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Palestinians gather to inspect their burnt and destroyed houses after Israeli settlers set fire to Palestinian residential area in Susya village of Hebron, West Bank on June 25, 2025. [Wisam Hashlamoun – Anadolu Agency]
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry on Saturday called for international intervention to stop illegal Israeli settler crimes in the occupied West Bank, Anadolu reports.
The call came after two young Palestinian men were killed during an attack by illegal settlers on the town of Sinjil in northern Ramallah on Friday evening.
One of the victims, 23-year-old Saif al-Din Kamel Abdul Karim Muslat, held US citizenship and was beaten to death by illegal settlers. The other, 23-year-old Mohammed al-Shalabi, died after being shot in the chest. The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed both killings.
The ministry urged the international community to “end double standards” in addressing the suffering of Palestinians and to take “necessary measures to implement international legitimacy resolutions and halt terrorist settler militia crimes in the West Bank.”
It also highlighted illegal settlers’ burning of Palestinian homes and injuring dozens during the Friday attack describing illegal settler crimes as “organized state terrorism aligned with official Israeli policy aimed at expanding colonial plans by supporting and protecting settler militants.”
The ministry stressed the urgent need to “hold illegal settler organizations accountable, prosecute them, and impose immediate sanctions on those who support and protect them politically and militarily.”
According to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, the number of illegal settlers in the West Bank reached around 770,000 by the end of 2024, spread across 180 illegal settlements and 256 illegal outposts, including 138 designated as agricultural or grazing outposts.
The commission also recorded 2,153 illegal settler attacks in the first half of the year alone, resulting in the killing of four Palestinians.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, at least 998 Palestinians have been killed and more than 7,000 injured in the West Bank by Israeli forces and illegal settlers, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
In a landmark opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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An aerial view shows thousands of people gathering in Hostages Square demand an end to the war in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages, on July 12, 2025, in Tel Aviv, Israel. [Yair Palti – Anadolu Agency]
Thousands of Israelis demonstrated in central Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand a prisoner exchange agreement with Palestinians, Anadolu reports.
“No victory without return of hostages,” and “There are 50 kidnapped families in Gaza,” read banners waved by protesters, Israeli Channel 13 reported.
The protest came amid reports of a deadlock in indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas delegations in Qatar.
“The negotiations have not collapsed, and the Israeli delegation continues talks in Doha despite Hamas intransigence,” the channel said, citing an unnamed political official.
A forum representing families of Israeli captives in Gaza called on the government to end the ongoing war on the Palestinian enclave.
“Missing the current momentum would be a serious failure; every day the war continues is an achievement for Hamas and a serious risk for our hostages and soldiers,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.
“All the polls and data show that an absolute majority of the nation of Israel wants an end to the war in Gaza and the return of hostages, and agrees that it is in Israel’s interest, including a decisive majority among coalition voters,” added the statement.
The families addressed a message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, “History will remember what you chose: the hostages and fighters, or cheap political maneuvers.”
Hamas said Wednesday it has agreed to release 10 live Israeli captives as a sign of “flexibility” to reach a Gaza ceasefire and prisoner swap agreement, while Israel remains rigid on key points, including withdrawal from Gaza.
In contrast, Israel insists on a buffer zone 2 to 3 kilometers wide in the Rafah area, and 1 to 2 kilometers in other border areas.
Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, Israel has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since late October 2023, killing nearly 58,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The relentless bombardment has destroyed the enclave and led to food shortages and a spread of disease.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Dave Rich, a professed expert on antisemitism and the Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust (CST), whose stated mission is to protect Jewish security in Britain. They work closely with government and the police, but have been condemned by, amongst others, the Jewish peace movement Na’amod for their vilification of Jewish opponents of Israel’s genocide, alongside anti-genocide protests more broadly.
Confronted with Israel openly committing to a grave war crime, who does Rich reserve his ire for?
The few British politicians condemning the crime.
He’s written an article for the Jewish Chronicle headlined “Pro-Gaza MPs comparing Israel to Nazis brought shame onto Parliament”. That’s because of comparisons between the proposed concentration camp and the Nazis made by two MPs elected on a platform opposing the genocide:
It is hard to think of any more pointed use of Nazi language and imagery than what two Independent MPs, Iqbal Mohamed from Dewsbury and Batley and Adnan Hussain of Blackburn, posted on X this week. Mohamed accused Israel of committing a “holocaust” in Gaza; Hussain posted: “We’re on the concentration camp stage. Gas chambers next?”
How Rich chooses to describe the concentration camp is revealing and deeply disturbing. He writes:
They were responding to news reports that Israel planned to construct a humanitarian zone in Gaza to separate Palestinian civilians from Hamas, and the use of the word “concentrate” in one headline was all it took to open the Nazi-themed floodgates.
Those who engage in atrocity denial receive damning judgements from history, and rightly so. Israel is planning to concentrate the Palestinian population in a camp, where they will be forbidden from leaving. Those who do not oblige will be regarded as legitimate military targets. This is a concentration camp.
The claim that this is a “humanitarian zone” is a perverse, Orwellian upending of the English language. We already know how Israel interprets ‘humanitarian’ given the experience of the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’. In this case, after Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza from 2nd March – an objective, incontrovertible war crime – this Israeli-American front brought in limited amounts of often unusable aid, focused in the south in an attempt to coerce the population into depopulating the north.
…
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect 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.Vote Labour for Genocide.UK Labour Party government Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are participants and complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide providing Israel with army and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu this week announced he has nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize during a visit to Washington | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The US president is desperate for a peace prize. That doesn’t align with Netanyahu’s plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza
Donald Trump’s claim to be nearing a breakthrough in the Gaza conflict, as he insisted ahead of his meetings with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu this week, in the end came to nothing.
Netanyahu has returned home from Washington. Mediating sessions continue in Qatar, but prospects are poor, which is hardly surprising given Netanyahu’s war aims of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in Gaza and much of the occupied West Bank.
Away from Gaza, Netanyahu wants to denuclearise Iran and force a change to its government. While Israel may present the recent war with Iran as a great success, developments since then suggest otherwise.
The key to the nuclear weapon issue is how much of the 60% enriched uranium that Iran has hidden away has survived, not whether it needs to enrich it further for a potential nuclear weapon. The common belief that the 90% enrichment is essential for weapons-grade uranium is wrong; the Hiroshima bomb used 80%.
Even 60% would be enough. Such a device may not be as efficient as one with 95% enrichment; it would be crude and cumbersome and might even be too heavy to deliver, but it could certainly power a test device and detonate.
That would be a huge symbolic moment, and would certainly make it much more important to move to a diplomatic outcome to the crisis, however much Netanyahu would oppose that.
In short, Netanyahu’s war has not ended Iran’s nuclear potential, with its programme damaged but far from destroyed. Similarly, the Iranian regime shows little sign of instability despite being under economic pressure.
Gaza, meanwhile, is turning into a double disaster for Israel as it transitions to fully fledged pariah status. In the past five weeks, another 640 Palestinians have been killed and over 4,500 wounded.
Hungry children are being killed and maimed as they wait for food. One of the few emergency hospitals still functional is a small, 60-bed Red Cross hospital in the south of Gaza. It says it has dealt with 2,200 weapon-related wounds in recent weeks.
To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s defence minister, Israel Katz, insists that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will now be concentrated into a huge detention camp in the south of the strip pending deportation to who knows where.
On top of this, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are even failing to destroy Hamas. Just ten IDF soldiers have been killed in the last two weeks, and another 14 injured. These figures may be very low compared with the scores of Palestinians killed every week, but they are more than enough to demonstrate that Hamas is still active and even controls parts of Gaza. We can also assume there is little shortage of angry young recruits to Hamas who have seen their families and friends killed and maimed.
The conflict continues in other ways, as well. When Israel fought its air war against Iran last month, the impression given by most of the mainstream media was that while occasional Iranian missiles might have got through the multi-layered Israeli air defences, their impact was minimal – perhaps causing some damage and even a handful of deaths and injuries, but with far greater costs to Iran.
While the extent of the fatalities and injuries may be correct, the 42 Iranian ballistic missiles that reached Israeli territory had a substantially greater impact than was admitted, with at least six hitting heavily protected military targets, including a major airbase and an intelligence-gathering centre.
Iran’s non-military targets included oil and power facilities, while its other missiles exploded in densely populated residential areas and left 15,000 homeless. These attacks cannot be reported within Israel due to strict military censorship rules.
This is relevant because it relates to possible future developments, especially Trump’s pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize, for which Netanyahu announced he had nominated him this week.
For Israel, US support was crucial in its support during its war with Iran. The IDF’s air defences relied heavily on an advanced X-Band Radar run by the US military, while two US Navy destroyers provided anti-missile cover. The Pentagon also provided two ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defence anti-missile systems, which launched at least 36 interceptor missiles, reportedly costing $12m each.
In the immediate post-conflict period, direct US support will expand further. Even before the war on Gaza began in October 2023, the US spent an annual $3.8bn on military assistance for Israel. That has since shot up, reaching $18bn in the first 12 months of the war.
The US is deeply embedded in the defence of Israel, but Netanyahu’s war aims have not been met, and he needs the conflict to continue for his own political survival. When the next phase of war starts, the US will be intimately involved, and Trump will see his vision of a Nobel Peace Prize disappearing over the horizon.
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European Union flags are seen waving outside the EU Commission Building in Brussels, Belgium. [Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency]
A group of 27 former EU ambassadors has urged the bloc to suspend its association agreement with Israel, citing serious violations of international law in Gaza, Anadolu reports.
In a letter published Friday by Brussels-based EUobserver, the former diplomats who previously served in the Middle East and North Africa or maintain a strong interest in the region — expressed deep concern over the EU’s lack of concrete action in response to Israel’s military attacks following Oct. 7, 2023.
The ambassadors stressed that Israel’s military response has been “indiscriminate and completely disproportionate,” resulting in tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths and massive destruction of infrastructure in Gaza.
They noted the EU’s “reluctance” to take serious action against Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, its de facto support for violent settler attacks on Palestinians, and ongoing annexation of land in violation of international law.
Their letter follows an EU review where foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas confirmed Israel’s breach of Article 2, which commits both sides to human rights. Under the Vienna Convention, such violations allow for suspension of the agreement.
“With the rule of law as a founding principle, the EU lives or dies by the full application of international law to its agreements, and in that regard needs must abide by the conclusions of this review,” they said.
The ambassadors urged the European Commission and the External Action Service to suspend parts of the agreement under “community competence,” such as trade preferences and the Horizon program, and to ban all trade with illegal Israeli settlements, measures that can be adopted by a qualified majority.
“That said, failure to take any action will further tarnish the EU’s already damaged reputation in the region and more generally to its foreign policy in the wider world, where it has come in for serious criticism on the grounds of double standards vis-à-vis its principled and unambiguous stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” they wrote.
EU foreign ministers will gather in Brussels on July 15 to discuss various issues, including possible further steps under the association agreement. However, due to divisions among member states, a suspension of the agreement remains unlikely, as such a decision requires unanimity.
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