Tuesday, August 11, 2026

"Insane how little media coverage the occupied West Bank gets while Israel steals more land and terrorizes Palestinians every, single, day." Assal Rad

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Assal Rad

@AssalRad

https://x.com/AssalRad/status/2087088992999309741

Al Jazeera English

@AJEnglish

BREAKING: Israeli military continues attacks and raids across the occupied West Bank, with arrests, home raids, and forced displacement reported in several areas. LIVE updates: aje.news/s92crs

Escalation in settler attacks in occupied West Bank driven by upcoming Israeli elections

The recent escalation in settler attacks against Palestinians is state-sponsored and driven by the upcoming Israeli elections at the end of October, according to Ubai Al-Aboudi, a human rights advocate and former executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development.

“As a policy and a way to promote their policies or to promote themselves among the general electorate, the Israeli politicians that are now in charge of the government are giving more of a free hand and encouraging settlers even more to do these kinds of widespread attacks, pogroms, ethnic cleansing operations against Palestinians,” Al-Aboudi said.

Al-Aboudi noted that the surge in violence is also linked to a potential change in government in October.

“So, the settlers also understand that any new government might not be as lenient towards them, towards the ethnic cleansing process that they are taking right now on the ground,” he said, emphasising that the primary objective is to displace Palestinians from their land.

“The fact [is] that Israelis, through the government policy, through their genocidal policies, through their support of the settler militias … have been trying to push Palestinians out of our lands, to drive us away to make us refugees again,” Al-Aboudi added. https://aje.news/suhi9z?update=4845765

ANALYSIS

Israeli illegal settlement enterprise aimed at denying Palestinians their rights

Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank is aimed at preventing Palestinians from exercising their rights and ultimately preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state, political analyst Xavier Abu Eid has told Al Jazeera.

“The effect on Palestinians is exactly the same. It’s part of the same settler enterprise aimed at preventing Palestinians from enjoying their rights in their homeland,” Abu Eid said. He said the issue of Israeli settlers has been normalised locally and internationally, with attempts to distinguish between those living in illegal settlements for economic reasons and more ideologically driven settlers.

But Abu Eid said such distinctions obscure the broader system Israel has built around illegal settlements. “It’s not just about settlements and housing, but about the whole infrastructure,” he said.

As an example, Abu Eid said it is cheaper to travel by bus to an Israeli settlement than to a Palestinian village in the West Bank, highlighting how Israel prioritises illegal settlements and the infrastructure serving them.

He described this as part of a creeping takeover of Palestinian land, accompanied by restrictions on Palestinian movement and the seizure of more territory for Israeli settlers. https://aje.news/suhi9z?update=4845425

Western Media manufactures consent for genocide https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/834977/dont-say-palestine-by-assal-rad/

Amid the systematic killing of Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, one organisation has been quietly bringing British media workers to Israel.

Journalist Amal Khalil reporting in Lebanon last month (Photo: Mohammed Zaatari/Alamy)

Lobby group taking journalists on propaganda tours of Israel

JOHN McEVOY
23 April 2026

On Wednesday, journalist Amal Khalil and photographer Zeinab Faraj were reporting from southern Lebanon when an Israeli airstrike reportedly hit a car in front of them.

The two journalists, working for the Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar, were then targeted as they sought shelter in a nearby home. Khalil was killed and Faraj was seriously injured.

Khalil is one of over 259 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists to be killed by Israel since 2023, with the IDF responsible for two-thirds of all journalist killings globally in 2025.

While systematically killing Palestinian journalists, the Israeli government blocked entry of foreign media workers to Gaza, in an effort to create a blackout of its genocidal campaign.

At the same time, an influential lobby group named ELNET has been quietly taking UK journalists on propaganda tours of Israel, Declassified can reveal.

ELNET was created in 2007 to “counter the widespread criticism of Israel in Europe”, and is increasingly seen as the AIPAC of Europe.

The journalists who participated in ELNET delegations to Israel have written for some of Britain’s largest news organisations including the Telegraph, Spectator, and Mail on Sunday.

ELNET has also taken former British military officers to Israel, with many of them returning to Britain and putting a positive spin on the IDF’s operations in Gaza.

Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, told Declassified: “Journalists can try to claim that these are fact-finding visits but, in reality, they are junkets specifically deigned to generate pro-Israel coverage.

“Embedded journalism like this is dodgy in peacetime but utterly scandalous during a genocide when the rest of the world’s media have been locked out of Gaza.

“At the very least, just as the UK competition regulator insists that paid-for content must be ‘clearly labelled’, the same should apply to news stories that are made possible by well-funded supporters of the Israeli regime”.

ELNET...

AI-Enabled Weapons Systems- As Artificial Intelligence moves onto the battlefield, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has shared his deep concern about the potentially disastrous consequences. Describing the taking of human life by AI weapons as “morally repugnant,” the Secretary-General has stressed: “Some decisions must remain forever human — none more than taking a human life.”

“It’s time to come clean.”

UN Secretary-General outlines risks and opportunities of a future with AI

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has urged world leaders, technology companies, and others to work together to ensure the safe use of Artificial Intelligence.

The Secretary-General warned that without greater international cooperation, the technology could widen global inequality instead of advancing sustainable development. The unregulated usage of AI has direct impacts on our environment, children, and weapons systems that are developing at a rapid pace without close human oversight.

The Secretary-General said that nations must come together to increase the safety of Artificial Intelligence, while mitigating its detrimental impacts in four critical areas.

The Environment

AI is hungry for land, water and power, and the data centers behind it already consume more electricity than most nations.

By 2030, they could use more power than all but five countries — and enough water to meet the basic needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub‑Saharan Africa for an entire year.

Despite these obvious concerns, communities are often uninformed about the environmental impact of the infrastructure rising around them.

In response, the Secretary-General has proposed the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative, calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems — carbon, water, and land footprints — and to commit to powering every data centre with renewable energy by 2030.

Child Safety

"Far from envisaging any withdrawal, the Israeli military has expanded its presence and now controls about 65% of the territory. Hemmed in towards the coast in the rest of the strip, much of the [PALESTINIAN] population faces an unrelenting daily struggle. Formal schooling has not restarted, the healthcare system has been largely destroyed and the entry of medical and other humanitarian aid remains severely restricted. Reconstruction work has been blocked, while the first building contract issued by the Board of Peace has been for an outpost to host foreign troops. Meanwhile, the world’s attention has shifted to Mr Trump’s illegal and reckless war on Iran – a grievous miscalculation in which Israel’s prime minister also played his part...."

The Guardian view on the failed Gaza peace plan: Trump’s hollow claims are ignored in Jerusalem

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has no interest in agreeing to a deal. For relief to come to Gaza, real US pressure must be exerted

Editorial Mon 10 Aug 2026 13.47 EDT

‘Much of the population is repeatedly displaced amid the rubble, as different areas are targeted and bombed.’ Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Getty

At the end of July, Donald Trump announced that a “monumental” US-backed deal had been struck on Gaza, securing the phased disarmament of Hamas in parallel with Israeli military withdrawal. Three days later it was reported that another 18 people had died in Israeli airstrikes. Not for the first time, it appeared that Mr Trump’s rhetoric had only a distant relationship with the reality it purported to describe... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/10/the-guardian-view-on-the-failed-gaza-peace-plan-trumps-hollow-claims-are-ignored-in-jerusalem

Monday, August 10, 2026

When will Israel fulfill its ceasefire obligations? "Netanyahu keeps getting away with constantly changing the goal posts" Daoud Kuttab in The Arab News

Displaced Palestinians gather to collect water at a tent camp in Gaza City, August 9, 2026. (REUTERS)

Daoud Kuttab

August 09, 2026

The badly violated Gaza ceasefire might be getting further attention from the US-led Board of Peace.

Last September, President Donald Trump presented Arab and Muslim leaders at the UN with a 20-point, multiphase plan for Gaza. It was accepted by all parties, including Israel and Hamas, and received UN backing from a binding Security Council resolution.

That is the point at which the plan stopped being respected. Or, to be fair, stopped being respected by one of the parties, Israel, which has continued shooting and occupying more land, while the other party, the Palestinian resistance, has become a lame duck.

But suddenly, while the world was focused on the war between the US and Iran and the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the beleaguered Gaza Strip recently got what appeared to be some good news.

Hamas, headed by newly elected leader Khalil Al-Hayya, agreed on July 31 to a detailed Board of Peace road map for the future. However, even the acceptance of a made-for-Israel plan, which was seen and not rejected by the Israeli authorities, is now opposed by Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing entourage had expected Hamas to reject the plan. On Sunday, Netanyahu himself openly dismissed it, saying that Israeli forces “would not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.” The Israelis are now looking for ways to once again shift the goalposts, with the expectation that Hamas will not accept any further compromise.

The BBC has reported that at least 13 people, including several children, have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza since Hamas agreed to disarm. Criticism followed from the US-appointed envoy Nickolay Mladenov, director general of the Board of Peace, who wrote on X: “Two days of strikes across Gaza have killed civilians and destroyed medical supplies.”

The board’s latest 15-point sequencing plan commits Hamas, along with other armed factions and militias, to total disarmament in return for a gradual, reciprocal Israeli withdrawal from 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and the governing of Gaza by a Palestinian technocratic committee chosen by Washington.

Trump publicly approved the plan, describing it as “a critical step toward Gaza finally being governed by a new Palestinian government.” In a message posted on Truth Social, he said that “the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors.”

This time, Israel will not be able to flout the ceasefire since it will be monitored by an international force... READ MORE https://www.arabnews.com/node/2654015

Israeli general says Gaza should remain ‘destroyed for generations’: Giora Eiland says Palestinian despair serves Israel and demands permanent control beyond the Yellow Line

Palestinian residential salvage what they can from an apartment targeted in overnight Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City on August 2, 2026. (Omar Al Qattaa/AFP)

Elis Gjevori

Published date: 9 August 2026 21:30 BST

A former head of Israel’s National Security Council has called for Gaza to remain devastated for decades, openly presenting Palestinian despair and destruction as desirable outcomes after Israel’s genocide in the enclave.

Retired Major General Giora Eiland told Israel’s 103FM radio station on Sunday that rebuilding Gaza would run against Israeli interests.

“Israel has no interest in Gaza being rebuilt, it is better for us that it be destroyed for generations to come,” Eiland said.

“The greater the despair in Gaza and the greater the destruction, and the greater the monument to what they did on October 7, years to come, that is good" he added.

Eiland, a secular Israeli nationalist aligned with opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, opposes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu politically.

Yet his prescriptions for Gaza have frequently gone beyond Netanyahu’s publicly declared policies.

Calls for Israel to occupy Gaza land... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-general-says-gaza-should-remain-destroyed-generations

A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue: As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, “People really effing hate data centers.”

The New Yorker Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty

Story by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

August 9, 2026

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/ai-is-now-a-major-election-issue

Sunday, August 9, 2026

Israel’s ‘Green Rafah’ plan aims to fragment Gaza, experts say Analysts warn Israel’s new administrative zones seek to erase the Palestinian cause and force mass displacement.

Buildings lie in ruins amidst the rubble in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, December 8, 2025 [Nir Elias/Reuters]

By Mohammad Mansour

Israel has quietly given the green light for infrastructure work to begin in a designated area of southern Gaza, according to Israeli media, as it advances a post-war vision that experts warn is designed to reshape reality on the ground and permanently fragment the enclave.

Dubbed “Green Rafah”, the project backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz is in eastern Rafah near the unilaterally imposed “Yellow Line”, the effective Israeli buffer zone squeezing Palestinians into smaller areas.

Army Radio, which reported the approval on Sunday, said the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office described the initiative as an Emirati-backed pilot project aimed at establishing temporary housing “free” of the influence of the Palestinian group Hamas.

While the Israeli military will reportedly supervise the installation of water, sewage and electrical infrastructure, Palestinian labourers will be subjected to intense security screenings by the Shin Bet intelligence agency.

Furthermore, strict limitations have been imposed on the project, with Israeli authorities reportedly banning the entry of “caravans” or mobile homes into the area until at least November.

Also on Sunday, Netanyahu said he rejects the 15-point plan for Gaza announced last month by the United States-led Board of Peace.

The plan calls for the disarmament of Hamas in stages and the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip, but Netanyahu said an Israeli pull-out won’t happen until Hamas is fully disarmed.

As political negotiations over the future of Gaza stall, Palestinian political researcher Ahmed al-Atawneh warned that projects such as “Green Rafah” are designed to create isolated cantons under total Israeli administrative and security control. With this framework, he argued, Israel leaves Palestinians with only three choices: “Either they fully submit to Israeli policies, face death or imprisonment if they resist, or emigrate.”

Far from providing genuine humanitarian relief, al-Atawneh said Israel’s strategy relies on stripping the Palestinian struggle of its political dimension.

“Treating Palestinians merely as residents rather than citizens with a national cause means, in practice, undermining and liquidating the Palestinian cause,” he said, adding that this approach aligns with the broad consensus in the Israeli parliament rejecting any Palestinian political entity.

Al-Atawneh further criticised Arab involvement in such frameworks outside of a unified Palestinian consensus. “If any country is involved in this project based on the Israeli vision and away from the Palestinians, it raises many questions and essentially serves Israeli policy, rather than genuinely assisting or relieving Palestinians,” he added.

The Israeli ban on mobile homes and delay of meaningful reconstruction of civilian infrastructure carry deep strategic implications, according to experts.

Mohammad Hamed al-Aila, a Palestinian researcher, pointed out that the humanitarian protocol attached to a ceasefire agreement signed last year in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh explicitly mandates the entry of temporary housing (caravans) and repair of civilian infrastructure.

“Israel has not adhered to these obligations, despite 10 months passing since” the signing of a ceasefire deal, said al-Aila, noting that Israel continues to stall while Hamas demands the full implementation of the first phase.

“Preventing the entry of caravans and postponing any serious reconstruction track cannot be separated from the broader Israeli goal of perpetuating the humanitarian catastrophe,” said al-Aila. “Israel views the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a tool of political pressure aimed at gradually pushing the population towards migration.”

Al-Atawneh agreed, suggesting that Netanyahu is using these delays to buy time ahead of Israel’s elections in October in an effort to preserve his far-right-wing coalition, all while pursuing long-term goals of demographic engineering and displacement.

The international force dilemma

In tandem with these administrative zones, preparations are moving forward to deploy a limited International Stabilization Force (ISF). Reports indicate that countries such as Morocco and Uganda may send small contingents of around 200 troops each, falling drastically short of initial plans for a much larger multinational force.

Al-Aila argued that these token numbers reflect Israel’s traditional tactic of superficially accepting US proposals while hollowing out their actual implementation.... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/9/israels-green-rafah-plan-aims-to-fragment-gaza-experts-say

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