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Zion and the Art of Armageddon

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This ceasefire's going v. well:

Israeli forces and settlers have carried out 2,350 attacks across the occupied West Bank last month in an “ongoing cycle of terror”, according to the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission (CRRC). CRRC head Mu’ayyad Sha’ban said on Wednesday that Israeli forces carried out 1,584 attacks – including direct physical attacks, the demolition of homes and the uprooting of olive trees – with most of the violence focused on the governorates of Ramallah (542), Nablus (412) and Hebron (401).

The spike in Israeli violence comes amid expectations that Israel’s Higher Planning Council (HPC), part of the Israeli army’s Civil Administration overseeing the occupied West Bank, will meet to discuss the construction of 1,985 new settlement units in the West Bank [yesterday]. The left-wing Israeli movement Peace Now said 1,288 of the units would be rolled out in two isolated settlements in the northern West Bank, namely Avnei Hefetz and Einav Plan.
Allahu Akhbar@Al Jazeera
 
Since a 2024 ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel has attacked Lebanon almost daily. Now, the pattern is repeating in Gaza.


And analysts say the attacks in Gaza since the latest ceasefire, which have so far killed at least 236 Palestinians and wounded another 600, are evidence that Israel is implementing a policy of “Lebanonising” Gaza – officially ending the war, but using its far superior military strength to give it the right to conduct attacks whenever it wants for an indefinite period.

“They [Israelis] don’t want to resolve the conflict,” Rob Geist Pinfold, a scholar of international security at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera. “War is the new norm.”

Allahu Akhbar@Al Jazeera

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Israeli soldiers have described a free-for-all in Gaza and a breakdown in norms and legal constraints, with civilians killed at the whim of individual officers, according to testimony in a TV documentary. “If you want to shoot without restraint, you can,” Daniel, the commander of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tank unit, says in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, due to be broadcast in the UK on ITV [tonight].

Guardian analysis in August of the IDF’s intelligence data showed that by the reckoning of Israeli military officials, 83% of those killed in Gaza were civilians, a historic high for modern conflicts, though the IDF disputed the analysis. More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war started and more continue to die despite a ceasefire that began a month ago.

The soldiers giving their accounts in Breaking Ranks also confirm consistent reports throughout the two-year conflict of the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice informally known as the “mosquito protocol”. “You send the human shield underground. As he walks down the tunnel, he maps it all for you. He has an iPhone in his vest and as he walks it sends back GPS information,” says Daniel, the tank commander, says in the documentary. “The commanders saw how it works. And the practice spread like wildfire. After about a week, every company was operating its own mosquito.”

“I feel like they’ve destroyed all my pride in being an Israeli – in being an IDF officer,” Daniel says in the programme. “All that’s left is shame.”
 
Israel is (still) Normalising Hate:

...fuelled by what analysts from within Israel have described as an absolute sense of impunity, anti-Palestinian violence has intensified across the country and the occupied West Bank while much of the world continues to look away, convinced that the work of the ceasefire is done.

Meanwhile.

...the parliament is debating reintroducing the death penalty, as well as expanding the terms of the offences for which it might apply – both unambiguously targeting Palestinians. Under the legislation, proposed by ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – who himself has past “terrorism”-related convictions for his outspoken support of Kahane – anyone found guilty of killing Israelis because of “racist” motives and “with the aim of harming the State of Israel and the revival of the Jewish people in its land” would face execution.

That bill passed its first reading this week.

Orly Noy, editor of the Hebrew-language Local Call, told Al Jazeera. “That hasn’t gone anywhere -

“Just because there’s a ceasefire and the hostages are back, the racism, the supremacy and the unmasked violence didn’t just disappear. We’re seeing daily pogroms by soldiers and settlers in the West Bank. There are daily attacks on Palestinian bus drivers. It’s become dangerous to speak Arabic, not just within the ‘48, but anywhere,” she said, referring to Israel’s initial borders of 1948.

On Tuesday, a meeting at a private house in Pardes Hanna near Haifa, hosted by Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, was surrounded and attacked by a mob of right-wing protesters. As police reportedly stood nearby, Israeli protesters surrounded the house, chanting “Terrorist! Terrorist!” and singing “May your village burn” in an attempt to interrupt the meeting, which was billed as a chance to build “partnership and peace” after “two years characterised mainly by pain and hostility”.

“Once you’ve manufactured consent for genocide, you need to be proactive in dialling the cruelty levels down, which is something we’re not seeing,” (former Israeli peace negotiator) Daniel Levy said. “If anything, we’re just seeing it continue. They have dialled the cruelty levels up to 11 … and they’re leaving them there.”
 
A report published last week by Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlighted the expulsion of 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in just three refugee camps this year. HRW said that the Israeli operation in the Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarem refugee camps, which began in January, led to the biggest mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967.

“We are witnessing the total abandonment of Palestinian lives. Israel has already shown it is capable of far greater violence, as we are seeing in the Gaza Strip,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem’s executive director Yuli Novak said on Friday. “The situation in the West Bank is deteriorating by the day and will only worsen, because there is no internal or external mechanism to restrain Israel or stop its ongoing policy of ethnic cleansing. The international community must put an end to Israel’s impunity and hold those responsible for crimes against the Palestinian people to account.”

Violence by settler groups is increasing, perhaps buoyed by fellow settlers occupying some of the highest positions in the Israeli state. In October, OCHA recorded more than 260 attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both. That is an average of eight incidents per day: the highest number since the agency began collating data in 2006.

Allahu Akhbar@Al Jazeera
 
...aaaand, not only but also (in the Grauniad)

Amnesty International has said Israel is “still committing genocide” against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, despite the ceasefire agreed last month.

“The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal,” said Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard. “But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.”

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Breakfast in the ruins.(2025)
 
Israeli claims of aid convoys being looted were correct after all...

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict. Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies at France’s prestigious Sciences Po university, describes Israeli military attacks on security personnel protecting aid convoys. These permitted looters to seize huge quantities of food and other supplies destined for desperately needy Palestinians, he writes. Famine threatened parts of Gaza at the time, according to international humanitarian agencies.

“The [Israeli] rationale [was] to discredit Hamas and the UN at that time … and to allow [Israel’s] clients, the looters, to either redistribute the aid to expand their own support networks or to make money out of reselling it in order to get some cash and so not depend exclusively on Israeli financial support,”
 
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