Hamas formally dissolved its government in Gaza this week, handing administrative control to a technocratic committee overseen by Trump’s “Board of Peace” and removing what it called Israel’s pretext for delaying reconstruction. Israel immediately dismissed the move and doubled down on a demand for full disarmament, a condition analysts say is designed to be impossible to meet. Tareq Hajjaj reports on why demanding the impossible is the point.
The ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran has broken down again, and the war has entered a new phase built around breaking Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. Mitchell Plitnick explains how a war without a clear purpose found one.
A coalition of Israeli settler groups submitted a plan to build 100 new outposts inside Areas A and B of the West Bank, territory nominally under Palestinian Authority control since the Oslo Accords. Backed by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the plan would gut what remains of the Oslo framework. Qassam Muaddi reports on the settler movement’s next phase of annexation.
➡️ Need a refresher on the Oslo Accords? See Yumna’s video from the 30th anniversary.
Twelve Palestinian families in the West Bank village of Masoudiyya have fenced off their homes and taken to round-the-clock watch shifts to survive near-daily attacks from a nearby settler outpost. Shatha Hammad reports from a community trying to hold its ground.
📺 WATCH: How Israel, with the help of FIFA, stole Palestine’s football team
🇵🇸 West Bank and Gaza
This week, we reported on a doctor left to die in administrative detention, toxic waste dumped on Palestinian land, and a Jerusalem church stripped of its property under the pretext of gardening.
READ MORE → Israel is murdering Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. The U.S. media is covering up the crime. — James North
READ MORE → Israel is drowning the West Bank in hazardous waste. Palestinians are paying the price with their health. — Aseel Mafarjeh
READ MORE → Israel’s seizure of Palestinian church land raises renewed fears of efforts to erase Christians from Jerusalem — Majd Jawad
🚨 Repression and resistance
A lifelong reader canceled his New York Times subscription over the paper’s Gaza coverage, a Columbia professor examines the McCarthyism aimed at campus organizers, and a new history traces the ADL’s decades-long project of policing the left in the name of civil rights.
READ MORE → The New York Times enabled the Gaza genocide and lost its legitimacy in the process — Elliott Colla
READ MORE → Palestine and the role of the activist intellectual — Philip Weiss
READ MORE → A new important book shows why the ADL has never been a civil rights organization — Michael Arria
🇺🇸 U.S. Politics
In Michigan, a closely watched Senate race has put AIPAC spending under scrutiny, House Democrats scrambled to avoid an on-record vote on weapons to Israel, and the UAW became the first major U.S. union to divest from Israel Bonds.
READ MORE → The Shift: Israel front and center as Michigan Senate race narrows — Michael Arria
READ MORE → How Congress manipulates its own rules to make sure Israel still gets its weapons — Mitchell Plitnick
READ MORE → UAW becomes the first major U.S. union to vote to divest from Israel Bonds — Michael Arria
Israel always moves the goal posts in any negotiation with the Palestinians. Israel has no interest in Peace with the Palestinians as long as the US Government protects Israel from any consequences for the decades of illegal land theft, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and instigating 50 or more endless wars in the Middle East.
That is why the US voting public must remove any members of the US Congress who would rather accept financial bribes from AIPAC, and its many subsidiaries, and rubber-stamp billions for extremist Israel rather than recognize the wishes and interests of the people who voted them into office.
We can now announce the birth of an entirely new form of literature! It’s called “I really really love Israel but something is wrong”.
Rahm Emanuels recent speech in Tel Aviv is an example of I-really-really-love-Israel-but-something-is-wrong. Here’s another examples in the pro-Israel pro-Zionist The Times of Israel:
The Blogs: Israel, you are spending our love like it’s infinite | Raphael Wahl | The Times of Israel
I am afraid of falling out of love with Israel. Not out of hatred, not out of some ideological conversion, but out of sheer accumulated grief at watching a country I grew up loving become, year by year, a little less recognizable to me….A nation in trauma needed steadiness, moral clarity, leadership capable of channeling grief into something other than vengeance without end. Instead, it got a government stitched together from personal survival and messianic fantasy, populated by ministers who treat Palestinian suffering as a rounding error and Jewish tradition as a weapon rather than an inheritance….I watch settler violence in the West Bank go functionally unpunished while the language used to describe it grows softer every year, and I watch the people responsible for that softness sit in the security cabinet….Somewhere in the last years, Israel seems to have lost its fluency in anything other than the language of force, and a country that only speaks one language eventually forgets how to listen in any other, including to itself.
“Disgraceful”: Rashid Khalidi Slams Israeli Attacks on Journalists, Detention of Rep. Ro Khanna
Democracy Now!
Jul 13, 2026
“Armed Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank have carried out a number of attacks in recent days targeting local Palestinians and foreign journalists, as well as detained U.S. Congressmember Ro Khanna during a fact-finding trip. Khanna said that when Israeli forces arrived, they sided with the settlers. “The U.S. government just merrily goes along funding these atrocities against American citizens, not to speak of atrocities against Palestinians who don’t happen to be American citizens,” says Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. “All of this is being done with our tax dollars.” “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9PDcvtg7sQ
The Palestinian situation looks like colonization to my eyes. I’d like to continue the discussion about why Omer Bartov thinks it’s relevant to discuss the Herero in the context of Israel:
In April 2025 Bartov wrote another essay in the New York Review of Books titled “Infinite License”. Here are his comments on the Herero:
On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered German farms in the territory….the German settlers who had begun to arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their grazing lands…..The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero, whom they described as “baboons.” …Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children [ says a German general after the revolt ]….That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,” the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant.
‘Infinite License’ | Omer Bartov | The New York Review of Books