As genocide grinds on in Gaza, the West Bank endures a bloody olive harvest
The symbolism could hardly be more fitting. On October 9, as South African human rights attorney Navi Pillay was attending a forum on international law in the very courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany where Nazi war criminals were tried, she received word that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
Pillay, who had been a UN Commissioner for Human Rights, served for nine years on the International Criminal Court (ICC), and is currently on the bench of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing genocide charges against Myanmar, had made herself “a frontrunner” for “an award for lies, hatred and blood libels” according to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “Now that the Nobel commission has rewarded the biggest lie of the 21st century, Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell.”
What did she do to merit ‘Goebbels’ applause’ and Netanyahu’s claim that she is “a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state”? Of her many criticisms of Israel for its decades-long violations of human rights and international law, perhaps the most stinging was the Legal analysis of the conduct of Israel in Gaza pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide issued in September 2025 when she chaired the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The 72-page report makes a meticulous case that “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
As Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz, “If Goebbels has a reason to applaud, it is upon seeing what has happened to the country that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. When Goebbels sees how the world sees similarities between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what is happening in Israel in the 2020s, he delights in the abashed irony of history.”
Trump lashes out at Norway and international law
Trump’s response was sadly predictable. In an early morning post, he called Navi Pillay an “unabashed hater of America and Israel” who “celebrated terrorists and rewarded Hamas.” At a rally later in the day, he declared that “the United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.”
Trump didn’t just lash out verbally. Within a few hours of the news breaking about the prize recipient, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio leveled new sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose judges, prosecutor and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese had already been sanctioned. The latest sanctions, which were at least temporarily blocked on October 13 by a preliminary injunction imposed by a US federal district court, are an effort to punish the ICC for arrest warrants issued against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant and to forestall the possibility that something similar could one day be done to American officials and soldiers. “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling their ability to operate against us because our message is clear: the United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC,” Rubio stated on social media. “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.”
The ICC is the sole international tribunal with jurisdiction for prosecuting individuals for such serious violations of international law as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. For more details about the scope of the new sanctions, see here.
Questions that remain unanswered
Two days earlier, Israel marked the third anniversary of the October 7 attack, which a Boston Globe editorial described as “an unprecedented act of terrorism, intended to touch off a regional conflagration that Hamas’s leaders hoped would bring down the state of Israel.” The editorial condemned the failure of the Israeli government to hold an independent commission to investigate “what went wrong with Israel’s preparation for and response to the invasion. What intelligence signals were missed? How was it possible for swarms of Hamas fighters to massacre so many defenseless Israelis? Why was the military’s response slow? And perhaps most important: Did Israel’s broader strategy to contain Hamas in the years before the invasion blind it to the very possibility of such a deadly attack?” It mentions reports that both Egypt and the UAE had warned Netanyahu that Hamas was planning an imminent assault on Israel – preparations for which were being conducted “in plain sight” according to this piece in The Electronic Intifada.
Ignored by the Globe editorial, and the US mainstream press generally, is the acknowledgement by Israeli commanders, former Israeli defense minister Gallant, Israeli pilots and soldiers, and some freed hostages that an untold number of the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7 had their lives taken by their own attack helicopters and tank fire. Their testimony has appeared in the Israeli media, as Medhi Hassan discloses in this powerful Zeteo video. The video traces the secretive ‘Hannibal Directive’ back to 1986 in southern Lebanon when it was developed to curtail the exchanges of abducted Israeli soldiers or their bodies for large numbers of Palestinian prisoners. The Directive called for preventing the seizure of Israeli soldiers at all costs, even if that meant that the soldiers themselves would be killed in the process. This Wikipedia piece includes a list of occasions when it is believed that the Hannibal Directive was implemented.
While the likely invocation of the Hannibal Directive on October 7 does not figure in mainstream US coverage, CNN has reported that the deaths of many as 24 of the 40 Israelis who died while being held in captivity were connected to Israeli military action. According to former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, Hamas, acting through Qatar, had immediately offered to return females, children, and non-military-aged men without demanding a prisoner exchange or other conditions. The offer was rejected by Israel.
Election season (except in Palestine)
As questions fester about Oct.7, Netanyahu is fighting not just for his political life and legacy, but to stay out of prison. Poll results published on Oct. 15 show Yashar, the party of Netanyahu’s main rival, former army chief of staff Gad Eisenkot, in the lead but short of the number of Knesset seats (61) needed to form a government.
Former general Eisenkot, whose son was killed in northern Gaza in Dec. 2023, was responsible for the use of massive disproportionate force known as the ‘Daniyeh Doctrine,’ first implemented in 2006 against Beirut’s southern suburbs. He has refused to consider including ‘Arab parties’ in a potential coalition government. (The two main Arab-majority parties, United Arab List and the Joint list, have been barred from running by the Central Elections Committee, but the Supreme Court could overturn the ban). Eisenkot says he supports settlements “provided they conform strictly to the map of Israel’s security interests and to the law” and that as far as the Palestinians are concerned, “we need to create the conditions for a permanent-status arrangement in the future. Will it be autonomous or a state-minus?...It certainly will not have an army, and will be under overriding Israeli security control.” The son of Jewish Moroccan immigrants, Eisenkot could become the first Mizrahi prime minister in Israel’s history.
Israel’s next leader, no matter who it is, will inherit a new security doctrine that emerged after Oct. 7, 2023, according to Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, the head of Israel’s influential think tank, the Institute for Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. In his analysis, which Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute calls “terrifying,” the doctrine privileges Jewish identity over democracy, does not regard peace as more than a means to an end; sees war and the undermining of Arab states, the tight control of Palestinians and expansion of settlements as essential to national security; and favors weaning Israel from dependence on the US which it regards as a “declining power” with values that are “incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.”
With the US midterms a week following the Israeli elections, the sizable ‘Israel can do no wrong’ contingent in Congress is in overdrive – see what many members and senators had to say about the third anniversary of October 7 here. As for Palestinian elections, President Abbas had announced on October 10 that legislative elections - which haven’t taken place for two decades - would be held on November 27. He recently postponed them until September 11, 2027 due to calculations described here.
The Gaza Strip: three years of horror with no end in sight
As the third anniversary of the war came and went, followed by the first anniversary of the fraudulent ‘ceasefire’ on October 10, Gaza’s residents are still living in a killing zone, with at least four Palestinians killed on October 7. Nine more were killed the following two days. By October 18, the Palestinian death toll had reached 74,469. Over 20,000 of the dead are children, with the Gaza Health Ministry reporting that a child has been killed in Gaza every 71 minutes over the three years, and that 71,000 have been orphaned. These figures do not include the thousands of bodies yet to be retrieved from the destruction, those vaporized by 2,000 pound bombs and deaths from starvation, untreated wounds and diseases generated by toxins, rat infestation and polluted water.
During the first year of the so-called ‘ceasefire’ – which has been denounced as bogus by Amnesty International and more than a hundred other major human rights bodies - the Israeli military has killed 1,488 people and wounded 5,281, according to Gaza Ministry of Health figures that the Israeli army says are ‘largely accurate.’
Also on October 7, Israel slammed shut the Kerem Shalom crossing, the only one permitting humanitarian aid to enter and a handful of Palestinians out of the many thousands on the medical evacuation list to leave for treatment. Eyad Anawi of the Gaza Relief Committee said that even when the crossing is open only 150 trucks are permitted to enter per day, not the 600 promised in the ‘ceasefire’ deal. Reluctant to move forward with the Trump ‘peace plan,’ Israel has also blocked the entry into Gaza not just of the Palestinian ‘technocrats’ on the ‘National Committee for the Administration of Gaza,’ but of the Board of Peace-appointed contractors who are supposed to build the outpost for foreign troops constituting the ‘International Stabilization Force.’
Gaza is in a brutal state of limbo as the genocide grinds on. In this Zeteo piece, Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada summarizes “Hamas’s shocks and miscalculations” and wonders what awaits the organization that, he says, currently “cannot put forward a new vision,” and its doctrine of armed resistance. Meanwhile, these Médecins Sans Frontières photos starkly illustrate what “three years of destroying the conditions for life” have meant for the Palestinian people.
West Bank – showing who is the boss
The settlers went on terrorist rampages around the West Bank on the third anniversary of Oct. 7. They injured 16 and killed Ali Hasan Bazzari, who had gone to the assistance of a family under attack as they were harvesting olives in the town of Burqa. The annual olive harvest is a lifeline for 110,000 families. Early in this season, settlers have carried out more than 200 attacks on farmers, killing at least four Palestinians, and Israel has barred farmers from their groves in the 60% of the West Bank known as ‘Area C.’ On Oct. 9, when at least 19 attacks took place, one soldier was filmed yelling “this is a Jewish state, and Jews have a right to everything here before Arabs, whether you like it or not.”
The protective presence of Israeli and foreign activists, and journalists in vests marked PRESS, have not deterred the violence. On October 16, ten days after settlers beat a photographer from Agence France-Presse, Washington Post photographer Heidi Levine was in an olive grove near Abu Falah when she knocked to the ground, and viciously clubbed with sticks by settlers while the army fired tear gas at Palestinians and, according to an eye witness, “did absolutely nothing about the settlers.” The harrowing scene is described here. She suffered fractures and had to have surgery on a nearly detached finger. The following day, settlers attacked diplomats from France, Belgium and Poland who were viewing the olive harvest hear the Christian village of Taybeh.
Fareed Taamallah, a West Bank farmer and journalist, wrote on Oct. 4 that “our villages are gripped by dread I have not seen before…military raids, arbitrary road closures and daily incursions by armed settler militias have turned our countryside into a militarized zone….Settlers are better armed than ever, equipped with assault rifles and military gear, and backed by state institutions…The political climate inside Israel has turned our groves into battlegrounds.” He urged the international community to go further than banning a few individuals and settlement products and impose a full arms embargo on Israel and provide “international protection before our land is emptied of its trees and its people.”
It is not just the rural areas (Area B and C) that are under siege. To demonstrate that it could do anything anywhere, the Israeli army on Oct. 13 raided two NGO offices in Ramallah, the very heart of Area A, which Oslo had designated under the complete civil and security control of the PA, and stationed snipers around the Palestine Medical Complex. The offices, belonging to the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, had already been ransacked years before when the groups were put on a list of six prominent NGOs designated as ‘terrorist’ organizations without evidence being offered.
In an interview on Democracy Now! former Addameer head Saher Frances said that the raid was part of a “propaganda show” intended to send the message: ‘We are the masters. We decide what we will do. You cannot interfere…we don’t respect the international law, we are not respecting the treaties and the institutions that implement and protect international human rights law, and we don’t care, because we are not accountable.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine