I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
Experts warn abuses may amount to war crimes, urge international action to end impunity
Beyza Binnur Donmez, AA.com, 30 April 2026
GENEVA
UN experts said Thursday that sexual and
gender-based violence is being used as a “systematic tool” of control
and oppression against Palestinians under Israeli occupation, warning
that the acts may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Israeli sexual violence has become
embedded in Palestinians’ daily lives under occupation,” the experts
said in a statement. “It is intersecting, structural and systematic, and
operates as a tool of control, subjugation and dispossession.”
The experts said abuses occur in multiple
contexts, including detention, checkpoints and house raids, and involve
Israeli forces and settlers.
They expressed concern about widespread impunity, saying investigations remain rare and accountability largely absent.
“Political convenience, strategic,
military and economic interests are placed above Palestinian lives,”
they said, warning that inaction “strikes the very basis of
international law.”
Citing previous UN findings, the experts
said the violence is used “to terrorise” Palestinians and contribute to
forced displacement by creating a coercive environment.
“Sexualised violence is deployed as a method of domination — to instil fear, punish, and fracture communities,” they said.
The experts urged Israel to end the
practices and urged the international community to take concrete steps
to ensure accountability and end the “climate of impunity extending
across both (Israel) state and illegal settlers.”
A source told Bloomberg that the US only has eight of the missiles, known as the Dark Eagle
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, April 30, 2026 at 2:20 pm ET | Iran
US Central Command has requested the
deployment of the US’s hypersonic missile, known as the Dark Eagle, for
potential use against Iran, as President Trump is considering restarting
the bombing campaign, Bloomberg has reported.
The US has already used a missile for the
first time against Iran, a short-range ballistic missile called the
Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, which, according to an investigation
from The New York Times, was used in a February 28 strike that hit a
sports hall in the Iranian city of Lamerd, killing at least 21 people in
the area, including boys and girls practicing sports.
Launch of a Dark Eagle missile on April 20, 2026 (US Army Contracting Command)
The Bloomberg report said that CENTCOM
wants to use the Dark Eagle, also known as the Long-Range Hypersonic
Missile (LRHW), because Iran’s missile launchers are now out of range of
the PrSM, which can hit targets more than 300 miles away. The Dark
Eagle reportedly has a range of 1,725 miles, though its capabilities are
not public.
Another reason the US wants to use the
Dark Eagle in Iran is to demonstrate to Russia and China that it has
hypersonic capabilities, as both Moscow and Beijing have already
deployed hypersonic missiles, and the US’s LRHW project is very far
behind schedule.
If the US does deploy the Dark Eagle to
the Middle East, it won’t have many to use. A source told Bloomberg that
each missile, developed by Lockheed Martin, costs about $15 million and
that there are no more than eight. The batteries to fire the Dark Eagle
also cost about $3.6 billion.
According to Axios, President Trump was
scheduled to receive a briefing on Thursday on the possibility of
launching strikes against Iran from CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper.
The idea would be to launch a limited bombing campaign to break a
deadlock in negotiations, though any US strikes would almost certainly
plunge the region into a full-blown war.
The report also said another option being
presented to Trump would be to use military force to open the Strait of
Hormuz, which could involve ground forces.
Leading U.K. media don’t mention
the Israel Lobby because they’re part of it, writes Mark Curtis. But its
influence over U.K. politics is likely to be greater than any other
state, except perhaps the U.S.
BBC Bias Kills – London protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza, May 15, 2021. (Alisdaire Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Britain’s national media
fails to recognise the influence – and even the existence – of an Israel
lobby, our new media analysis shows.
Declassified researched two years of reporting by seven British media outlets and found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks.
Nearly all those mentions are in comment
articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what
influence such an Israel lobby might have.
The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with
speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26
mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a
disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.
For example, one Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’.” The Daily Mail reported
in May 2024 of hecklers at a speech by then foreign secretary secretary
David Lammy “accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the
‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000
from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.”
In fact, British businessman Trevor Chinn has funded Keir
Starmer and several senior Labour ministers and was awarded the Israeli
medal of honour for his “dedication” to and “love” for Israel.
Of seven media outlets analysed — BBC, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and Times — the BBC and the Express
are the most extreme. No mentions of the phrase Israel lobby, used
without speech marks, could be found at all in their publications.
BBC Broadcasting Building entrance at night, 2013. (Zizzu02/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)
The BBC is failing to mention the Israel lobby while having regular meetings with it. As Declassified recently revealed, the BBC held nine meetings with Jewish groups strongly sympathetic to Israel in the first year of the Gaza genocide.
TheGuardian was found
to have made only five mentions of an Israel lobby without speech marks,
three of which are in comment pieces by columnist Owen Jones.
By contrast, independent Scottish newspaper The National,
which has consistently criticised U.K. policy towards Israel, has
mentioned the Israel lobby twenty-three times in the two-year sample
period, never in speech marks.
Israel Lobby
The Israel lobby in Britain is extensive. Declassified has revealed that a quarter of MPs have been funded by pro-Israel individuals and groups, as have one half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet.
Neither of these findings have been reported in the mainstream media, as far as Declassified is aware.
British ministers and officials are known to hold off-the-books meetings
with pro-Israel lobbyists, and under Starmer’s government, the Foreign
Office has held numerous meetings with pro-Israel advocacy groups such
as Board of Deputies of British Jews and the European Leadership Network
(ELNET).
The U.K. government’s total proscription
of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah in 2019 was the work of pro-Israel
lobbyists while the lobby group, We Believe in Israel, has taken credit for the U.K. government’s proscription of Palestine Action last year.
Keir Starmer, as Labour Party leader,
attending the Labour Friends of Israel vigil on Oct. 10, 2023, at Labour
Party conference in Liverpool following the Hamas attacks on Gaza on
Oct. 7, 2023. (Keir Starmer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
As long ago as 2009, a landmark Channel Four documentary, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby,
which was presented by journalist Peter Oborne, revealed the close
relationship between the Israel lobby and the Conservative and Labour
parties, and its attempts to curb criticism of Israel in the media.
The Israel lobby’s influence over U.K.
politics is likely to be greater than any other state except perhaps the
U.S., and certainly far more than Russia which has received decidedly
more media attention.
Friends of Israel
The British media’s failure to explicitly
acknowledge an Israel lobby comes alongside nearly 300 articles in these
seven outlets during the two years mentioning either Labour Friends of
Israel (LFI) or Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), of which dozens of
MPs are supporters.
These lobby groups are invariably
mentioned in the media without any analysis of their influence or even
that they are explicitly part of a lobby that advocates for goals which
benefit a foreign country, such as opposing an arms embargo on Israel.
TheIndependent has mentioned the phrase “influential Labour Friends of Israel” group three times, and TheTimes once, without mentioning how it is influential.
Yet CFI has been the largest donor of free overseas trips for MPs in recent years, and both CFI and LFI refuse to provide a list of their funders. LFI says
its work is funded by “the generosity of members of the Jewish
community and those who share our commitment to the State of Israel.” It
adds that it “does not receive any money from the Israeli government or
the Israeli Embassy.”
The Times has mentioned the
phrase Israel lobby, without speech marks, on only four occasions in the
two years, but has mentioned Labour Friends of Israel in over 50
articles. That LFI might be a part of a broader Israel lobby has
apparently not been spelled out by The Times to its readers.
Part of the Lobby
These omissions might be because the seven
media outlets we analysed often function as part of the Israel lobby
that they refuse to sufficiently recognise.
The most extreme is TheTelegraph,
which routinely publishes articles supportive of Israel during its
genocide in Gaza, illegal war on Iran and brutal attacks on Lebanon.
The paper has recently called to restore U.K. military ties to Israel, headlined with “Israel condemns ‘hateful and racist’ Greens,” and published an article by pro-Israel writer Jake Wallis Simons headlined “The case for Trump attacking Iran,” among many similar articles.
Some articles in these outlets suggest that recognition of an Israel lobby is anti-semitic. One opinion piece in TheTelegraph runs:
“Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory
about how the world works. You think you live in a democracy, it runs,
but actually there is this secret invisible system of Jewish power that
rules the world through the banking system, the media and the Israel
lobby.”
Similarly, TheGuardianreported on Labour MP Diane Abbott in May 2024, stating:
“She apologised for liking tweets about
the influence of the Israel lobby, which she admitted could be
interpreted as an anti-semitic trope.”
TheGuardian has been found to cave in to pro-Israel pressure, to amplify Israeli propaganda, and to be responsible for
the same “systemic bias, deliberate distortion and deceptive
underreporting” on Israeli crimes as the rest of the British media.
When the vice chair of LFI, Damian Egan,
was forced to pull out of a school visit in January this year due to
pressure from a pro-Palestinian group, both TheIndependent and TheTimes
chose to focus on Egan simply being Jewish, headlining: “Jewish MP’s
visit to local school cancelled after pro-Palestine campaign.”
Over 100,000 people have recently signed a petition calling for a public inquiry into pro-Israel influence on politics and democracy.
Note – our media analysis covered the
period Apr. 7, 2024 to Apr. 7, 2026, using the Nexis media database and
conducting website searches of the seven media outlets.
Mark Curtis is the co-director of Declassified UK and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.
Secretary
of Defense Pete Hegseth appears before a House Committee on Armed
Services business meeting on the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2027,
on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, April 29, 2026, in Washington. [AP
Photo/Rod Lamkey Jr.]
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified
before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday on the Trump
administration’s plan to increase military spending by 50 percent, from
$1 trillion this year to $1.5 trillion in Fiscal Year 2027.
Hegseth, who has rebranded the Pentagon as
“the Department of War,” told the committee the budget would put the
defense industrial base “back on a wartime footing.”
The request is the sharpest single-year
jump in US military spending in the postwar era. It would lift outlays
to 4.5 percent of gross domestic product, with House Republican leaders
calling for 5 percent as the eventual target.
The buildup is preparation for war with
nuclear-armed China and Russia, the two states Trump’s National Defense
Strategy names as principal adversaries.
In the face of a broadly unpopular
administration openly stating its intent to commit war crimes in pursuit
of global domination, the Democrats on the committee made it their
highest priority to emphasize—despite tactical disagreements—their
solidarity with the Trump administration’s megalomaniacal program of
world conquest.
Democratic ranking member Adam Smith of
Washington opened by expressing his sympathy with the Iran war and with
the 50 percent surge in military spending. “I think we should all
recognize that our troops deserve nothing but our praise for the
incredible job that they have done,” Smith told Hegseth. “We have
demonstrated to the world that we have a highly capable military, and I
hear the chairman on the need for an increased” budget.
Smith then condemned the mass popular
opposition to the war. “I strongly disagree with the folks on the far
left who say that we don’t really face any threats, that the US is a
malign influence in the world and always has been. I don’t agree with
that,” Smith said. “China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Hezbollah, Hamas,
the Houthis,” he continued, “They want to push us aside.”
Republican Don Bacon of Nebraska summed up
the bipartisan consensus for global war. “We are the most bipartisan
committee out of 20 in Congress. We have a tradition of voting on NDAAs
with large, large majorities year after year,” Bacon said. “And it’s
important not to be a Republican first in here or a Democrat first.
We’re Americans trying to ensure that our country is well defended. And
in that spirit, I compliment the operations in Iran.”
Bacon is correct about the bipartisanship
of the war drive. The Democrats funded the buildup before the Iran war
began and refused to halt it once it was under way. The House passed the
FY26 National Defense Authorization Act on December 10, 2025, by 312 to
112, with the entire Democratic House leadership voting yes; the Senate
followed 77 to 20. On January 22, 2026, the House cleared an $839
billion defense appropriations bill 341 to 88. On February 2, 21 House
Democrats supplied the margin for a continuing resolution to keep the
government funded; the same day, a US F-35 from the USS Abraham Lincoln
shot down an Iranian drone over the Arabian Sea. Twenty-six days later,
the US-Israeli assault on Iran began. Once it had, both chambers voted
down War Powers Act resolutions to stop it.
The plan’s largest line item, $71 billion,
would massively expand the US nuclear arsenal—new ballistic-missile
submarines, long-range bombers and intercontinental missiles aimed at
China and Russia. Shipbuilding receives $65 billion. Bombs and
conventional missiles get $25 billion. The “Golden Dome” missile-defense
program is funded at $22 billion. The Space Force budget doubles.
Procurement rises 76 percent and research and development 64 percent.
Another $54.6 billion is earmarked for a Defense Autonomous Warfare
Group to wage drone war, most of it contingent on a future
reconciliation bill.
Hegseth said the budget would put 14
munitions production lines on a sustained wartime tempo—Patriot, PAC-3,
THAAD, Tomahawk, AMRAAM and JASSM missiles among them—with companies
offered multi-year demand signals to expand their factories. The
active-duty force grows by 44,000 troops. The Pentagon claims to have
triggered more than $50 billion in private investment, 280 new factories
and 18 million square feet of American manufacturing floorspace. Joint
Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine called the budget “a historic down
payment on future security.”
Republican Mike Rogers of Alabama, chair
of the House committee, framed the request around preparation for war
with China. “China builds 47% of the world’s ships. The US builds
one-tenth of 1%. We build fewer ships than Croatia or the Netherlands,”
Rogers said. The Chinese military, he added, has become “a modernized
military force capable of projecting power well into the Pacific.”
Caine said the Pentagon was reviewing “all
three legs of the nuclear triad”—submarines, missiles and bombers—to
make sure they were “reliable, redundant, and workable” for, in his
words, “our nation’s most important day.” Hegseth warned the committee
that “the country that dominates in quantum will dominate the future in
C2, in comms, in every way that we fight.” Bacon called for a nuclear
buildup expressly aimed at Beijing: “Russia, China needs to know no
matter what they do, we can launch those 400 ICBMs.”
The defense secretary spoke the vocabulary
of a crime boss. He said the spending would build a military that
“instills nothing less than unrelenting fear in our adversaries.” He
cited the year’s operations as proof. “That matters when you go 37 hours
around the world for Midnight Hammer,” he said, referring to the June
2025 B-2 bombing of Iranian nuclear sites. “That matters when you go
downtown in Venezuela and grab the indicted dictator of a country in the
middle of the night.” Russian air defenses sent to protect Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro before his January 3 abduction, Hegseth said,
“were defeated in 15 minutes.”
Democratic Representative Seth Moulton of
Massachusetts questioned Hegseth over his March 13 press conference
order to give boats in the Caribbean “no quarter, no mercy.” Moulton, a
former Marine Corps officer with four combat tours in Iraq from 2003 to
2008, said, “An order for no quarter or no survivors is a war crime
under the Geneva Conventions.” Hegseth did not retract the order. “The
Department of War fights to win,” he replied.
Wednesday’s hearing made clear that the
war on Iran is one phase of a global war the American ruling class is
preparing for control of the world.
An aggregated food security report
released on 29 April warns that more than 1.2 million people in Lebanon
will face acute hunger from April to August 2026 due to worsening living
conditions from the US-sponsored Israeli war.
Joint findings by the World Food Programme
(WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and Lebanon’s
Agriculture Ministry have concluded that around one in four people will
fall into the “crisis” phase of food insecurity or worse.
This marks a steep increase from November
to March, when 874,000 people – around 17 percent of the country’s
population – were already in that category, as more than one million
people were displaced by Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and
deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure.
Israeli forces continue their attacks in
south Lebanon, where residents have been warned not to return, with both
sides continuing to exchange fire despite a ceasefire announced on 17
April.
The instability has compounded existing
vulnerabilities in agriculture and rural livelihoods, particularly in
the south and the Bekaa Valley, where some of the heaviest Israeli
attacks have taken place.
WFP official Allison Oman Lawi said
earlier gains had been reversed, warning that “families who were just
managing to cope are now being pushed back into crisis.”
The Integrated Food Security Phase
Classification (IPC) analysis indicates that households are increasingly
unable to meet basic food needs, with many reducing meal sizes,
skipping meals, or turning to debt and asset sales to survive.
FAO representative Nora Ourabah Haddad
said the findings confirm “continued and deepening fragility,” calling
for urgent agricultural support to prevent further collapse.
The report warns that without sustained
humanitarian assistance, acute food insecurity is likely to deepen
further in the coming months.
Israeli forces intensified attacks
across Lebanon on 27 April, expanding strikes to the Bekaa region for
the first time in weeks while continuing heavy bombardment across
southern towns, causing injuries and widespread destruction.
The escalation came alongside Hebrew media claims
that Israeli occupation forces had begun scaling back parts of their
ground presence, redeploying units while maintaining “limited
operations” that include raids and the demolition of buildings under
claims of Hezbollah affiliation.
Despite these reports of partial
withdrawal, airstrikes and artillery fire persisted, with jets flying
low over areas such as Bint Jbeil, where Lebanese resistance fighters
continue to operate.
Israeli
army soldiers add zip ties to the mast of an Israeli flag flying at a
special area for exercises during a military drill in the
Israeli-annexed Golan Heights on July 8, 2025.
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Syrian journalist Oudai Efnikher is deeply
familiar with life under Israeli occupation. He was born in Kafer
Hareb, a village in Syria’s Golan Heights, from which he and his family
were expelled after Israel seized the territory during the 1967 Six-Day
War.
Now he is once again facing down Israeli forces, as they “take our land, kill our crops, and abduct our fathers.”
“This is a slow occupation, but soon, we will lose what they have not yet taken,” Efnikher told Truthout.
After Bashar al-Assad was ousted by Syrian
rebels in December 2024, Israeli forces wasted no time before launching
a massive aerial bombardment campaign on the country, destroying almost
80 percent of the military capacity left behind by the Assad regime.
Israeli forces also entered the
demilitarized buffer zone established by a UN Security Council
resolution in 1974 between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the
rest of Syria. They seized the territory and then established a
“security buffer” beyond the last demarcation line administered by UN
observer forces.
200 masked settlers descended on the West Bank on March 22, throwing Molotov cocktails and terrorizing Palestinians. By Theia Chatelle , Truthout
March 28, 2026
The area now under Israeli military
control is off-limits to Syrian civilians and government forces. Farmers
have been unable to tend to their land, and landowners have little hope
they will ever be able to access it again
In total, Israel now occupies an additional 177 square miles of Syrian territory than it did before the fall of Assad.
“Maybe Israel will take it all. They
already have a safe zone in southern Syria, so that could ultimately be
the best option for Israel,” Syrian political analyst Issam Khoury told Truthout.
But what is most concerning for Efnikher
is not the Israeli military’s presence in Syria, but what has become
regular incursions by Israeli settlers.
On April 22, a group of roughly 40
settlers affiliated with the far right Halutzei HaBashan movement, or
the Pioneers of Bashan — a reference to the name in the Torah for the
fertile territory located northeast of the Sea of Galilee, which the
Torah says was once ruled by the tyrant King Og before Moses defeated
him — entered Syrian territory and asked the Israeli government to
legalize settlement activity there.
According to Efnikher, who has been
working to monitor Israeli settlement activity in Syrian territory since
Assad’s fall in December 2024, this was the fifth such incursion by
Israeli settlers into Syria.
According to Etkes, this is how the
Israeli settlement movement functions: by “changing the facts on the
ground” until what was once unthinkable becomes reality.
The settlers see themselves as fulfilling a
biblical mandate. They consider this Syrian territory part of the
ancient land of Israel. Still, the Israeli military condemned
the incursion, calling it “a criminal offence that endangers civilians
and IDF troops.” Dror Etkes, a longtime Israeli settlement monitor who
led the advocacy group Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project and later
founded Kerem Navot, an organization that tracks Israeli land seizures
in the West Bank, says none of this comes as a surprise.
“Nothing is surprising anymore, not after
Gaza,” he said. “Many things I didn’t think would happen have happened,
so I think I should be pretty cautious when it comes to predicting what
will happen in this country.”
Etkes watched settlers build their first outposts in the West Bank in the 1960s, and then, after the Second Intifada,
the construction of the separation barrier. “If you had asked me 10
years ago, five years ago, two years ago, not to mention 50 years ago,
whether half a million Jews would be living in the West Bank, whether we
would have 350, 360, 370 outposts in the West Bank, of course nobody
would have said yes,” he added.
According to Etkes, this is how the
Israeli settlement movement functions: by “changing the facts on the
ground” until what was once unthinkable becomes reality. And this, he
says, is the goal of the settlement movement — whether it’s in Syria,
Lebanon, Gaza, or the West Bank.
The Pioneers of Bashan is not the only
settler organization entering closed military zones to pressure the
Israeli government to legalize settlements in foreign territory.
In southern Lebanon, a group called Uri Tzafon has worked
to build a movement to establish outposts in territory currently
occupied by the Israeli military. The group has flown drones into
Lebanese territory, urging residents to leave, and planted trees to
cement a claim to the land.
It was the same in Gaza with the far right
Tzav 9 movement, which on more than one occasion since October 7, 2023,
attempted to enter the enclave and establish outposts.
Slowly, the borders of the Israeli
imagination — much like the state’s own physical borders — are being
expanded by the settlement movement.
Slowly, the borders of the Israeli
imagination — much like the state’s own physical borders — are being
expanded by the settlement movement. In many cases, these incursions
have taken place with the implicit endorsement of the Israeli military.
According to both Etkes and Efnikher, it would have been impossible
for the settlers to enter Syrian territory without at least the tacit
approval of Israeli forces. There are hundreds of miles of fencing
dividing the Israeli-controlled Golan from Syrian territory, reinforced
by hundreds of thousands of mines.
Efnikher added that there are a number of
gates in the fencing that allow the Israeli military to cross into and
beyond the demilitarized buffer zone, which is how the Pioneers of
Bashan were able to enter Syrian territory.
The Israeli military said in a statement
after detaining and escorting the settlers back to Israeli-controlled
territory that “settlement in Bashan is essential to preserve the
achievements of the war.”
The push for these settlements is part of
the project of Greater Israel, which seeks to expand Israel’s borders to
what some settlers and religious nationalists claim were the boundaries
of the ancient Israelite kingdom — a biblical vision, contested
by mainstream archaeology, that imagines a realm stretching from the
Euphrates to the Nile, encompassing parts of modern-day Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt
But the expansionist drive is not only
about land. It is also about water. Efnikher pointed to the Mantara Dam,
the largest dam in Syria’s Quneitra Governorate. The dam controls water
flow into the Yarmouk River, another critical water supply for southern
Syria.
Before he was a journalist, Efnikher owned
a restaurant overlooking the dam. It has been closed since Israeli
forces expanded their occupation of the territory — a significant
financial blow to him and his family, though he stressed that he is
better off than most.
Israeli forces have destroyed thousands of dunams of farmland with pesticides in the process of building their outposts, and have established checkpoints — including aerial ones — to regulate the movement of Syrians near the buffer zone.
“There is a heavy psychological toll,
falling heaviest on children and the elderly,” Efnikher said. “We’re
talking about villages displaced since 1967 and families still affected
across generations, now living through yet another occupation.”
He pointed to the West Bank as emblematic of what the Quneitra Governorate might soon become.
Israel has held control of the West Bank for so long that many Palestinians and Israelis in the territory, more than a third of whom are children, do not remember a time when it was free of Israeli outposts and settlements. Now, according to
the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, there are more than 279
illegal settlements and 700,000 settlers living in the West Bank.
“This is a model [they’re] trying to
copy-paste in Syria and in Lebanon. It’s the same people, coming from
the same places, from the same ideological greenhouses.”
The commitments of the settlement movement
vary, but at its forefront are those who see it as their personal
mission to restore Jewish sovereignty over the land they claim as
Greater Israel, even if it must be paid for in blood.
“It’s been almost 58 years since this
project started. And all of it started actually illegal[ly] or
half-legal, started without official authorization. This is a model
[they’re] trying to copy-paste in Syria and in Lebanon. It’s the same
people, coming from the same places, from the same ideological
greenhouses,” Etkes said.
Efnikher warned that Israeli forces are
intensifying their incursions in the Quneitra region: They enter the
villages, make arrests — by his tally, more than 70 Syrians from the
Quneitra Governorate are currently held in Israeli prisons — set up
checkpoints, and then withdraw.
But Efnikher fears it is only a matter of
time before they stay. The presence of the Pioneers of Bashan is one
troubling sign. “They are winning,” Efnikher said of the Israeli forces.
Even for Etkes, there is little hope.
“Look at what they achieved in the last 58
years in the West Bank,” he said. “They have very good reasons to be
very optimistic.”
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about:blank This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Theia Chatelle is a freelance journalist
and photographer covering conflict, human rights, and displacement
across the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Based in
Jerusalem, she reports on war and social movements, with a focus on
human-interest storytelling and investigations into state power. Her
work has appeared in The Forward, The Nation, Haaretz, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other outlets. Her photography has been published by MS NOW and USA Today,
among others. Chatelle holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
American Studies from Yale University. She was a 2025 fellow at the
International Women’s Media Foundation and is an alumna of the Rory Peck
Trust and the Type Media Center.
(Photo credit: Emilio Morenatti/AP Photo/picture alliance)
