Israel tightens its stranglehold on all of Palestine
The situation in Gaza is increasingly dismal under a ‘ceasefire’ which hardly merits the name.
More than two hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the truce began on Oct 10, many for straying too close to the mostly unmarked ‘yellow line’ giving Israeli troops control of more than half of the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 28, Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered “powerful strikes” across Gaza in response to what was said to be a Hamas sniper attack near Rafah that killed an Israeli soldier (a claim denied by prominent Gaza analyst Muhammad Shehada) and the failure of Hamas to return all the hostage bodies. Israel’s latest bombardments, that took the lives of 104 Palestinians, including some 46 children, had been approved by President Trump who stated: “Nobody knows what happened to the Israeli soldier, but they say it was sniper fire. And it was retribution for that, and I think they have a right to do that.”
Three days earlier, an Israeli airstrike targeting an alleged member of Islamic Jihad was not seen as a ceasefire violation by the US since, in the words of Secretary of State Rubio, he represented an “imminent threat” to Israel. On the same day President Trump said Hamas could face “action” for its failure to locate the remaining bodies of 13 hostages that might be buried under mounds of rubble and tons of unexploded bombswhich continue to take limbs and lives.
A ‘technical’ Egyptian team has entered the Gaza Strip to assist Hamas with the search, and some 200 US soldiers are now monitoring the ceasefire with their own drones from a new Civil-Military Coordination Centerat Kiryat Gaza in the south of Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu assured his supporters that despite this enlarged international presence Israel remains an independent country that is fully responsible for its own security.
No end to famine conditions
Gaza’s residents are still facing starvation. Only a fraction – 94 trucks per day - of the promised 600 trucks per day of food entered Gaza from the beginning of the ceasefire to Oct. 21, and the number entering since then is still not meeting basic needs.
According to Muhammad Shehada, many of the trucks carry commercial products no one can afford and no tents have been permitted to enter as winter approaches. There is no way to fight the growing sanitation crisiscaused by a severe water shortage and a quarter million tons of waste accumulated just in the streets of Gaza City. The Oct. 28th New York Times reported that markets are being stocked with soda and food that is not nutritious and “what is really needed are extensive repairs to the devastated water and sewage treatment system. That requires items that Israel has not been willing to let into Gaza, saying it fears they could be used for militant activities.”
On Oct. 22, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion stating that Isreal had to ease food restrictions to meet the ‘basic needs’ of Palestinians and should stop blocking the operations of UNRWA. The opinion also affirmed the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
Israel wasted no time stating that it “categorically rejects” the ICJ ruling, and declared that UNRWA had been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas, an assertion denied by the ICJ which strongly rejected these “unsubstantiated allegations.” The US State Department rejected the opinion of the ICJ as “corrupt” and said it “unfairly bashes Israel and gives UNRWA a free pass for its deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism.”
A plan to divide the Gaza Strip in two
According to an Oct. 22 report in the Wall Street Journal, the US and Israel are giving serious consideration to Jared Kushner’s plan to divide the Gaza Strip into two zones until Hamas can be fully disarmed and all its tunnels destroyed. Rubble clearance and re-building would only occur in the more than half of the Strip controlled by the Israel army, where Palestinians (including the clans armed by Israel) could choose to move. Israel would then gradually extend its control beyond the ‘yellow line’ to undermine Hamas. The Jerusalem Post reported that given Netanyahu’s refusal to have the Palestinian Authority take over the governance of Gaza, and the reluctance of many countries to get involved on the ground without Palestinian input, Trump and JD Vance are now supportive of the Kushner plan.
In his compelling discussion with Peter Beinart, Muhammad Shehada argued that under the pretense of ‘reconstruction’ Israel shows its determination to stay in Gaza. He said it plans to build what are in essence ‘Potemkin villages’ in order to whitewash the genocide. Palestinians who do not want to move to the Israel-controlled zone will be forced into concentration camps along the Egyptian border and eventually will be ejected from Gaza Strip. He predicted that if Kushner and Tony Blair have their way, the Gaza Strip will be turned into a high tech international tax haven that serves as a profit-making center for exploiting Gaza’s offshore gas fields.
The worst olive harvest ever
Meanwhile in the West Bank club-wielding settler thugs often accompanied by the army have accelerated their pogroms in Palestinian towns and villages and turned olive groves into war zones.
“Settler terror devastates West Bank olive harvest” was the headline in the Oct. 24 Israeli publication +972 Magazine, which documented more than 150 settler attacks on olive farmers in the previous two weeks. As well as attacking even elderly olive harvesters and the international activists who tried to protect them and were then deported, settlers have vandalized olive trees and set Palestinian cars on fire, while soldiers have barred Palestinians from accessing their olive groves and permitted settler caravans to be installed on Palestinian land.
Jasper Nathaniel, a US journalist, filmed 55-year-old Araf Abu Alia being clubbed until she lay unconscious on the ground and the role of soldiers in luring the settlers to where the villagers of Turmus Ayya were gathering their olives. Some 80 percent of the residents in the village hold US citizenship. The Times of Israel has described the WhatsApp channel on which the settlers boast of their attacks and enumerate the number of trees they have destroyed, cars and houses they have set on fire and ‘Arabs’ they have injured.
On Oct. 21, the UN Human Rights office reported that in the first six months of 2025 there were 757 settler attacks causing damage to people and property, a 13 percent increase over the same period in 2024. “While the olive harvest season has always witnessed tensions and violence and restrictions,” the report states, “the escalation is truly alarming. It is occurring against the backdrop of an accelerated Israeli land grab. Israeli government officials are openly declaring the state’s intent to annex the whole of the West Bank and to forcibly transfer Palestinians.”
Trump’s ‘no’ to annexation does nothing to stop Israel’s land grab
Shortly before Netanyahu travelled to the US in September 2025 to address the UN General Assembly, Trump had asserted “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank…It’s not gonna happen.”
Then, on Oct. 22, when Vice-President Vance was in Israel, the Knesset voted by 25 to 24 to do exactly that. Three more positive votes are needed before the annexation bill becomes law. The following day, President Trump and other US officials denounced the action, with Trump declaring “Israel is not going to do anything with the West Bank.”
But it has been doing plenty to ensure that the Palestinians will never exercise West Bank sovereignty and to carry out de facto – if not de jure – annexation. Since the war on Gaza began the map of the West Bank is being radically re-shaped by Messianic settlers and Kahanist government ministers. Ethnic cleansing of Palestinian farmers in the over 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C has been accelerating, with Israel aiming to push West Bank Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas, much as they are doing in the Gaza Strip.
In what has been described by the Israeli organization Peace Now as “a Mega theft of Palestinian lands in Area C,” Israel in May 2025 ruled that – in violation of international law concerning occupied territory – illegal settlers would be able to register Area C land in the official land registry while Palestinians would be barred from doing so. In the words of the group Stop the Wall, “Settlers now merely need to place a tent or caravan on Palestinian land to file a claim, effectively turning acts of displacement into a colonial legal path to ownership.” At the same time Defense Minister Katz gave approval to 22 new West Bank settlements. According to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth the Israeli government approved the building of 48,000 settlement units since 2023, including 3,401in E1 near Jerusalem that would divide the West Bank in two.
Where is the international community?
It is not just court rulings and UN resolutions that have failed to arrest Israel’s decades-long drive to establish ‘Greater Israel.’ Western nations have been all too often complicit in Israel’s wars and settlement expansion, and reluctant to engage in the kind of arms and trade embargos that had been mobilized against Apartheid South Africa.
In the summary of her Oct. 20th report “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese ponders what the future could bring:
“Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
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