Israeli forces raid several areas in occupied West Bank
The Israeli army has carried out raids across the occupied West Bank on Friday.
According to al-Jazeera, two Palestinians were arrested in the mountain areas north of Nablus, where clashes have broken out between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters in the town of Abwein, near Ramallah.
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Middle East Eye
10 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
Israeli settlers burn Palestinian homes and property in West Bank town
Israeli settlers set fire to several Palestinian properties and injuring dozens of residents in the occupied West Bank town of Deir Dibwan, east of Ramallah, on Wednesday evening. Dozens of settlers carried out the widespread attack, which residents have described as a "holocaust". Medical sources in the town said that at least 30 Palestinians were wounded, most suffering head wounds caused by settlers throwing stones and beating them with sticks. Additionally, dozens of others experienced choking due to smoke from the fires. Settlers burned at least seven homes, 10 vehicles, sheep pens, and a horse stable, according to local media. The Israeli army arrived more than an hour after the settlers set fire to Palestinian property and prevented residents from approaching or extinguishing the flames, which allowed the fires to spread further. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Ahmed Jaber, a resident of the Deir Dibwan, told Middle East Eye that at 6pm on Wednesday, 80 settlers entered the outskirts of the town via the settlement road known as Route 60. They immediately set fire to a building that was home to around 45 people, and also torched nearby vehicles and a horse stable belonging to their neighbours. The settlers then moved to another area, setting fire to vehicles along the way and assaulting anyone who tried to confront them. 'One resident, who suffers from chronic illnesses, sustained a facial fracture after being assaulted by the settlers. He was left bleeding until he was eventually taken to a medical centre,' Jaber said. On Wednsday, Israeli settlers attacked the town of Deir Dibwan in the occupied West Bank, east of Ramallah, and burned Palestinian owned homes and vehicles. According to the official Palestinian news agency, dozens of settlers attacked homes in the town belonging to the Abu Kaid… — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) June 4, 2025 Jaber added that an ambulance attempted to transport two wounded people to the government hospital in Ramallah, but the road was blocked by an Israeli military barrier. The ambulance was then forced to return to the town, where paramedics attempted to provide first aid. "The Israeli army stood on the settlement road, watching from a distance as everything unfolded and what we were being subjected to. After about an hour, they entered Deir Dibwan and prevented residents from extinguishing the fires," Jaber said. Residents rushed to save their livestock, but several animals were killed in the flames. A livestock feed store, a truck, and several barns were also destroyed. "The scene was unlike anything we've experienced before. Settlers have attacked the town in the past, but this was the most violent attack. We watched as property was reduced to ashes," he added. Israeli land theft Deir Dibwan has been constantly subjected to attacks by settlers in recent years, who have seized vast swaths of its land. The attacks have escalated since the current Israeli government, the most far-right in Israel's history, came to power in late 2022. The government then issued a decision to confiscate around 14,000 dunams of the town's land for military purposes. Israel to take full control of land registry in West Bank's Area C, cementing annexation Read More » The town's mayor, Imad Musabbeh, said that settler groups began targeting Deir Dibwan's land in April 2023, prior to the start of the war on Gaza. Since then, settlers have established four pastoral outposts and seized hundreds of dunams. More than 80 percent of Deir Dibwan's land has been confiscated, either through military decrees or settler attacks. "The settlers are preventing us from accessing our pastures and are seizing every area their cows and sheep can reach, under the full protection of the Israeli army," he told MEE. The town's residents can no longer graze their livestock anywhere but in their own yards - the only areas still accessible to them. Deir Dibwan is one of the leading Palestinian towns for livestock raising, the main source of income for its residents. However, this livelihood is now under threat due to a lack of grazing land and the continued targeting of residents by settlers through theft and violence. "We went to the Israeli courts several times and tried to stop the confiscation orders, but it seems they are political, not military. The goal is to seize as much of the town's land as possible and confine us to our homes. We have nothing left," the mayor said.
Middle East Eye
10 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
Netanyahu admits Israel armed Gaza gangs to drive lawlessness
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted his country is arming gangs in Gaza, which have been accused by aid groups of stealing lifesaving humanitarian aid, in a bid to counter the Palestinian movement Hamas. Netanyahu said on Thursday his government had "activated" powerful local clans in the enclave on the advice of "security officials," hours after former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman alleged the gang that Israel was backing was affiliated with the Islamic State group. "We made use of clans in Gaza that are opposed to Hamas… What's wrong with that?' Netanyahu said in a video posted on X. "It's only good. It saves the lives of Israeli soldiers." Hours earlier, Netanyahu's office said that "Israel is working to defeat Hamas in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment." New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Satellite images and videos seen by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz showed that the gang Israel is backing had expanded its presence in southern Gaza, and was operating inside an area under the direct control of the Israeli army. According to media reports, the gang is reportedly led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a Rafah resident from a Bedouin family, known locally for his involvement in criminal activity and the looting of humanitarian aid. Abu Shabab's gang, which calls itself the "Anti-Terror Service," is believed to consist of around 100 armed men. The Times of Israel reported on Thursday, citing unnamed defence sources, that Israel had provided members of the gang with Kalashnikov assault rifles, including some weapons seized from Hamas. Hours earlier, Lieberman, an opposition lawmaker, alleged that Abu Shabab's gang was affiliated with the Islamic State group. 'The Israeli government is giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons, identified with Islamic State, at the direction of the prime minister,' Lieberman, who heads the opposition Yisrael Beiteinu party, told Kan Bet public radio. "To my knowledge, this did not go through approval by the cabinet." Hamas officials told Reuters that Abu Shabab was wanted for "collaborating with the occupation against his people". The officials said Hamas fighters had killed at least two dozen of Abu Shabab's men before January, after they had allegedly looted aid trucks. Al Jazeera Arabic's Anas al-Sharif reported in early May that Israeli forces attacked shop owners and local Gaza security teams who were attempting to protect shops from looting and chaos. Asaad al-Kafarna, a police officer in Gaza, was killed by Israeli forces near a restaurant on 2 May after pursuing armed looters accused of collaborating with Israel's military. In response to such looting by gangs, a number of influential families in Gaza published statements denouncing the scenes. "These gangs act in alignment with the goals of the occupation," the Madhoun family wrote at the time. In November, an internal UN memo obtained by the Washington Post revealed that gangs 'may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence' or 'protection' from Israeli troops. One such gang leader, according to the memo, established a 'military-like compound' in an area 'restricted, controlled and patrolled' by Israel's military. Commentators have suggested that by backing criminal gangs and targeting members of Gaza's civil administration, Israel was attempting to create a power vacuum and lawlessness. Earlier this month, the Abu Shabab family renounced Yasser over his connections to the Israeli military, saying he and anyone who joined his group "are no longer linked" to the family.
Middle East Eye
10 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
For Palestinians, to exist is to resist Israel's war of annihilation
In a speech to the UN General Assembly on 22 September 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brandished a map in which the occupied Palestinian territories were no longer distinguishable from Israel, as he threatened Iran while touting the future glories of artificial intelligence (AI) and a world in which Israel would lead the region into a limitlessly bright future. Less than a month later, Israeli AI-driven technologies such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where's Your Daddy - developed in partnership with US corporate giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon - exponentially boosted target banks, resulting in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, wiping out entire families in one fell swoop. The following year, at the 27 September 2024 General Assembly, Netanyahu doubled down on his earlier claims, further amplifying his division of the world: "As Israel defends itself against Iran in this seven-front war, the lines separating the 'blessing' and the 'curse' could not be more clear." By then, at least 41,000 Palestinians had already been killed in Gaza by Israeli air, naval, artillery and ground attacks. This against a people - needless to say, but still needing to be said - with no air force, air defences, navy, or mechanised units, not to mention bomb shelters or, most of the time, electricity. What is finally becoming clear to more and more people is that, as far as Israel is concerned, Palestinian resistance begins with simply existing. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters This resistance through "being" then extends to all other human activities: breathing, sleeping, eating, walking, farming, giving birth, and on, ad infinitum, to everything a person might do in life. Thus, every Palestinian, by virtue of their very existence, is considered a "legitimate" target. Carceral geography Since the inception of Zionism, colonisation in Palestine has exerted every possible effort to erase, usurp and fragment the land and its indigenous people into ever-smaller and less contiguous areas and communities. We have now reached a point where, in addition to the wholesale destruction in Gaza, there are towns and cities in the occupied territories where Palestinian residents must pass through checkpoints simply to exit their own homes. In some towns, Palestinians must pass through checkpoints just to exit their own homes. This extreme spatial fragmentation has been replicated inside Israel's vast prison system - at least until the more recent mass kidnappings and torture of Palestinian hostages, primarily from Gaza but also from the West Bank. Netanyahu's brazen display at the UN in 2023, his aim to expand the Abraham Accords at the expense of any possibility of Palestinian self-determination, the relentless atomisation of Palestinian land and society, and mass incarceration without charge, trial or hope of release - are all elements of the incendiary mix that exploded in Operation al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023. No matter one's opinion of it, the stated aim of the operation was to unify a deeply fragmented Palestinian population under the banner of resistance - with the support of other resistance movements - while capturing prisoners of war and hostages to exchange for Palestinians held hostage in occupation prisons. The sentiments expressed by prisoners in the first exchanges between Israel and Hamas are so distant from western conceptions of individual personhood as to seem almost incomprehensible. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war Muhammed al-Arda, understanding all too well the enormity of the collective sacrifice involved, declared: "If you gathered all the poems, elegies, proverbs and sayings of the land, they would not do justice to Gaza." Another said: "Our freedom was paid for by the blood of the martyrs of Gaza. We owe them a debt that can never be repaid." Narrowing the frame The propaganda of so-called liberal democracies narrows the horizons of thought, severely limiting our ability to make sense of what is actually happening. When the official 9/11 Commission recommended the need to "bureaucratise imagination", it was not forecasting some future Orwellian dystopia, but describing the world we were already living in. With all the terminology used in discussing Israel and Palestine - genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, anti-Zionism, and more - the key missing words remain "imperialism" and "national liberation". Trump's Middle East moves revive the question of who's in charge Read More » We cannot, for instance, even speak about Palestinian armed resistance - their political or military strategies, successes or failures - without first making a disclaimer of some kind. Under the standards his administration has set for ordinary civilians, it would seem that President Donald Trump's own team should be charged with consorting with "terrorists", as they negotiated the release of dual US-Israeli citizen and soldier Edan Alexander. The absurdities abound and multiply, as does the impunity: mere hours after Alexander's release, the Israelis assassinated journalist Hassan Eslaih, reducing to rubble the hospital where he was being treated after a previous assassination attempt. They went on to execute 12-year-old Mohammed Bardawil, the sole surviving witness to the actions of Major Nikolai Ashurov and Israeli tanks during the execution of UN field security supervisor Kamal Shatout, during the massacre of 15 Palestinian paramedics and other civilians on 23 March 2025. Since Alexander's release, the litany of new weapons tests, executions, forced displacement to new kill zones, systematic hospital destruction, and the use of starvation as a tool of genocide has continued apace. Breaking the spell As the "two-state solution" fades further into fantasy in the minds of western leaders - buying time for Israel to steal more Palestinian land, destroy more homes, and displace and kill more people - it might be time to open the floodgates of imagination. While many credit student movements and public opinion with ending the US war in Vietnam, the more decisive factor - rarely acknowledged - was the insubordination of US soldiers. Urban uprisings also pulled the National Guard away from overseas deployment. How many more generations will be enslaved to guard the imperial front of US interests, upholding a totalitarian, colonial ideology that dominates their lives? In Vietnam, whole units were known to refuse orders, sabotage operations, and refuse to engage in combat. "Fragging" - the use of fragmentation grenades against overzealous officers - was not limited to a few isolated cases. One book alone, Fragging: Why US Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, documents 500 such incidents. We have become so accustomed to self-incriminating social media posts by Israeli soldiers - cheering the demolition of homes, mosques, hospitals, schools and universities; prancing around in women's clothing in vandalised and destroyed homes - that it is almost impossible to conjure anything else. But can we even imagine these same soldiers refusing orders, let alone bearing arms against their commanding officers or staging a revolt? How many "existential" wars will they be expected to fight? How many more generations will be enslaved to guard the imperial front of US interests, upholding a totalitarian, colonial ideology that dominates nearly every aspect of their lives - and every aspect of Palestinian life? Once there was "denazification"; then came "de-Baathification". Did they work? What about "de-Zionisation"? Could it work? Could we even imagine a democratic Palestine, from the river to the sea? Is this genocide yet another attempt to forestall that inevitability - by etching irreversible traumas into bodies and minds? From Balfour to the present As we travel down the road of Sykes-Picot 2.0 - with Syria's newly installed regime negotiating with Israel, and Lebanon on the path to becoming a protectorate - we are witnessing the culmination of processes set in motion by the 1917 Balfour Declaration. These processes were vividly imagined in Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, and most cogently analysed in Ghassan Kanafani's The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, written in the shadow of the Naksa, the 1967 "setback" and what has come to be known as Black September. Kanafani's text, as Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum has noted, "has everything to do with the imperialist victory over the Arab and internationalist liberation movements in the 1970-1971 war in Jordan." As if written today, Kanafani notes in his introduction: "In the years 1936–39, the Palestinian revolutionary movement was dealt a devastating blow by the three formations that have since evolved to become the major forces working against the people of Palestine: reactionary Palestinian leaders, Arab regimes surrounding Palestine, and the alliance between Zionism and imperialism." As the US shores up support among Gulf oil and other Arab regimes while silencing dissent on imperial policies regarding genocide and famine in Gaza, and as Mahmoud Abbas's collaboration forces repress uprisings in the West Bank, what has actually changed? We are at a crossroads. The forces arrayed against justice in and for Palestine remain largely the same, though their firepower and technological reach have expanded dramatically, as shown by the entourage of CEOs accompanying Trump to Saudi Arabia, including Palantir's openly genocidal Alex Karp. But Palestinian resistance must not only be further understood, it must be embraced by anyone who hopes to retain earthly and spiritual value while rejecting the despair and nihilism spreading across the political and cultural spectrum. Israel and its western allies have made their choice unmistakably clear: total destruction, mass population transfer, genocide, and full compliance with their agenda. Most Arab regimes have also chosen to lavish Trump with gifts while offering not a single loaf of bread for Gaza. As the lines are drawn, the question remains: who else will join the struggle for justice, and what form will it take? The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
