I tried to write a summary of what has happened in Palestine since I left last, but I don’t think it is possible to write a succinct description truly honoring the magnitude of immense horrors. Every human surely lacks the capacity. For every day I witness footage of children collecting the scattered body parts of their family. Every day I see videos of people without shoes or proper clothing wandering amidst the rubble trying to find food, often resorting to eating weeds and animal feed. How can this orchestrated evil possibly be contained on a page? It cannot.
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In August, the Israeli military began a widespread assault called “Operation Summer Camps,” which targeted Jenin and Tulkarem, cities and refugee camps. Armed military vehicles, bulldozers, and aircraft stormed several towns. Israeli drones hit buildings in the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, which killed five Palestinians, including three teenagers. Military bulldozers dug up roads during a raid in the Nur Shams camp and destroyed the main water networks and caused severe power outages. They have imposed a curfew on the refugee camp and prevented residents from leaving or entering even for food. In Jenin, Israeli military bulldozers have demolished more than 70% of the streets, destroying over 12 miles of the city’s water and sewage grid. 80% of residents lost access to water. The mayor of Jenin estimates that over 500 million shekels ($135.2 million) of damage had been caused. Zionists also blew up homes in the Jabriyat neighborhood of the refugee camp and blocked ambulances from reaching the injured.
On August 9 my comrade Daniel, a high school English teacher from New Jersey, was also deliberately shot through his thigh during a peaceful demonstration in the West Bank village of Beita. The Biden Administration never condemned his attack and no investigation was preformed.
In September, Israeli forces stormed Birzeit University, north of Ramallah, and confiscated properties and publications. They furthermore confiscated over a million shekels ($265,000) from a money exchange shop in Hebron. Without proof, they claimed the money was intended to finance the resistance. This is not a new tactic; the IOF commonly loots banks, exchange shops, and gold and cash from families’ houses in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel also infiltrated electronic devices, which is now known to be one of the biggest acts of mass terrorism. Thousands were maimed and dozens were murdered in Lebanon.
On September 6, Aysenur Eygi was fatally shot in the head by the IOF at a peaceful protest against illegal Israeli settlements on Mount Sbeih in Beita. She was 26 years old and had been in the West bank for just a few days. There was no investigation.
In October, within the span of three weeks, Israel launched thousands of strikes in Lebanon. In the past year, Israeli attacks have killed more than 3,516 Lebanese, including 231 children, according to the Ministry of Public Health. Israel has targeted 66 attacks on hospitals and 225 attacks on emergency medical services. At least 14,929 people have been injured and over 3,500 have been murdered. A quarter of the population has been displaced, which amounts to around 1.2 million civilians.
In these last months, Israeli forces have continued to bomb indiscriminately in Gaza, targeting hospitals and schools. 1.7 million, or approximately 90% of the population in Gaza, have become refugees. In addition, over 85,000 tons of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, turning the strip into more than 42 million tons of rubble. Israel has wiped out 900 bloodlines in Gaza. 900 families where every member of that family has been slaughtered. The death toll in Gaza has been frozen at 43,970 for months. It has become impossible to truly measure how many have been murdered there, and human rights organizations everywhere predict the number is much, much higher. The majority of the victims are women and children. Over 104,000 people have been injured. 11,000 are missing. 86% of the population are facing crisis levels of food insecurity. Over half the population has no more than 15 liters of water a day for drinking, cooking and hygiene, while two thirds of households have access to less than the minimum recommended amount of six liters per day. People have begun washing their clothes in, and drinking, sea water. 100% of Gazans live in acute poverty imposed by the Israeli government. Everyone faces famine.
Since October 7, 2023, more than 3,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have had their homes demolished by the IOF, thus becoming refugees in their own homeland. 13 entire towns have been forced to permanently evacuate. The UN has recorded over 1,250 settler attacks in the West Bank alone. Over 10,500 Palestinians in the West Bank have been detained or jailed without trial in the last year.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant now brazenly speaks of wiping out every Palestinian living in the occupied West Bank. He stated, “the military has been ‘mowing the lawn’ during an ongoing major operation against terror groups in the West Bank, but will eventually need to pull out the roots.” Obviously there are no terrorist groups in occupied Palestine, only people trying their best to survive. Palestinians everywhere just want their fair shot at creating a life. Under international law they have the right to resist in any way they can against occupation and foreign invasion.
This week, Minister of the Treasury Bezalel Smotrich announced that following Trump’s comeback to the White House, “2025 will be the year Israel will finally be sovereign in the West Bank.” Across occupied West Jerusalem there are huge banners spanning the sides of buildings that proclaim Trump will make Israel great again. What could this possibly mean when Israel was created by displacing over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes? When Israel was founded on genocide and colonization? When upon conception it was an apartheid ethno-state rooted in Jewish supremacy and racism?
The only way I can look at myself in the mirror as a citizen of a country funding this evil enterprise is knowing I’m doing the little I can to make it harder for Israel to continue. I know this to be true not only because Palestinians I work with tell me so but also because Israeli leaders are scared of our presence and do their best to stop us from documenting their crimes. A popular extremist Israeli news website called INN recently interviewed Knesset member and Zionist party politician Zbi Sukkot to talk about about the group I work with specifically:
“Some may raise an eyebrow and wonder whether dealing with these anarchists is a burning issue worthy of pooling resources in a year of war on several fronts.” Sukkot explains that the more he was exposed to the issue, the more it became clear to him that the damage caused to the State of Israel by these provocateurs was much greater than a local conflict between Jewish and Arab shepherds. “The greatest strategic damage to the State of Israel today comes from this gang,” he claims. “This includes the halt of munitions and the phenomenon of sanctions on Israeli civilians. In the Netanyahu-Biden and Gallant-Blinken talks, the issue of settler violence is always raised with us.”
A brief insight to Sukkot’s character: He is a representative of the far-right terror group known as “The Revolt” and was arrested on January 18, 2010, during an investigation of a mosque arson. He was also expelled from the West Bank due to evidence he planned and carried out violent attacks against Palestinians and their property. The Jewish human rights group B’Tselem has charged Sukkot with committing attacks and vandalizing property and his legacy as a racist terrorist is well documented by many other international activists. He calls us anarchists, not because all of our volunteers have anarchism and self-governance as a political ideology, but because he knows that to most people that word is synonymous with chaos, and evokes fear. The group I work with has nonviolence as one of its core principles. It is revealing that simply recording and spreading the truth of what is happening in the West Bank threatens Israeli occupation.