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ethnic cleansing
Palestinians May Pay the Price for Netanyahu's Defeat in Iran
Historically, when Israel fails to secure a strategic breakthrough on one front, it seeks compensation on another—typically where Palestinians are most vulnerable and where international scrutiny is weakest.
Jun 19, 2026
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing perhaps the most precarious moment of his political career. He knows it. His allies know it. And his rivals—both within his coalition and across Israel's political spectrum—are preparing to capitalize on his growing weakness.
Former Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who also served as deputy prime minister between 2007 and 2009, is among the latest Israeli political figures to join a growing chorus of criticism directed at Netanyahu.
“In the final result,” Ramon said in an interview with Radio Galey, cited by the Israeli outlet Srugim, “we did not win.” He then broke down that failure in blunt terms: “We did not win in Lebanon, we did not win in Iran, and we did not win against Hamas.”
Another prominent critic is former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot, who joined Netanyahu’s emergency war government following the events of October 7, 2023, before resigning with Benny Gantz in June 2024.
Arab and Muslim countries, along with their allies in the international community, must not wait for Israel to launch a much larger assault on the West Bank before responding.
Beyond accusing Netanyahu of failing to protect Israel on October 7, Eisenkot argues that the prime minister has effectively surrendered Israel’s political decision-making to US President Donald Trump, thereby strategically weakening Israel.
Ironically, Netanyahu’s coalition partners have often been even more opportunistic than the opposition.
Since the formation of the current coalition government on December 29, 2022—widely regarded as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history—figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have repeatedly used Netanyahu’s political vulnerability to expand their own influence. Whenever Netanyahu needed political support to remain in power, they demanded concessions in return.
For Israel’s far-right extremists, Netanyahu’s inability to secure decisive strategic victories has often translated into opportunities to advance their own agendas. Every setback on the battlefield became an opening for greater settlement expansion, harsher measures against Palestinians, and deeper entrenchment of extremist policies.
Unable to deliver "victory," Netanyahu turned perpetual war into a political strategy in its own right. The result has been a genocidal war in Gaza, widespread devastation in Lebanon, and a dangerous confrontation with Iran that has repeatedly brought the region to the brink of a wider catastrophe.
For a time, this formula proved politically sustainable. Netanyahu successfully enlisted unwavering US support to keep the fires of war burning. At the same time, the failure of Europe and much of the international community to hold a wanted war criminal accountable provided him with the political space necessary to continue his bloody calculations.
Yet that formula may be nearing its limits. While this possibility may appear encouraging, it comes with a serious warning. If Netanyahu can no longer sustain the wars that have prolonged his political life for nearly three years, he may escalate where resistance is weakest: the occupied West Bank.
Regarding Iran, there is growing recognition that the current confrontation is unsustainable indefinitely and that some form of arrangement will eventually emerge. Likewise, regardless of whether Lebanon is formally included in any future agreement, Israel’s ambition of permanently occupying parts of Lebanese territory remains untenable.
Historically, when Israel fails to secure a strategic breakthrough on one front, it seeks compensation on another—typically where Palestinians are most vulnerable and where international scrutiny is weakest.
As Israeli elections approach, it is therefore reasonable to fear a further escalation of the genocide in Gaza, pushing both the death toll and the level of destruction to new heights. According to Gaza health authorities, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire agreement was announced in October, bringing the overall death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza to 73,000 Palestinians.
Though Israel's war has already failed to break Palestinian steadfastness, the broader objective remains unchanged: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza and the transformation of the strip into a space that can no longer sustain Palestinian life.
The West Bank, however, presents a different challenge.
There, Israel faces a fragmented political landscape and a Palestinian Authority that refuses to develop an effective strategy for confronting accelerating Israeli violence, ethnic cleansing, home demolitions, land confiscation, and the relentless expansion of illegal settlements.
This vulnerability has enabled Israel to move from discussing annexation to implementing it in practice. The strategy rests on two interconnected pillars: extreme violence and displacement on the one hand, and rapid settlement expansion on the other.
According to an Oxfam International study published on June 12, Israel has killed 1,244 Palestinians, including 268 children, in the occupied West Bank since 2023—more than the total number killed during the previous 17 years combined.
This bloodshed has been accompanied by large-scale displacement that has already uprooted nearly 46,000 Palestinians, many of them from refugee camps and vulnerable communities across the northern West Bank.
An Amnesty International report published on June 10 documented the full or partial displacement of at least 117 Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities between January 2023 and April 2026.
Expectedly, the violence, displacement, settlement expansion, and land seizures are not isolated developments but components of a coherent political project. In September 2025, Smotrich openly proposed the annexation of 82% of the occupied West Bank. What was once presented as a political vision is now steadily being translated into facts on the ground.
The era of Netanyahu may be nearing its end, but before this bloody political chapter closes, countless more Palestinians may be forced to bear the cost.
Arab and Muslim countries, along with their allies in the international community, must not wait for Israel to launch a much larger assault on the West Bank before responding.
The matter demands urgent attention and immediate action.
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How Western Media Normalizes Israel's Ethnic Cleansing in Lebanon
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire, the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people.
Jun 12, 2026
In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.
Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”
Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”
The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”
And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.
‘Urgent evacuation warnings’
While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip.There has been no remotely comparable destruction on the Israeli side, and a recent Reuters article (5/31/26) that had attempted to suggest some symmetry now comes with the preface: “This May 31 story has been corrected to remove a reference to tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced by Hezbollah fire, in paragraph 3.”
Like in Gaza, where genocide proceeds apace in spite of a declared ceasefire (FAIR.org, 10/21/25), the media tend to report “ceasefires” in Lebanon without caring to highlight the fact that it’s not a ceasefire when Israel is still pummeling the country and massacring people, all the while setting the stage for a massive land grab with its creeping so-called “evacuation orders.” These “evacuations” have been focused on the Shiite demographic, with Israel warning Christian and Druze communities not to allow Shiite neighbors to take refuge in their towns (New York Times, 4/1/26).
Lebanese journalist Habib Battah, co-author of the aforementioned Public Source investigation, suggested to me that such orders might be more accurately termed “ethnic cleansing directives.” But that, of course, would be way too much for corporate media outlets to handle—and so it is that we learn about Israel’s “urgent evacuation warnings” and “large-scale evacuation orders,” as though it’s some sort of public service announcement, fire drill or other fundamentally legitimate Israeli undertaking, rather than entirely illegal in addition to downright psychopathic. From a legal and moral perspective, after all, you can’t just go around ordering people in other countries out of their homes, oftentimes only to bomb them when they comply.
Then there’s the matter of the “Yellow Line” or “security zone”—more terminology borrowed from Gaza (FAIR.org, 5/19/26)—which denotes the portion of south Lebanon that Israel is currently illegally occupying. But Israel has never been very good at staying within the lines, and its latest “evacuation orders” spanned no less than one-fifth of the entire country, far beyond its own unilaterally appointed Yellow Line.
As Battah remarked to me, the media’s acceptance and deployment of such arbitrary vocabulary creates “artificial structures” and a sense of orderliness, when in reality “there’s no yellow lines, there’s no yellow, there’s no colors—these are just illegal invasions.” And because media are committed to sanitizing Israel’s behavior rather than questioning it, “colonization becomes normalized.”
‘A warning to residents’
The eagerness of journalists to do Israel’s bidding is all the more confounding given that Israel is currently the No. 1 killer of journalists in the world. A recent Associated Press article (5/29/26), for example, reduced the pulverization of Lebanon to simply “ongoing fighting in southern Lebanon between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.”
A June 4 Reuters writeup blamed Hezbollah for having “rejected” the latest US-mediated “ceasefire” plan—which, mind you, would basically have given Israel the green light to seize south Lebanon outright. Reuters refrained from referencing the thousands of Lebanese casualties since March, but did allow Israel the usual space to defend its depredations: “The Israeli military, in a warning to residents of the south, said it was continuing to target Hezbollah facilities.”
This is not to say that corporate media do not report on the destruction, displacement and killing in Lebanon; they do—and sometimes even sympathetically. But the refusal to paint a consistent and properly contextualized picture of what is actually going on in the country means that they mostly just end up legitimizing Israel’s war crimes.
Imagine for a moment that Hezbollah had just killed thousands of Israelis in three months and occupied northern Israel. In doing so, it laid waste to 5,000-year-old cities, and bombed the fuck out of everything from homes to ambulances to World Heritage sites to university students to environmental activists who protect sea turtles. Suffice it to say we’d be hearing a lot more about the utter barbarity of it all—and that Hezbollah wouldn’t be allowed to claim ad nauseam that it was targeting “military facilities.”
Almost three years into a genocide that has officially killed nearly 73,000 Palestinians and given Israel every opportunity to blind the world with its true colors, it is no short of an abomination that Israeli officials are still permitted to insist—with little to no media pushback—that they only target “terrorists” and “terrorist infrastructure.” If Israeli officials were to claim that two plus two equals eight, or that Elvis Presley was living in a cave in Madagascar, would the corporate media also report such information with a straight face?
By taking Israel’s word for it, journalists wind up essentially validating mass killing and occupation—as in the corrected May 31 Reuters piece that straight up makes the case for Israel’s seizure of a 900-year-old castle that lies nowhere near the imaginary colored line:
The advance into Beaufort Castle has granted Israeli troops a vantage point over much of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, from which attacks have been launched towards Israeli residential areas.
‘Iranian proxy on its borders’
Of course, willful media decontextualization and omission of relevant history facilitates the conversion of Israeli propaganda into “news.” One handy trick is to always, always, always remind audiences that Hezbollah is a “powerful Shia group supported by Iran,” as the BBC (5/28/26) puts it.
On March 13, CNN ran an analysis datelined Tel Aviv that bore the headline: “The War That Never Ended: Israel Seizes Moment to Finish Fight Against Hezbollah, Iran’s Proxy in Lebanon.” The analyst proceeded to justify Israel’s belief that “it needs to establish a strong military defense to protect civilians from the Iranian proxy on its borders.”
But while invoking Hezbollah’s support by Iran is practically a requirement for Western media reports, it is never deemed necessary to qualify Israel’s own orientation in any way—like, I dunno, “The war that never ended: Genocidal psychostate backed to the hilt by global superpower seizes moment to finish fight against Hezbollah.”
As for why this fight started in the first place, the media can somehow never summon the energy to explain that Hezbollah owes its very existence to Israel’s apocalyptic 1982 invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, prompting the group’s formation. Indeed, Israel’s lengthy history of invading Lebanon—not to mention its 22-year occupation of the south of the country, which ended in its ignominious eviction by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance—would seem to be pretty crucial context in terms of understanding the current war. But those journalists who do bother to provide a bit of background do so in as ambiguous and cursory a fashion as possible, as in the New York Times’ explanation (6/3/26) that “Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia group, has been in conflict with Israel, on and off, for decades.”
A May 13 NBC News intervention headlined “Amid Ceasefire, Israeli Forces Ramp Up Destruction of Homes in Southern Lebanon” offers a roundabout summary of Hezbollah’s origins: “The group, formed in the early 1980s as a civil war consumed Lebanon, was created with support from Iran and sought to expel Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.” The piece went on to discuss some details of the present destruction in south Lebanon, including footage from a video posted to X on April 24 in which
two excavators can be seen destroying solar panels in the Christian border town of Debel, where a photo last month showed a soldier taking what appeared to be an axe to a statue of Jesus.
In a statement to NBC News that can be safely filed under the can’t-make-this-shit-up category, the Israeli army “said…that the damage to the solar panels was not in line with its values, and that disciplinary measures had been taken.” Here’s praying that corporate journalists might someday have the balls to take Israel to task on more existential matters.
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Israel Escalating Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank 'Before the Eyes of the Entire World': Amnesty
"This is not the work of rogue actors," said the human rights group's secretary general. "What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation."
Jun 10, 2026
The international community is allowing the Israeli government to carry out an explicit policy of "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians in the West Bank that is rapidly accelerating, according to a report out Wednesday from Amnesty International.
The human rights group said the world must intervene to stop what it described as a campaign of forcible displacement, rampant state-backed violence by Israeli settlers, demolitions of Palestinian homes, and tightening restrictions on Palestinian access to land and water.
Using United Nations data, Amnesty determined that at least 117 predominantly Bedouin and herding communities faced full or partial displacement between January 2023 and April 2026, with about 45 communities totally depopulated.
Nearly 6,000 people were forced from their homes during that time, roughly 17% of the Palestinian population in the Israeli-controlled Area C's Bedouin and herding communities.
Amnesty found that Israeli authorities demolished more than 3,400 Palestinian homes and structures in Area C during that time, displacing more than 3,000 Palestinians.
The group describes this systematic displacement as explicit Israeli state policy. The government advanced plans for more than 50,000 settler housing units from 2023-25 and authorized 102 new settlements by April 2026, the largest number ever approved by an Israeli government.
This has coincided with a dramatic increase in violence by armed Israeli settlers, who have set fire to homes and farmlands, vandalized schools and agricultural equipment, cut electricity lines and dumped water tanks, and beaten and killed Palestinian residents.
The UN's Office on the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calculated that four settler attacks have occurred per day on average in the roughly two years following October 7, 2023, and have only grown more frequent this year, particularly after Israel and the US's joint attack on Iran, which was followed by an invasion of Lebanon that has also entailed mass destruction of homes and the forced displacement of over a million residents.
In several documented cases, armed settler attackers have been escorted or accompanied by Israeli soldiers, who have at times taken part in the destruction.
“Over the past three and a half years, Israeli authorities have accelerated a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, uprooting, dispossessing, and forcibly transferring Palestinian communities," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general.
"This is not the work of rogue actors or what the international community has repeatedly labeled as extremist settlers, organizations or one or two ministers," she said. "What we are witnessing is deliberate, state-led annexation, in complete violation of international law unfolding before the eyes of the entire world."
The report comes just a day after a group of Western nations—including the UK, Canada, France, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway—announced coordinated sanctions against Israeli individuals and organizations accused of financing and enabling settler violence in the West Bank.
However, Amnesty argued that these measures were too narrow.
"These limited measures are woefully insufficient to address the state campaign of ethnic cleansing and the systemic violations that have been rapidly increasing before the eyes of the international community,” Callamard said.
She said states, "particularly those with influence over Israel," including the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, and other European Union and Arab States, needed to "ban all trade, investment, and any form of cooperation or financial assistance that contribute to Israel’s unlawful occupation, system of apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."
Callamard added that states "must impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against Israeli officials directly implicated in these acts." She included Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right settler politicians like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well as settlers who have allegedly committed acts of murder, like Yinon Levi, who was filmed last year shooting and killing human rights activist Awda al-Hathaleen and was released from custody after a day.
Callamard said, "Without accountability, Palestinian communities across the West Bank will vanish before our eyes."
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