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israeli occupation
From Oslo to Displacement: 33 Years That Changed the Map of Palestine
Between the handshake of 1993 and the map of 2026 lies the story of 33 years. At its heart is one question: Who controls the land—and who is still able to remain on it?
Sep 16, 2026
On September 13, 1993, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin stood on the White House lawn and shook hands before the world.
For Palestinians, that image carried a larger hope: that a transitional process would lead to the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The five years that were supposed to be transitional passed.
Then 20 years. Then 20.
Now, 33 years have passed.
Perhaps we do not need the thousands of pages written about Oslo to understand where we have arrived.
We only need to look at the map.
Israeli settlements have expanded. Outposts have spread across the hills. Roads connect many of them to Israel and to one another. Palestinian land has been confiscated or become increasingly difficult to reach.
East Jerusalem is increasingly surrounded by settlements. Area C, more than 60% of the West Bank, remains under extensive Israeli control over planning, construction, and land.
In Area A, which was supposed to be under Palestinian civil and security control, Israeli forces continue to enter Palestinian cities and refugee camps and carry out arrests, demolitions, and road closures.
In Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps, more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees displaced since early 2025 remain unable to return home.
And then there is Gaza—part of the same Palestinian territory Palestinians entered Oslo believing would one day become their state.
If two states are made impossible, can anyone defend a permanent one-state reality in which Palestinians and Israelis do not enjoy equal national and political rights?
Between the handshake of 1993 and the map of 2026 lies the story of 33 years.
At its heart is one question: Who controls the land—and who is still able to remain on it?
Less than five months after Oslo was signed, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron during dawn prayers in Ramadan and opened fire on Palestinian worshippers, killing 29.
Less than two years later, Israeli extremist Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin because he opposed the political path Rabin had pursued.
The events were different, but both revealed early on the strength of the forces opposing any process that might eventually end Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory.
Negotiations continued.
So did settlement expansion.
And this became Oslo's central contradiction: Palestinians were negotiating over a state while the land on which that state was supposed to exist was changing beneath their feet.
Perhaps no place illustrates this more clearly than E1.
The area lies between occupied East Jerusalem and the Israeli settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. Its importance is not simply how many settlement homes may be built there, but what construction would do to the map.
Expansion in E1 threatens Palestinian territorial continuity between the northern and southern West Bank and further separates East Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings.
If the international community still speaks seriously about a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, where exactly is that state supposed to exist if the territory itself continues to be fragmented?
Governments can issue endless statements supporting two states.
But maps do not read statements.
They record what is built, who controls the land, and who is allowed to reach it.
The same contradiction appears in Area A.
The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C was meant to be temporary. Yet what was temporary has become almost permanent, while the boundaries created by Oslo do not prevent Israeli forces from entering areas supposedly under Palestinian control.
Since early 2025, large-scale Israeli military operations have displaced more than 33,000 Palestinian refugees from Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams camps. Many remain unable to return.
For me, this is one of the most painful images of the post-Oslo era: A Palestinian refugee, whose family was displaced once before, being displaced again—this time from the refugee camp itself.
There are political arguments about Oslo, security arrangements, and who violated which agreement.
But what language describes a refugee becoming a refugee for a second time?
Settlement expansion, too, is often reduced to an image of houses appearing on a hill.
But for Palestinians living nearby, a settlement is not simply a house.
It is also a road, a checkpoint, a gate, an outpost, a field a farmer can no longer safely reach, and a grazing area a shepherd can no longer use.
During the first eight months of 2026, the United Nations documented more than 1,600 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage across 275 communities.
But numbers alone do not explain what happens afterward.
Can the farmer return to his field after an attack?
Can the shepherd return to the same hill tomorrow?
Can a family continue to live where every journey to its land becomes a confrontation?
Consider Al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah.
By early September, more than 56 settler attacks resulting in casualties or property damage had been documented there during 2026.
Settlement outposts have expanded around the village, while access to agricultural and grazing land has become increasingly restricted.
On September 2, two Palestinian children were shot and killed by Israeli forces there amid another period of settler attacks and military operations.
At that point, settlement expansion is no longer simply construction on a hill.
It becomes a system of pressure on a village and on the ability of its people to remain.
Then there is water.
A Palestinian farmer may legally own his land. But what does ownership mean if he cannot water it?
This question is especially acute in the Jordan Valley.
In Bardala this year, Israeli forces demolished seven agricultural greenhouses covering about 11 dunums and destroyed the water networks connected to them.
It may sound like a small incident beside the headlines of war and killing.
It is not small to a farmer waiting for water to save his crop.
If water disappears for days, he may lose a harvest. If the problem continues, he may lose his income. If access to water becomes a permanent struggle, farming itself may become impossible.
And when farming becomes impossible, a Palestinian does not simply lose a crop.
He loses one of the strongest reasons he has for remaining on his land.
This is why displacement does not always begin with a bulldozer demolishing a home.
The house may remain standing while the field goes dry, grazing land shrinks, the road closes, and attacks continue.
Eventually, a family packs its belongings and leaves.
From a distance, that departure may look voluntary.
But it did not happen in a vacuum.
And then there is Gaza.
Not because Gaza and the West Bank have experienced the same reality.
They have not.
But both were part of the Palestinian territory Palestinians entered Oslo believing would eventually become their state.
In 2005, Israel removed its settlements from Gaza and withdrew its permanent ground forces from inside the territory. While settlements disappeared from Gaza, the settlement project continued expanding in the West Bank.
After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel imposed a severe blockade, while Egypt also maintained restrictions on the Rafah crossing.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a large-scale attack on Israel. Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed, and hostages were taken into Gaza.
That is a fact, and it should be stated.
But it does not tell the story of what followed.
By September 9, 2026, the reported Palestinian death toll in Gaza since October 2023 had reached 73,669, with 174,652 people reported injured, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health.
Entire neighborhoods have been devastated. Families have been displaced repeatedly. Hundreds of thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed, alongside hospitals, schools, roads, water networks, and other essential infrastructure.
In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed and were continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In June 2026, the commission issued further findings concerning violations against Palestinian children and concluded that the deliberate targeting of children had resulted in acts of genocide,, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Israel has rejected those findings and denied committing genocide.
But Gaza does not need legal language or statistics alone to tell its story.
Ask one family a simpler question: Is there still a home to return to?
And in the West Bank, ask another: Will Palestinians still be able to remain on their land at all?
The experiences are different.
But in both places, the ability to remain has itself become a political and human question.
Put these realities on one map, and the picture becomes difficult to ignore.
In Gaza: killing, destruction, and repeated displacement.
In East Jerusalem: settlement expansion, demolitions, and displacement.
In Area C: settlements, outposts, and pressure on Palestinian communities.
In E1: a threat to territorial continuity.
In the Jordan Valley: a struggle not only over land, but over the water that determines whether people can farm and remain.
These realities are not identical.
But they lead back to the same question: Who will still be able to remain on the land?
After 33 years, it is no longer enough for governments to say they remain committed to the two-state solution.
If the world genuinely wants two states, it must protect the physical possibility of a Palestinian state now—an independent and sovereign state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Stopping settlement expansion, preventing displacement, protecting Palestinian land and water resources, and halting projects that destroy territorial continuity are not issues that can be postponed until another negotiation.
They determine whether there will still be something left to negotiate.
But if the international community continues to speak about two states while, on the ground, one state consolidates control over the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, then another question can no longer be avoided: If two states are made impossible, can anyone defend a permanent one-state reality in which Palestinians and Israelis do not enjoy equal national and political rights?
It is not for me, or for this article, to decide on behalf of Palestinians and Israelis what the final political arrangement must look like.
But one principle should be simpler than every map and every negotiating formula: The future cannot be the permanent domination of one people by another.
Either there are two real states: Israel and an independent, sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Or, if the reality created on the ground makes that solution impossible, there must be one democratic state in which Palestinians and Israelis live with equal rights and equal citizenship.
The international community cannot defend the two-state solution in words, accept one-state control in practice, and reject equal rights within the reality that emerges.
In September 1993, the world watched Arafat and Rabin shake hands
The question then was: When will the Palestinian state be established?
Thirty-three years later, another question comes first: What land will remain for that state—and who will still be there to live on it?
Maps do not record intentions.
They record outcomes.
When a farmer is prevented from reaching his land, when a shepherd loses his grazing ground, when water no longer reaches a field, when a home is demolished, and when a refugee is displaced again from a refugee camp, it is not only individual lives that change.
The map changes.
That is why the question is no longer simply: Where is the Palestinian state?
It is also: Is there still enough connected land for such a state to exist—and will Palestinians still be able to remain on it?
We can disagree over the name, borders, or structure of the eventual solution.
But no permanent solution can mean one people enjoying full national and political rights while another remains under its control without the same fundamental rights.
A bombing may stop. A military raid may end. A bulldozer may leave. A checkpoint may be removed.
But if a family has lost its home, if a farmer has lost access to his land, if a crop has died because water no longer reaches it, or if a refugee has been displaced once again, the result remains visible on the map.
The land stays where it is.
What changes is who is able to remain on it.
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Qusra is Just a Warning: Israel’s Blueprint for the West Bank
What emerged in Qusra was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: Settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.
Aug 28, 2026
If you want to understand the bleak future awaiting the occupied West Bank, do not look away. Just pay attention to the events unfolding in the small Palestinian town of Qusra, south of Nablus.
The story of the future of the West Bank begins here.
While much of the media is treating reports emerging from the area as simply another episode of “settler violence,” it is not. Qusra represents something far more consequential: a glimpse into the new Plan Dalet that Israel has in store for Palestinians.
Plan Dalet was the military blueprint through which Zionist forces conquered much of historic Palestine, village by village, during the Nakba.
The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.
The plan did not suddenly emerge in 1948. It built on military schemes dating back to 1945, developing into a strategy for conquering Palestinian towns and villages, destroying communities, and expelling their inhabitants.
The significance of this history today is not merely symbolic. The Nakba was a process, implemented in stages. So, too, is the annexation of the West Bank.
Nor is this merely an intellectual argument. Israeli officials have openly invoked a new Nakba as an intended outcome. In November 2023, Avi Dichter declared: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding, “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end.”
True to form, this new Nakba carries many of the characteristics of the old one: coordinated violence, massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and land confiscation.
The genocide in Gaza represents the zenith of this violence—a more devastating manifestation, but a continuation of the original sin upon which the Israeli state was established.
While all eyes were on Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023, the West Bank was largely ignored, allowing Israel the space to escalate violence in all its forms to levels unseen in decades.
The result has been staggering. Since October 7, 2023, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank, including over 240 children, and wounded thousands more. Tens of thousands have been detained, while more than 33,000 Palestinians remain displaced from the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps alone.
Now, back to Qusra.
Beginning on August 9, armed Israeli settlers surrounded three Palestinian homes in the Ras al-Ain area on the outskirts of the town.
They blocked access to the houses, erected tents outside them, and cut water and electricity supplies. Families, including young children, were effectively trapped inside.
The Israeli military subsequently declared the surrounding area a closed military zone, restricting access by Palestinians, activists, and journalists.
What emerged was not simply settler violence but a division of labor: Settlers create the crisis; the army imposes the restrictions; Palestinian movement is curtailed; and the victims themselves are pressured to leave.
And the siege continued. As I write these words, the siege of the Qusra homes has concluded its second week.
Qusra is not incidental to this strategy. Israel has already confiscated its land for the settlement of Migdalim, while nearby outposts including Esh Kodesh have long been associated with attacks and attempts to seize Palestinian agricultural land.
Control of such areas is essential to the larger project of connecting settlement blocs, fragmenting Palestinian territory, and transforming Palestinian communities into isolated enclaves.
A few years ago, the Israeli government behaved as though its plan to formally annex large swathes of the West Bank had been placed on hold. Yet, since October 7, annexation has moved from aspiration to obsession—in both words and action.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir oversaw the mass distribution of weapons after October 7, arming thousands of civilian security-squad members with rifles amid an already heavily armed settler population.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has systematically worked to transfer powers over the West Bank from military administration to Israeli civilian authorities—one of the clearest institutional mechanisms of annexation.
And now another piece is falling into place: Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered preparations to transfer law-enforcement responsibility over Israeli settlers in the West Bank from the military to the Israeli police, another critical legal step toward annexation.
The picture is becoming complete: settler militias, government funding, weapons, the army, police, civilian bureaucracies, courts, and political decisions originating at the highest levels of the Israeli state.
Seen in this wider context, Qusra becomes a microcosm—and potentially a testing ground—for the mechanisms through which larger-scale annexation can be implemented. These realities echo the past. The Nakba did not simply "happen," but followed years of planning and incremental military schemes. That is why Qusra matters.
Some governments are warning of accelerating annexation; others sanction individual settlers, as though targeting a few extremists could reverse a blueprint implemented by an entire state apparatus.
Palestinians in the West Bank are fully aware of the challenge awaiting them. Urging the Palestinian Authority, which maintains security coordination with Israel, to suddenly devise a "strategy" is painfully redundant.
But for the rest of us who understand the horrors of the Nakba—and the reverberations of that catastrophe from Deir Yassin to the genocide in Gaza—recognition is no longer enough.
The price of silence is already being paid by every Gazan living among the ruins of the strip and every Palestinian in the West Bank confronting the violence of settlers and their military partners.
It needs to end now, before Qusra becomes the blueprint for what comes next: today, Qusra; tomorrow, the whole of the West Bank.
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From Iraq to Gaza, We Are Failing in Our Debt to the Child
What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?
Aug 26, 2026
"Whereas mankind owes to the child the best it has to give…"—United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 1959
There were Iraqi children before Gaza, before Hind. Before Iran and the Minab School bombing. Iraqi children dying by the thousands, as many as 500,000 as a result of US-supported UN economic sanctions and wars in Iraq. Governments expressed “concern.” International scholars and lawyers called it a genocide. Former Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, called it a price worth paying.
Who are we; what universe is this where one writes again and again in support of children, of “the child” as if they were some political cause. It’s the new abnormal, where everyday brings news of children suffering, injured and dying, in Iraq, in Ukraine, and Sudan. In Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, in Iran and Lebanon to name a few.
The child is trapped in a car, shot dead; they are buried under the rubble of their bombed-out house, of their school or the hospital where they have just been born. They’re wounded, missing eyes, arms, and legs; missing parents and siblings, aunts and uncles.They’re missing all the little as well as the significant “stuff” that is, that should be, a child's life. They’re sick and there are no doctors or medicines; they’re hungry and there’s no food or clean water. There’s no school, no mosque, no church, and no more neighborhood. Out of a house, in a tent or on the street, forcibly moved from here to there. What sort of world is this, what kind of culture. What heart refuses to protect and even worse, intentionally targets “the child” along with the people and institutions that provide the care and protection necessary to sustain the child’s life?
We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues.
While instinct—some call it maternal—helps insure the future of a species, caring about and for one’s own offspring doesn’t necessarily translate to caring about all children. This enormous responsibility has been taken up by governments and international organizations; children need guaranteed special protections because they are “…innocent, vulnerable, and dependent.” The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1990), the most widely endorsed human rights document in history, committed world leaders to giving children the “first call” on human and financial resources and know-how to address critical issues such as: poverty, education, child and maternal health, and protection during armed conflicts. With great fanfare, they reaffirmed these aspirations, calling for a world “fit” for children in 2002 at the UN Special Session on Children, the largest ever gathering for a UN Special Session.
The disconnect of words to actions and to the actual situation for children in 2002, as the Special Session convened, was not lost on those of us who cared about Iraq and Iraqi children. An estimated half million had died. The alarming increase in birth defects and childhood cancers was stressing a medical system under siege. The overall health of Iraqi children as measured by the Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) “…the single most significant indicator of the state of a nation’s children…” had declined by 160% in the decade since the CRC. It was the largest decline in well-being by far for children in any country in the world. And this, like the overall destruction of Iraq and Iraqi society was brought on by war and sustained by the severe US-supported UN economic sanctions imposed by the very agency pledging to take responsibility for the world’s children.
International law failed to protect Iraqi children; it has failed Palestinian children for decades despite their well-documented fragility under Israeli occupation. And now, we watch as the already precarious “child” in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank suffers unimaginable atrocities.“Atrocity in the ordinary sense of the term, as evoking simply the shock and horror that most would feel in the face of such enormous and gratuitous human damage; a circumstance in which we would be hard-pressed not to disparage the justifications” (Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, 2010).
UN and human rights organizations wring their hands and issue condemnations. Some do not call this a genocide. The majority that might help to end this catastrophe has stood by—including women, mothers, and global health and human rights organizations—and watched the occupation and genocide kill and maim thousands and thousands of Palestinian children and their extended families. Watched as the very country is rendered uninhabitable. Stood silently by as the very ones seeking to protect Palestinian children are treated and prosecuted as terrorists.
The moving promises of UN declarations and their aspirations on behalf of children have come to nothing. We’re being subjected to a form of global violence Joy Gordon warned about, that of "a single nation," or in today’s world, two nations—the US and Israel—"hijacking an institution of international governance, substituting their own agenda in place of the interests and will of the international community.” This should not stand.
According to the Ministry of Health, 73,386 Palestinians—including 21,000 children—were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 174,256 were injured between October 7, 2023 and August 9, 2026. This includes 1,258 fatalities and 4,295 injuries between the announcement of a ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025 and August 9, 2026. We know, everyone knows this is not the world “fit for Children” promised by global leaders at the UN some 30 years ago, yet it continues. I’m at a loss. What can be said that hasn’t been said, or written that hasn’t been written. What poem or investigative article, what personal narrative could possibly bring an end to this carnage.
In 1915 Henry James declared, “The war has used up words, they have weakened, they have deteriorated…” Dr. Salma Al-Hadad, head of the pediatric oncology unit at Children’s Welfare Teaching Hospital in Baghdad since 1992, shared his view. After years of interviews revealing the struggles to save increasing numbers of patients with increasingly difficult cancers without even the most basic medicines and technology, she went silent. “The very hard times I’ve experienced over these years,” she wrote sometime in a mid-2000 email, “have rendered me silent. I find no comment.”
The moral universe owes a deep debt to the people of Palestine who have not gone silent, or ceased to document the atrocities against them. They pay for this every day with their lives, and in many cases the lives of other family members. I urge myself on. We have to repay that debt by breaking the silence even when we feel there is nothing more to say. Silence cannot be an option for those who are suffering under the weight of the atrocities being committed against children.
"All people,” wrote Leo Tolstoy, “live, Not by reason of any care they have for themselves, But by the love for them that is in other people.” If we truly care about “the child,” we have to increase our efforts on their behalf.
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The Gaza Peace Trump Announced, and the Rejection Netanyahu Delivered
Netanyahu’s arrogant message is unmistakable: Israel can defy Washington, and Washington will absorb the political cost.
Aug 15, 2026
President Donald Trump took to social media Thursday, July 30 to announce what he called a breakthrough: a phased agreement under the Board of Peace requiring the Palestinian Resistance to disarm and Israel to withdraw. The optics were of a president closing out a genocide he, and his predecessor, enabled for two years.
The Palestinian Resistance agreed to the plan. Israel rejected it.
Imagine if the Resistance had rejected the 15 points by reasonably conditioning disarmament on an end to Israeli occupation. We don't have to imagine Trump's reaction. He'd have condemned them by nightfall and held them responsible for killing the peace plan.
Israel gets a different standard. On Sunday, August 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet, “I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document.”
Trump's Gaza legacy does not differ from his predecessor former President Joe Biden's. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu's rejection.
Rather than call out Israel for sabotaging his own plan, Trump waved away Netanyahu's rejection as mere election posturing, as if that were acceptable. Trump’s dismissal didn't go unnoticed. Three days later, Israel's Defense Minister, Israel Katz, doubled down declaring that Israel will not withdraw, not from Gaza, not from Lebanon, and not from Syria
Last May, I wrote an article: “Stop blaming Netanyahu, stupid,” where I argued, it was never one man. It's the Zionist Project itself, and the Israeli public that keeps ratifying it. A poll released last summer found 76% of Israelis believe the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. Half of all Israelis now say they'd support renewing Jewish settlement inside Gaza itself—a figure that climbs to 83% among the ultra-Orthodox and 67% among religious Jews. And in a finding that goes to the heart of how Israelis have rewritten their own history, 56% now believe that if the 2005 disengagement had never happened, October 7 would have been far less likely.
Withdrawal, in other words, has been recast in the Israeli imagination as the original sin, not occupation, and not Israel’s pre-October 7 starvation siege.
In rejecting Trump’s plan, Netanyahu is pandering to his voting base. He is giving the Israeli Jewish majority exactly what they've told pollsters they want. He's competing against political challengers who reject any withdrawal from Gaza. Trump excuses this as political “posturing,” as if it's temporary, when in fact, it is creating a status quo to be normalized after the election.
As usual, Israel responded to Trump’s plan in two days of intensive strikes across Gaza, murdering 26 Palestinians and wounding 76. The single ugliest strike hit medicine warehouses attached to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, one of the last facilities in central Gaza still able to treat large numbers of patients. Two of four storage buildings were destroyed and two more badly damaged. The target was a “dangerous storage” of intravenous fluid, dialysis supplies, intensive-care medication, in a place where half the dialysis machines didn't work and kidney patients were dying because treatment sessions keep getting cut.
These weren't abstractions. In Gaza City's al-Sousi Tower, a strike killed Abdullah Abu Taif, 33; his pregnant wife, Abeer Anan, 29; their 5-year-old son, Azzam; and where medics recovered the remains of an unborn child from the rubble. Near Khan Younis, a strike murdered Mahmoud al-Hams, 38; his wife, Fatima, 37; and their young daughter. An elderly couple, Kamal and Huda Abu Muailiq, were killed in their home near Deir el-Balah the same night.
This’s how Israel translates Trump’s “breakthrough” on the ground.
It is how Netanyahu sends a message to American presidents, as he did nearly a year ago when he openly defied Trump’s calls to stop bombing Gaza. Palestinian children’s blood becomes the currency of political pressure. With every refusal to heed Washington, Netanyahu demonstrates that he can ignore an American president’s demands without consequence, while the credibility and authority of the US president are diminished in the process. Netanyahu’s arrogant message is unmistakable: Israel can defy Washington, and Washington will absorb the political cost.
In October 2025, Israel secured the release of Israeli captives under a deal conditioned on ending the war. It got what it wanted immediately and did not deliver on its side. Since the ceasefire of October 10, 2025, Israel has violated it more than 4,000 times, murdering 1,300 Palestinians—more than all the Israelis, soldiers and civilians, killed on October 7. This is while food aid deliveries was two-thirds less than what the agreement promised. The territory Israel was supposed to withdraw from has instead expanded from 53% to 70%. Any withdrawal Israel may now negotiate, if any at all, will start from that expanded line of occupation, not the yellow line agreed at the ceasefire.
A president who announces a peace deal to the world has no agency of his own. He is too weak to bring himself to hold Netanyahu to account for rejecting his own plan; a political eunuch, unable to rein in a potentate whose country survives on US political and financial largesse.
Trump's Gaza legacy does not differ from his predecessor former President Joe Biden's. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu's rejection. Two subservient leaders who had shown over again that Israel does not answer to Washington, Washington answers to Israel. They leave behind a legacy of enabling an Israeli genocide and two consecutive Israel-first administrations.
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Occupation and Genocide Anywhere Are a Threat to Democracy and Freedom Everywhere
Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all.
May 20, 2026
Earlier this year a number of participants announced their withdrawal from Australia’s Adelaide Festival’s "Writer’s Week" following the disinviting of Australian-Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah. The event was subsequently cancelled.
This made me think of United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese’s words—“The occupation of Palestine must be understood as part of a broader project of domination. This is not merely about the physical borders of historical Palestine. It is a systematic assertion of permanent supremacy that knows no border…”—delivered in her Nelson Mandela Lecture.
Indeed, the impact of the ongoing genocide and occupation not only echo far beyond Palestine, because of our shared humanity, but also because of the impact it is having on freedoms across the globe. The censorship of Abdel-Fattah is yet another example of this, and it is not only happening in Australia. Even in South Africa, a country that charged Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), artists are facing attempts to constrain their work.
The global wave of solidarity with Palestine has been used by some governments as a pretext to diminish freedoms by attacking the right to protest and political participation. While some did this by using laws that were already in place, others enacted ambiguous or unduly expansive legislation criminalizing Palestine solidarity and weaponizing the battle against antisemitism.
Protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.
For instance in the US, Project Esther was released by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank also responsible for the odious Project 2025. The strategy’s recommendations have made their way into the policy of the Trump administration. This includes suing, firing, deporting, and defaming activists, organizations, and institutions by effectively claiming that involvement in advocacy for Palestine is material support of "a terrorist support network.” And also clamping down on college and university campuses where “more than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained.”
The United Kingdom, on the other hand, used counterterrorism legislation to ban Palestine Action. This despite an intelligence assessment report undermining the government’s claims by finding that most of the groups’ activities are “not terrorism” and the ban risked wrongfully criminalizing people. While the ban has been found to be unlawful, since put into effect in July 2025 terrorism arrests have increased by 660%, with the majority of these linked to it.
Across Europe Palestine solidarity was particularly targeted, like in Germany where the homes of pro-Palestinian activists have been raided and support for Israel has become a prerequisite for citizenship.
The effects of these actions will not be limited to Palestine advocacy and puts all movements at risk by diminishing freedoms that enable organizing across issues. So protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.
Research by investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory, Andrew Loewenstein, identified over 120 countries that have bought weapons or some form of repressive technology from Israel, all principally tested on Palestinians.
Israel provided military and strategic support to apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola, resulting in mass casualties; it is among the countries that armed perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide and Myanmar at a time it was found to be committing a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against its Rohingya Muslim population.
In modern times Israel’s offerings have included drones, spyware, and surveillance tools. Like the Israeli-made spyware being used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an immigration agency that has been found to not only undertake abusive practices, but also violate its own policies.
For us in South Africa though, this is no surprise. The "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, where I was born and raised, was a product of the South African apartheid regime’s segregationist policies—which Israel took interest in—and stripped Black people of South African citizenship.
Like other homelands when it declared "independence" in 1977, it was shunned by the world. Despite its official stance, Israel was the only country to quietly recognize Bophuthatswana through informal connections and a quasi-diplomatic mission. A Jerusalem Post editorial in 1992 even referred to Bophuthatswana as "Africa’s Little Israel."
The backdrop of this relationship was the “clandestine alliance” between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Not only did the two countries collaborate on nuclear, but Israel would also become South Africa's largest weapons importer after the 1977 UN arms embargo and support the regime’s attempt to undermine sanctions.
It was a relationship of mutual admiration, an ideological alignment that in recent times is only matched by India’s admiration of Israel.
Apartheid had far-reaching consequences that extended beyond South Africa's borders. Along with unlawfully occupying Namibia, a colonial legacy embraced by the regime, it also launched hostilities in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Similarly, Israel continues to conduct atrocities and aggression not only against the Palestinian people, but also in places like Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria. More recently, more than 300 people have been killed and scores injured following Israel's 10 minute assault in Lebanon—despite a two-week Middle East ceasefire, which Israel would afterwards claim did not include Lebanon. In the same way apartheid was deemed a threat to international peace and security, so too is the occupation and genocide in Palestine.
Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all. Because beyond the bombs, Israel has used international humanitarian law to try to justify the murder of civilians—a template being adopted by others like the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.
Like the people of South Africa and oppressed people everywhere, the people of Palestine too will continue to make their rightful claim to freedom. And for the sake of humanity everywhere, people of conscience must continue to stand with them and keep the fire of freedom within reach.
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The All Too Ordinary Death of Nasrallah Abu Siyam
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades.
Feb 26, 2026
I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.
Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his fam ily’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.
In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.
What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades—one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.
Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it.
That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:
“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”
In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood— that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.
Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.
Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers—229 of them children. That means more than 1 in 5 of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.
And yet, none of this devastation takes place on a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice—not as rare or exceptional events.
By this point, it may sound like a broken record—not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.
Impunity—that, I must say—does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam—at least six of them in the past two years—are killed under an occupation supported by US authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.
Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life—American or not—is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.
No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable—and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.
This piece was originally published on Substack.
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Trump Is Right to Discuss His Gaza Peace Plan and the Melania Film in the Same Speech
Ironically, his framing of his plans for Gaza as in some way like the Melania film displays a Freudian slip, a rare moment of complete honesty, since both are just for show, with no reality behind them.
Feb 20, 2026
President Donald J. Trump convened his so-called “Board of Peace” in Washington, DC, on Thursday. Some two dozen formal member states attended, and a similar number of international observers.
Trump again lied in saying that he had resolved eight wars, even as he seemed intent on fomenting one against Iran. Of Gaza, where the Israeli genocide continues with less visibility, he said, “Gaza is very complex. It’s been amazing. I want to thank Steve and Jared for an amazing job. Marco’s over there watching. Everybody’s fantastic. And JD, what a job they’re all doing.”
The Gaza so-called “ceasefire” has never actually been implemented, with continued Israeli occupation of over half the strip and continued bombardment and throttling of food and medical aid. It has not moved to the “second stage,” much less the third.
Trump’s Gaza project is like most of his gaudy con games, such as his university, which never educated any students and for which he had to settle out of court; or such as his border wall with Mexico, which will never be built nor will Mexico pay for it; or such as his regime change gambit in Venezuela, where he simply colluded in a coup with Nicolas Maduro’s vice president; or such as the Jeff Bezos film about Melania that has lost at least $60 million. As we will see, he more or less admits the justice of this last comparison. That is, his Gaza plans have no concrete reality, consisting of a mere Potemkin Village. In the meantime, the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are sleeping rough and suffering food and medicine shortages and their children are not receiving an education, since Israel destroyed all the schools and universities.
Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists.
He said:
Albania, Kosovo, Kazakhstan have all committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza. Egypt and Jordan are likewise providing very, very substantial help, troops, training, and support for a very trustworthy Palestinian police force.
Andrew Roth at The Guardian reports that Morocco and Indonesia have also agreed to send troops. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said he would be willing to send 8,000 soldiers, and even more. President Prabowo, a former general, leads the world’s most populous Muslim country and is seeking a higher profile on the world stage.
The Guardian explains, “Maj Gen Jasper Jeffers III, the US officer appointed to command the future international stabilisation force (ISF), said the board planned to deploy 20,000 soldiers in five different sectors of Gaza, beginning with Rafah.”
This colonial military arrangement is a recipe for disaster. The foreign troops will almost certainly come into conflict with Hamas. And Israel has a long history of shelling United Nations peacekeeping troops in Lebanon. Since Trump cannot conceive of a genuine political solution that gives basic rights to the Palestinians, this overlay of foreign troops is simply a Band-Aid over a deep wound that will certainly break open again.
According to the computer-generated transcript at C-SPAN, which I had ChatGPT clean up, Trump announced:
But together, we’re committed to achieving a Gaza that is properly governed throughout the whole area is going to be, you know, so many countries that have really nothing to do with the Middle East, but they’re maybe somewhat close by.They’re all involved. They want to go in and fight. They tell me all the time, "We’d like to send soldiers to fight if it’s necessary."
And I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.
We have two countries that want to go in and do a number on Hamas.
I said, "I really don’t think it’s I hope it’s not going to be necessary because they made a promise and they promised me get rid of their weapons."
Looks like they’re going to be doing that, but we’ll have to find out.
But it’s no longer a hot bed of radicalism and terror.
And to end that we have uh today and I’m pleased to announce that Kazakhstan, Azerban, UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Usbekistan, and Kuwait have all contributed more than 7 billion dollars toward the relief package.
Trump said that he would also put in $10 billion. That is $17 billion, if it ever actually materializes. Trump’s $10 billion almost certainly will not. In fact, it is not clear where he would get it from. I presume that the US Constitution has not yet been entirely abolished and that Congress is the body that appropriates funds. In any case, it is insufficient. The United Nations estimates that rebuilding Gaza will cost $70 billion.
The premise, that the conflict is resolved, is also faulty. Israeli cabinet members continue to push for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Hamas leaders have said that they will only lay down their arms if a Palestinian government is established in Gaza. Trump instead plans a colonial administration that in some ways resembles the one established by the League of Nations after WW I, which started the whole Mideast catastrophe.
Trump said in introductory remarks:
When I took office, the war in Gaza was raging with thousands of people being killed and no end in sight.
Today, thanks to unrelenting diplomacy and the commitment of many of the great people in this room, we have 59 countries signed up on Gaza.Think of that. We have uh it’s amazing. But all the people, many really so many in this room, the war in Gaza is over. It’s over. There are little flames. Little flames.
Hamas has been I think they’re going to give up their weapons, which is what they promised. If they don’t, it’ll be, you know, they’ll be harshly met. Very harshly met. They don’t want that.
You know, all the stuff like they don’t mind dying. They told me that’s not true. Everyone said, “Oh, they don’t mind dying.” No, they don’t want to die. They said, “We don’t want to die. People don’t want to die.”
The ceasefire was held and every last remaining hostage, both living and dead, has been returned back home. Think of that. That was an impossibility.
And we did hundreds of hostages, but the last 20, and I always said to Steve and Jared, I said, “The last 20 are going to be very tough. Very, very tough.” And we got them back.
We got the living back. And then we only got about 16 of the dead. And we said, “Well, you got to get them all. You promised them all.”
And they dug and dug and dug. You can imagine it’s a job that’s brutal.
And Hamas really did a lot of that work. And you got to give them credit for that. They uh they brought the last last one home a week ago.
And we got all 28 of them living and dead.
The amazing thing because I’ve never seen anything quite like it. The the parents of the dead, they knew their boy was dead. This case boys, all boys, men. But to the parents’ boys, they knew their boy was dead.
They wanted that dead body as much as if he were alive.
And when they got them back, there was great sadness, but there was great joy, too.
They wanted it as much as the people that got their sons back alive.
But we got a lot of people before those 20, Steve, what nobody talks about, but you know, hundreds of people.
Uh we did a good job and you guys did a fantastic job.
I want to thank every nation that helped us achieve this monumental breakthrough saving countless lives and really bringing peace and bringing the concept of peace because nobody thought peace in the Middle East.
I’ve always heard peace in the Middle East is impossible and it’s turned out not to be.
And we do have some work to do with Iran. They can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s very simple. They can’t have you can’t have peace in the Middle East if they have a nuclear weapon.
And they can’t have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been told that very strongly.
Since the hard one ceasefire of last October, the United States and our partners have facilitated the delivery of vast amounts of humanitarian aid, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before.
In November, the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved the Board of Peace.
And last month in Davos, we welcomed over two dozen members to this very important new organization and we are very closely working with the United Nations...
First I had an escalator that stopped. You know that it’s going up. Boom.
It’s lucky my movie star first lady was in front of me because I put my hand on a certain part of her body and I was able to stop my fall. otherwise because she had no trouble.
I said, “Boy, that was a very sharp stop, Johnny.”
So, I said, “That was strange. I’ve I’ve been on a lot of escalators. It’s never happened before. Usually, it stops very slowly. This was just boom, but our first lady was right in the proper location for me.”
I’m waving to people and uh she was holding on a little tighter. She knew what was happening. She did. She said she
That’s a very successful movie out right now. like number one. Can you believe this? And it’s a big movie big movie star.
And I always say it’s trouble because I always say there’s not room in one family for two stars. I told that we can’t have two stars in one family.
So I don’t know what that means, but it’s not it’s not good.
But it is good because we’re proud of her. She did a People in the United States love the first lady and she did the movie and it’s become the biggest selling documentary in 20 years. Can you believe?
The theaters are all packed. Women especially, they go back and they see it two or three times, four times.
I include the comments about the escalator and Melania and the part of her body and Trump losing his balance and his description of her as a movie star because Jeff Bezos funded a boondoggle flick that has earned $16 million on a $75 million production budget. These sorts of passages, which suggest mental imbalance, are usually edited out by the MSM. This one speaks eloquently about how the Trumps are at the center of his thinking even when he is discussing Gaza.
Ironically, his framing of his plans for Gaza as in some way like the Melania film displays a Freudian slip, a rare moment of complete honesty, since both are just for show, with no reality behind them.
I’m glad, and I think everyone is glad, that the living Israeli hostages were released and the remains of the dead were returned to their grieving families. Hamas’ hostage-taking, targeting innocent civilians for the most part, was an egregious war crime.
But it is astonishing that this man could jabber on like that about Melania and about his so-called ceasefire in Gaza for all that time and never mention the way its Palestinian population has been genocided, Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, and tens of thousands of its innocent civilians slaughtered, including 19,000 children. And while it is true that he, unlike Joe Biden, forced the Israeli government to reduce the intensity of its campaign substantially, he hasn’t actually brought peace to the strip, where Israel has killed hundreds in recent months and where it continues to brutalize the civilian population.
Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, United Arab Emirates, United States, and Uzbekistan are founding members of the BOP, and the following countries have indicated an intention to join: Albania, Belarus, Cambodia, Egypt.
The list consists for the most part of small countries or medium powers hoping to ingratiate themselves with the president for their own reasons. The US is the only democracy, if it is one anymore. Turkiye has become a competitive authoritarian regime and Israel rules 5 million Palestinians militarily without affording them any right to vote on their own destinies. Western Europe indignantly rejected Trump’s overtures.
Critics have complained that Trump, who made himself chairman of the board for life, is attempting to replace the United Nations—which he has defunded in an attempt to destroy it—with a body under his personal control.
It doesn’t matter. Nothing constructive will come of all this verbiage and all this kowtowing to Trump by an assemblage of dictators, absolute monarchies, dusted-off generals, genocidaires, and far right-wing populists. Palestinians are huddling in tents atop the rubble of their former homes, and babies are dying of hypothermia. We can talk about the “ceasefire” when that situation has been remedied.
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Before It Even Began, This Year’s UNGA Revealed Its Bias Toward Israel
Despite a theme centered on peace and a strong commitment to safeguarding fundamental human rights, this year’s session is already exhibiting deep cracks that hint at a stark contradiction between the UN General Assembly's stated ideals and its actions.
Sep 25, 2025
The United Nations is often regarded as the global community’s foremost symbol of peace and problem solving. Each September, world leaders gather in New York City for the annual General Assembly, a weeklong summit that is framed as the pinnacle of diplomacy and international cooperation. This year’s 80th session opened on Tuesday, September 23, under the theme: “Better together, 80 years and more for peace, development, and human rights.”
While the 2025 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) boasts a laundry list of urgent global issues, the question of Palestine is poised to take center stage. Against the backdrop of deepening humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, and a recent wave of announcements by many Western countries formally recognizing Palestinian statehood, the world is watching closely to see how global leaders will respond.
However, despite a theme centered on peace and a strong commitment to safeguarding fundamental human rights, this year’s session is already exhibiting deep cracks that hint at a stark contradiction between the UNGA’s stated ideals and its actions. It was already evident—even before the proceedings had begun—that this forum is not structured to advance concrete action to end the atrocities unfolding in occupied Palestine but, rather, to further Israeli interests.
In perhaps the most glaring example of UN hypocrisy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is currently the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant and whose government has officially been charged with genocide by the UN itself—has been granted a prominent platform and is scheduled to address the UNGA this Friday, September 26. In stark contrast, Palestinian delegates have been denied US visas, effectively banning them from attending in person. While virtual participation has been permitted, the message is unmistakable: Netanyahu will quite literally have the stage to blast propaganda in attempt to justify Israel’s genocide, while Palestinian voices remain largely sidelined.
This year’s UNGA—with Netanyahu present and genocide apologists like Baerbock taking prominent roles—allows global leaders to save face without delivering any substantive change.
This blatant evidence of UN bias in favor of Israel, and its broader complicity in Israel’s genocide, has been further reinforced by the election of former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock as president of this year’s UNGA. During her tenure as Germany’s foreign minister, Baerbock pursued a staunchly pro-Israel agenda, offering unwavering support for Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank. Notably, in October 2023, she blocked a European Union declaration calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
As thoroughly detailed in a recent press release by the National Lawyers Guild International Committee, Baerbock’s record of militarism clashes with the stated mission of the United Nations and, of course, the theme of this General Assembly. Under Baerbock’s supervision, Germany approved arms deliveries to Israel totaling €485.1 million ($554.3 million), a record figure. She justified this support by echoing the Israeli government's claims about Hamas’ alleged use of human shields, stating that Hamas was “playing with human suffering, using women and children in Gaza as human shields, hiding its weapons under supermarkets, apartment blocks, even hospitals.”
It should be noted that the very leaders who have feigned solidarity with Palestine over the past few weeks—offering merely inadequate recognitions of Palestine statehood but no meaningful actions to end the genocide—were the ones who elected Baerbock to this position and will, more likely than not, refrain from boycotting Netanyahu’s appearance before the UNGA.
The overt influence of Israeli interests at this year’s UNGA reflects a longstanding pattern of systemic bias within the United Nations. From its early endorsement of resolutions that laid the groundwork for a Zionist ethnostate, to the enduring structural power imbalances—most notably the US veto, consistently weaponized to enable Israel and block ceasefire efforts—the UN has repeatedly failed the Palestinian people. Far from being a neutral arbiter, it has proven both ill-equipped and, at times, complicit in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
The staunch unwillingness of the UNGA, and the broader UN system, to challenge Israel or intervene in its ongoing genocide was made starkly clear just last year. The UNGA set a September 18 deadline for Israel to withdraw from all occupied Palestinian territories, citing an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice that affirms the illegality of the Israeli occupation. Israel, of course, ignored the demand; the deadline came and went without consequences, once again exposing the UN’s reliance on empty words rather than meaningful action.
And we are already witnessing a similar pattern of nonaction this year. While heads of state like France’s Emmanuel Macron attempt to use the UNGA to cleanse their reputations with hollow statements and symbolic gestures, it is crucial to recognize not only the UN’s ineffectiveness but also its role in perpetuating genocide and deflecting international outrage. Essentially functioning as a performative media spectacle, this year’s UNGA—with Netanyahu present and genocide apologists like Baerbock taking prominent roles—allows global leaders to save face without delivering any substantive change.
Words alone are not enough. Merely recognizing a Palestinian state does not end the genocide. What’s needed is an arms embargo, targeted sanctions, and other concrete measures that exert real pressure on Israel and force an end to its ongoing extermination campaign against the Palestinian people. In the face of sustained atrocities, including Israel’s current brutal assaults on Gaza City, and broader regional aggression by Israel throughout the Middle East, these lukewarm gestures by world leaders and the UNGA are nothing short of unacceptable.
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In Palestine, Food Is a Way to Survive, Resist, and Come Together
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation.
Sep 12, 2025
Food—and the denial of it—has come into sharp focus with the Israeli occupation’s mass starvation and genocide in Gaza and the increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Famine has been officially declared in Gaza.
The United Nations World Food Programme had estimated that at least 470,000 people have been enduring famine-like conditions in Gaza, a number growing by the day as the siege and blockade of food into Gaza continues
One in 5 children in Gaza suffers from "severe malnutrition" as of late July. When food is available to buy, the prices of essentials are astronomical, and privatized food aid delivery remains erratic, unsafe, and cruel, with several people shot dead while attempting to secure anything they can get to feed their families.
Amid these atrocities and the images of emaciated Palestinians, it is vital to remember that across every village in Palestine, food has not just been a means to survive but the connective tissue to our culture, identity, liberation, resistance, and to our land. Centuries-old food practices live on in the homes of the steadfast residents that remain. The ingredients and where and how they are grown may have changed as a result of decades of occupation and colonial violence, but customs and flavors endure.
Palestinians adapt and resist, and have done so for almost 80 years.
Agricultural practices and communities have adapted and been transformed. Some have vanished with decades of displacement and extermination, while others have stood firm and celebrated a resurgence. Recipes have evolved to make use of new ingredients connected to the struggle for land and resources, and traditions like al-ʿAwna, a system of collective agricultural labor, embody this spirit of adaptation and resilience. Rooted in mutual aid, al-ʿAwna has long repelled colonial tactics of extermination and displacement by providing communal opportunities to cultivate land, acquire food, cook, and support one another.
For Palestinians, food has been a means to prevail.
A History of Adaptation and Mutual Aid
During the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948, more than 530 Palestinian villages were forcibly displaced. People were cut off from their land and farms and lost access to growing Indigenous produce. Many became refugees overnight, pushed into Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries and compelled to take up work in urban areas as settler colonialism eroded links to land and agricultural traditions.
Today, Palestinians have to increasingly buy rather than grow their own food, but the meals prepared with these staple ingredients still feature in kitchens and on dinner tables.
Before 1948, farmers from Silwan, a Jerusalem neighborhood, would grow black-eyed beans and green chard in the Bustan area. Foraging for ingredients like khubayza, nettle, milk thistle, and mulberry leaves was and is still practiced in Palestine. Seeds were distributed among Palestinian communities to grow native fruits and vegetables, including a recent initiative in northern Gaza called Thamara that distributes these seeds to those living in tent camps as a result of Israel’s ongoing military onslaught in the Strip.
Food as solidarity
While Palestinians may have been separated from their land where they grew wheat and sesame, their dishes persisted through new recipes and food traditions from different towns and villages, fused into new culinary traditions. Rummaniyeh—a lentil and eggplant stew cooked in pomegranate juice—was modified by Palestinians from Lid and Ramleh who were displaced into Gaza. There, they added Gazan flavors like ‘ein jarada (dill seeds and chili) and red taheini (sesame sauce), giving birth to a distinct new flavor.
These culinary delights revolved around the concept of takaya (soup kitchens), an Islamic tradition based on communities looking after one another. Solidarity was the basis of food cooked and eaten together.
Many takaya were built hundreds of years ago, with Hebron’s itikea established in the 12th century and still in use today. Others followed during the Ottoman era, such as the Fatmeh Khatun itkiea in Jerusalem near Al-Aqsa Mosque, two takayas in Gaza, one in Al-Bireh, and another one in Jenin. Over time, traditions of takaya and giving became prevalent in every Palestinian town and village. Ouneh and faz’a, cultures of mutual aid through funding and community help, were also established to support those in need. Their existence defies settler colonialism ensuring survival and a sense of community despite threats of erasure (see Jerusalem in the Malmouk Era: History and Architecture, Taawon Publishers, Jerusalem, 2024).
Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Six years ago, an initiative was launched in rural Jerusalem to prepare meals for resisters on Mount Sbih that settlers were attempting to occupy. Another itikea was launched in Jerusalem for hospital patients from Gaza who came to the city to receive treatment.
The occupation has realized that there is strength in our traditions of mutually preparing food and passing our recipes through generations. That is why it has targeted takaya across Palestine, destroying some 42 of them in recent years. But my research has consistently shown that our people and our food can overcome this, too.
Food as Memory
For so many Palestinians, certain dishes are tied to an event and a place in time and can evoke strong memories. Jarysheh, a dish of cracked wheat, meat broth, dried yogurt, and lamb, was a hallmark of weddings and funerals in Lifta and Dayr Yasin. But as elders such as Im Ibrahim, a woman from Dir Yasin, recalls: Jarysheh has not been made for a wedding since the Nakba—it is too deeply connected now with funerals and a sense of loss and death from the infamous Dayr Yasin Massacre on April 9, 1948.
Efforts to elevate Palestinian cuisine and food traditions can help prevent food appropriation and theft by the occupation. Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Food Sovereignty, Survival, and Resistance in the Present Day
Today in Gaza, the soil is forever contaminated with heavy metals from the relentless Israeli bombardment. According to a recent estimate of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Gaza is left with only 1.5% of cropland that is accessible and suitable for cultivation. Last month, in a violent assault on Palestinian food sovereignty, Israeli occupation forces raided and destroyed a Palestinian seed bank in the West Bank city of Hebron. A few weeks ago, in the village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah, the Israeli military carried out raids, demolished homes, and seized land. In addition to all the violence and forced displacement against the people of Al-Mughayyir, the Israeli army also uprooted 3,000 olive trees from their land, leaving them without land and olives and struggling for the minimum to survive.
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation. Hundreds of takaya have sprung up across the strip and few in Tulkarem and Jenin. Food and money donations pour in, and volunteers help cook food. They have become the primary source of cooked meals for the majority of the displaced population.
What is happening in Palestine today, the starvation and bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli occupation, not only threatens people’s immediate food security, dignity, and health but severely imperils Palestinian food sovereignty. Adaptive practices with deep roots in Palestinian traditions are our hope. They are a means to survive both as people and as a culture and serve as a stark example of Palestinian resilience, resistance, and sense of community. There may no longer be Jarysheh at weddings or black-eyed beans on the farms of Bustan, but there is nevertheless a collective will to survive and, together with our food, outlive the forces that try to erase us.
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Palestinian Women on Hunger Strike to Demand Israel Return Body of Peace Activist Killed by Israeli Settler
"Whatever the occupation forces will do, whatever the settlers will do, we will persist," said the mother-in-law of slain activist Awda Hathaleen.
Aug 04, 2025
More than 60 Palestinian women have launched a hunger strike to demand Israel return the body of a peace activist killed by an Israeli settler last week in the occupied West Bank.
The body of Awda Hathaleen, who was shot and killed on Monday as Israeli settlers moved in to bulldoze his village, is still being held by Israeli authorities.
Meanwhile, his killer—Yinon Levi, a notorious settler who has been sanctioned by several governments, at one point including the United States before President Donald Trump lifted the sanctions—has been set free after a brief period of house arrest.
Hathaleen, who appeared last year in the documentary No Other Land, was highly regarded among peace advocates in Palestine, Israel, and the United States—where he was scheduled for an interfaith speaking tour before he was abruptly deported by the U.S. government in June.
Israeli police have refused to return Hathaleen's body to family members for a burial unless his family agrees to hold a quick funeral under cover of night, outside the village, with no more than 15 people in attendance.
The family refused these restrictive conditions, saying: "Awda is not a thief. We will not bury him in the dark."
Following Hathaleen's killing, Israeli forces have also arrested at least eight others from the village—including Hathaleen's brother.
According to Middle East Eye:
Israeli forces have raided family homes in the village each night since the killing, arresting their husbands and brothers and beating other family members.
"A woman would be not properly dressed, lying in bed, and they would come in and open the door and say, 'We want your husband, we want your brother'," Ikhlas Hazalin, Hathaleen's sister-in-law, told Middle East Eye on Thursday.
"Whenever they didn't find whom they were looking for, other family members would be beaten–his brother, or one of his family members—until the wanted person was brought in."
Hazalin added: "I've never seen such brutality."
On Thursday, 60 women from Hathaleen's village of Umm al-Khair launched a hunger strike, demanding the Israeli military occupation release his body and free the eight others currently being held in detention.
"I found him soaked in his blood," Hathaleen's mother told Al Jazeera. "I started calling his name: 'Awdah!...Awdah!' But he wasn't responding."
"I am on hunger strike until they hand me my son's body," she said. "I want to smell him."
Hathaleen's wife, Hanady, said that their three children—none of whom is older than five—have spent recent days crying for their dad.
"The moment his father was killed, Mohammed was next to him, shouting, 'My God! My God!'," she said. "Mohammed is only two-and-a-half years old."
Her husband's death was the result of the government-backed settler violence he'd spent years attempting to resist. Since October 2023, nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the military and settlers in the West Bank, while Israel has demolished nearly 3,000 family homes, according to the United Nations.
In 2025 alone, there have already been more than 750 documented attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians or their property, which the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) says is a 13% increase from the previous year. Home demolitions ordered by Israeli authorities forcibly displaced over 1,200 Palestinians in the first half of the year.
The eight people from Umm al-Khair currently being held in detention are among more than 3,000 being held without charges by the Israeli military under administrative detention. Meanwhile, according to the human rights group Yesh Din, 94% of settlers who wage violence against Palestinians walk away without even facing criminal charges.
Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, described the attack on Umm al-Khair as a microcosm of this grave power imbalance.
"The people who were injured are in prison. The people who tried to prevent this are in prison. The people who acted in self-defence are in prison," she told Middle East Eye. "And the guy with the smoking gun—the guy who shot the gun on video—is sitting at home and drinking coffee."
Hathaleen's family says the military's refusal to let him have "the proper funeral that he deserves" is yet another indignity that they intend to resist.
On Thursday, his wife and nieces announced that they would not eat until his body was returned. Dozens of other women soon joined them across the village—ranging from teenagers to those in their 70s.
Many men in the village have said they will also join if the military continues to hold Hathaleen.
Israeli peace activists have joined in calls for Hathaleen's body to be returned to his family and for other Palestinian prisoners to be freed. Over the weekend, dozens of protesters marched through West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, leading to four arrests.
(Video: International Solidarity Movement)
"He was a great activist and a great man," said Hathaleen's mother-in-law, Fatme, in a video posted by the International Solidarity Movement. "Our hearts are in pain for him."
"We already had dizziness and fainting from hunger and thirst. Doesn't matter," she said. "Whatever happens to us, we will continue until he is returned to us."
The hunger strikers say they hope their sacrifice will put enough international attention on the Israeli authorities that they'll be pressured to return Hathaleen's body and free their friends and family without conditions.
"We will persist," Fatme Hathaleen said. "Whatever the occupation forces will do, whatever the settlers will do, we will persist."
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