawals and reconstruction — hinge.

Since the ceasefire went into effect, more than 900 people have been killed in Gaza — dozens of those close to or over the yellow line, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry doesn’t say how many are militants, but unarmed men and children have been among the dead.

soldiers who spoke to AP and Breaking the Silence — the whistleblower group that has collected troops’ testimonies throughout the war — say that at times soldiers were too far away, acting too quickly and under too much pressure to tell.

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel controls 60% of Gaza and the next step was to move to 70% control.

The soldiers told AP that on the ground, the ceasefire is elusive.

“We need to stop using this term,” one said of the word, ceasefire. “It’s not serving people that want to stop the war.”

The EU has agreed sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, ending a years-long deadlock over the issue but still taking only a “baby step” according to one MEP.

The full list of names has not been published following Monday’s agreement in principle but is understood not to include two extremist Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair were put under UK sanctions last June for their “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities”.

The deadlock was broken after Hungary’s new pro-EU government lifted its veto on the sanctions, which had been blocked by the previous prime minister, Viktor Orbán.

The measures against a small number of settlers fall short of what some member states wanted. France and Sweden have called for tariffs on imported products from illegal settlements. “We believe that the EU urgently needs to increase the pressure on Israel to halt its settlement policy and practices,” the two countries wrote in a joint paper.

Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said putting tariffs on products from illegal settlements was “the most realistic proposal”.

Banning products requires unanimity among the 27 member states, whereas tariffs can be imposed by a majority vote.

Under the EU-Israel association agreement, goods from the occupied territories miss out on preferential terms but trade is not prohibited.

Amid surging violence in the West Bank and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, the EU is under renewed pressure to use its leverage to push Israel’s government to change course.

The signatories say this illegal settlement of 3,400 illegal homes would cut the West Bank in two “and so wreck any prospects of a viable Palestinian state”. The declaration was signed by 452 former senior EU politicians, diplomats and officials, including two former prime ministers, Guy Verhofstadt of Belgium and Stefan Löfven of Sweden.

The soldiers who accidentally shot three Israeli hostages during the Israel-Hamas War had orders to shoot all men they saw on sight, and to "use their judgment" when it came to women and children, one of the soldiers told a hostage's mother in a new episode of Hamakor on Channel 13.

Yotam Haim, 28, Samer Talalka, 25, and Alon Shamriz, 26, were all taken captive during Hamas's attack on October 7, 2023. In December that same year, IDF soldiers accidentally shot and killed all three in Gaza, despite them waving a white flag and calling out "Help" in Hebrew.

Two of the hostages, Talalka and Shamriz, had been shot and killed immediately. The third, Yotam, had been wounded in the hand and fled. Soon afterward, he returned to the location where the other two hostages had been killed, raising his arms in surrender, and was killed.

Col. Israel Friedler, commander of the brigade, also admitted to Iris that it was standard procedure for Hamas terrorists to be killed by soldiers even if they had no weapons on them.

The letter – sent on Monday and made public on Thursday – largely focused on Israel’s conduct in Lebanon, where the Israeli military is systematically turning border towns that it has depopulated into rubble.

“The declaration of military evacuation zones has been used to permanently displace people and destroy homes and towns – acts that are in violation of international law,” the legislators wrote.

“Furthermore, no declaration of evacuation zones or ‘kill zones’ absolves Israeli and US forces from the absolute legal responsibility to determine that each individual person or civilian facility targeted by drones, jets, and gunfire is, in fact, a military target.”

Signatories to the letter include prominent progressives such as Peter Welch, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen.

Chris Coons, a centrist and staunch Israel supporter, also signed.

Throughout its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel used displacement orders to depopulate large areas of the territory, and then blew up nearly every structure in the evacuated area.

Israeli officials have publicly admitted that they aim to re-create the same model in South Lebanon, creating a desolate, uninhabitable no-man’s land that would serve as a buffer zone that would not require permanent military occupation.

Israel has granted a perpetrator of war crimes in Gaza the honor of lighting a ceremonial torch on Independence Day. By choosing Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv to represent “the spirit of the nation,” Israel is making genocide part of its official national ethos.

“There’s nothing for them to go back to in Rafah and Jabalya… Tens of thousands of families have no documents, childhood photos, ID cards, homes. Nothing.” This boast was made by Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, an Israeli Rabbi who perpetrated war crimes who has been chosen to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day ceremony, today, April 21. This is one of the highest accolades in the country, granted to “exemplary citizens” who represent “the spirit of the nation.”

Rabbi Zarbiv served about 500 days as a military reservist in Gaza over the last two and a half years. As a bulldozer operator during the genocide, he carried out war crimes of which he has openly boasted in videos he filmed, media interviews and public talks.

Bestowing one of the highest civilian honors in Israel on a citizen who committed war crimes illustrates how deeply the dehumanization of Palestinians has taken root in the Israeli mainstream. It is yet another terrifying signal that genocide has officially become part of the national ethos. Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a regional rabbinical court judge for the settlement of Ariel, and head the pre-military academy in the settlement of Beit El that educates hundreds of Israeli youth. Choosing him as an “exemplary citizen” represents a state-level endorsement of the complete de-humanization of Palestinians, systematic destruction of Palestinian life and the governing logic of annihilation and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Zarbiv is not ashamed of his actions, neither, clearly is the State of Israel. We’vecompiled some documentation here to mark the occasion.

An extremist rabbi known for razing civilian homes in Gaza will light a torch at Israel’s independence day celebration on Tuesday, a role human rights campaigners said marked the embrace of genocide as the official “spirit of the nation”.

The footage spread so widely on social media that his name entered the lexicon of Hebrew slang. “To Zarbiv” now means to destroy, a neologism that the 54-year-old has embraced, making it the title of a lecture earlier this year.

Zarbiv’s selection for the ceremony marks an official endorsement of the dehumanisation of Palestinians and systematic destruction of Palestinian life, according to the rights group B’tselem. It said: “This selection sends a clear message to the citizens of Israel and the entire world – in Israel, genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes are the ‘spirit of the nation’.”

Israel's levelling of these structures comes after Defence Minister Israel Katz's order on 22 March to "accelerate the destruction of Lebanese homes" near the Israeli border based on the "model in Gaza" as part of its campaign against Hezbollah.

The systematic demolition of these towns and villages may amount to a war crime, international law experts told BBC Verify.

Katz's plan for an Israeli-controlled "security zone" extending from the border to the Litani river would take up about 10% of Lebanon's territory.

Using verified footage and analysis of available satellite imagery, BBC Verify found evidence of controlled Israeli demolitions in at least seven border towns and villages.

We found more than 460 buildings had been demolished in Aita al-Shaab alone. Excavators and armoured vehicles can also be seen in satellite imagery of the village, according to Tony Reeves, founder of intelligence analysis firm MAIAR.

The deliberate demolition of structures is not a new Israeli military tactic. It has been deployed across swathes of Gaza during the war that was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Multiple legal experts told BBC Verify the destruction of property is strictly prohibited by international humanitarian law, unless it is demanded by military necessity. The bar for necessity is higher than military convenience or advantage, according to Prof Janina Dill, a global security and international law expert at Oxford University: "It certainly does not cover levelling entire villages as a predicate to long-term national security." It also requires case-by-case analysis when determining which buildings have military significance, said Yuval Shany, a legal expert from the Israel Democracy Institute think tank. The capacity of some civilian buildings to be used for military activity "does not justify a sweeping policy of creating buffer zones next to the border inside which all buildings are to be destroyed", he added.

Dr Lawrence Hill-Cawthorne, co-director of the Centre for International Law at the University of Bristol, reiterated that the "fundamental rule of law" is that civilian objects must not be targeted. "It is not a permissible defence to claim that the total destruction of towns and villages in southern Lebanon is necessary for creating a buffer zone to hold back Hezbollah," he said. "Even if Israel's war in Lebanon can be considered self-defence against attacks from Hezbollah, its conduct seems to go far beyond a limited war of self-defence against specific attacks."

Israel is not a normal democracy that abides by the rule of law or legal restraint. It is very much an expansionist state with bold ambitions and a demonstrated willingness to break international law. The events of the past two years have made this reality impossible to ignore.

The “Greater Israel” project, a term that has carried two primary meanings over the decades, has moved from the ideological fringe into the governing coalition of Israeli politics. In its narrower, post-1967 usage, “Greater Israel” referred to Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. In its maximalist, biblicist form, drawn from Genesis 15:18, it invokes the territory stretching “from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates,” a vast area encompassing parts of modern Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and potentially reaching into Iraq.

Once confined to religious nationalists and settler ideologues, this expansionist vision now sits at the cabinet table. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for Israel to “expand to Damascus,” displayed a map showing Jordan as part of Israel at a 2023 speech in Paris

Netanyahu’s coalition agreement explicitly declares that “Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and that “the government will promote and develop settlements in all parts of the Land of Israel.”

Perhaps most striking is that this rhetoric is no longer confined to the religious right. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, an ostensibly secular figure, stated in February 2026 that he supports “anything that will allow the Jews a large, broad, strong land,” adding that “the borders are the borders of the Bible.” When even centrist politicians invoke biblical mandates to justify territorial expansion, the ideological transformation becomes undeniable.

Smotrich has repeatedly asserted that the military campaign in Lebanon must result in a “change of Israel’s borders.” On March 23, 2026, he told an Israeli radio program that the campaign “needs to end with a different reality entirely, both with the Hezbollah decision but also with the change of Israel’s borders.” He then declared at a Knesset faction meeting that “the Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon, just like the Yellow Line in Gaza and like the buffer zone and peak of the Hermon in Syria,” adding, “I say here definitively, in every room and in every discussion, too.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz has adopted a complementary posture. He announced at the end of March that the IDF will maintain “security control over the entire area up to the Litani River” and that “hundreds of thousands of residents of southern Lebanon who evacuated northward will not return south of the Litani River until security for the residents of the north is ensured.”

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.

“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.

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.