Diggers were seen demolishing Palestinian homes on Friday afternoon
The Israeli military has begun demolishing Palestinian buildings in the city of Hebron, after two Israeli soldiers were killed in an attack by two Palestinian gunmen.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military would “destroy” the neighbourhood where the two attackers came from, and that Israel was ready for “extensive action” in the occupied West Bank.
Three other soldiers were wounded in the attack at a checkpoint outside Hebron, before the gunmen were shot dead, officials say.
It comes at a time of high tensions, with extremist Jewish settlers targeting Palestinians during the annual olive harvest, and Israel’s general election taking place in four days’ time.
Footage verified by the BBC shows an intense gun battle between soldiers and the gunmen. Other footage shows two gunmen exit a car armed with what appears to be a handgun and an assault rifle and start firing on soldiers at the checkpoint, before coming under return fire.
…
Speaking later from the scene, Netanyahu said that the military would “demolish this place and completely transform it,” referring to the Hebron neighbourhood where the attackers are said to have come from.
It is common for Israeli forces to demolish the homes of Palestinians who are suspected of carrying out attacks on Israelis -a practice Israeli rights groups have criticised as collective punishment.
Netanyahu likened his plans to previous operations in West Bank refugee camps where residential buildings were demolished and thousands were displaced.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
An injured child is transferred to a Yemeni hospital after a Saudi strike in Saada province on 18 October (Photo: Houthi Media Center/Alamy)
Wes Streeting once called for an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia. Now he’s helping its air force bomb Yemen.
Britain is expanding its aerial refuelling of Saudi fighter jets to include bombing raids on Yemen, despite a major spike in civilians being killed in these airstrikes.
Wes Streeting initially said the UK would only provide air-to-air refuelling for Saudi jets patrolling the kingdom’s skies to ward off drone and missile attacks on airports and oil infrastructure by Yemen’s Houthi movement.
The defence secretary is now letting British fighter jets join those patrols, as well as providing refuelling for Saudi airstrikes on “Houthi military targets in Yemen”.
It comes as last month saw more civilian casualties resulting from Saudi airstrikes on Yemen than any other since 2022, according to the Yemen Data Project.
At least 66 civilians were killed and a further 90 injured, with eight children among the dead.
One of the deadliest strikes came on 22 September, when six civilians including a woman and two children were killed in the bombing of a residential home in the city of Mokha.
That same day, Britain agreed to provide air-to-air refuelling support to the Saudi air force, supplementing the deployment of air defence equipment and UK personnel already in the region.
Saudi forces struck a market in the Al-Taiziyah district of Taiz governorate five days later, killing seven civilians and injuring 40 others, including five children.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Wounded Yemeni civilians receive treatment under dire conditions at Al-Thawra Hospital, the city’s largest public hospital, in Taiz, Yemen, on October 21, 2026. [Hamza Mustafa – Anadolu Agency]
At least 1,574 people have been killed and 6,939 others injured in Yemen since the latest military escalation began in August, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday.
In a report seen by Anadolu Agency, the UN health agency said it had recorded 8,513 casualties since the beginning of August.
The figure included 1,574 deaths and 6,939 injuries as of Oct. 19, the WHO said, without specifying whether the casualties were civilians, military personnel or both.
The agency said 292 people were killed and 1,048 others injured during the latest eight-day reporting period.
Last Thursday, the WHO said it had recorded 1,282 deaths and 5,891 injuries since the escalation began on Aug. 6, 2026, before the toll rose to the latest figures.
Yemen has been engulfed in conflict since the Houthis seized Sanaa and several other provinces in 2014, prompting a Saudi-led coalition to intervene in March 2015 in support of the internationally recognized government.
The Houthis control much of northern and western Yemen, while government forces and their allies hold Aden and large parts of the country’s southern and eastern provinces.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
An Israeli F16-fighter jet [US Air Force photo/ Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald/Wikipedia]
Dozens of Israeli fighter jets flew close to Iran’s border earlier this week in a maneuver that may have been intended to provoke an Iranian military response, Israeli media reported Wednesday, citing US sources.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the operation took place overnight Monday into Tuesday and involved dozens of fighter jets accompanied by Israeli Air Force refueling aircraft.
According to the broadcaster, the aircraft flew over Syrian and Iraqi territory before turning back toward Israel after approaching the Iranian border at a very short distance.
US sources told Channel 12 that Israel may have hoped Iranian forces would open fire on the aircraft, potentially providing a justification for launching an attack on Iran.
US and Israeli officials described the operation as a deterrence exercise, but the maneuver carried the risk of an Iranian miscalculation that could trigger a military response and reignite the war, according to Channel 12.
The US sources said Israel had notified Washington of the operation in advance, describing it as a military exercise intended to demonstrate its capabilities and deter Iran.
They added that Israel knew Iranian air defense systems would detect the aircraft.
The operation coincided with US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s visit to Israel, during which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz at Ovda Air Base.
Separately, the Financial Times reported Wednesday that Netanyahu had instructed the Israeli military earlier this month to prepare a major new offensive against Iran.
Citing three people familiar with the plans, the newspaper said the military had prepared a multiday campaign targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, government-linked sites and civilian infrastructure, including power plants.
The strikes, initially planned for 10th October, were called off after US President Donald Trump opposed resuming the war ahead of the 3rd November US midterm elections, according to the report.
The US and Israel launched a war against Iran on 28th February. Tehran responded with missile and drone attacks across the region and effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington later imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France on October 13, 2026. [Mustafa Yalçın – Anadolu Agency]
Emmanuel Macron’s phrase landed like a cracked whip in the stale air of Western politics. “As unacceptable as they are stupid.” The target was not immigration policy, but a lie — the claim, amplified by Donald Trump and a chorus of right-wing figures, that Muslim migrants had set France alight. The protests that swept Paris, Lyon and Marseille were not a civilisational invasion.
They were a cry about grocery bills, overcrowded classrooms and a state that had cut 4,000 teaching posts while fuel prices climbed. Macron’s fury was therefore more than a defence of immigrants. It was a rejection of the most durable political technology of the age: the conversion of economic failure into cultural panic.
The mechanics are almost elegant in their cynicism. When wages stagnate, and public services buckle, the scapegoat is not the tax code or the corporate margin. It is the most visible minority. Trump told Macron to “close your borders and take control before it is too late”. The facts said otherwise.
More than half a million people marched — students, trade unionists, farmers — against the cost of living and the decay of public provision. The violence was real, but the culprits were not a religious category. They were a political economy that has spent four decades redistributing risk downward while protecting wealth upward.
The digital architecture of 2026 has made this old manoeuvre infinitely more potent. AI-generated images of an elderly couple “stripped and robbed,” of a Palestinian flag atop the Eiffel Tower, of “hordes” storming French streets, accumulated millions of views in hours. Macron named the mechanism precisely: foreign leaders, some mid-election campaign, “naively repeat AI-generated content or spread narratives that certain circles are clearly trying to promote”.
The grammar of the “Muslim threat” is centuries old; the delivery system is new. What once required a pamphlet or a tabloid now requires a prompt and an algorithm optimised for outrage.
Against this manufactured panic sits an empirical reality that is almost impolite to state.
The OECD findsthat 77 per cent of immigrants across its member states are economically active, and that migration attenuates labour shortages in ageing societies.
Bruegel’s 2025 analysis is blunter still: with fertility rates unlikely to rebound, “continuingly high positive net-migration levels” are the only route to mitigate the economic effects of ageing, and inward migration can deliver a positive net contribution to public finances.
In Spain, the net annual fiscal contribution of the average immigrant has been estimated at some €1,600 more than the native-born, while costing the treasury 32 per cent less. The scapegoat, in other words, is subsidising the very state that is being told to fear him.
France’s security apparatus tells a more troubling story about how the panic is institutionalised. The FSPRT file — the register of suspected Islamist radicalisation — contained some 15,800 individuals as of late 2024. The database does not measure crime; it measures risk, and risk is a category that expands to fill the political demand for it. When a state can see a population through the lens of pre-emptive suspicion while remaining structurally blind to the socioeconomic composition of a protest, it has perfected a form of strategic unknowing.
The Muslim is legible as a suspect, illegible as a citizen with a grievance. That asymmetry is not a bug in the liberal state. It is a feature of how the liberal state has learned to govern insecurity.
This is where the global conversation must resist the imported script — and recognise that the script is no longer imported at all. It is written simultaneously in every major democracy.
In the United States, Gallup found in June 2026 that 73 per cent of Americans still see immigration as a good thing, and that the share wanting less immigration had fallen from a peak of 55 per cent in 2024 to 30 per cent — yet the political class continues to behave as if the opposite were true.
In Europe, the Transatlantic Trends survey records that 47 per cent of Europeans and 50 per cent of Americans see immigration as more of a problem than an opportunity, with the divide sharpest among those without a secondary education and those who have no personal contact with migrants. In Berlin, where 85 per cent of households rent, advertised rents have nearly doubled since 2014, and the far-right AfD has converted the housing crisis into an argument for restricting immigration, reaching around 17 per cent in city polling.
In Canada, Nanos Research found 52 per cent of respondents favour admitting fewer immigrants and temporary residents, with housing shortages, strained public services and the cost of living cited as the drivers — even as population growth slowed sharply. The proximate grievances are real and material: housing scarcity, wage stagnation, underfunded hospitals and schools.
But the moment those grievances are translated into a cultural threat narrative. These solutions might actually work — denser cities, a functioning care economy, a tax base that funds public infrastructure, sectoral bargaining that lifts wages — are displaced by a politics of exclusion that leaves the underlying failure untouched and the underlying distribution of power intact. The scapegoat is not a misunderstanding of the crisis. It is a substitute for solving it.
The far-right playbook now travels with a translation layer. The Guardian documented nationalist parties from the National Rally to Vox to Chega seizing on the same European unrest, each converting a housing or cost-of-living protest into evidence of “anarchic immigration” or an “uncontrolled influx”. The script is modular. Only the cast changes.
Macron’s own record is compromised. His governments have passed anti-separatism laws that Muslim civil society experienced as a targeted gaze, and his defence of French Muslims against foreign slander sits awkwardly beside domestic policies that have often treated Islamic practice as a problem to be administered. That contradiction matters, because it reveals the deeper trap.
The liberal centre condemns the crudest scapegoating while maintaining a softer, more respectable version of the same logic: integration as cultural erasure, security as a permanent suspicion. The choice is not between Trump’s panic and Macron’s laïcité. It is between a politics that names the real sources of anger and one that keeps looking for a minority to absorb it.
The lesson is not that immigration is costless or that every grievance is economic. It is that the political economy of scapegoating is now more profitable than the political economy of repair. A party that blames a migrant for a hospital queue need not explain why the hospital was starved of capital. A leader who warns of an Islamist takeover need not account for the energy shock, the fiscal squeeze or the algorithmic amplification that turned a local protest into a civilisational melodrama.
The costs of that evasion are not borne by the scapegoater. They are borne by the Muslim family in a Paris banlieue, the asylum seeker in a Mediterranean detention centre, the working-class neighbourhood in Ohio or Saxony told that its neighbours are the cause of its decline. They are borne by every community invited to trade solidarity for suspicion, and by every democracy that discovers, too late, that the anger it mobilised cannot be contained by the institutions it hollowed out.
Macron’s word — stupid — was undiplomatic and precise. It named an intelligence failure disguised as a political strategy. The task for policymakers is to make that strategy expensive. That means provenance and transparency in digital information, so that fabricated images carry a cost. It means fiscal and industrial policy that makes migration’s contribution visible in the public ledger, not merely in think-tank working papers. It means a security architecture capable of distinguishing suspicion from citizenship.
And it means a political language that treats the cost-of-living crisis as a crisis of distribution, not of demography. The scapegoat is a substitute for argument. The only antidote is the argument itself — conducted with the courage to name who actually benefits when the crowd is pointed at the wrong gate.
