Por Jeffrey St. Clair
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Boys salvaging a destroyed building in the Gaza Strip. Photo by Shareef Sarhan, © UNRWA. CC BY-SA 3.0 igo |
+ The UN found that Israel has averaged 50 attacks on Palestinians in Gaza a day over the last week.
+ Israel killed at least 12 Palestinians last weekend, including three children. One of the slain children was 14-year-old Mohammed Abu Hammad, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his home in central Gaza soon after he had returned from school. He was killed while still wearing his school backpack.
+ Since October 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that the official death toll is 74,494, with 175,604 injured and around 10,000 bodies still buried under rubble. Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect on October 11, 2025, Israeli forces have killed at least 1,534 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 5,486. That works out to around 18 Palestinian casualties a day since the Trump-brokered ceasefire. That compares to around 12 US casualties per day during the height of the Iraq War. Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in Gaza since the “ceasefire” went into effect: 7.
+ Starving the starving…The UN World Food Program has warned that funding shortages will leave about 500,000 people in the Gaza Strip without vital food aid in a territory where two-thirds of the population remains in a state of acute food insecurity, including 200,000 experiencing emergency conditions requiring immediate assistance to prevent death from hunger. The WFP said it is reducing its monthly assistance from 1.6 million to 1.1 million people.
+ The agency is also cutting its food rations in half and reducing daily hot meals from 250,000 to 150,000. Those Palestinians living in hard-to-reach areas of Gaza, including near the Israeli military’s yellow line, will only receive hot meals every other day instead of daily. An estimated 67% of Gaza’s population face acute food insecurity.
+ Israel’s weeklong closure of the only crossing into Gaza has led to the exhaustion of fuel supplies for Gaza’s hospitals. Unless the fuel supplies are replenished soon, the hospital will be forced to impose power cuts, including for life-saving medical devices such as ventilators and dialysis machines.
+ Items Israel still bans from entering Gaza, a year after the alleged ceasefire: toilet seats, water and sewage pumps, crutches, wheelchairs, electrical generators, medicines, batteries, lighters, toys, rubber balls, hair clips.
+ From Marwan Bishara’s new book, Twelve Days That Shook the Middle East: “The war on Gaza was not a war. It was a reckoning: a reckoning with civilization itself. As Gaza was reduced to ashes, the whole world watched—and turned away. Gaza wasn’t only destroyed. It was abandoned.”
+ In the first six months of 2026, UN’s OCHA recorded an average of six settler violence incidents per day, or more than 1,200 in the first half of 2026 alone.
+ Over the weekend, Haitham Tayseer Abdel Jaber, a Palestinian-American from the Palestinian town of Burqa near Ramallah, was attacked by Israeli settlers while he was harvesting olive trees. In an interview with the Middle East Eye, Jaber recounted being surrounded and attacked by a mob of 50 masked Israeli settlers with bats and rocks before losing consciousness. He was hospitalized for his injuries and needed around 200 stitches for open wounds in his skull and around 25 near his eye and forehead.
+ Israeli settler violence is rarely prosecuted and when it is, the cases rarely result in conviction. Only 3% of all acts of settler violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have led to convictions.
+ According to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, as of June 2026, settler militias have stolen more than 264,400 acres of Palestinian land in the West Bank. This represents roughly 18% of the West Bank. More than 64 Palestinian communities have been fully displaced by Israeli settlers.
+ There are currently more than 700,000 Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian land in the West Bank, with more arriving every day, under the protection of the Israeli government.
+ Joseph Massad on the colonialist origins of Zionism:
Revisiting the genesis of the term makes clear that, contrary to some of its stubborn but ignorant defenders, Zionism has always been a colonialist ideology and movement. Its central project has always been the colonisation of Palestine by European Jews.
From the beginning, Herzl and his followers conceived of it as necessitating the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians, whom they regarded as inferior to Jews and an obstacle to its realisation. A few examples from the movement’s history suffice.
Herzl insisted that the Jewish colonists must “try to spirit the penniless [Indigenous] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country”.
+ Trump, who declared he could be elected Prime Minister of Israel, endorsed Netanyahu the same week that Israeli settlers brutally beat an American citizen and Washington Post photographer (Heidi Levine), as Israeli security forces stood by passively and watched. But his endorsement hasn’t helped Netanyahu’s sagging fortunes, whose party is poised to lose control of the Knesset by at least 10 seats, with Palestinian parties winning 15 seats and likely having a decisive say in the makeup of a new ruling coalition, though whoever wins, Israel will continue to be Israel, an Apartheid state that is committing genocide in Gaza and land theft and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories.
+ JD Vance on why he refused to endorse Netanyahu’s reelection, after Trump threw his (considerable) weight behind him: “I’m not anti-endorsing him. I’m not pro-endorsing him. I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections.”
+ The probability markets in Vegas give Eizenkot a 56% chance of victory, while Netanyahu odds are roughly 38%.
+ In a new report condemning the widespread attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, Amnesty International called on international governments to place an arms embargo on Israel, impose sanctions on government officials who are implicated in the most serious abuses and crimes, and back an investigation by the International Criminal Court. Amnesty charged that the settlers are acting with the approval and backing of the Israeli government, as part of a coordinated effort to use violence and vandalism to drive Palestinians from their homes and seize their land.
+ Calling the recent attacks during the annual olive harvests “a season of horror,” Amnesty’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Heba Morayef, said: “Attempts by senior Israeli officials and electoral candidates across the political spectrum to portray this state-sponsored brutality as the work of a few individuals are a blatant distortion of reality.
…States must recognize that settler attacks are not isolated acts, but a central policy of the Israeli state and take concrete measures to respect their obligations under international law and to avoid complicity in Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinians by halting all trade, investment and cooperation that contribute to maintaining the unlawful occupation, apartheid and the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing.”
+ Ilan Paz, a retired Israeli general who commanded an IDF brigade in the West Bank and later headed the Israeli civil administration of the occupied territory, largely agrees with Amnesty’s assessment:
This is the worst period ever. The reason behind it is that the Israeli government supports it. The ministers who have the power to control it don’t want to use it — especially now, two weeks before the election.
The attack on Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine by masked Israeli settlers. (Screen capture from video posted to X.)
+ Even US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, as fanatical a Christian-Zionist as you’re likely to encounter this side of the Damascus Gate, was appalled by the Israeli settler attack on Heidi Levine, perhaps because it occurred near a village of Palestinian Christians which has endured similar assaults:
We have called for a full investigation, arrest, and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law against whoever participated in this. Attacking a female photographer is a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards. Dishonorable act of senseless violence.
+ Ehmeid Hamayel, a volunteer lookout at the olive grove in Abu Falah outside Ramallah, on the Israeli settlers who the settlers broke into his neighbor Nader Abu Murrah’s trailer of the town, and poured gasoline on him as he slept in bed: “They’ve even tried to attack us inside our homes at least 12 times.”
+ Food insecurity has more than doubled in the West Bank. In the last three years. More than a million Palestinians in the West Bank now need food assistance.
+ Carl Skau, acting head of the World Food Program:
The settler attacks over only these first two weeks of harvest have already surpassed the whole of last year in terms of number of attacks…The human rights crisis has turned into a hunger crisis, because food insecurity has more than doubled in the last three years…Food is now a line that we cannot afford to cross…Where hunger spreads, instability follows.
+ After the international outrage in response to the attacks on Levine and visiting European diplomats and politicians, Itamar Ben-Gvir went on Israeli television to proclaim that the real victims were the Jewish settlers on Palestinian land: “Let’s not forget who the real victim is here, and who the attacker is.”
+ On Wednesday, Israel arrested dozens of US citizens, including former NYC comptroller and soon-to-be member of Congress, Brad Lander, who were part of a delegation with the Israeli human rights group T’ruah escorting Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest, who have faced brutal attacks by masked Israeli settlers…Lander was released after being issued a warning from the Netanyahu regime. The others remain in detention.
+ In all, more than 80 American and Israeli protesters were detained, most of them Jewish, many of them rabbis. The arrests constitute the largest mass detention of peace activists in more than a decade.
Brad Lander on the arrests:
We were on private Palestinian land. We were with the farmers whose land it is. There’s no obligation to coordinate with the Israeli military. This was the IDF making it impossible for these poor Palestinian farmers to harvest their olive trees.
To be clear: Palestinians face far worse consequences every day. These detentions by the IDF are one more attempt to undermine Palestinians’ right to harvest their olive groves, travel on their roads, and live in their homes. Yet one more element of escalating, and very clearly state-sponsored, ethnic cleansing.
+ Jill Jacobs, the leader of T’ruah, an Israeli human rights group that sends Jewish activists out with Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest as shields against settler mobs:
This is how we practice our Jewish values, by accompanying the farmers. It’s 100 percent legal for Palestinians to harvest their olives, and it’s 100 percent legal for them to bring friends and partners. Nobody is interested in provoking violence.
+ A new Gallup poll shows that neither Israelis nor Palestinians in East Jerusalem think a two-state solution is workable, though for different reasons.
+ Two states, where one state dominates the other, was never going to be a solution. One democratic state is the only possible path to peace and justice in Palestine.
+ Former Columbia grad student Mahmood Khalil has filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court to overturn the decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals allowing his arrest and deportation by the Trump Administration, which had detained him under a rarely invoked statute permitting the Secretary of State to deport legal residents whose presence “undercuts the national interest.” A district judge ruled that the law was likely unconstitutional and ordered his release, but a hotly divided Third Circuit court ruled that the petition belonged first in immigration court, which is controlled by the executive branch.
+ From Ansam Abu Sitta’s story “Behind the Walls” in the collection Bench of the Reserves:
Days passed as usual. No one knew what was going on behind the walls. No one saw the tyranny and cruelty of time, how it creatively tortured them and the way no one sensed it. How it simply slept at ease amongst their family members. And yet they were always present there, alone, behind the walls!
+ I haven’t seen Poh Si Teng’s documentary following three American doctors treating the victims of Israeli genocidal violence in Gaza yet, but the trailer is harrowing…
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
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