"In its official comments, the Israeli army had said that the displaced [Palestinian] population had left voluntarily, that “civilians who wished to evacuate were permitted to temporarily leave the area”. Ahmaro was outraged at the suggestion that he had any choice about fleeing. “Never, never, never. Why should I leave my house?” he asked."

Guardian graphic. Source: Peace Now

 

... Within hours, the whole city of 250,000 people had been sealed off [by Israeli forces] and the neighbourhood of Farsh al-Hawa [Palestine], closest to the site of Friday’s attack [on Israeli forces at one of the many Israeli checkpoint chokeholds on Palestine], had been flattened. By Sunday morning, there was nothing left but rubble of an industrial area that had been full of car workshops, a big ceramics plant and other enterprises.

As the bulldozers were at work there, another district a few kilometres away was being systematically emptied. Ein Deir Baha was allegedly home to at least one of the two men involved in the attack (both of whom were killed on the spot), and on Friday its residents paid the price.

Fahed Ahmaro, who was forced to flee his home in the Deir Baha area of Hebron by Israeli security forces, looks at his house from a distance. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

 

The imam from the local mosque, Fahed Ahmaro, was woken at about midnight by the loudspeakers from military vehicles patrolling the street, telling [Palestinian] homeowners to vacate their homes immediately for their own safety.

Ahmaro had 30 members of his family living in his house. He rushed his frail mother and some of his grandchildren to his daughter’s house in another part of Hebron, and was on his way back in the hope of picking up some of his possessions when his neighbour phoned him.

“He told me not to come back, and the [Israeli] army had blown up the gates to the house. I don’t know what they have done to it by now. I heard they destroyed the furniture,” Ahmaro said. “You don’t know what you have until you lose it. Now I realise how devastating it is to lose your home.”

At midday on Sunday, he was in a Hebron market shopping for a change of clothes for his grandchildren, uncertain how long the family’s exile would last.

He had heard that the house was being used as a base by Israeli soldiers and looking up at the house, perched on the side of a steep hill, he could see some lights on but no sign of life.

The Hebron municipality said that 370 families, nearly 2,000 people, had been displaced by the army sweep through Ein Deir Baha. In its official comments, the Israeli army had said that the displaced population had left voluntarily, that “civilians who wished to evacuate were permitted to temporarily leave the area”.

Ahmaro was outraged at the suggestion that he had any choice about fleeing.

“Never, never, never. Why should I leave my house?” he asked.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/26/collective-punishment-palestinians-displaced-israeli-forces-take-over-hebron-homes

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Israeli soldiers raze neighbourhood in Hebron, driving families from homes

PM Benjamin Netanyahu vows ‘to destroy this place’ in retaliation for militant attack on army checkpoinks

Israeli troops have levelled a neighbourhood in Hebron, driving out hundreds of families in collective punishment for a militant attack on an army checkpoint outside the West Bank city, local Palestinian authorities said.

The Hebron municipality estimated that 35 hectares (86 acres) had been destroyed or marked for destruction and about 1,500 people had been evicted from their homes by Saturday afternoon in the district of Ein Deir Baha. The whole city of 250,000 people was sealed off by checkpoints on every point of entry.

Videos sent by a Hebron resident showed a substantial area of devastation with every house over several blocks flattened in an urban area. One video showed soldiers marking Palestinian houses with a sprayed black cross, another showed a bulldozer tearing down a stone wall on a hillside and another showed a large residential building festooned with Israeli flags... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/24/israel-soldiers-raze-west-bank-neighbourhood-hebron-families-from-homes

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Israel uproots 400 olive trees in occupied West Bank as harvest season approaches... The trees are hundreds of years old- uprooting them not only destroys the trees, but also affects the livelihoods of Palestinian families that depend on them.

 September 24, 2026

Israeli forces uproot 400 olive trees belonging to Palestinians and destroy 31 dunams of land with heavy machinery in the town of Beit Rima, northwest of Ramallah, in the West Bank, Palestine on September 24, 2026. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260924-israel-uproots-400-olive-trees-in-occupied-west-bank-as-harvest-season-approaches/ 

 ... Since the beginning of 2026 through Sept. 22, Israel has issued 51 orders to remove trees and vegetation in the occupied West Bank, targeting 2,093 dunams of land, according to data from the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

The uprooting operation comes as the olive harvest season approaches. Olive trees are a major source of income for thousands of Palestinian families. Bulldozing and uprooting operations cause losses to farmers and threaten their ability to access and cultivate their land.

Afrah Qadura, 65, from Beit Rima, told Anadolu Agency that residents learned of the military order two days ago and saw a map at the municipality building showing the areas targeted for the removal of olive trees.

He said landowners were given 12 hours to remove trees before the Israeli army would implement the order. “How can we remove trees planted by our fathers and uproot them with our own hands?” he asked rhetorically.

Qadura said the olive trees had been planted over decades, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s and 1980s, as well as trees planted in the 1990s.

He said some of the trees uprooted Thursday had become highly productive for years, adding that olive trees are a primary source of livelihood for residents.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are preparing for the olive harvest season, which usually begins in October.

Thousands of Palestinians rely on olive trees and their crops as a source of income, alongside their connection to the land and agricultural heritage passed down through generations.

“We are proud of those trees like our children,” said Qadura, noting the years he and his father spent cultivating the land, caring for the trees and watering them.

He added that he used to bring water from a well to water the saplings and follow their growth during the years. “My father worked hard planting the trees, and we also worked hard caring for them.”

He said his family continued to tend, clean and care for the trees until they became part of their lives. Losing them in this way was, for him, like losing one of his children.

Qadura said uprooting the trees would not force his family to abandon their land, stressing that he and his family intend to replant the trees uprooted by the Israeli army.

“We will continue planting trees like my father did, and our children will continue after us,” he said, citing his family’s connection to the land and its cultivation across generations.

Abdul Rahman al-Rimawi, mayor of Bani Zeid al-Gharbia, which includes Beit Rima and other towns, told Anadolu Agency that everybody was surprised Thursday when Israeli army bulldozers began uprooting mature olive trees in the town in an area of 31 dunams.

Rimawi said the trees “are hundreds of years old,” and that uprooting them not only destroys the trees, but also affects the livelihoods of Palestinian families that depend on them.

​​​​​​​He said the operation comes as the olive harvest season approaches, describing it as part of “arbitrary Israeli practices against people, trees and stones.”

Rimawi said the residents of Beit Rima “are not isolated from this people” and what Palestinians are subjected to in terms of harassment, killings, displacement and the uprooting of olive trees.

He implored international institutions and relevant parties to work to halt the decision to uproot the trees, noting that there is ongoing communication with the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission to that end.

Rimawi said Israeli authorities had not, according to him, explained the grounds for implementing the decision, and that what is happening represents “Israeli practices against all members of the Palestinian people” in the occupied West Bank.

 WATCH: Gaza and the dystopian future of AI-powered war | Palestine This Week

At 76, Mansoura’s most precious possession is the key to her former home... ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza

This is the most precious thing I own – the key to our house in the north. It is the key to the house that the occupation forces bulldozed. They flattened it: the house, the trees, the well, even a pen full of animals – they bulldozed it all. We couldn’t take anything with us, no money, no livestock.

I lived through wars before this. None was as bad as this one. During the 52-day war, we sheltered in schools, and we were OK – there wasn’t bombing like this, not the level of killing, and not the destruction of homes. But this war is extremely difficult. The destruction is enormous, the devastation is enormous – and all without any benefit. All of this is for nothing.

Life has become very different. Our family never knew hunger before, never knew displacement, bombardment, missiles, killing and destruction in this way or on this scale. The other thing I keep in this bag is a bullet – it was pulled from my son’s back. During the famine, he had nothing to eat and nothing to feed his seven children, so he went to get a bag of flour to feed his children from the aid stations, and they shot him. I keep this as a reminder of what happened – all for the sake of getting food.

‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza

 https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ng-interactive/2026/sep/23/this-is-where-i-live-now-the-back-of-a-truck-a-day-in-the-life-of-a-grandmother-in-gaza

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"All they will find is sand" Eyal Weizman on the demolition of Gaza in The London Review of Books April 2026

Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026

 Eyal Weizman   

The​ UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.

The idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be ‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even sexual reproduction.

Architects’ Data (1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens, bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry, which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement of life to the production of death.

Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement.

Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction... READ MORE 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n07/eyal-weizman/all-they-will-find-is-sand 

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/776402/ungrounding-by-eyal-weizman/

Eyal Weizman’s new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, will be published next month. 

Harvesting Olives in the West Bank, in Photos For 7,000 years, the tradition has been a lifeline for Palestinians. Now, it’s under siege [by Israeli Settlers]...

New York Magazine

@NYMag

 

Palestinians in the West Bank face a double bind: Relinquish their homes to Israeli settlers, becoming either displaced within Palestine or international refugees; or remain on their land, perpetually vulnerable to surveillance, attack, and intimidation. 

 

Disruption of the olive harvest is both a means of land dispossession and a form of regimented impoverishment. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians rely on income from olive farming, and an estimated 70 percent of their harvest was threatened in 2025. 

 

At the end of the season, the U.N. reported 178 settler attacks. 

 

Farmers and their families, including children, were killed by gunfire and tear gas. 

 

Centuries-old olive trees were razed. 

 

Thousands of acres were burned, bulldozed, or blocked off for Israeli “military use.” 

 

Since then, the violence hasn’t died down: In February, settlers reportedly destroyed seven Palestinian villages in a single week. 

 

At the same time, Israel continues to exert ever tighter control over the West Bank, making it more difficult for Palestinians to retain their land. 

 

The writer Jasmine Sanders traveled to the West Bank to volunteer during the 2025 olive-harvest campaign. “My experience of the olive harvest was one of queasy liminality,” she writes. 

 

“Not war, and yet not peace: the bracingly quotidian terror of life under threat from settlers and amid Israeli military occupation, which is now the longest such occupation in history.” 

 

Read more about her experience: https://nymag.visitlink.me/e43Mea

 

                           Jasmine Sanders, is a writer from the South Side of Chicago.

 

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