Israel/Palestine Thread

Just as the threat of famine in Gaza has receded (though extreme hunger is still widespread), it seems the Israelis are very unhappy.

So what to do? easy….

Haaretz:

The Israeli government said it would revoke the license of 37 humanitarian organizations to operate in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, ActionAid, and Oxfam, over what it said were violations of security and transparency standards. Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry claimed that "security reviews revealed that employees of certain organizations were involved in terrorist activity... in particular, Doctors Without Borders."

Doctors Without Borders, which currently sponsors hundreds of aid workers in Gaza, said it refused to cooperate with Israeli policy as French law barred it from providing information on its staff. According to the new Israeli directive, the aid group will have to evacuate its staff from the Strip by March 1.

The U.K., Canada, France, Japan and several other countries others expressed "serious concerns about the renewed deterioration ‌of the humanitarian situation in Gaza which remains catastrophic" in a joint statement.

Nope, nothing to see here. Move along now.

Haaretz:
A court ordered the release from house arrest of the three far-right settler activists suspected of attacking a pregnant woman in Jaffa earlier in December.

The police had requested a six-day extension of their detention to conduct further investigations and cited a danger to public safety.

…………………………

There are other points I may get to in the coming days, but I want to deal with these head on.

No, I have never been to Israel, but there are number of reasons I may visit some day. I do not qualify for Israeli citizenship and have no plans to ever live there.

I also do not know exactly how fast people in Israel have to be ready to run from Iranian rockets/drones, I just picked 15 seconds as a guesstimate of how quickly one would want to go from hearing air raid sirens to wanting to be in shelter. Perhaps I should have clarified, I don't know what the exact local standards are in terms of access to bomb shelters - only that it is a nationwide issue.

And how could the pager bombs be "war crimes," when they were about as surgical as it possible for a strike to be?

I hope your other points are a bit better than this.

The vast majority of posters can see the Israeli crimes against the Palestinians over the years and are fair about condemning them. They also condemned the Hamas attack on Oct 7th and this can be seen at the beginning of the thread. All people want to see is fair play but many of the pro-Israel posters can never seem to criticise anything Israel does. When fairness and Justice is reserved only for one side then the people who believe that they are not getting fairness or Justice will always react. It is a common trend all throughout history.

I cannot believe that those sick evil cowards in Israel are going to ban doctors without borders. They are the lowest of the low.

The 18,000 children killed directly by the IDF is almost certainly an underestimate. But the number also almost certainly does not include children who have died from:

1. Lack of medical care
2. Starvation and malnutrition
3. Hypothermia
4. Disease and infection from amputations and severe injury

And per @Cluedo Monopoly 's post, Israel is now banning various aid agencies who provide exactly that medical care, food and shelter.

Heard on RTE1 today that one organisation has been trying to get 5000 tents into Gaza and been continually denied by Israel.

Any cursory look at the numbers exterminated by Israel over the last two years would absolutely categorise the state as a terrorist killing machine that has no regard to humanitarian law. And that does not include what they are doing in Lebanon, Syria and the occupied territories.

I hope 2026 brings Israel exactly what it deserves.

Alleged War Criminal (at large) and convicted felon at odds with each other. Popcorn time.

Haaretz:
U.S. President Trump will allow the reconstruction of Gaza to begin, most likely in the cleared Rafah area, even before the disarmament of Hamas is completed, the remaining tunnels are destroyed and Gaza is demilitarized, sources close to PM Netanyahu told Haaretz, adding that Trump will ultimately not insist on eliminating Hamas.

Speaking to Fox News, Netanyahu said that any progress in the Gaza cease-fire depends on Hamas' total disarmament, adding that this means taking away "60,000 AK rifles… and breaking up the terror tunnels." Regarding the transition to the cease-fire's second phase, Netanyahu said "I think we have to give it a chance."

Ethnic Cleansing.

Haaretz:"Soldiers and armed settlers stand by the yellow gate.

In a moment of calm between tear gas shells and stun grenades thrown by the military, a Palestinian family passes with items they collected from their badly damaged home on the outskirts of the [West Bank] town of Tarqumiyah.

The family had been expelled early on in the [Gaza] war, and soldiers and settlers are now preventing their return.

The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes by settlers has become commonplace;

still, this marks a new development: the houses from which this family and their neighbors were expelled are in Area B – under Palestinian administrative control – where Israel and its soldiers, and certainly its settlers, are not permitted to expel anybody.

This situation would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago, though in hindsight the early signs were clear"

Matan Golan

They may well all just leave…

Haaretz:

Israel's population growth fell to a new low in 2025, rising by just 0.9 percent, a study published Wednesday found, attributing the decline to lower birthrates, higher mortality, and chiefly to net negative migration. The study, conducted by demography expert Prof. Alex Weinreb, described the 0.9 rise in population as "an unprecedented decline," and said 2025 was a demographic turning point for Israel.