THE SET-UP: President Trump is back to not backing down. Despite a worldwide wave of rejection and a week-long effort by his White House to walk it back, he just reiterated his call to ethnically cleanse Gaza, take ownership over the 25 mile-long bombing range and transform it into a giant beachfront resort. He doubled-down on his original plan to permanently remove nearly two million Gazans during his Super Bowl-linked softball interview with FOX News’s Bret Baier-hug.
Of course, he still doesn’t have a place or places for them to go. Nor has he talked to Gazans about his “cunning plan.” They have no say in his plan for them. Trump and Netanyahu don’t care what Gazans think. Gazans are objects, not subjects. Trump wants them out. Period, end of story. Perhaps Trump’s banking on another year of suffering to finally drive them out of their ethnic enclave … suffering which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will happily deliver.
Over the last year they’ve methodically destroyed civilian infrastructure with the obvious intent to make Gaza unlivable. It’s self-evident. And should Phase Two of the ceasefire deal collapse, the IDF will drop Uncle Sam’s 2,000 lb bombs on what little is left … and make more orphans and amputees. Perhaps that’s why Trump doubled-down on his right-out-there-in-the-open proposal to Make America Ethnically Cleanse Again.
After all, Israeli policies have supported the slo-motion cleansing of the West Bank for two decades … and, as a proof of concept, it’s been successful. The United Nations’ human rights office reports that approximately “700,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.” And now they have a US President who’s willing to join-in on the fun. We shouldn’t underestimate the impact of a US President repeatedly declaring his intent to commit a crime against humanity. Nor should we overlook the impact of two key members of Trump’s foreign policy team stating publicly that Israel has a “Biblical right” to land they don’t currently own. It’s a novel legal notion to enforce a promise made thousands of years ago by a mythical being. If they can be removed, abused or lose their rights altogether because an ancient religious book says so … we are all on tenuous ground.
When it comes to the rights and humanity of people who don’t share your beliefs … perhaps they are people living on land you want … having God on your side is the ultimate trump card. That’s the card the US played when it wrested the West away from its occupants. And that’s the card Trump will deal in a couple weeks when he officially rechristens the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. - jp
TITLE: As War Halts, the Environmental Devastation in Gaza Runs Deep
https://e360.yale.edu/features/gaza-war-environment
EXCERPTS: The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot where wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa meet.
Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves. “The shallow sand wells provided an ample supply of the sweet life-giving water,” says Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, which advocates for peace through diplomacy on water. This water, overlain by fertile soils, was why so many Palestinians fled to Gaza after being expelled from their homes by militias following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
But Gaza’s population has since soared to more than 2 million inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth — it vies with Singapore, but without the high-rises. That has put immense pressure on the underground water.
As water tables fall, salty seawater has infiltrated the aquifer. By 2023, more than 97 percent of Gaza’s once-sweet underground water was unfit for drinking, according to the World Health Organization. Increasingly, well water has been restricted to irrigating crops. Public water supplies have come largely from seawater desalination plants built with international aid, augmented by water delivered from Israel through three cross-border pipelines.
But since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action. Output from water-supply wells had fallen by more than a half, and desalination plants lacked power, while Israel had reduced deliveries down the pipelines. A survey found that only 14 percent of households still relied on public supplies. Most were taking water from potentially contaminated open wells or unregulated private tankers.
[T]he fate of the once-abundant underground water — the lifeline for both human and natural life — hangs by a thread. With most wells currently out of use for irrigated agriculture, withdrawals from the aquifer may have been reduced. But the war has increased contamination of what water remains.
Meanwhile, sewage treatment has all but ceased, with facilities either destroyed by military action or disabled by lack of power. Even the solar panels installed at some treatment works have reportedly been destroyed.
Raw sewage and wastewater spills across the land and into water courses or the Mediterranean — up to 3.5 million cubic feet every day, according to UNEP. The porous soils in most of Gaza mean sewage discharged onto the land readily seeps into underground water reserves.
The destruction of the built environment in Gaza is also a threat to the natural environment. U.N. agencies estimate the war has created more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials, and unexploded ordnance.
Before the conflict, cultivation covered more than a third of Gaza. But by September, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizaton assessed that two-thirds of farmland had been badly damaged. Analyses of satellite imagery…found that more than 2,000 farms, greenhouses, and other agricultural sites had been destroyed, “often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.”
Before the war, trees covered around a third of the cultivated area. By late September, 67 percent of them had been damaged. But by January 21, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, that figure had risen to 80 percent, with losses exceeding 90 percent in northern Gaza.
There are two likely causes of tree loss: displaced residents cutting down trees for firewood, and the Israeli military bombarding and uprooting trees to eliminate cover for Hamas fighters and clear security buffer zones around the edge of Gaza.
[T]he environmental implications of tree loss could also prove permanent and devastating for future generations. UNEP says that uprooting by military equipment “has moved, mixed and thinned the topsoil cover over large areas.” This, it says, “will impact future cultivation [and] make the land vulnerable to desertification.”
Currently, most information about the state of Gaza’s natural environment comes from such remote sensing imagery. Detailed ground observations are rare. It has been unsafe, and even with a ceasefire, NGOs have other priorities. Meanwhile, academic life has been shattered by the war. Much of the Islamic University of Gaza, including Abd Rabou’s biology department, was destroyed in the first days of the conflict.
When I contacted Abd Rabou by email in January to discuss his work, he sent a swift reply. “Now I am not able to communicate at all,” he wrote, “because five of my children were lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and my house was completely destroyed.”
TITLE: The ‘Gaza-ification’ of the West Bank
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/09/gaza-west-bank-00202976
EXCERPTS: Since the beginning of the year, Israeli forces have killed 70 Palestinians, including eight children, in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Israeli officials say the attacks on Jenin city and its adjacent refugee camp, dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” are an effort to “defeat terrorism in the area.” The operation is a marked escalation both in scale and intensity from previous attacks. Israeli fighter jets have carried out air strikes, killing at least 25 people, while soldiers blew up an entire neighborhood block. Roads inside and near the camp have been smashed, including those leading to Jenin Government Hospital, the only public health facility in the area, damaging water, sewage and telecommunication networks.
“It felt like the same scenes from Gaza were playing out in the West Bank, especially the closure of and siege imposed on hospitals, the prevention of movement to and from the facility, and the attacks on medical staff,” said Dr. Wissam Baker, the head of Jenin Government Hospital.
Israel’s Gaza-ification of the West Bank, as some like Baker are calling it, involves destroying vital infrastructure, essential services such as water and electricity, raiding homes, preventing medics from reaching injured Palestinians, and attacking large crowds of residents in refugee camps.
The attack was the second large-scale operation against Jenin in as many months. The first had been an unprecedented security operation carried out not by Israeli forces but by the Palestinian Authority, which administers small parts of the West Bank.
The PA has been vying for a role in Gaza ever since its long-dominant Fatah party was defeated by Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections and kicked out of the coastal enclave in a brief civil war in 2007. The attack on Jenin, which began Dec. 5, was not only an attempt to prove its worthiness as a subcontractor for Israel by showing its strength in policing the Palestinian population, but also a testament to how “sacred” — as PA President Mahmoud Abbas once called it — the PA agreement with Israel on security matters is.
The PA crackdown, which lasted until Israeli forces took over, focused on a coalition of armed groups called the Jenin Brigade. The groups are affiliated with traditional Palestinian factions such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and even Fatah, the PA’s ruling party.
establishment in 1994. For nearly two months, the PA besieged the Jenin camp, cutting off water and electricity to most of the inhabitants. At least 11 Palestinians were killed, six of them civilians, including one child.
Together, PA and Israeli operations in Jenin have destroyed between 150 and 180 houses, the vast majority of them during the ongoing raid by Israeli forces. Both forces have also restricted access to the camp, forcing UNRWA, the agency that aids Palestinian refugees, to suspend schools and health services, as well as solid waste collection, worsening an existing sewage crisis.
UN experts have warned that the operations in the West Bank coincide with increased Israeli settlement expansion and armed settler violence against Palestinians. It also comes at a time when UNRWA has been outlawed by Israeli authorities, who argue that the agency perpetuates the refugee issue by recognizing descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees themselves.
In recent days, Israel has expanded its operation beyond Jenin. On January 29, an Israeli airstrike struck a crowded neighborhood in the village of Tamoun in the northern West Bank, killing at least 10 Palestinians in one of the deadliest attacks in the area in months.
Minutes later, Israeli forces raided Qalqilya and its outskirts, escalating the military offensive, ensuring control of all major districts in the northern West Bank. What began as an operation centered in the Jenin refugee camp has now become a sweeping campaign across multiple cities, including Tubas, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jericho.
Similarly in Tulkarem, located southwest of Jenin, Israeli forces damaged infrastructure and disrupted access to water and electricity, leading to the displacement of nearly 1,000 people. In Tulkarem’s refugee camp, Israeli operations have so far displaced over 12,000 of the camps population of nearly 16,000.
TITLE: Palestinians in the West Bank Describe How Israeli Settlers Seize Land
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/west-bank-israel-palestinians-pastoral-settlement-herding-1235260258/
EXCERPT: [D]emolitions did not deter the people of al-Farisiyah. They remained on their land despite the heavy price they had to pay: They were forced to rebuild their structures from scratch. Their children were forced to walk more than three miles each way to school at a nearby village. Water was only available through private companies at exorbitant prices, when Israeli authorities denied them access to water sources — which their settler neighbors enjoyed with far greater access.
Despite their greatest efforts to eke out a living, families began to flee when settlers started targeting them and their property. It started in 2021 with settlers bringing their own livestock to graze on the land of al-Farisiyah. Then they began stealing the families’ water tanks. Shortly after, sheep started to disappear or were found dead, stabbed or shot. It wasn’t long after that that settlers, often accompanied and under the protection of Israeli soldiers, started preventing Palestinians in the area from grazing their flocks, taking over the land for their own animals to roam freely. This is according to Shamekh Daraghmeh, 49, who still lives in the community with his family of six, and relies on herding a 300-head sheep flock.
Pastoral settlement succeeded in causing Palestinian families to flee when demolitions in the area largely failed, bringing down the number of families in al-Farisiyah to five. Daraghmeh’s callused hands and his wrinkled, tanned face are a testament to the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to straddle two worlds: the nomadic lifestyle of ancestors and the harsh reality of forced displacement.
Farming or pastoral settlement — while not new or official — has escalated since the Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip began in October 2023, shortly after Hamas launched deadly incursions into southern Israel. It has involved reducing the amount of land available for Palestinians’ livestock to graze, blocking or denying access to water supply, and using checkpoints to isolate the Jordan Valley from the rest of the occupied West Bank.
Settlers have…taken advantage of “Operation Iron Wall” — a series of military raids on Jenin, Tulkarem, and other West Bank cities and towns — to attack Palestinians and their property. Since the operation was launched on January 21, nine Palestinians have been injured, and eight vehicles and over 120 trees, mostly olive, were damaged by settlers.
Israeli authorities have also declared much of the Jordan Valley as “firing zones” (training areas for the Israeli army) or nature reserves, so it becomes virtually impossible for these pastoral communities to build legally and to have access to water and electricity. But the violence perpetrated by settlers, which residents say has ramped up since the October 7 attacks, has made it nearly impossible to live in the Jordan Valley.
“I used to be able to go far for my sheep to graze. Now I cannot go farther than 50 to 100 meters from my tent. The settlers are there with their own livestock and we are not allowed near them, so they effectively are able to close off hundreds of dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 square meters) which we cannot access,” Daraghmeh says.
“Every day, settlers attack us and try to steal our sheep,” he continues. “I’ve personally been assaulted more than once, as have others, pushing them to leave the area. But since October 7, the harassment and assaults have intensified. I’ve been beaten and shot at, and settlers told me they have no qualms about killing me.”
Pastoral settlement enables settlers to take over large swaths of land without the issuance of military orders, said Amir Daoud of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Wall and Settlements Commission, making it far more dangerous than land appropriation for housing units.
Settler farms are now proliferating throughout the West Bank. Since October 7, at least 40 pastoral outposts have been established, most of which have been built in the eastern slopes of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, in addition to Masafer Yata, near Hebron, Daoud said. The total number of these outposts now nears 120, Daoud explains. (Israeli settler watchdog Peace Now puts the number at 113).
“These pastoral outposts, which have become a launching pad for settlers to carry out attacks, have led to the expulsion of 29 Palestinian Bedouin community clusters since October 7,” Daoud says.
The Israeli army says that it does not condone violence and that its soldiers often act against Israelis involved in “violent incidents or incidents aimed at Palestinians and their property.” However, some Israeli settlers acknowledge that these outposts are the best way to control land, and last year, the Israeli government gave over $20 million to farming outposts even though they are technically unauthorized.
About 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to the United Nations’ human rights office. Dror Etkes, a leading Israeli expert on settlements, says the point of pastoral settlement is to push Palestinian communities out of their land as part of “a greater campaign to empty the West Bank of Palestinian presence, which was maintained for generations by herders”.
Etkes, who has spent the last two decades documenting and monitoring settlements in the West Bank, speaks of a pattern to take over herding areas: Settlers assault Palestinians in the meadows and in open areas, going as far as attacking families, including children, inside their tents and shacks. Once the community flees, you see an outpost popping up.
Whether or not the settlers want to use the land for herding is irrelevant, he says. “The bottom line is that herding activity is deliberately being used as a means of displacement and dispossession and to push away Palestinian communities from big areas of the West Bank.”
The more isolated and smaller Palestinian communities are, the more vulnerable they are to settler attacks, Etkes says. “It’s a system,” he explains. “Once the community is forced to leave, settlers move to the next community and so on.”