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The directors of the film—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival—said they "felt the responsibility" to expose insider testimony about Israel's systematic mass killing of Palestinians.
A documentary film that premiered Thursday at the Venice Film Festival offers a rare inside account of Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza, with former members of a secret Israeli intelligence unit describing how they helped transform the mass killing of Palestinian civilians into a routine, bureaucratized affair.
NAZA, directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is based on interviews with 24 Israeli military and intelligence insiders, several of whom served in a secret unit that reported directly to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"We really are looking at... a system of killing, which is mass killing [and] relies on mass surveillance," Abraham told reporters in Venice on Thursday. "We felt the responsibility as Israelis to use our position... to bring insider testimony into how the system looks like from the inside... And this is the film that we made."
Szor said that "a lot of these things are also, it's important to say... known because they've been documented by journalists, Palestinian journalists, in Gaza. It's footage that has been out there."
"But I think that we felt that there is still some sort of an importance to take those testimonies and put it in a film in a way that, of course, first of all, it's different to hear," she added. "The people who designed and operated those systems talk about it in front of a camera."
According to the film, one former member bluntly said that the unit's mission was to “thwart peace.”
However, Abraham and Szor said their purpose was not to expose a handful of rogue soldiers, but to examine the machinery and policies behind the violence.
The documentary’s title refers to an Israeli military acronym used to quantify the civilians expected to be killed in an attack—a chilling bureaucratic shorthand for people often referred to as collateral damage, or, in the so-called "War on Terror" still being waged by the United States 25 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, "bugsplat."
The film’s sources describe artificial intelligence-assisted targeting, mass surveillance, and the hacking of mobile phones to identify alleged Hamas operatives, sometimes despite the known presence of family members and other civilians.
Israeli forces have operated under loosened rules of engagement that effectively permit the killing of an unlimited number of civilians when targeting even a single low-ranking Hamas member. The Israel Defense Forces utilizes cutting-edge AI technology to select targets at a far faster rate than humans alone could, and destroys them with weapons including 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs—many supplied by the US.
The result has been the killing and wounding of more than 250,000 Palestinians since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. Most of the victims have been civilians, including more than 21,500 children killed and tens of thousands more disabled or wounded.
Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice—also in The Hague—and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.
Abraham and Szor are best known internationally for co-directing with two others the film No Other Land, which chronicled ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the illegally occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers. The film won the 2025 Academy Award for best documentary feature. No Other Land co-director, co-writer, and producer Hamdan Ballal, who is Palestinian, was brutally attacked by Israeli settlers and violently detained by IDF troops in March 2025, as Common Dreams reported at the time.
NAZA—which reportedly received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere—is the sole documentary among the films competing for the festival's famed Golden Lion. It joins a growing body of recent films about the Gaza genocide.
American Doctor, directed by Poh Si Teng, follows US physicians working inside Gaza hospitals amid Israel's deliberate destruction of the strip's medical and healthcare systems.
Last year's The Voice of Hind Rajab offered a harrowing mix of acted scenes and the actual 70-minute audio recording of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl's desperate final phone call to Palestine Red Crescent Society personnel amid an Israeli massacre of her family as they were trapped in a car under tank fire.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "apologists have to explain why killing kids happens so regularly and effortlessly," said one congressman who noted growing support for blocking US weapons to Israel.
A series of Israeli strikes across southern Lebanon since Friday night have killed and wounded dozens of people, including women, children, and paramedics, despite a US-brokered ceasefire.
On Monday, Israeli strikes in Kfar Rumman killed 12 people: a paramedic and 11 people in a targeted residential building, including at least four women and two children, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health.
Al Jazeera reported that the attack on the targeted home killed three generations of one family, including a 2-month-old baby.
Another 11 people were killed in Lebanon on Sunday, and four others before that, bringing the death toll to 27, with at least 69 civilians wounded, according to the ministry. Women, children, medics, and journalists were among those harmed.
Those casualties followed Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz claiming Friday that the IDF had taken control of Lebanon's Ali al-Taher ridge, about six miles from the border, and vowing that his country's military "will not withdraw from the security zone in Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed."
Since Hamas led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, resulting in the Israel Defense Forces' genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, the Lebanese political and militant group Hezbollah has sided with Palestinians in the besieged exclave, and the IDF has been attacking southern Lebanon.
Hezbollah has also backed Iran since the US and Israel began bombing the country in February, leading to renewed Israeli violence in Lebanon. In addition to slaughtering at least 73,658 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, the IDF has killed more than 8,900 Lebanese and injured over 30,6000, according to the ministry.
That bloodshed over the past few years has fueled calls for cutting off the billions of dollars in military aid that the United States gives Israel annually. US Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) issued one such call after the attacks on Monday, stressing on social media that "Israel strikes Lebanon and kills kids. They continue to strike Gaza and kill kids."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "apologists have to explain why killing kids happens so regularly and effortlessly," Pocan continued. "More and more members of Congress are saying it's time to #BlocktheBombs."
Although a June ceasefire brought some relief to the people of Lebanon, hundreds of thousands remain displaced by Israeli occupation and attacks. Agence France-Presse reported Monday that after the June ceasefire deal was reached, villagers returned home to Kfar Rumman.
Following the attack after midnight Monday, "an AFP photographer saw the building that was hit in Kfar Rumman had been destroyed, with school books and remnants of furniture strewn across the rubble," the agency detailed. It continued:
"Since we returned here, we've lived in fear," Fouad Chakaron told AFP.
He insisted the targeted building was inhabited by "peaceful people with no connection to anyone."
Neighbors fled after the strike, which also damaged nearby buildings, AFP's photographer said.
Multiple outlets noted that the IDF didn't issue an evacuation warning before the strikes on Kfar Rumman. Reuters pointed out that the IDF claimed steps had been taken to mitigate harm "to uninvolved individuals, including the use of precise munitions and aerial surveillance," and it is now reviewing the reported casualties.
The IDF said on social media Monday that it hit "several Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure sites across southern Lebanon, including a weapons storage facility. Additionally, the IDF struck terrorists who were identified transferring weapons in the area of Kfar Rumman, in order to remove the threat they posed. The strikes were in response to Hezbollah’s launch of two explosive drones toward IDF troops in the security zone."
The deadly strikes on Monday came after Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health announced Sunday that "the Israeli raids launched by the occupation forces this morning led to the complete destruction of the Ghandour Hospital in Nabatieh, which constitutes an additional serious violation of international humanitarian law that provides for the protection of health facilities."
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun condemned the destruction of the hospital, which was reportedly emptied of patients and staff, and highlighted that attacks in the area also "resulted in the fall of innocent victims and caused severe damage to the building of the Ministry of Finance there."
Israel's assault on the Nabatieh region is "a dangerous escalation," the president said, and "reveals a persistent pattern of attacks that goes beyond the alleged military targets to purely civilian administrations and health centers, reflecting a clear intent to strike the continuity of Lebanese institutions' operations and disrupt people's daily interests."
While Aoun said he holds "the Israeli side fully responsible for this ongoing escalation," he is also "calling on the United States of America and the international community to take urgent action to stop these violations and hold their perpetrators accountable, affirming that Lebanon, despite all these attacks, is committed to upholding its sovereignty, the stability of its south, and the safety of its citizens."
"This is not justice," said the healthcare charity. "Two years of silence, followed by closures that raise more questions than they answer, is unacceptable."
The international healthcare charity Médecins Sans Frontières on Thursday joined the humanitarian group World Central Kitchen in demanding that an "impartial investigative body" examine deadly Israeli attacks on its staffers in Gaza, following the Israeli military's announcement that it was closing the cases without opening a criminal investigation.
MSF, also known in English as Doctors Without Borders, noted that the decision by the Israeli military advocate general (MAG) did "not come as a surprise" and was "the predictable output of a military apparatus investigating itself."
The Israel Defense Forces and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, said the France-based organization, have proven themselves "unwilling to respond to the extent of violations that may amount to war crimes emerging from Gaza," with Israeli officials continuing to insist that the IDF has been targeting Hamas with its bombardment of Gaza—despite the fact that the death toll of more than 73,000 Palestinians includes at least 22,000 women and 20,000 children and that healthcare facilities, schools, and at least 92% of residential buildings have been destroyed or damaged in attacks.
In addition, said MSF, 15 staff members of the healthcare organization have been killed by Israeli forces since they began bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack in October 2023, including two who were killed in multiple attacks on an aid convoy in Gaza City in November 2023 and two who were killed in a strike on an MSF shelter in Khan Younis in February 2024.
"There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale sacrifice of civilians. And there is no internal military review that can substitute for genuine, independent, and impartial accountability."
MSF submitted those cases to the MAG for review, but along with an attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers in April 2024, the military said there was no suspicion of criminal conduct in the assaults on MSF workers.
"This is not justice," said MSF. "Two years of silence, followed by closures that raise more questions than they answer, is unacceptable."
"MSF staff and their family members are dead. Their names are known," the group continued. "Their locations were shared. Their vehicles were identified. We have always maintained that all elements point to a clear responsibility of the Israeli army for the deadly attacks. And yet, those responsible for their deaths have declined to pursue any criminal investigation."
The decision by the MAG makes clear, said the group, that "there is no prospect of accountability within the Israeli legal system for the killing of our staff, just as there has been no accountability for Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians."
Following the MAG's announcement on Wednesday, World Central Kitchen issued a statement condemning Israel's "account of the deaths of our seven colleagues on April 1, 2024."
"We fundamentally disagree with their decision about criminal investigations into the IDF airstrikes that killed our team," said WCK. "There has never been any excuse or justification for the attacks, and there is nothing in this account that does so. The decision is inconsistent with the full truth and deeply offensive."
Israeli authorities did not issue a warning to WCK before it attacked the aid organization's convoy, which was traveling through what was supposed to be a deconflicted zone when it was struck.
"At the time of the lethal attacks, the IDF knew that our team in Gaza was unarmed and posing a threat to nobody. It had full visual clarity on our clearly marked humanitarian vehicles during the extended, multiple airstrikes. It knew our team’s movements, identities, and activities in advance," said WCK. "We continue to demand truth and justice for our team and their families. We continue to demand an independent commission to investigate the airstrikes because the IDF cannot credibly investigate its own conduct. And we continue to grieve the loss of our friends."
MSF stressed that Israel's decision to "close" the cases of the attacks "must be understood in their proper context: In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Healthcare facilities have been destroyed. Humanitarian convoys have been struck. Journalists, medical personnel, UN personnel, and aid workers have been killed in numbers unprecedented in any recent conflict."
"MSF reaffirms what we have stated since the beginning of this violence: There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale sacrifice of civilians," said the group. "And there is no internal military review that can substitute for genuine, independent, and impartial accountability."
"To our colleagues we have lost," MSF added, "and to the countless civilians and humanitarian workers who have perished in Gaza: We will not let your deaths be filed away as procedural inevitabilities. You deserved protection. You deserve justice."
"933 days since Hind Rajab and her family were killed. All that time, Israel lied, denied, deflected, distorted, gaslit," said one critic. "This is their modus operandi with high-profile crimes. The 'criminal probe' will be a sham."
After years of denying responsibility, the Israel Defense Forces announced Wednesday that it is opening what critics fear will be sham criminal investigations into numerous high-profile killings of Palestinians in Gaza, while separately clearing troops involved in other deadly attacks, including a massacre of World Central Kitchen aid workers.
The IDF Military Advocate-General’s Corps published its first war crimes report since October 2023 on Wednesday, covering more than 150 probes into massacres and other killings of Palestinians.
The most infamous case involves the January 2024 attack in which invading IDF troops fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition at a car carrying 5-year-old Hind Rajab and six relatives as they tried to flee Gaza City, and then attacked a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance dispatched to rescue survivors. The ambulance attack killed two PRCS medics.
Other "exceptional operational incidents" by IDF troops are also under investigation, including the apparent execution-style killing of 15 on-duty first responders—among them PRCS medics, Civil Defense personnel, and a United Nations worker—traveling in a convoy of ambulances and other vehicles in Rafah in March 2025.
The IDF cleared troops involved in the April 2024 attack on a World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy in Deir al-Balah that killed seven members of an international aid team working to feed Palestinians amid the burgeoning famine caused by Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza.
The military also cleared troops involved in a February 2024 tank attack on a house in al-Mawasi where Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff and their families were sheltering. Two women were killed and seven others were wounded in the attack.
Israeli officials had initially either denied carrying out these attacks or claimed the victims were members of or associated with Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group that led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
"The Israeli army lied through their teeth. They claimed no Israeli troops were operating in the area where Hind Rajab and her family were killed," British journalist Owen Jones wrote Wednesday on X. "They lie and lie and lie again—yet Western media outlets still treat Israeli claims as credible."
Few critics of Israel welcomed the IDF probes, while many said they won't accomplish anything.
"Investigations into violations committed by Israeli forces overwhelmingly end without meaningful examination, prosecution, or punishment," the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), which was established to challenge Israeli impunity, said Wednesday in a statement. "In the small number of cases in which soldiers have been convicted of crimes, the punishments imposed have often been exceptionally lenient or administrative in nature."
HRF continued:
The killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh provides a stark example. After conducting its own investigation into her May 2022 killing, the Israeli military acknowledged in September 2022 that there was a “high possibility” that Abu Akleh had been shot by Israeli military fire. Yet the Military Advocate General concluded that there was no suspicion of a criminal offense warranting a Military Police investigation. No criminal investigation was opened.
"This is not new," HRF stressed. "It is the continuation of a decadeslong pattern in which announcements of internal investigations have repeatedly failed to produce meaningful accountability for crimes committed against Palestinians."
HRF noted that 88% of publicly reported Israeli probes into alleged IDF crimes in Gaza "had either been closed without a finding of wrongdoing or remained under review without any publicly reported outcome. Only one resulted in a prison sentence."
"Against this record, the sudden announcement of criminal investigations into the murders of Hind Rajab and the 15 Palestinian paramedics should not be mistaken for a genuine turn toward justice," the group said. "These investigations come amid mounting international scrutiny... Their purpose is not to deliver accountability, but to preserve its appearance while perpetuating impunity."
In the United States—which backs Israel's war with billions of dollars in annual armed aid, diplomatic cover, and genocide denial—Council on American Islamic Relations national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said Wednesday that “everyone, including the Israeli government and its supporters, have long known that Israel was responsible for deliberately murdering Hind Rajab, her family, and the paramedics who tried to save her."
"The Netanyahu regime’s belated admission that it murdered Hind and will open a token criminal investigation is worthless. No one should take it seriously," he added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
“Instead, our nation should hold the Israeli government accountable for killing Hind and tens of thousands of other innocent people during the ongoing genocide in Gaza by suspending military aid and imposing sanctions on Israel," Mitchell added. "So should the international community.”
Israeli scholar Shaiel Ben-Ephraim asked on X: "After spending over two years denying even having been in the area, Israel finally admitted to shooting Hind Rajab. Why?"
"Certainly not because of accountability," he continued. "A source in the IDF legal department told the Jerusalem Post that issuing real decisions, including ones critical of soldiers, is 'critical to defend Israel' in those forums and to 'preserve receiving military weapons overseas from the US and other allies.'"
"And because this is the highest profile case of Israeli murder in this genocide, and the most difficult to defend, since Israel had advance knowledge that there was a child in the car, this is the one they chose," Ben-Ephraim added.
Israel's 1,047-day assault on Gaza has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, including thousands who are believed to be dead and buried beneath rubble. Around 2 million other Gazans have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
Attacks on Palestinian children—more than 21,500 of whom have been killed by Israeli forces—and aid workers, as well as the obliteration of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure, have been defining features of a war that United Nations experts, human rights groups, scholars, and a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice call a genocide.
The plight of Hind Rajab drew worldwide attention after the PRCS published a recording of a desperate phone call made by Hind and her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh, who was also killed in the car. The recording, which continues for several hours while the mortally wounded child slowly died, was the basis of the award-winning 2025 film "The Voice of Hind Rajab."
Exhaustive investigations, especially into the Hind Rajab massacre, have already occurred. Forensic Architecture, Earshot, and Al Jazeera published the most detailed reconstruction of the attack; The Washington Post, Sky News, and others also documented the events of the massacre.
In the case of the 15 first responders, Forensic Architecture and Earshot, The Washington Post, Bellingcat, The New York Times, and other media outlets investigated the massacre, with some of the reports refuting the IDF's initial claim that the convoy vehicles—at which Israeli forces fired around 1,000 rounds of ammunition—had approached without headlights or emergency signals. The Times affirmed that victims were shot in the head execution-style, while the Post also documented the burial of the responders and their destroyed vehicles in a mass grave.
Despite these exhaustive reports, many Israelis and their international supporters called the Hind Rajab story a fabrication, pointing to discrepancies in reporting about the child's age and other ultimately inconsequential details. Many media outlets, including Common Dreams, initially reported that Rajab was 6 years old. Some supporters of Israel denied that Hind Rajab ever existed; others claimed she was killed by Hamas.
"We know who killed Hind. We know the responsibility of the 401st Armoured Brigade under Beni Aharon, the 52nd Battalion commanded by Daniel Ella, and the Vampire Empire Company commanded by Sean Glass," HRF director general Dyab Abou Jahjah said Wednesday. "These people should be behind bars."
However, he added that “we have no trust whatsoever in the Israeli judicial system. This is a charade aimed at whitewashing and exonerating the criminals who killed Hind Rajab and her family."
"We believe justice will be served, but not by a system responsible for justifying crimes committed during the genocide," Jahjah added. "Justice will be served through international justice, through the ICC, and through national jurisdictions abroad. HRF will continue on this path, and we will not be fooled by these maneuvers.”
"These criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families, and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave."
"The horrors unfolding in Qusra are far from an isolated incident," a leader at Amnesty International declared Friday as the Israel Defense Forces and police failed to remove Israeli settlers who have besieged Palestinian homes in the illegally occupied West Bank since Sunday.
Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty's senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, said that the events in the village over the past week "reflect the relentless escalation and expansion of an accelerating and well-documented pattern of coordinated and strategic settler terror, enabled, backed, and funded by the state of Israel, with the aim of displacing Palestinians across the occupied West Bank."
"The three families under siege have been threatened, harassed, and attacked by Israeli settlers from nearby outposts for several months," she stressed. With settlers having cut off the water and electricity, residents are "running out of food, and lack access to basic necessities," she added, and local activists have been unable to deliver supplies.
The Amnesty statement followed similar condemnation from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which said Thursday that "these criminal actions by the settlers, supported or acquiesced to by Israel, the occupying power, are making life unbearable for these Palestinian families, and are clearly aimed at forcing them to leave their homes and land. Time is running out for these three families before they are forcibly displaced."
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also said Thursday that it "condemns in the strongest terms the dangerous escalation in settler terrorism," highlighting that the attack has involved "sabotage of electricity and water networks, shooting at houses, and attempts to burn children, in systematic assaults that can only be described as terroristic, aimed at the displacement and extermination of the Palestinian people."
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Friday that "IDF and Border Police forces have attempted several times this week to evacuate the settlers, but they have remained at the site. The group initially put up a shade canopy there, despite the presence of soldiers. Border Police forces arrived at the site and dismantled the canopy, yet the settlers remained at a nearby location, waiting for the forces to leave."
Ziv Stahl, executive director of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, told The Associated Press that "it's like a kids' game, like cat and mouse... It's clearly not a matter of capability but a matter of will."
Qusra resident Abdul Kareem Hassan similarly told Al Jazeera that "this is all a charade," and if the IDF "were serious, the whole operation would not take them one hour. We're talking about 20 settlers. If they would treat them the same way they treat Palestinians, they could finish in less than an hour."
IDF troops have long been accused of and documented not interfering with or even aiding in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
One of the besieged homes is owned by Palestinian-American Loui Ridi, who is based in Ohio. His brother and nephew are among those trapped.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on social media Thursday that his embassy "has been VERY involved and the IDF and Israel police have gone at our request to remove the Israeli terrorists doing this. The actions of those doing this to this family’s home is criminal... Actions by those who carried out this horrific act of terror meant to intimidate and harass this family are disgusting. No excuse for such thuggish behavior."
Huckabee later shared a video from the scene, then claimed on Friday that Israeli "'settlers' are not the problem," and the violent ones are a "very small minority who do great damage to Palestinian families and to Israel." The ambassador also pointed to The Jerusalem Post's reporting on one settlement leader, Ysrael Ganz, condemning the outpost in Qusra.
Reuters reported that Ridi welcomed Huckabee's initial remarks but also said they were not enough. He told the news agency that "we need protection. We need supplies. We need to live freely in our house."
As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, told the UN Security Council the previous day that demolitions of civilian infrastructure, mass displacement of Palestinians, and illegal settlement expansion have brought the West Bank to a "breaking point."
While settler attacks were once concentrated in the Israeli-controlled Area C, Alakbarov said, settlers are increasingly behaving violently toward Palestinians in Areas A and B. Guevara Rosas noted that "the homes targeted in these attacks are located in Area B of the West Bank, supposedly under Palestinian administrative control and Israeli military control, according to the classification of the Oslo Accords."
"Yet Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances trying to deliver food and water to the homes were also attacked by settlers. Despite these violent attacks, Israeli forces allowed the settlers to remain [in] close proximity to the Palestinian families' homes," she said. Sources told Amnesty that for several hours on Thursday, the IDF forced two besieged families and six neighboring households to evacuate their homes.
Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim similarly reported that "Israeli soldiers initially tried to move the trapped families out of their homes while settlers remained camped outside. The families refused, not trusting that the Israeli soldiers would allow them back into their homes, and were eventually grouped together in one home."
Guevara Rosas argued that "for far too long, the world has ignored the immense, unfathomable suffering of Palestinians being uprooted and erased from land they have inhabited for generations. The international community must stop treating such incidents as ‘isolated’ and instead hold Israel accountable."
"Israel, as the occupying power, has a legal obligation to protect the Palestinian population under its control and not to stand by or worse, stand with settlers—while they lay siege to Palestinian homes and cut off families’ access to healthcare, electricity, and water for days on end" she continued.
"States must end any form of direct and indirect support for Israel's unlawful occupation of the occupied Palestinian territory and its brutal system of apartheid, including its illegal settlement enterprise," said the Amnesty leader, whose group has also joined advocates and experts around the world in denouncing Israel's ongoing violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.
"This includes banning trade and investment that contribute to the maintenance of Israeli settlements, as well as ending any cooperation and assistance to entities and individuals involved in the settlement enterprise," Guevara Rosas said. "States should also show no further hesitation in imposing targeted sanctions on senior Israeli officials allegedly responsible for international crimes, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid, and forcible transfer of Palestinians in the unlawfully occupied West Bank."
She added that "it is imperative that states demonstrate unequivocal resolve by increasing protective measures for Palestinian communities at risk of displacement and using all their diplomatic and political leverage to secure the return of forcibly displaced Palestinians to their homes. Failure to act would further embolden Israel and state-backed Israeli settlers to continue their unlawful and violent actions against Palestinians, who are left unprotected and without any recourse to justice."
"Settler violence has reached unprecedented levels," said a coordinator for the Middle East peace process. "Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces."
Home demolitions by Israeli forces; attacks on healthcare infrastructure, homes, and schools; mass displacement of Palestinians; and the expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank have brought the occupied Palestinian territory to "the breaking point," said a top humanitarian official at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, calling for a "coordinated international effort" to end the violent Israeli occupation.
At a meeting on the situation in the territory, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, addressed the council as families in the town of Qusra, northern Nablus, were facing days of attacks by Israeli settlers.
That violence exemplified what the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem called an escalating "ethnic cleansing" operation that Israel's military allows.
As B'Tselem said Wednesday, settlers had established an illegal outpost in the yards of two Palestinian families' homes, “forcing the families out and taking over their homes," and the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done nothing to protect the Palestinian residents.
“Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in full view of everyone,” Yuli Novak, president of B'Tselem, told Anadolu Agency, adding that the settlers' seizure of the Palestinian homes was “not an isolated incident."
Breaking the Silence, an organization run by former IDF members who oppose the occupation, explained how settlers, with the backing of the military, essentially blockade individual homes as a method of driving Palestinians out.
"Violent settlers may do the 'dirty work' of daily terror against Palestinian men, women, and children, but neither this terror nor ethnic cleansing would be possible without the army’s support," said the group. "Village after village, house after house. It keeps happening because it is policy."
At the Security Council meeting, Alakbarov said Israeli forces have killed 76 Palestinians, including 18 children, in the West Bank in 2026 so far, while children make up nearly half of the 3,800 Palestinians who have been displaced by settler attacks, demolitions, and evictions.
"One hundred and twenty-seven Palestinian communities have experienced full or partial displacement since January 2023, including 47 that have been entirely displaced, affecting more than 6,390 Palestinians," said Alakbarov. "Settler violence has reached unprecedented levels. So far this year the UN has documented more than 1,430 incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, affecting approximately 260 Palestinian communities. Many incidents occurred in the presence of Israeli forces."
As Alakbarov spoke Tuesday, the World Health Organization warned that the West Bank has also seen an uptick in violence against healthcare infrastructure, with Israeli carrying out 83 attacks on healthcare transport such as ambulances and 11 attacks on medical centers and facilities, injuring at least 33 people and killing four. July saw a surge in healthcare attacks—a hallmark of Israel's assault on Gaza that began in 2023—with 37 strikes on infrastructure.
Settler attacks were once mainly concentrated in Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank and is under Israeli control.
But Alakbarov said settlers are increasingly waging violence against Palestinians in Areas A and B, which are under the administration of the Palestinian Authority.
“The future of the region is at stake,” the UN permanent observer for the state of Palestine, Riyad Mansour, told the Security Council. “International will cannot bow before the colonial whims of the Israeli government.”
Israeli officials in recent months have advanced and approved about 12,360 housing units in settlements across the West Bank this year, with the Security Cabinet signing off on 13 new settlements in the central part of the territory last month. The move further isolates East Jerusalem, which Palestinians consider the capital of a future Palestinian state, from the rest of the West Bank.
Last year Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also signed an agreement to develop 3,400 new units in the E1 settlement, which would also cut off access to East Jerusalem. The prime minister said as he approved the deal, "There will be no Palestinian state."
The approvals of more settlement housing this year and the escalation in IDF-sanctioned violence against Palestinian communities across the West Bank "are interconnected steps, not isolated developments,” Alakbarov said Tuesday.
"The situation in the West Bank must be treated as an emergency requiring urgent action," he said. "The concern is not only the continued expansion of settlements, but the speed and systematic manner in which new facts are being created on the ground. New outposts are established, often with state support, and can be retroactively authorized or incorporated into the wider settlement system. From these outposts, settler violence and intimidation have driven the displacement of Palestinian communities."
He added that the spread of settler outposts in agricultural and grazing areas is "deeply troubling."
"Requiring only a small number of settlers, they enable control over vast areas of land," said Alakbarov. "Israeli monitoring organizations report that agricultural and pastoral outposts now exercise effective control over close to 20% of the West Bank."
Israeli forces also arrested 23 Palestinians on Tuesday, including two children, days after a large-scale operation at Qalandia refugee camp resulted in the detentions of more than 60 people.
Hannah Sulieman, deputy executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), emphasized that 355 Palestinian children are currently being detained in Israeli military prisons—"the highest number in eight years."
The arrests and the violence mean that for children and their families in the West Bank, "the fundamental spaces of childhood—the home, the classroom, the street, the community—are becoming increasingly unsafe," said Sulieman.
“Children in the West Bank have the same rights as children everywhere,” she said. "To live, to learn, to be protected, and to imagine a future beyond violence and fear."
“They had already bulldozed the whole village," said one mayor of a southern Lebanese town. "Then they set fire to the trees."
Environmental and rights advocates are condemning what one academic called "the latest in a neverending series of international crimes" by the Israel Defense Forces as firefighters and residents in southern Lebanon report that the IDF has purposely started destructive wildfires by continuing to bomb the region.
The blazes are an attempt, one town mayor said Wednesday, to make it appear "as though nobody had ever lived here.”
Israel renewed attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon in March, as the US-Israeli war on Iran widened across the Middle East. Following a "ceasefire" agreement in June, Israeli forces have continued occupying about 20% of Lebanese territory after forcibly displacing over 1 million people from the southern part of the country.
Israeli officials have said they aim to apply the "Gaza model" to Lebanon, deploying the kinds of attacks that have destroyed 90% of civilian infrastructure in Gaza since the IDF began attacking the exclave in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz recently boasted that the IDF had destroyed 24 villages “that had existed for hundreds of years."
Now, Hafez Ghasham, mayor of the southern town of Yaroun, told The Guardian, “they are trying to make the land uninhabitable."
“They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees—large groves, with very old olive trees," Ghasham told the newspaper. “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village."
Residents who had been forced out of Yaroun said they learned from people in nearby Christian towns that their olive and fruit groves as well as many homes had been set on fire by Israeli soldiers.
The head of Civil Defense in the Nabatieh region said about 30-40% of the land in the area had been affected by the fires, and firefighters have been forced to withdraw as they've tried to extinguish the flames as the IDF has launched drone strikes after the initial attacks that sparked the fires.
"There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned," Hussein Fakih told The Guardian.
Kelley B. Vlahos, editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, noted that "while the rest of the world is trying to put out forest fires this summer, Israel reportedly started them as a military tactic," even following the Lebanon ceasefire.
Last Friday, large wildfires were caused by Israeli munitions and drones that struck woodlands in Kfarchouba and in the area between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.
The Israeli military has accused Hezbollah of using woodland areas as cover for its military outposts and tunnels. The IDF has similarly defended extensive bombing of Gaza's schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure by claiming Hamas operates in tunnels beneath the buildings.
In a statement, Hezbollah's media relations officials said the fires represent "a continuation of urban destruction, the bulldozing of infrastructure, and the theft of ancient olive trees."
"The party called on the government, the Ministry of Environment, and all relevant authorities to speak out and act immediately to halt Israeli savagery against the environment, human life, and infrastructure," reported Al Mayadeen.
Hisham Younes, the founder of Lebanese conservation group Green Southerners, told The Guardian that Israel's bombing of forested areas amounts to "ecocide."
“These are long-established woodlands," said Younes. "They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds."
“It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate, and sustain life," Younes added. "When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”
“Amal’s killing can’t be allowed to become yet another unresolved case of a journalist killed by Israeli forces with complete impunity,” said one campaigner demanding a probe into the Lebanese reporter's death.
An Amnesty International investigation published Thursday led human rights defenders in Lebanon and around the world to renew their calls for a war crimes probe into an Israeli attack that killed Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil and wounded a colleague earlier this year.
Khalil, a 42-year-old veteran correspondent for the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, and 21-year-old freelance photographer Zeinab Faraj were reporting in the southern Lebanese village of al-Tiri on April 22 when an IDF drone bombed what Amnesty said was a civilian vehicle traveling in front of them. A second strike then hit the journalists' car, wounding them.
As Khalil and Faraj sheltered in a nearby building, IDF drones hovered overhead for two hours before the structure was bombed, collapsing it. Lebanese Red Cross personnel coordinated access to the site with Israeli authorities, and once granted permission, rushed to the scene and pulled Faraj—who suffered a fractured skull, severe leg and eye injuries, and a crushed hand—from the rubble. But due to what they called threats of further attack while trying to save the mortally wounded Khalil, the Red Cross workers said they had to withdraw. Recovery operations were delayed for hours.
A medical examiner's report said that Khalil died of cardiac arrest due to head trauma and severe bleeding hours after rescuers were forced to leave her.
Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam at the time condemned that attack as "a clear-cut war crime."
The IDF contends that it declared the area where Khalil was killed off-limits and that it was targeting Hezbollah militants.
"The IDF does not target journalists in any way and works as much as possible to minimize harm that may befall them while maintaining the security of our forces," a spokesperson said.
However, dozens of journalists have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Lebanon, while the figure is in the hundreds in Gaza, where Israel is waging what Amnesty and many others say is a genocide in retaliation for the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. The IDF also attacked and invaded Lebanon—which it has repeatedly done before—to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Gaza.
According to Reporters Without Borders, Israel was the world's leading killer of journalists last year, while the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in February that Israel was responsible for two-thirds of all journalist deaths worldwide in 2025.
“The Israeli military says it does not target journalists, but the facts and evidence show that it has repeatedly done so. Amal Khalil and Zainab Faraj are the latest victims in a long series of such attacks,” Ramzi Kaiss, a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Lebanon, said Thursday. “The evidence is clear that the Israeli military knew or should have known that Faraj and Khalil were civilians, but attacked them anyway, and then prevented paramedics from rescuing them for hours."
“Israeli forces’ continued killing of journalists shows a brazen willingness to commit atrocities without any fear of consequences," Kaiss added.
Amnesty argues that the IDF strike on the building where the journalists were sheltering, and the subsequent delay in allowing first responders to rescue them, should be investigated as a war crime.
“Amnesty International’s investigation paints a harrowing picture of a direct attack on two civilians while they had sought refuge from Israeli attacks," Amnesty Middle East and North Africa regional director Heba Morayef said Thursday in a statement.
"After the first strike had eliminated the military-stated target, and with two drones flying low overhead, the Israeli military knew or should have known that two civilian women were sheltering in that building," she continued. "Despite this, they proceeded with what we have reasonable grounds to believe amounted to a direct attack on civilians, demonstrating a shocking disregard for international humanitarian law (IHL)."
“The fact that the two journalists were in what Israel has designated a no-return zone does not make them lawful targets," Morayef added. "All parties to a conflict have a clear obligation to distinguish between civilians and military targets at all times and to direct their attacks only at military objectives. There can be no justification for targeting civilians who sought shelter in search of safety. This attack must be promptly, independently, and impartially investigated as a war crime.”
CPJ regional director Sara Qudah said Thursday that “Amnesty International’s findings paint, yet again, a deeply disturbing picture of a systemic failure of legal mechanisms designed precisely to protect civilians—including journalists.”
“Amal’s killing can’t be allowed to become yet another unresolved case of a journalist killed by Israeli forces with complete impunity,” Qudah stressed. "This repeated failure to conduct transparent investigations into attacks on journalists has reinforced a climate of impunity and hollowed out the protections granted to the press under IHL."
"The systematic removal of rubble at this pace conceals the evidence of appalling crimes Israel committed in Gaza, especially those related to genocide, such as summary executions and killing unarmed civilians."
A new report published Monday details how Israeli soldiers and civilian contractors are systematically removing potential proof of genocide from the Gaza Strip, an apparent violation of an order issued by the World Court for Israel to preserve evidence of genocidal acts committed in the Palestinian exclave.
The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said that Israeli forces and contractors "are conducting a wide and organized operation to process and clear the rubble from neighborhoods and facilities they have destroyed in the Gaza Strip and relocate it from areas under their military control to outside the strip."
"This is occurring without any official record of the quantities removed or independent oversight, and before international and local investigative committees have had the chance to survey, examine, and document the sites," the group noted. "This risks destroying crucial evidence of genocide and the remains of victims still unaccounted for under the rubble."
"The systematic removal of rubble at this pace conceals the evidence of appalling crimes Israel committed in Gaza, especially those related to genocide, such as summary executions and killing unarmed civilians," Euro-Med said. "These sites need careful examination and thorough criminal investigation before any intervention that might change or erase their features."
"The debris scattered throughout the Gaza Strip includes possible locations of unlawful killings and bombings that targeted entire families, as well as sites believed to contain mass graves or bodies buried within destroyed homes, hospitals, shelters, and civilian facilities," the group continued. "These sites hold evidence critical for identifying the weapon, attack sequence, victim and attacker positions, firing ranges, cause and manner of death, as well as fragments, projectiles, spent cartridges, biological traces, and personal belongings."
Euro-Med cited an April report published jointly by the World Bank, United Nations, and European Union, whose authors estimated that around 68 million tons of rubble are spread across Gaza's 141 square miles after nearly 34 months of ongoing, ceasefire-flouting bombing and other attacks that have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
With the carnage of the war on Iran, the world has forgotten what US-UK-EU-backed Israel did to Gaza.
Survivors of the genocide live in a hellscape of rubble and ash, which looks like the aftermath of a nuclear war…
And the world looks away. https://t.co/J8XsgtvFzE pic.twitter.com/NKechLozxR
— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) July 18, 2026
"Crushing, mixing, and transporting rubble can erase evidence, location details, and connections within the crime scene," Euro-Med said. "This process also disrupts the chain of custody, potentially making it impossible to trace where evidence was collected or to link it to a particular incident or victim. This damage cannot be reversed by aerial photographs or subsequent testimony, as investigating international crimes also requires tangible evidence that can be examined, compared, and legally verified."
Thousands of Palestinians remain missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of the nearly 200,000 buildings, or over 80% of all structures, that were destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks. Palestinian victims of Israeli aerial massacres are still being unearthed, with the remains of 112 Gazans—including 40 women, 38 children, and seven people with disabilities—largely exhumed by hand over 136 hours in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City last week.
At least 10 million tons of rubble "have been removed, crushed, or moved from their original sites within the areas under Israel’s unlawful military control, which encompass about 66% of the Gaza Strip," Euro-Med said.
"Approximately 400 heavy pieces of excavation, demolition, crushing, and transport machinery, operated by Israeli civilian companies under military protection, are active across eastern and southern Gaza," the group added. "They demolish remaining structures, crush rubble from destroyed neighborhoods, and load the debris onto trucks for transportation away from the original sites."
Euro-Med continued:
The debris in the Gaza Strip comprises more than just rubble; it includes private and public property, essential building materials like steel, stone, and concrete that can be recycled and reused, as well as other valuable assets necessary for Palestinians to reconstruct their homes, roads, and infrastructure. It may also contain property documents, official records, and personal belongings that are part of individuals’ and families’ rights and memories.
Removing rubble from the Gaza Strip and commercially exploiting it without the owners’ consent or compensation may, depending on the circumstances and intent of the seizure, constitute unlawful confiscation or pillage. Such acts are prohibited under international humanitarian law, especially Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the relevant provisions of the Rome Statute.
"These actions are part of a broader pattern that has involved bulldozing sites believed to contain mass graves, storming and damaging hospitals and medical facilities after they were suspected of being sites of grave crimes, ongoing demolition of buildings in military-controlled zones, and targeting Palestinian journalists," the group added.
The International Court of Justice's provisional orders of January and May 2024—which came as the ICJ began weighing a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations—directed Israel to "take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations" of violations of the Genocide Convention.
Israel has been accused of violating those ICJ orders and another issued by the Hague-based tribunal in March 2024 ordering Israel to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza, whose people were being deliberately starved by the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, according to arrest warrants issued in November 2024 by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Haaretz, Israel's oldest daily newspaper, last year published an investigation detailing how a loosely supervised Israel Defense Forces unit has been operating in Gaza outside normal chains of command and oversight. IDF soldiers and civilians, including settler colonists from the illegally occupied West Bank, used Palestinian civilians as human shields while they demolished homes and other buildings in Gaza.
Israeli soldiers and settlers use bulldozers and other heavy equipment made by Caterpillar, Hyundai, and other manufacturers to demolish buildings and remove rubble, desecrate graves, and "level" or "flatten" Gaza, as numerous Israeli and US officials, including President Donald Trump, have advocated. Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer variants are part of the billions of dollars in annual armed aid the US provides for Israel despite the ally's increasing international isolation over not only what a UN commission of inquiry last year called a genocide in Gaza but also occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
"States where the implicated companies or machinery manufacturers are based should mandate a halt to any actions that could lead to property demolition, evidence removal, or rubble seizure," Euro-Med said. "They must also preserve all relevant contracts, correspondence, and operational data, and carry out independent investigations into the accountability of their directors and staff."
"Any efforts to remove rubble or rebuild in the Gaza Strip must be led by Palestinians, involving local residents, property owners, and families of the missing," the group added. "These initiatives should ensure the protection of evidence, recovery of remains, clearance of unexploded ordnance, sorting of hazardous materials, local reuse of rubble, preservation of property maps and urban fabric, and prevent reconstruction from being used to cement control or alter [Gaza's] geographic or demographic makeup."
As The Times of Israel described, "Israel has largely failed to crack down on such attacks, with arrests rare, indictments even rarer, and convictions almost unheard of."
As the Israeli government faces increasing scrutiny for its enabling of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces has reportedly closed an investigation into one of the most brutal assaults documented in recent memory. Nobody has been charged.
Haaretz reported on Friday that the Military Advocate General’s Office has closed its investigation into an incident from October 12, 2023, in which about two dozen armed settlers attacked the village of Wadi as-Seeq, about 10 miles east of Ramallah, where most residents had been driven out by violence by a nearby Israeli outpost.
Three Palestinian men who'd remained in the village to help evacuate the local Bedouin community were detained by the gang of Israelis, who they said tortured them for hours, stripping them naked, beating them, urinating on them, burning them with cigarettes, and sexually abusing them.
Several Israeli peace activists also said they were attacked during the incident and corroborated much of the testimony of the Palestinian victims.
A photo of the three men stripped, bound, and blindfolded quickly made international headlines and drew condemnation from human rights organizations and even some pro-Israel groups like the US-based Israel Policy Forum, which called the reports "sickening and inexcusable."
The military prosecutor's office apparently found it very excusable. According to Haaretz:
The Military Advocate General's Office decided that the evidence collected did not establish the involvement of specific soldiers to the standard required for criminal prosecution.
The decision was made even though, following the initial publication, several soldiers who were present at the scene—including the unit's commander—were dismissed.
The soldiers were from the IDF Desert Frontier unit, a unit that recruits "hilltop youth," radical and often violent settler youths from illegal West Bank outposts. Some of the victims said that settlers also took part in the assault alongside the soldiers.
The dismissal of the case comes amid what the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) described as "an unprecedented surge in settler-related violence" this year, particularly this summer. June saw a record 460 settler-related attacks, and the trend has continued into July, with 360 documented incidents between July 1-24.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned on Wednesday that settler violence was at an "all-time high," noting that 18 Palestinians have been killed so far this year in incidents linked to settler attacks, more than the 17 who were killed all of last year.
The Israeli government, meanwhile, approved over $430 million to establish 34 new settlements in the West Bank earlier this year.
"The increase is part of a broader upward trend in settler violence that has been developing since 2023 but has accelerated significantly in 2026," said Nasser Khdour, Middle East Assistant Research Manager at ACLED. "Recorded incidents include attacks on Palestinians and their property, land seizures, looting activities, uprooting trees, grazing on Palestinian land, and clashes with Palestinians."
As The Times of Israel noted on Friday: "Israel has largely failed to crack down on such attacks, with arrests rare, indictments even rarer, and convictions almost unheard of. The current government has been accused of turning a blind eye to the phenomenon or even tacitly supporting it."
Members of the IDF have often been documented either directly participating in the violence or providing protection to settlers who are.
Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed during a CNN interview that his government was working hard to bring violent settlers to justice and conducting "real investigations."
But he also minimized the problem of settler violence that has become rampant, boiling it down to about “150 or so juvenile delinquents" causing mayhem while stating that they don't represent the broader settler community.
There have been no reported charges coming from this month's deadly attacks, which have resulted in the deaths of at least eight Palestinians and many more injuries, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
A Guardian analysis on July 21 found that Israel has not once prosecuted any of its citizens for killing a Palestinian in the West Bank at any point this decade.