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U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gives a speech in West Jerusalem, on October 22, 2025. [POOL / Marc Israel Sellem – Anadolu Agency]
US Vice President JD Vance on Thursday ruled out Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, calling a Knesset vote for annexing the occupied territory “a stupid political stunt,” Anadolu reports.
“If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it. The West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel,” Vance told reporters in Tel Aviv.
“The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy,” he added.
Vance said that he was told that the Knesset voting was “a symbolic vote.”
“If people want to take symbolic votes, they can do that. But we certainly weren’t happy about it,” he added.
On Wednesday, the Knesset approved in a preliminary reading two bills to annex the West Bank and the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc. Both drafts still must pass three additional readings to become law.
Annexing the West Bank would effectively end the possibility of implementing a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as outlined in UN resolutions.
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.
Regarding the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip under US President Donald Trump’s 20-point ceasefire plan, Vance said some parts of the enclave with no Hamas presence can be rebuilt “quickly.”
“We can actually have tens of thousands of Gazans moving into southern Gaza, where you have the Hamas free zone, in the next couple of months,” he said.
“I think the hope is to rebuild Rafah over the next two to three years. And theoretically, you can have half a million people live in a rebuilt Rafah,” the vice president added.
Vance said “a lot of progress” was made regarding the understandings of the composition of an international task force in Gaza.
“No American troops on the ground,” he said, but rather they will be “supervising and mediating the peace.”
The vice president arrived in Israel on Tuesday for a three-day visit to oversee the implementation of the truce that came into force on Oct. 10 in Gaza and discuss the second phase of Trump’s plan with senior Israeli officials.
Phase one included the release of Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. The plan also envisages the rebuilding of Gaza and the establishment of a new governing mechanism without Hamas.
Since October 2023, the Israeli genocidal war has killed over 68,200 people and injured more than 170,300, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
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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.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
US President Donald Trump during a meeting with Mark Rutte, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2025.[Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
US President Donald Trump said he would decide whether to push for the release of imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, a figure many see as capable of uniting Palestinians behind a two-state solution, Anadolu reports.
“I am literally being confronted with that question about 15 minutes before you called … That was my question of the day,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview published Thursday. “So, I’ll be making a decision.”
The comments came as Trump discussed Palestinian leadership, saying Palestinians “don’t have a leader right now, at least a visible leader.”
When asked about Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s potential role in post-war Gaza governance, Trump said, “I’ve always gotten along with him. I’ve always found him reasonable, but he’s probably not.”
Barghouti is a prominent Fatah leader often called the “Palestinian Mandela” for his influence and leadership qualities.
He was arrested by Israel in 2002 and sentenced to five life terms plus 40 years for allegedly directing deadly attacks against Israelis.
Barghouti tops most polls among Palestinians for whom they would vote for in a presidential election, making him a potentially unifying figure for a two-state solution.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Hind Rajab and her family were martyred by Israeli forces, who fired 355 bullets at the child and her family while they were trapped in a vehicle. Photo: PRCS
The move followed a thorough criminal investigation conducted by various institutions, which provided compelling evidence of the complicity of the named personnel.
The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) filed a complaint on Tuesday, October 21, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), with the names of 24 Israeli soldiers and commanders, whom evidence suggests are complicit in murdering six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, six of her family members, and two Palestinian paramedics in January 2024.
The move came one day after Al Jazeera Arabic broadcast a documentary on Monday, October 20, revealing the identities of the Israeli personnel, who “directly participated in or facilitated” the brutal assault.
The Brussels-based non-profit organization, which was named after the victimized Palestinian child with the mission of addressing and challenging Israeli impunity, said that the new complaint builds on its first communication to the ICC that was filed on May 3, 2025.
Who are the Israeli personnel identified by the HRF?
The first communication was filed by the foundation, after it identified Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Benny Aharon as the Israeli officer who has been directly responsible for Hind Rajab’s crime.
Aharon is the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that carried out the military operation, which targeted Hind’s family car in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood.
The HRF said then that it took a whole year of investigation to identify the IOF personnel under Aharon’s command who were involved in the attack.
In its new complaint, the HRF named the following IOF commanders and soldiers besides Aharon:
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Ella, Commander of the 52nd Armored Battalion, which operates under the 401st Armored Brigade.
Major Sean Glass, Commander of the Vampire Empire Company, which operates under the 52nd Armored Battalion.
22 identified tank crew members of the Vampire Empire Company.
HRF’s executive director, Dyab Abou Jahjah, explained to Al Jazeera that the organization has known that the 401st brigade was responsible for killing Hind Rajab, but it wanted to go deeper than that and identify the battalion, the company and even every single tank participating on the ground at the time of the crime.
Regarding the complicit IOF company, Abou Jahjah said: “The company has only an English name ‘Vampire Empire’, which also indicates that it is in some sense a multinational company, and indeed it is. This company played a heinous role in the genocide in Gaza. It participated in the assault on Al-Shifa Hospital and in committing the massacre there.”
“There is a large number of dual-nationality soldiers in the company, and this truly opens up avenues for legal action at the countries’ level. At the level of the home countries of these criminals,” he noted.
How were these names identified?
According to Al-Jazeera’s documentary, these names were identified by tracking the social media accounts and profiles of various IOF personnel, who were boasting about their crimes in Gaza by posting related footage online for several months.
Publicly available sources and other privately leaked documents, were also used by Al Jazeera to identify the names of those found complicit in various IOF units during Israel’s genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip, focusing on Hind Rajab’s killing incident.
An investigation was conducted by Al Jazeera, London-based multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture, and the world’s first not-for-profit organization producing audio investigations, Earshot.
The three investigatory partners relied on evidence and analysis based on maps, satellite images, eye witnesses accounts, audio recordings, and phone calls obtained from the crime scene, which precisely revealed the source of the shooting.
“It was a site where there was not much visual evidence of the incident until after it had transpired. As with many of our cases, we use satellite imagery and this case was no exception. And we were, in this case, also able to use audio recordings that were captured by the Palestinian Red Crescent,” Nicholas Masterton from Forensic Architecture told Al Jazeera in the documentary.
“What was interesting about this case, was the way that those two things; the spatial mapping that came from the satellite imagery and the audio recordings, came together to give us an insight into what occurred on that day,” Masterton added.
Israel claimed that Hind Rajab, her family, and the paramedics were present in an area where an exchange of fire took place between the IOF and Palestinian resistance fighters.
However, a 28-second audio recording of Hind Rajab’s cousin screaming at the time of the incident, while rapid gunshot from a weapon that fires at high rate is heard, confirms that no exchange of fire took place then.
Satellite images also showed that only Israeli Merkava tanks were deployed in the area, when the crime was perpetrated.
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.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah and other health workers hold press conference after Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, October 2023. Source: Ghassan Abu-Sittah/X
Palestinian health workers and members of flotilla missions condemn Israel’s ongoing crimes in Gaza and the false promises of Donald Trump’s so-called peace plan.
“There is no peace and there is no plan,” Dr. Mustafa Barghouti emphasized during a discussion hosted by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) on Sunday, October 19, speaking about the situation in Palestine following the announcement of a ceasefire earlier this month. Together with Dr. Hanne Bosselaers and Aziz Rhali, both health workers and participants in recent attempts to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza by sea, Barghouti addressed ongoing Israeli crimes and the need for international solidarity movements to keep mobilizing.
The outline proposed by US President Donald Trump, Barghouti argued, “does not mention once the necessity to end occupation. It does not mention the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people. It does not mention the right of the Palestinian people to be free and have a state of their own.”
All of these things, however, remain at the heart of the Palestinian liberation struggle, he said, and they rely also on international solidarity. According to Barghouti, it was this sustained global mobilization that pressured both the US and the Israeli government to reduce the intensity of the assault on Gaza. “I think the ceasefire happened only because of two factors: the steadfastness and heroism of the people of Gaza – of the Palestinian people in general – but also because of the international solidarity movement, which has become a revolution, a true revolution,” he stated.
Israeli abductions fail to break health workers’ solidarity
Bosselaers and Rhali have been active contributors to that movement, particularly over the past two years, including through their participation in the Global Sumud Flotilla and Consciencemissions. Although both were illegally intercepted in international waters and kidnapped by Israeli forces on separate days, their experiences following these illegal acts have a lot in common.
“Every hour during the night, they came to wake us up just to count us,” Rhali described how Israeli soldiers tried to exhaust and break the determination of flotilla participants. “When we started protesting because one of us needed insulin, they refused to give it to him. They came armed, with dogs, to tell us we were simply being counted and that they weren’t going to give insulin to terrorists.”
“They tried everything in that prison to discourage us, to humiliate us, to make us afraid, to break us, but that didn’t work,” Bosselaers added. “We stayed dignified and kept thinking about all the Palestinian prisoners just one wall away from us.”
Bosselaers was one of more than 90 health and media workers aboard the Conscience, whose mission included exposing the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists and medical staff since October 2023. “When you are committing a genocide, you don’t want anyone to witness it or bring out the truth, that’s why more than 250 journalists were killed in Gaza,” she said. “And if you want to perpetuate a genocide, you don’t want people saving lives, so all health workers, all hospitals were heavily targeted – more than 1,500 health workers were killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.”
Attacks on healthcare in Palestine continue
Despite the ceasefire agreement, Israeli attacks on Gaza’s health system continue in other forms. “It was completely heartbreaking to see [Palestinian Medical Relief Society] structures and clinics we spent 30 years building destroyed in just a couple of minutes,” Barghouti said. Equally painful is knowing that occupation forces still block the entry of essential equipment and medicine, and prevent thousands of Palestinians in need of care from seeking treatment abroad. “They are preventing the passage of medical materials and medicines that we need very badly,” he emphasized. “They are preventing any construction materials from reaching Gaza, and you know most of the infrastructure there is destroyed.”
“Nobody should think the war in Gaza is over, it’s still going on,” Barghouti warned, adding that the so-called peace plan celebrated by Western leaders is an insult to Palestinians, particularly where it envisions foreign rule over the Gaza Strip. “Why do we need foreign rulers? We struggled for decades against British colonialism and now we’re struggling against Israeli colonialism, certainly not just to have another foreign body ruling us in Gaza.”
Instead, Barghouti said, the focus must remain on maintaining international pressure through grassroots movements and workers’ solidarity. He referred to the recent general strikes in Italy and mass protests in Spain, France, and elsewhere as examples of how the Western working class can play a role in ending Israel’s impunity. “We need to enhance the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against the Israeli occupation,” he said. “Because our goal is not just to end the war on Gaza. Our goal is to achieve freedom. Our goal is to end occupation. Our goal is to end the system of apartheid that we are subjected to.”
People’s Health Dispatchis a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movementand Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and subscription to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
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.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and head of CENTCOM Admiral Brad Cooper, in Gaza days after the ceasefire was announced. Now they are back to salvage the deal. Photo: Steve Witkoff / X
The US administration has dispatched Witkoff, Kushner, and Vance to Israel to salvage the shaky ceasefire deal.
US President Donald Trump confirmed to reporters on Sunday, October 19, that the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal, which he announced on Wednesday, October 8, is still in place.
Trump’s confirmation came after Israel launched a renewed aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip during the past several days with a series of airstrikes and shooting attacks, which left dozens of Palestinians killed.
Israel claimed that its warplanes waged the deadly airstrikes in retaliation of an alleged shooting attack by Hamas fighters against two personnel of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), leaving them dead. Aid entry into the starved enclave was halted as a response to the purported shooting attack as well.
“We want to make sure that it’s going to be very peaceful with Hamas. As you know, they’ve been quite rambunctious. They’ve been doing some shooting, and we think maybe the leadership isn’t involved in that, that it’s some rebels within, but anyway it’s going to be handled properly. It’s going to be handled toughly, but properly,” Trump told reporters.
When he was asked: “Is the ceasefire still in place?” The US President replied: “Yes.”
Israel has committed scores of violations since the ceasefire started
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip reported that after the renewed Israeli aggression, the death toll in the war-torn strip has risen to 68,216 fatalities since October 7, 2023.
Trump sends Witkoff, Kushner, Vance to Israel to bolster the fragile ceasefire deal
In an effort to salvage the fragile ceasefire deal, the US administration dispatched its “Middle East” envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Israel on Monday, October 20, to meet Israeli officials, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and two IOF major generals.
Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance is set to arrive in Israel on Tuesday, October 21, to join the discussions on the deal.
Israeli media outlets reported that Witkoff and Kushner warned Netanyahu against taking any action that may jeopardize the first phase of the deal.
“Do not act in a way that would endanger the ceasefire. We want to do everything to reach the second phase,” the two US envoys were cited saying while addressing Netanyahu. “Self-defense is acceptable, risking the ceasefire is not,” they insisted.
Maintaining the first phase of the ceasefire deal was not the only topic to be discussed during the meetings. The “entire mechanism for dismantling and demilitarizing postwar Gaza”, and “all the preparations necessary to carry out the second phase of the agreement” were also on the table.
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.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAOrcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
