HAARETZ EDITORIAL: "A Palestinian Family Is Gunned Down and No One Will Be Questioned" - from 3/23

As indicated by today's HAARETZ lead editorial, transmitted below, some people in Israel have, exceptionally, been made to feel uncomfortable by a particular slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians, one which inevitably recalls the slaughter of Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza but which has occurred this time in the West Bank.

Of course, unexceptionally, there will be no adverse consequences -- or even, in this case, any inconvenience of being questioned -- for the family's murderers.

As the editorial concludes: "The killing of Arabs, any killing of any Arab, is not a crime and doesn't merit an investigation.... Palestinian lives -- innocent adults, children, people with disabilities -- are cheap, their blood may be spilled with impunity. Did you kill without justification? Nothing bad will happen to you."

This "incident", as well as, to cite a non-exhaustive list of examples, Israel's current full-scale wars against Iran and Lebanon and periodic bombings of Syria, the repeated Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza culminating in the current and continuing Gaza genocide and the U.S. government's prior wars for Israel against Israel's perceived enemies Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran, are all illustrative of a fundamental reality: An injustice as monumental as the transformation of Palestine into Israel, necessarily requiring the dispossession and dispersal of the great majority of the indigenous population and the oppression of the survivors to encourage them to leave, can only be sustained by perpetual violence.


A Palestinian family Is Gunned Down and No One Will Be Questioned

March 23, 2026

Nine days after the killing of members of the Bani Odeh family in the town of Tamum, none of the Border Police officers who took part in the heavy gunfire at the vehicle -- carrying four young children, one of them blind, and their parents -- have been summoned for questioning.

Sources familiar with the investigation said that the Justice Ministry department that probes allegations of police misconduct decided not to question the officers because the evidence supports their claim that they fired "out of fear for their lives."

It's unbelievable. An undercover unit hides behind a wall at night, a car whose passengers are unaware of the policemen emerges -- witnesses say the car was driving slowly, its windows open, so that it was easy to see who was inside -- and the Border Policemen shower it with bullets.

The officers did not call on the car to stop, did not fire into the air or at the vehicle's tires; rather, they immediately began shooting dozens of bullets at innocent passengers. Waad Othman Bani Odeh, her husband Ali Khaled Bani Odeh and their sons Othman, 7, and Mohammed, 5, died at the scene. Khaled, 11, and Mustafa, 8, survived. Khaled told Haaretz later that the officers beat him after they killed his parents and his two youngest brothers.

Such a serious incident must be investigated. The decision to blindly accept the Border Policemen's version of events without even questioning them marks another stage in the swift deterioration of the rule of law in Israel. It's also hard to understand the dubious excuse given by the Justice Ministry department: If the officers, the Palestinian eyewitneses and the two surviving children were not interviewed, then how do they know that the officers' version is correct? Based on what evidence?

In the past, Border Policemen were brought in for questioning immediately after such incidents occurred to prevent them from coordinating their stories and obstructing the investigation. Most of the cases were buried in the file drawers of the Justice Ministry unit without any legal action being taken.

This time, however, the agency responsible for investigating alleged police misconduct decided not to investigate at all. Perhaps its investigators know there's no point in probing the pointless killing of a Palestinian family because no one will do anything with the investigative material. In the background, there is also the chilling effect on the investigative entities in the wake of the Sde Teiman affair.

The gravity of these issues cannot be overstated. The "spirit of the commander" of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has also taken control of the Justice Ministry department:
The killing of Arabs, any killing of any Arab, is not a crime and doesn't merit an investigation.

The conclusion that Border Policemen are drawing is clear: Palestinian lives -- innocent adults, children, people with disabilities -- are cheap, their blood may be spilled with impunity. Did you kill without justification? Nothing bad will happen to you; you won't be troubled even with a questioning to determine the motives and circumstances of your despicable crime.

The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

An ISRAELI court says...

An Israeli court has concluded that a Palestinian minor who died in custody most likely succumbed to starvation, despite the formal closure of the investigation into his death.

According to details reported by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz, Judge Ehud Kaplan ruled that Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmed, a 17-year-old from Silwad, suffered from severe malnutrition while held in Megiddo prison, and that starvation was the most likely cause of death.

Read: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260325-israeli-court.../

In What World is the Okay??

Yesterday, the occupation forces placed concrete blocks at the entrances to a number of residents’ homes in the town of Deir Ballut, west of the Salfit Governorate.

Local sources reported that the occupation forces proceeded to block the entrances to residents’ homes in the area near the town’s main entrance by placing concrete blocks at the entrances to their main homes.

These measures are part of a campaign to harass residents and impose additional restrictions on their movement.

The Iran War is about Palestine

By helping Israel demolish what’s left of international legal constraint, the Iran war is hastening the dissolution of the Palestinian question.

Jonathan Shamir. March 24, 2026

IN 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—then a lawmaker in the Knesset—was working on A Place Among the Nations, a foundational text of his political ideology. In the book, written at a moment when the Palestinian cause was back on the international agenda amid the start of a partition process, Netanyahu sought to reframe the conflict as a broader civilizational struggle in a bid to justify Israel’s own rejectionism. “The PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] is a Pan-Arab Trojan horse . . . that the Arabs have been trying to coax the West into accepting for over twenty years,” he wrote. Netanyahu’s contention was that Palestine was a symptom, not the cause, of Arab and Muslim hostility toward Israel, and that negotiating any territorial compromise with the PLO would be fruitless when it was actually external powers that had their hands on the reins: first the Soviet Union and Egypt, and now Iraq. In this telling, it was Saddam Hussein who was “the Middle East’s, and Israel’s, number one problem.”

But by the time of the book’s publication, the Gulf War and subsequent sanctions had already eliminated any threat Iraq could have posed. Netanyahu’s narrative was now urgently missing a compelling puppet master to frame as the “number one problem.” Netanyahu found his answer in Iran. Throughout the 1990s, he began casting Iran’s increased support of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah as evidence that two-state solution negotiations rooted in territorial concession would not bring peace. “Iran is the center of world terrorism today,” he wrote in 1996. By then, he was preaching to Congress that Iran was “the most dangerous” of the regimes in the Middle East. As with Iraq before it, Iran now served to lift the Palestinian question out of the colonial frame and into the civilizational one—taking it off the negotiating table and putting it onto the battlefield.

Today, three decades after he first cast Iran as the engine behind anti-Israel sentiment, Netanyahu has finally gotten his war. Israel posits the war as defense against an existential threat, but as ever, what is driving it is the impulse to suppress and displace the Palestine question. Seen this way, the Iran war once again reveals Israel’s most fundamental interest, which has remained unchanged for decades: to prosecute the question of Palestine on its own terms, whether through the continued system of apartheid or outright genocide. Netanyahu is once again proving that he would sooner redraw the map of the Middle East than push back Israel’s borders—preferring to crater Tehran and Isfahan than concede a single dunam in the West Bank.

Read the whole article from Jewish Currents here.