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05/13/25 7:44 PM

#525846 RE: fuagf #525152

Palestine Has Exposed Every Lie the West Tells the World

"Murder in the ME - More than 90 killed in Gaza strikes including journalist who just became a father

Ehud Barak: the military mastermind Israel loves to hate
[...]Israel's yearning for experienced military leaders brought him back to political life after the 2006 Lebanon war and he became minister of defence. He seems to have a feel for what motivates his enemies and was widely quoted as saying: "If I were a Palestinian I would have joined a terrorist organisation." Barak also stated during a US television interview last year that he would "probably" strive for nuclear weapons if he were in Iran's position. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173530549

Time passes, but the lies remain.

Kody Cava
May 02, 2025


Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim.

This article was also published by CounterPunch on May 5th, 2025, link here
.. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/05/palestine-has-exposed-every-lie-the-west-tells-the-world/ .


All links

There are very common refrains in our society. You know them: The United States and the West stand up all over the world for democracy, free speech, a free press, free markets, the rule of law, and human rights. This is what they tell us. What meaning these sentiments, which is indeed all that they are, may have once had, if ever, is lost. They have become pablum. Worse than this, they are lies repeated ad nauseum to inoculate societies from thinking for themselves. Palestine, perhaps like no other crisis before it, has exposed these common cants for what they are, mendacities of the highest order. Whether or not this truth will really take hold and stick in the society I do not know. I am not optimistic. But just as there was no going back after 9/11, our decadent party rudely interrupted by reality, so there is no going back after October 7th.

Let us briefly take each of these Western lies in turn.

Democracy:

In 2006, when Hamas was democratically elected to majority seats in the Palestinian Authority (an election which none of the children of Gaza back then nor today had anything to do with), the Western world, that sole purveyor of global democracy, collectively lost its mind and shouted “No! We didn’t mean democracy like that!” Congress quickly passed a law barring any aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it demonstrated “progress toward purging from its security services individuals with ties to terrorism, dismantling all terrorist infrastructure and cooperating with Israel’s security services, halting anti-American and anti-Israel incitement, and ensuring democracy and financial transparency.” Likewise, the “Middle East Quartet” composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, issued a statement, saying, “A two-state solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel’s right to exist, and disarm.” Unsurprisingly, this enjoinder applied only to the Palestinians. Israel could not be expected to renounce terror, accept Palestine’s right to exist, and disarm. Netanyahu’s own party platform specifically denies support for a Palestinian state.

More than this, Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle-East” they tell us (with no regard for the fact that the worst autocracies in the Middle-East — Saudi Arabia and Egypt — receive billions of dollars from the U.S. every year), has instituted both a de facto and a de jure Jim Crowed existence upon the Palestinians. The Palestinians of Israel do not have equal rights. The Adalah organization maintains a list of over 65 discriminatory laws .. https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771 .. against Palestinians. The Nation-State Bill passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018 expressly states that only Jews have the right to national self-determination within Israel. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank do not have freedom of movement between there and Gaza or inside Israel proper. Palestinians can be legally barred from living in Israeli villages. It is illegal for Palestinians to collect rainwater. Palestinians cannot get construction permits for their homes. They do not have the same marriage rights as Jewish Israelis. Any person who marries a Palestinian, regardless of their nationality, has their movements restricted within Israel and may even be prohibited from reentering the region. A Palestinian who marries a Jewish Israeli cannot be naturalized as Israeli. Some Palestinians who have managed to leave Israel are disallowed from ever returning. The aim of these citizenship laws are clear: maintaining Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinian rights. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid admitted as such, saying, “We shouldn’t hide the essence of the Citizenship Law. It’s one of the tools aimed at ensuring a Jewish majority in the State of Israel.” Israel is, plainly, not a democratic state.

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[Insert: Yep, the late Shimon Peres, though he was big on settlements, was wise when it came to Israel's future
either a democracy or a Jewish state. Ehud Barak a realist about that too. And yes, Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy: Getting Rid of Netanyahu Is Not Enough
[...]Hanno Hauenstein
When you say the two-state solution is dead — what would be the alternative?
Gideon Levy
Right now, we are in a quite hopeless moment. But if we zoom out of the current situation, we have de facto been living in one state for over fifty years now. Between the river and the sea, there is only one state. I don’t know any other. The only question that matters is its regime. You cannot be both a democratic state and a Jewish state. Israel clearly chose one aspect over the other by paying lip service to democracy while being well aware that someone who lives in Jenin or in Ramallah has no rights. So it’s simple: Israel is not a democracy.
Today we have a vision: one democratic state with equal rights, civil and national, for everyone between the river and the sea.
Hanno Hauenstein
What would have to happen for this vision to become reality?
Gideon Levy
It must start with international pressure to put an end to apartheid.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175491521]

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Here in the U.S., some citizens are trying to exercise their democratic right to boycott Israeli goods. Unfortunately, many U.S. states make you sign a loyalty oath to Israel if you want government contracts or government jobs, specifically barring any tactics used by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement (BDS) against Israel. The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on a bill which would make it a federal crime to boycott Israel, with up to a million dollars in fines and 20 years in prison. One recent example, the city of San Marcos, Texas, found that it was sending $4.4 million dollars to Israel every year. In response to the city council simply drafting a resolution to be voted upon which calls for shifting those funds towards domestic priorities, Texas governor Greg Abbott has threatened to remove San Marcos from all future state contracts. That’s our democracy at work — a (“conservative”) governor subverting localized control in favor of a foreign country.

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[ Want a Contract with A&M? Be Ready to Sign a Pro-Israel Loyalty Oath.
In August 2018, Texas A&M University-Commerce gave George Hale a choice: 1) Sign a loyalty oath swearing he would never join or support a boycott of Israel, 2) Lose his contract to continue working on an award-winning podcast about unsolved crimes in Texas for the public radio station associated with...
By Jim Schutze March 6, 2019
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/pro-israel-loyalty-oath-required-to-do-business-with-texas-aandm-11589214

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (if you’re allowed): Anti-boycott laws in Kansas and Missouri that force large companies to swear an oath to israel.
Solidarity with Palestine grows but local lawmakers in Kansas and Missouri stifle resistance, pledging allegiance to Israel in law.
By Lynnie Holl ? Justice, Kansas City, Politics, World ? November 20, 2023
https://kansascitydefender.com/world/boycott-divestment-sanctions-if-youre-allowed-anti-boycott-laws-in-kansas-and-missouri-that-force-large-companies-to-swear-an-oath-to-israel/ ]

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Free Speech:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of people have been arrested, harassed, assaulted, thrown in unmarked vans by plainclothes cops, surveilled, had their visas revoked, and deported for as little as writing editorials in favor of the Palestinian people. If you want to argue that students forcibly occupying government and university buildings is an arrestable offense, fine, but proclaiming loudly that Palestinian people should not be annihilated by a murderous ethnonationalist Zionist state is not illegal, nor should it ever be. In the U.K., which perhaps you may be surprised to learn does not have a specific free speech protection like the U.S. does, a leading activist with Palestine Action has been arrested and charged with supporting a terrorist organization for two speeches that he gave. That’s all. He gave speeches. In the U.K., if I had any prominence, any one of the articles that I have written on Palestine could bring me to court. That’s how bad it is over there.

With these draconian state tactics, we are returning to the days of WWI, when a nationwide witch hunt was carried out by the reactionary state and its deputized paramilitaries and police forces to utterly destroy anti-war and pro-labor activism. Offices were ransacked. Publications were shut down. Private mail was spied on. Thousands were imprisoned and hundreds were deported. That’s where we are again. Funny how views which are shared by the state, such as Zionism, aren’t criminalized. I sure hope your “balanced” and “nuanced” pro-Israel stance feels worth it. All it cost was the First Amendment.

Free Press:

This state repression has also been used against journalists. I’m not even talking about the insidious imperial propaganda that the mainstream liberal press has always peddled on this issue. I mean journalists are literally being detained, interrogated, having their personal effects stolen, and charged with serious crimes. Some examples: Journalist Sarah Wilkinson was arrested in the U.K. .. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/30/fdbr-a30.html .. and had her devices stolen for “content that she has posted online” regarding Palestine. Asa Winstanley, an associate editor for Electronic Intifada, was arrested in the U.K. .. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/uk-police-raid-home-seize-devices-eis-asa-winstanley .. and had his devices stolen for “encouragement of terrorism.” Journalist Kit Klarenberg was arrested by counter-terrorism officers in the U.K. and interrogated about his political views. Craig Murray, a journalist and former U.K. diplomat was arrested in the U.K. and had his devices stolen for his pro-Palestine activities. Journalist Richard Medhurst has been arrested by both the U.K. and Austrian governments on separate occasions, both times having his journalistic property seized. The reasons for such state repression of journalists is obvious. In Medhurst’s interrogation by Austrian cops, the officers literally emphasized the fact that Medhurst has a sizeable following and is therefore dangerously influential.

In some quarters, these suppression tactics are having their intended effect. One personal example: after Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah using U.S.-made 2,000 pound bombs in Beirut in an urban attack that killed hundreds of people, I quickly wrote up an article about the attack. I argued that Israel’s longstanding technique of assassinating leaders in the resistance movement, debilitating though these decapitations may be for organizations such as Hezbollah to remain fully functional, would nevertheless not ultimately destroy the resistance but rather perpetuate it. I submitted the article to several smaller outlets that focus on Middle-Eastern affairs and the Global South. One of these outlets, based in Europe, expressed initial interest in the piece, but then sent me this: “We may not be able to publish the article unfortunately. After consulting with our editors, who reviewed your piece, it was deemed that the article can’t be published especially due to legal implications.”

They didn’t expand on “legal implications,” but I assumed they were worried about being hit with charges that they were supporting Hezbollah in some way. Given Europe’s lack of free speech protections, I wasn’t surprised, but very disappointed in this stance. I was willing to adjust the piece to get it published and sent back to them this response:

Asa Winstanley of the Electronic Intifada was just detained by the UK police and had his materials stolen by them. To me, this is a time for the alternative press to be even more courageous, more emphatic, more unapologetic, not less.

I'd be happy to work with the editors if there are specifics that could be changed or excised to get the piece published (which now could focus on the recent assassination of Yahya Sinwar). But I would nevertheless push for the main thrust and tone of the piece to remain the same.


I never heard back.

You could argue that they simply used the “legal” excuse as a way to say no to an article that they wouldn’t have run anyway. Even if that were true, it’s still very telling that they would use such an excuse as an effective way to silence certain viewpoints. Given that the article’s subject was time-sensitive, I ended up self-publishing it here, and that was that.

I can go on with examples like these. It’s not just arrests. Everything that CNN and BBC reporters in Israel ran had to be screened by Israeli censors and those outlets complied. They complied. So much for a free press.

Much worse than any of these instances is the fact that at least 232 journalists have been killed in Gaza .. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/2/gaza-war-deadliest-ever-for-journalists-says-report#:~:text=Israel's%20war%20on%20Gaza%20has,Affairs'%20Costs%20of%20War%20project. .. since October 7th, many of them deliberately targeted by Israeli airstrikes. A report by Brown University’s Costs of War project says that this staggering number of journalists killed is “more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” A recent horrific case is that of Ahmad Mansour, a journalist who was burned alive after an Israeli bombing near Nasser Hospital.

[Trump’s Assault on PBS and NPR Chooses Oligarchy Over Press Freedom and Democracy
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176177416]


A notable case before October 7th is that of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter who, while wearing clearly marked press jacket and helmet along with her film crew, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank. As is typical in such cases, the Israelis claimed that the journalists were caught in cross-fire, only after first suggesting that it was actually a Hamas bullet that killed Abu Akleh. These Israeli claims have been authoritatively debunked, but no punishment was levied against them. Abu Akleh’s funeral procession was brutally attacked by Israeli security forces, causing the pall-bearers to nearly drop Abu Akleh’s casket under the blows of Israeli truncheons.

Free Markets:

The suppression of the BDS movement has already been mentioned. But what about Palestine itself? Gaza is totally blockaded from the outside world. Gazans themselves cannot fish in the Mediterranean Sea or else their boats will be bombed and shot. Their fertile land has been stolen or destroyed. Aid has been totally cut off. Those who try to organize aid ships to Gaza themselves are always attacked. In 2010, ten aid workers with the Freedom Flotilla, including a U.S. citizen, were attacked and killed by Israeli forces for trying to deliver aid to Gaza. Just last night, on May 2nd, another Freedom Flotilla boat with 30 aid workers was bombed by two suicide drones, likely from Israel or its allies.

In the West Bank, local shops and grocers are constantly raided and shut down by Israeli Defense Forces. People are forced to rely on international charity and aid workers. Of these, many are paranoid about donating for fear of being caught up in Western anti-terrorism laws which forbay giving material support to any organization linked to “terrorism” as deemed by the West, a squishy definition. Free markets do not exist for Palestine and its supporters.

Moreover, global markets have been disrupted by Yemen’s Houthis attacking trading vessels in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Yemen’s demands are clear. They will not cease attacks on vessels until Israel ends its murderous campaign against Gaza. Israel has refused, and the West is bombing Yemeni civilians in retaliation. Evidently, international free trade takes a backseat to an internationally-run genocide.

The Rule of Law:

The United States — by continuing to fund and arm the Israelis even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to prevent the genocide of Palestinians — is a full partner in Israel’s genocide, and thus criminally responsible. We have vetoed multiple resolutions at the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire. Even though U.S. law forbays us from giving military support to countries which impede humanitarian aid, we have continued to give weapons to Israel despite it preventing food and other necessary aid supplies from entering Gaza. More than this, every single dollar that the U.S. sends to Israel violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because Israel is a nuclear-armed nation. A law passed by Congress in 1976 bars any aid to be given to nuclear-armed countries which have not signed the NPT. Israel has not signed the NPT. The U.S. does not even officially acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons because to do so would mean to admit that the billions of dollars that is given to Israel every year is illegal.

As Palestinian-American writer Rami Khouri points out, the West consistently demonstrates its lawless capriciousness in regards to Middle Eastern affairs:

The difficulty with the Israelis and the American government, especially the State Department…is they don’t really have any ethical or legal point of moral reference. … Whatever they say goes. … International law, UN resolutions, treaties, genocide conventions, these things don’t mean anything to the American government or to the Israeli government in this situation in the Middle East. They might mean something to them with the Rohingya or with somebody else, but here in our situation these rules of law are not applicable.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other high-level Israeli politicians and military leaders for their crimes against the Palestinians. Despite this, not a single government which has hosted visits of these Israeli officials since the warrants have issued have followed their legal duty to arrest these criminals as signatories to the treaty that created the ICC. Instead, officials with the ICC and the ICJ, along with their family members, have been sanctioned by the U.S. and barred from travel.

The Hind Rijab Foundation, a watchdog group, has been alerting governments when Israeli soldiers that have clearly documented their war crimes on social media .. https://x.com/trackingisrael .. are visiting their countries. None of these soldiers have faced criminal punishment despite ample (self-reported) evidence. None of the Israeli’s flights over Western airspace have been grounded. Here I remind you that the U.S. grounded the flight of the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, when it expected that Edward Snowden was on board. Snowden, a whistleblower against criminal worldwide U.S. surveillance is certainly not a genocidaire, yet the U.S. revoked his passport and tried to extradite him from Hong Kong using legal documents that “did not fully comply” with the law, Hong Kong said. In the same statement, apropos of nothing of course, Hong Kong also reminded the U.S. that it had been illegally hacking Hong Kong’s computer systems for years. Similarly, Julian Assange was forced to live in captivity for 14 years between his time at the cramped Ecuadorian embassy in London and the high-security Belmarsh prison simply for reporting on leaked documents given to him by Chelsea Manning that showed widespread war crimes and international fuckery beyond what was thought previously possible. This is our rule of law. Whistleblowers and journalists are jailed and hounded to the ends of the earth. Mass-murderers walk around scot-free.

Human Rights:

Where to begin and end? The atrocities have never let up in Gaza. The U.S. is sending bombs unimpeded to Israel to vaporize children. The U.K. is regularly sending spy planes over Gaza to provide Israel with military intelligence, making it complicit in Israel’s crimes as well. I can’t believe I’m writing this next sentence: The U.S. recently bombed Yemeni civilians, killing 8 of them, after a random Twitter user posted pictures and coordinates of what she thought was a Houthi weapons storage facility .. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/us-yemen-bombing-x-osint . The intelligence used in our drone wars and bombing campaigns has always been full of shit, with some stretches of time where most of the people killed were not the intended targets, but this is next-level laziness and depravity.

I’ve written about the ongoing atrocities in Palestine before. No single person or group can keep track of them all. They are daily. They are constant. But what hit me most recently was this interview with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his two recent times volunteering as a trauma surgeon in what remains of Gaza’s hospital system. Please, please, please watch the interview .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9lEnYa4q0 . Please watch it. Dr. Sidhwa is incredibly grounded, articulate, and convincing. What he shares is harrowing beyond belief. These are my main takeaways from what he says: There is no functioning hospital system in Gaza anymore. If a hospital hasn’t already been bombed to oblivion then it’s been starved for supplies, overrun by patients and refugees, and raided and ransacked multiple times by Israeli forces. Hospital buildings have become refugee camps. People are targeted by Israeli snipers and bombing when moving in and out of the hospital grounds, so medical staff remain fulltime in the building, working and sleeping, working and sleeping, working and sleeping. The care that is being done is little more than what can be done in your own kitchen with a scalpel and some gauze. Individual volunteer doctors are bringing over as much medical supplies as they can personally carry because Israel is not allowing supply trucks to enter. There is no sterility. There are no blood banks. People are dying left and right from survivable wounds simply because they are getting infections or bleeding out. There are multiple mass graves outside the hospitals. Doctors in every remaining hospital are seeing dozens of children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Dozens of children. With gunshot wounds. To the head and chest. Not shrapnel. Gunshots. Targeted. Children. Shortly after one Israeli attack, Dr. Sidhwa says, “Honestly, for the first ten or fifteen minutes all we did was pronounce small children dead.”

Watch the interview .

As I see what we wreak upon the Palestinians every day, contrasted with the contagion of moral apathy in our society, our unthinking retreat into the frivolous and the trivial, our happy opiates, our spectacle, our deathly American trance — I want to scream. I want to overthrow the tables. I want to wake the children sleeping. No more can this go on. This, all of it, is unbearable. And yet it is borne. “Death has been thick, lately,” writes Dr. Farah El-Sharif.

If you stick your tongue out anywhere in America these days, the invisible particles of Gaza’s almost quarter million dead will precipitate on your lips and you can taste the bitter tonic of mass murder as you guzzle down your X-Large Frappuccino.



Luminescent particles of the souls of the dearly genocided haunt the air. It cannot be escaped. The monsters are in charge. Terror reigns but an eery “normalcy” abounds. A pervasive banality of evil. The air is heavy with machine-like decadence, spiritual death, moral decay, mass strangulation.


Welcome to America: Imperial core. Festival of insanity.

This is who we are. You cannot take the good, what remains of it, without the bad. There is no going back from this I’m afraid. Want an actionable item for all of this? Get upon the gears.

Weird Catastrophe by Kody Cava is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

https://weirdcatastrophe.substack.com/p/palestine-has-exposed-every-lie-the
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fuagf

05/14/25 8:35 PM

#525974 RE: fuagf #525152

Palestinians in razed West Bank hamlet vow to stay

"Murder in the ME - More than 90 killed in Gaza strikes including journalist who just became a father
"UN and aid groups denounce Israeli-U.S. plan for Gaza aid delivery
"The six controversies plaguing Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu""
"

By AFP - May 07,2025 - Last updated at May 07,2025


Palestinians check the destruction at a UNRWA school housing displaced people,
following an Israeli strike in the Bureij refugee camp in the centre of the
Gaza Strip, on May 7, 2025 (AFP photo)

KHALLET AL-DABAA, PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES — Standing in the rubble of what used to be his home, Palestinian farmer Haitham Dababseh cleared stones to make space for a tent after Israeli army bulldozers destroyed his village in the occupied West Bank.

Residents of Khallet al-Dabaa and other hamlets in the West Bank's Masafer Yatta region have for years contended with violence from Israeli settlers and repeated demolitions.

But the bulldozers that descended on Khallet al-Dabaa on Monday carried out "the biggest demolition we've ever had", said Dababseh, razing to the ground the hamlet that is home to about 100 Palestinians.

Israeli forces "came here in the past, they demolished three times, four times", the 34-year-old farmer told AFP, but never entirely destroyed a hamlet this size in Masafer Yatta.

"I just have my clothes. Everything I have is under the rubble."

Behind him, his 86-year-old father struggled to move the house's former door out of the way so that they can set up their shelter.

Khallet al-Dabaa is one of several villages featured at length in the Oscar-winning documentary "No Other Land", recounting the struggles of the Palestinian residents of the area in the West Bank's south, a frequent target of settler violence and army activities.

Several of the communities shown in the documentary have experienced settler attacks or army demolitions since it won an Academy Award in March.

No protection

Several years after occupying the West Bank in 1967, the Israeli army had declared Masafer Yatta a restricted firing zone.

Israeli forces regularly demolish structures that the military authorities say were built illegally in the area, where about 1,100 Palestinians live across several hamlets.

"Enforcement authorities of the Civil Administration dismantled a number of illegal structures that were built in a closed military zone in the South Hebron Hills," the Israeli military told AFP in a statement on the Khallet al-Dabaa demolition.

"The enforcement actions were carried out after the completion of all required administrative procedures and in accordance with the enforcement priority framework previously presented to the Supreme Court," it added.

Some residents, and many of their ancestors, once lived in caves in the rocky terrain to escape the area's stifling summer heat, and built houses with stone and other materials after the Israeli firing zone designation in the 1970s.

Dababseh said he was the first member of his family to be born in a hospital and not a cave.

He lamented that the army had blocked the entry to the cave near the family home where his father and grandfather were born.

In the middle of Khallet al-Dabaa, what served as a health and community centre is now a pile of broken concrete with no walls.

A torn logbook that an aid organisation used to record residents' medical check-ups lay under dust.

On the outside wall of the only structure left standing, a painted mural read "Let me live".

Mohammed Rabaa, head of the nearby Tuwani village council which has jurisdiction over Khallet al-Dabaa, told AFP that the foreign aid his community received was useless if the world "can't protect it".

'I'm not leaving'

According to Rabaa, "nine settler outposts were established in the Masafer Yatta area" since October 2023, when war began in the separate Palestinian territory of the Gaza Strip.

The West Bank is home to about three million Palestinians, but also some 500,000 Israelis living in settlements that are illegal under international law.

Settlement outposts, built without the authorities' prior approval, are considered illegal under Israeli law too although enforcement is relatively rare.

The settlers who live in the nearby outposts "attack homes, burn property, destroy and vandalise" with full impunity and often under army protection, said Rabaa.

To him, they aim to force Palestinians to leave and "do not want any Palestinian presence".

The day after Khallet al-Dabaa was razed, Israel's Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician who lives in a settlement, expressed his hope that the government would formally annex the territory soon.

Umm Ibrahim Dababseh, a 76-year-old woman who has lived in Khallet al-Dabaa for six decades, said she would not leave under any circumstances.

"I told them, 'make my grave right here'," she said of the Israeli soldiers, adding that they had to drag her out of her now ruined house.

"I didn't even get to wear my clothes properly," she said, sitting with her granddaughters on a rock under the shade of an olive tree.

Haitham Dababseh, a distant relative of Umm Ibrahim, said that hardships would not make him leave either.

"Last night, I slept there," he said, pointing to a bed exposed to the elements on the hilltop.

"I have a bed, okay, I will cover myself with the sky, but I'm not leaving."

https://jordantimes.com/news/region/palestinians-razed-west-bank-hamlet-vow-stay

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Home demolitions in occupied West Bank rise by 200%


**

Palestinians mark Nakba amid mass displacement in Gaza and West Bank

Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – Palestinians on Wednesday commemorated their displacement during the creation of Israel, saying that history was being repeated today in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Issued on: 14/05/2025 - 20:35Modified: 14/05/2025 - 20:36
2 min
Palestinians wave national flags as they commemorate the 77th anniversary of the "Nakba" in the city of Ramallah
Palestinians wave national flags as they commemorate the 77th anniversary of the "Nakba" in the city of Ramallah © Zain JAAFAR / AFP

Tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza and an aid blockade threatens famine, while Israeli leaders continue to express a desire to empty the territory of Palestinians as part of the war sparked by Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack.

In the West Bank, too, occupied since 1967, Israeli forces have displaced tens of thousands from refugee camps as part of a major military operation.

This year marks the 77th anniversary of the Nakba -- "catastrophe" in Arabic -- which refers to the flight and expulsion of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

More - https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250514-palestinians-mark-nakba-amid-mass-displacement-in-gaza-and-west-bank