Israeli Cabinet approves 19 new apartheid colonies in occupied West Bank

Brett Wilkins | Common Dreams

"The ONLY reason Israel gets away with this naked thievery is US military and political support," said one observer.

Israel's Cabinet on Sunday finalized approval of 19 new Jewish-only settler colonies in the illegally occupied West Bank, a move the apartheid state's far-right finance minister said was aimed at thwarting Palestinian statehood.

Cabinet ministers approved the legalization of the previously unauthorized settler outposts throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, bringing the total number of new settlements in recent years to 69.

The move will bring the overall total number of exclusively or overwhelmingly Jewish settlements — which are illegal under international law — to more than 200, up from around 140 just three years ago.

Included in the new approval are two former settlements — Kadim and Ganim — that were evacuated in compliance with the now effectively repealed 2005 Disengagement Law, under which Israel dismantled all of its colonies in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.

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How the world can resist the UN Security Council’s rogue colonial mandate in Gaza

Craig Mokhiber | Mondoweiss.net

The UN Security Council resolution backing the Trump plan for Gaza is clearly illegitimate, but there are several ways that states and individuals worldwide can challenge its illegality.

n a now infamous moment in television history, former US President Richard Nixon, three years after leaving office in scandal, was asked by interviewer David Frost if the US President could commit illegal acts. Nixon replied: “If the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” 

With those twelve words, Nixon dismissed the core idea of republican government and the very essence of the rule of law. For Nixon (and far too many today), some people and some institutions are simply above the law. And not only are they not bound by the law that binds the rest of us, but we must follow their orders. Afterall, this is the divine right of kings. 

Almost a half century later, Nixonian ideology is alive and well. 

In the wake of the Security Council adoption of resolution 2803 last month (a resolution that shocked legal analysts and human rights defenders around the globe for its blatantly colonial content, and about which I have written previously) even critics of the resolution have thrown up their hands to declare “oh well, the Security Council adopted it, so now its law.” In other words, to paraphrase Nixon, “if the Security Council does it, that means it is not illegal.” 

Nonsense. 

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Israeli Forces Accused Of Executing Unarmed Palestinians After They Surrendered

Zero Hedge

Members of the Israeli border police have been accused of executing two unarmed Palestinian men after they surrendered in the West Bank town of Jenin.

In the incident from Thursday caught on camera, two men can be seen emerging from a doorway of what appears to be a warehouse, lifting their shirts, before they were shot dead by the Israelis. 

The IDF says that the incident is under "review" - but claims that the two men were terrorists who had attacked them earlier. After gathering their bodies, the IDF says that the men were identified as Mahmoud Qassem Abdallah, 26, and Youssef Asasa, 37, and were "wanted individuals who had carried out terror activities, including hurling explosives and firing at security forces." 

"The forces entered the area, enclosed the structure in which the suspects were located and initiated a surrender procedure that lasted several hours," an IDF spokesman told the Telegraph. "Following the use of engineering tools on the structure, the two suspects exited.

"Following their exit, fire was directed toward the suspects. The incident is under review by the commanders on the ground and will be transferred to the relevant professional bodies."

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YouTube erases hundreds of videos of alleged Israeli war crimes

RT 

The hosting platform has cited US sanctions against NGOs that investigated the abuses as the reason.

YouTube has removed hundreds of videos documenting alleged human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including eyewitness accounts, investigative reports, and humanitarian footage, according to the American non-profit news outlet The Intercept.

Since October, the video hosting platform has reportedly deleted more than 700 videos and suspended the accounts of prominent Palestinian human-rights groups Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. The deleted materials reportedly included an investigation into the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces, footage of home demolitions in the West Bank, and a documentary about mothers who survived Israeli attacks in Gaza.

The Intercept described the removals as part of a broader US-backed effort to suppress documentation of alleged Israeli war crimes. The same Palestinian organizations targeted by YouTube were sanctioned by Washington in September for submitting evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The ICC issued arrest warrants for both officials in 2024 over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

A YouTube spokesperson, Boot Bullwinkle, told The Intercept that the platform's owner Google "is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions."

Washington's influence over tech companies became a national controversy during the Joe Biden presidency. In the Murthy v. Missouri case, federal agencies were accused of pressuring Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to suppress disfavored opinions under the pretext of combating misinformation. The Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024 on procedural grounds, leaving unresolved whether such government-platform coordination violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The removals come amid Washington's military and diplomatic support for Israel during the Gaza conflict. The US has provided additional arms to Israel and repeatedly blocked UN resolutions calling for ceasefires and condemning civilian casualties. Critics argue that such moves shielded Israel from accountability and weakened international efforts to end the violence.

The latest violence started when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health authorities, over 68,000 Palestinians have been killed since.

Comment: It's more probably hundreds of thousands. And no mention of how many Silicon Valley companies are controlled by the Zionist Establishment.

Israel Arrests Ex-Army Lawyer Over Leaked Video Showing Palestinian’s Abuse

Al Jazeera

Israeli police have arrested a former military prosecutor after she leaked a video appearing to show soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee.

Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was detained overnight on Monday, according to the country’s national security minister, following a scandal that erupted after she leaked a video, resigned and then disappeared.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the leaking of the video perhaps the most “severe public relations attack” on Israel since its founding.

Reporting from Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the arrest of Tomer-Yerushalmi has created “a political and legal storm in Israel”, noting the spotlight on the leaker has overshadowed attention to the original crime.

“There is so much focus on the fact that this video was leaked, at the expense of discussing how this crime actually happened – and the fact that the UN says that these kinds of crimes are being committed in a systematic manner,” Odeh said.

“In one way, it’s a way to shift attention from the fact that these crimes are happening, by focusing on this woman and the fact that she leaked the video.”

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The Not-so-Secret History of Netanyahu's Support For Hamas

Ghousoon Bisharat | +972 Magazine

From sabotaging Oslo to funneling Qatari cash into Gaza, Bibi has spent his career bolstering Hamas to help perpetuate the conflict. Even after Oct. 7, argues historian Adam Raz, he's still advancing the same strategy. 

When Israeli historian and human rights activist Adam Raz set out to write "The Road to October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Production of the Endless Conflict and Israel's Moral Degradation," he knew he was tackling a blind spot in Israeli public discourse. The vast majority of Israelis, Raz believes, fail to grasp the full extent of Netanyahu's involvement in bolstering Hamas before the current war, and in perpetuating an unending state of conflict.

Raz's book, released in May of this year, sheds light on a controversial policy whereby Netanyahu's governments for years routinely approved and encouraged the transfer of Qatari funds into Gaza to prop up Hamas. While noting that the Israeli media has devoted more attention to this policy in the aftermath of October 7, Raz told +972 that this is "just a sliver of the bigger picture," which is rooted in Netanyahu's broader opposition to a just resolution to the conflict. "People need to understand the full scope of Netanyahu's strategy," he said.

According to Raz, who also works as a researcher at the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, Netanyahu's priority is not maintaining Israel's security but rather preventing any real chance of resolving the conflict through the division of land, ending the occupation, or a two-state solution. Keeping the cash flowing to Hamas served this objective by ensuring the Palestinian national movement remained splintered between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, thus allowing Israel to maintain its dominance over the whole of the land. Even after the devastating events of October 7, Raz warns that Netanyahu's playbook remains unchanged.

This book isn't a history lesson about the conflict, Raz emphasizes, but rather a damning exploration of a political alliance that continues to degrade Israel's moral fabric. "I didn't write this book, I yelled it on the pages," he said.

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Recognition of Palestine Is a Repeat of the West’s Oslo ‘Peace’ Fraud. Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook | Global Research

he reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, Canada this week is a con – it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.

Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.

That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.

At Israel’s insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.

Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.

The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of “an entity which is less than a state”: a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.

After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.

He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the occupied West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed “peace-making”, Israel colonised Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.

In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was secretly caught on camera, explaining how he achieved this reversal.

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Israel is trying to collapse the Palestinian Authority. The first step is destroying the Palestinian economy.

Mondoweiss | Qassam Muaddi 

As countries around the world recognize a Palestinian state, Israel is doing everything it can to prevent the possibility of any future state. One way it plans on doing that is through financial strangulation.

Following the wave of global recognitions of the State of Palestine from key Western and European nations, Israel has been stepping up its plans to render these gestures moot by implementing measures meant to cripple and delegitimize the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Earlier this month, Israel approved a massive settlement plan that would split the West Bank in two. Since October 7, 2023, it has plunged the PA into an economic crisis by withholding nearly 7 billion shekels (around $2 billion) in Palestinian customs money. And in recent months, the Israeli army has launched repeated invasions into the heart of Palestinian cities in the West Bank, ostensibly under PA control.

But Israel still hasn't used its most important trump card in responding to the recent Western and global recognitions of a Palestinian state. It involves a piece of paper, and the person holding it is Israel's hardline Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

Every year, the Finance Minister renews an indemnity letter allowing Israeli banks to accept money transfers from Palestinians in the West Bank, shielding Israeli banks from anti-terrorism laws they might be at risk of breaking by dealing with Palestinian banks. Smotrich has repeatedly threatened to revoke this letter in response to global sanctions against hardline Ministers like himself and Itamar Ben-Gvir, which could cause the collapse of the Palestinian banking sector — and possibly, the Palestinian Authority. Smotrich has recently been periodically renewing the letter in four-month stretches, using the intervals as pressure points to threaten the PA.

This is the spearhead of Israel's campaign of economic warfare against Palestinians in the West Bank. Here's why it could hasten the collapse of the PA and formally bring about a one-state apartheid reality. 

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Israel announces thousands of new settler units in West Bank

Press TV

Israel has reportedly approved plans for the construction of 6,000 new settler units in the occupied West Bank, in flagrant defiance of international outcry over the Tel Aviv regime’s settlement expansion policies in the Palestinian territories.

Israeli officials said on Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet had approved permits for 6,000 new units for settlers in the so-called Area C of the West Bank.

The area is the largest division in the occupied territory as it comprises 60 percent of the land, and is under full Israeli military control.

The Palestinian leadership rejected the construction announcement, with the Palestinian Foreign Ministry calling it “evidence of the dark colonial mentality of the rules in Israel and which ignores all United Nations resolutions, international law and the signed agreements.” 

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Israel face-recognition start-up ‘secretly tracking Palestinians’

MEMO| Middle Eastern Monitor

A start-up known as “Israel’s most high-profile biometric recognition firm” is playing a key role in monitoring Palestinians at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, reported Haaretz.

According to the article, Anyvision Interactive Technologies “is taking part in two special projects in assisting the Israeli army in the West Bank”.

One project “involves a system that it has installed at army checkpoints that thousands of Palestinians pass through each day on their way to work from the West Bank.”

In a statement in February, the army said “27 biometric crossings” had been established in the West Bank, as part of a “wide-ranging” effort to “upgrade” the checkpoints in question.

The second project, however, “is much more confidential”, reported Haaretz, and “includes facial recognition technology elsewhere in the West Bank, not just at border crossings”, as “cameras deep inside the West Bank try to spot and monitor potential Palestinian assailants”.

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The EU’s destructive “peace” partner

Maureen Clare Murphy
Electronic Intifada

While the defenseless population of Gaza was being pummeled by the Israeli military on Saturday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief condemned the firing of rockets from the territory in a nakedly one-sided statement.

“These attacks provoke unspeakable suffering to the Israelis and serve only the cause of endless violence and of an endless conflict,” Federica Mogherini admonished, making no mention of the Palestinian victims of massive Israeli bombing.

“Together with the international community, we will keep working to bring relief to all those suffering from this conflict and cooperating with those who serve the cause of peace,” she added.

Days earlier, Mogherini entertained a proposal from COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, that international donors give hundreds of millions of dollars for a sewage treatment plant in Gaza.

The plant is critically needed in Gaza, the type of civilian infrastructure that Israel as the occupying power is obliged by international humanitarian law to provide.

Cynical scheme

 

But Israel knows that it can destroy Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza, and third states will pay for its reconstruction, with no cost to Israel.

Israel in fact benefits economically from reconstruction in Gaza, as it controls the import of all raw materials to the Strip, privileging Israeli vendors such as cement companies and trucking and storage firms that profit from the inevitable delays to the delivery of goods.

It’s a cynical scheme resulting from a myopic and dogmatic commitment to a so-called peace process that has completely lost touch with the reality on the ground.

In the West Bank, Israel’s euphemistically named Civil Administration, a unit of COGAT, implements a policy that incrementally dispossesses Palestinians from their land.

That scheme, implemented in the “seam zone” between Israel’s wall and the Israel-West Bank boundary, sees the coercive division of land collectively maintained by Palestinian communities into smaller parcels owned by individuals.

If the parcel of land is smaller than 330 square meters, as the journalist Amira Hass points out, it is declared by the Civil Administration to have “no agricultural necessity” and so access permits are not issued to its Palestinian owners.

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Israel government to fund hotels in illegal West Bank settlements

MEMO

The Israeli government will subsidise hotels in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as part of a plan to attract more tourists to the area.

According to an article in Arutz Sheva, citing a report by Israel Hayom, Israel’s Tourism Ministry “will aid entrepreneurs who want to invest in building or expanding hotels in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank]”.

The entrepreneurs can now apply for a grant of up to 20 per cent of their intended investment.

Israel Hayom reported that a meeting held earlier this year between senior settler officials and the managers of Israeli travel agencies in the occupied West Bank “showed that the number of guest units is insufficient, causing tourists to avoid staying in the area for more than a day”.

According to the report, the government grants “are intended to encourage investors to open additional guest units in [illegal settlements in] Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley [the occupied West Bank]”.

Settler leader (Yesha Council chair) Hananel Dorani stated: “We thank [Tourism] Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) for his important work on the issue of tourism in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley.”

“Building hotels and guest houses in the area is an important step which shows the deepening of our roots in the ground and paves the way for Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he added.

“Giving grants for the creation of hotels is another supplemental step which will help solve the problem of where to sleep and will strengthen settlements and our hold on Judea and Samaria.”

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Illegal Israeli squatters seize over half a square kilometer of Palestinian land in Jordan Valley

PressTV

A number of Israeli settlers escorted by troops have confiscated a large area of Palestinian land in northern Jordan Valley in the West Bank despite the international outcry against the Tel Aviv regime's land expropriation policies in the occupied territories.

Local Palestinian media reports said on Monday that the group placed barbed wire and electric fence around more than 600 dunams (0.6 square kilometers) of Palestinian-owned land in Khillet al-Oqda and al-Sweideh areas of the valley, which comprises a third of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli troops have also installed surveillance cameras on the seized land.

The illegal Israeli land grab in the occupied Jordan Valley is a regular occurrence by the extremist settlers and the Israeli military.

The Palestinian territories are seized by the Tel Aviv regime under the contested Absentee Property Law, which paves the way for Israel to take over the property of Palestinians who have been forced from their homeland following the 1948 war. 

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UN ‘shocked’ at ‘terror’ waged by israeli (apartheid state) settlers

Uprooted Palestinian's blog

The United Nations has voiced “shock” at the “terror” carried out by Israeli settlers that killed a Palestinian father of four in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“Today’s violence in al-Mughayer is shocking and unacceptable!” UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov tweeted on Sunday, referring to a Palestinian village that was violently stormed by Israeli settlers and where they killed one Palestinian.

“Israel must put an end to settler violence and bring those responsible to justice,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the Palestinian man killed and those injured. All must condemn violence, stand up to terror,” the envoy added.

Thirty eight-year-old Hamdi Taleb Na’san was killed and 30 others were wounded after Israeli “settler volunteer security teams” and regime troops stormed al-Mughayer, located 27 kilometers northeast of the city of Ramallah in the occupied territories on Sunday.

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Israeli forces assault residents of Khan al-Ahmar, prepare to demolish village

Ma'an News Agency

Israeli forces assaulted residents alongside activists and supporters of the Khan al-Ahmar Bedouin village east of Jerusalem in the central occupied West Bank on Wednesday.

Activists from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Committee and others have been stationed in the village for weeks, as a form of protest against the planned demolition of Khan al-Ahmar and the displacement of its people.

Israeli forces and military vehicles had surrounded Khan al-Ahmar in the early morning hours on Wednesday.

The land on which the Bedouin village is built is entirely owned by and registered at the Land Registration for the residents of the nearby village of Anata.

Israeli forces have been attempting to displace the residents of the Bedouin village, inhabited by 181 people, half of whom are children. Earlier this week, Israeli forces raided Khan al-Ahmar, in preparation to demolish the village which would displace more than 35 Palestinian families, as part of an Israeli plan to expand the nearby Kfar Adummim settlement.

Although international humanitarian law prohibits the demolition of the village and illegal confiscation of private property, Israeli forces continue their planned expansion by forcing evictions and violating basic human rights of the people.

Sources added that Israeli police deployed near the Bedouin village blocked the main road. Buses were also called by the Israeli authorities to transfer the residents to the village of al-Eizariya, east of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that 35 people were injured and treated in the field, while 4 were sent to hospitals for treatment.

Israel has been constantly trying to uproot Bedouin communities from the east of Jerusalem area to allow settlement expansion in the area, which would later turn the entire eastern part of the West Bank into a settlement zone.

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Israel announces plans for 2,500 homes in occupied W. Bank days after Gaza bloodshed

RT

Israel says it plans to build 2,500 new settler homes in the West Bank in violation of a 2016 UNSC resolution. It comes just days after the IDF killed dozens of Palestinians protesting the Israeli occupation. 

Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Thursday that he was finalizing plans for the construction of new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Writing on Twitter, Lieberman said he would seek approval for the project next week, expressing hope that the regional planning board – the High Planning Council in Judea and Samaria – would designate 1,400 of the housing units for immediate construction.

“We will promote building in all of Judea and Samaria, from the north to south, in small communities and in large ones,” Lieberman wrote, using the Biblical names for the West Bank. Some 500,000 Israelis already live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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US Human Rights Report whitewashes Israeli high crimes

Stephen Lendman
stephenlendman.org

Annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices omit US high crimes - the most egregious human rights abuser over a longer duration in world history from inception.

Each year, its horrendous abuses over the past 12 months are airbrushed from the State Department report.

It greatly downplays Israeli high crimes. In previous years, its report on the Jewish state headlined "Israel and the Occupied Territory."

Its current one is titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza."

Zionist zealot US ambassador to Israel David Friedman reportedly asked the State Department to stop calling the Occupied Territories occupied.

Last year he was quoted saying (illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land) "are part of Israel."

The State Department's report falsely called Israel "a multiparty democracy." There's nothing democratic about a ruthless rogue state, the region's leading human rights abuser - at war with Palestinians for 70 years, attacking neighboring states at its discretion. 

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Israeli Terrorism Against Palestinians Will Never End if Western Hypocrisy in Middle East Continues

Eva Bartlett
RT

The US is fine with "rebels" like Al-Qaeda "protesting" in Syria, but when genuinely unarmed Palestinians protest the occupiers who violently expelled them from their homes and land, they are "inciting violence."
During peaceful protests on March 30 in eastern Gaza, an unarmed Palestinian man walked on farmland towards the fence built by his occupiers. Within minutes, he was shot by one of the 100 Israeli special forces snipers deployed along the fence precisely to quash dissent-by any means necessary-under the old pretext of "self-defense."

On the same day, a Palestinian woman, armed solely with a flag, walked towards the fence which has imprisoned her for so many years. She, too, was targeted by one of the snipers.
Among the 17 killed that day was a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old farmer, the latter killed by Israeli tank fire.

Even the BBC, which is not generally known to report fairly on Palestine, noted: "The first to die was Omar Samour, 27 - a Palestinian farmer killed in Israeli shelling as he worked his land near Khan Younis early on Friday, before the protests began."
Yet, according to Israel, this farmer was a "terrorist infiltrator," the lexicon which Israel uses to whitewash its extrajudicial assassinations.

Sputnik reports that the Israeli Army spokesperson proudly tweeted they knew "where every bullet landed," but later deleted the tweet, likely because it was clear these bullets landed in the bodies of unarmed protesters.

In my three years living in Gaza, I frequently accompanied such demonstrations, and also did so in countless demonstrations when I stayed as an activist for eight months in the West Bank. Having experienced these first hand, I'm acutely aware that Israel has zero moral authority on conduct.
In the tens of demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza which I accompanied, "violence" always began with the Israelis shooting live ammunition, lead bullets covered with a thin rubber layer, and suffocating tear gas at unarmed Palestinians. That Palestinian youths chose to respond with slingshot-spun rocks is entirely within their rights. But in my experiences, it was always Israel which began, shooting to maim and kill, kidnapping and imprisoning unarmed protesters.

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The IDF vs The Teenage Girl: Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi Arrested For Slapping Soldiers Who Shot Boy

Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net

Ahed Tamimi lives in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. She has literally been fighting tooth and nail against Israeli occupation soldiers since before she was a teenager. In the 2015 video above, we see her fighting off a soldier who was trying to take away her then 11 year-old brother Mohammed. Since the video, she became both a symbol of Palestinian resistance and an easily recognizable target for Israelis, both civilian and military.

She told Al Jazeera:

"Many Israelis threatened me on social media after the video was released, demanding that I be detained or even killed... The harassment handcuffed my life. I was scared to even go outside or visit my friends." [...]

The harassment began immediately following the video's release, as Israelis called her a "terrorist" on social media and threatened to kill her, the family says. Bassem, Ahed's father and a long-standing leader in the village, said that her 19-year-old brother, Waed, was detained after the release of the video. At the start of his 10-month stay in Israeli jail, Ahed's mother, Nariman, received permission to enter Israel to visit him, and Ahed tagged along.

"When we passed a checkpoint near Jerusalem, the Israeli soldiers got on the bus and immediately singled her out," Nariman told Al Jazeera. "While everyone else was permitted to pass, Ahed was pulled off the bus and told she wouldn't be allowed into Israel."

During the village's protests, Israeli forces would often scream Ahed's name and shout curses at her. "Look! It's Ahed Tamimi. Shoot her!" Bassem recalled one soldier as saying.

The family was often scared for their daughter, he added: "Whenever the soldiers recognise her, they do something to make her life difficult. Every time she left the house, we were scared something would happen to her." Ahed was even forced to stay at her cousin's home in Ramallah, where she attends school, to avoid the danger of passing through Israeli checkpoints on her way from Nabi Saleh.

She began attending protests at Nabi Saleh when she was nine. Here she is when she was young enough to be half the size of the armed soldiers she confronted: 

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Israel's vision for Palestine's future is terrifying

Ramzy Baroud
Politics for the People

Empirical historical evidence combined with little common-sense are enough to tell us the type of future options that Israel has in store for the Palestinian people: perpetual apartheid or ethnic cleansing, or a mix of both.

The passing of the "Regularisation Bill" on 6 February is all we need to imagine the Israeli-envisaged future. The new law allows the Israeli government to retroactively recognise Jewish outposts built without official permission on privately-owned Palestinian land.

All settlements - officially recognised settlements and unauthorised outposts - are illegal under international law. The verdict has been passed numerous times by the United Nations and, more recently, pronounced with unmistakable clarity in UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

Israel's response was the announcement of the construction of over 6,000 new housing units to be built throughout the Occupied Palestinian territories, the construction of a brand new settlement (the first in 20 years), and the new law that paves the way for the annexation of large swathes of the occupied West Bank.

Undoubtedly, the law is the "last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution", but that is not important. It never mattered to Israel, anyway. The talk of a solution was mere smoke and mirrors as far as Israel was concerned. All the "peace talks" and the entirety of "peace process", even when it was in its zenith, rarely slowed down the Israeli bulldozers, the construction of more "Jewish homes" or ended the unceasing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians

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