Palestine weekly wrap: Israel’s ‘quiet annexation’ grows louder

This week, the campaign of land seizure that Israeli officials have largely pursued unofficially was, in places, declared aloud. In Hebron, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he had “cancelled” the 1997 Hebron Agreement, stripping the Palestinian municipality of planning authority over the Old City and Ibrahimi Mosque.

In Gaza, Israeli television reported that Israel, blocked by the United States from a new ground offensive, had indeed chosen what its own officials called “creeping” or “quiet” annexation – pushing its lines of control westward without announcement.

And in central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp, an Israeli strike killed Al Jazeera Mubasher cameraman Ahmed Wishah, the 12th member of the network’s staff killed in Gaza since October 2023.

The week intensified the early summer’s trends so far: international censure mounting on the one hand, and on the other, a state extending its hold over Palestinian land in Gaza and in the West Bank, in apparent contravention of international law and agreements.

Annexation – both quiet, and loud

The loudest move came in Hebron. Speaking at the inauguration of the new illegal settlement of Doran, Smotrich said that Israel had annulled the Hebron Accords and now held planning authority in the H2 zone of the occupied West Bank city containing Israeli settlements and the Ibrahimi Mosque.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry partially walked the claim back, saying the agreement itself had not been cancelled but that a cabinet decision months earlier had transferred planning powers over the Jewish community and holy sites. The Palestinian Authority called the move illegal, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation warned it undermined the city’s status, and even the US State Department stated it “does not support Israel annexing the West Bank”.

In Gaza, the parallel process of annexation was quieter but – by Israel’s own account – deliberate. Israel’s Channel 13 reported that after the administration of US President Donald Trump blocked a larger ground operation, Israel had opted for “creeping” annexation – expanding the so-called Yellow Line westward and conducting periodic incursions without formal announcement. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights estimated Israeli forces now control roughly 64 percent of Gaza, up from the 53 percent stipulated under the October 10 ceasefire that was supposed to stop Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian enclave.

The West Bank’s louder track ran through both the illegal settlement system and a brazen expansion of Israel’s security apparatus. After the Israeli army said last week that it was building its first permanent post since the Oslo Accords were signed in the 1990s inside Area A – the area of the occupied West Bank that is supposed to be under complete Palestinian administrative control – bulldozers worked through the week to establish the military base. In the northern Jordan Valley, local Palestinian activists described work advancing on the “Crimson Thread” barrier – designed to sever the area from Nablus and Tubas – after the Israeli Supreme Court lifted an order blocking it the week before.

In a rare operation, hundreds of Israeli border police demolished homes at four settler outposts. But according to Wafa, the Israeli Civil Administration – led by Smotrich – also approved 576 new settlement housing units.

Post-ceasefire death toll hits 1,000; Al Jazeera journalist killed

More than eight months into a nominal ceasefire in Gaza, the killing persists. The Gaza Health Ministry’s post-ceasefire death toll passed 1,000 on June 17 and reached 1,024 by June 22, with the cumulative toll of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza since October 2023 surpassing 73,000. Briefing the United Nations Security Council on June 18, UN relief chief Tom Fletcher said more than 250 of those killed since the ceasefire were children.

Amid the interminable crisis, on June 20, a strike on the Safadi family’s apartment on al-Thalathini Street in Gaza City killed a father, Hussein al-Safadi, and his daughters Lana, 14, and Zina, four, with the mother dying later of her wounds; Al Jazeera correspondents reported the area had received no warning ahead of time.

The same day, in al-Bureij, a strike on the Abu Hasna family home killed three, among them Ahmad Wishah, a cameraman for Al Jazeera Mubasher and the brother of a colleague killed in April. Al Jazeera condemned the killing as deliberate and rejected as “baseless” the Israeli military’s evidence-free claim that Wishah was a Hamas operative; he was Al Jazeera’s 12th staff member killed in Gaza since October 2023, among at least 260 Palestinian journalists who the Committee to Protect Journalists says have been killed in that time.

Also this week, Israel’s Supreme Court again rejected an appeal by Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who is being held without charge and, his lawyers say, in solitary confinement with signs of torture.

As such allegations persist, pressure from abroad continues growing at a steady pace. Norway announced plans to ban trade with West Bank settlements, 85 US House of Representatives members pressed Washington to halt the E1 settlement project, and the UN warned that Israeli settler groups could be added to its blacklist for grave violations against children. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, severed contact with the European Union’s top diplomat over attributed remarks comparing Israeli policy to apartheid.

Nevertheless, the humanitarian squeeze tightened in step. The UN said fuel entering Gaza in the week of June 16 fell well short of needs, forcing partners to ration it to life-saving services. The report added that more than 520 surgical and endoscopic procedures risked suspension for lack of disinfectant. The overall humanitarian mission, it noted, is currently funded at 24 percent of what is needed.

UN relief chief Fletcher warned that no hospital in Gaza is fully operational, while Gaza is “being held together by humanitarian workarounds and Palestinian perseverance”.

‘Night of the Mosques’, and a war on water

Among the farming villages of the central highlands and the region’s Bedouin herders, settlers repeatedly targeted two pillars of Palestinian society in the West Bank: mosques and water.

Early in the morning on June 17, in the villages of Jiljiliya and Mazraa al-Nubani, settlers torched mosques, scrawling Hebrew graffiti that included the phrase “Night of the Mosques” – whose construction in Hebrew evokes Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass”, in which Jewish synagogues were systemically attacked and burned by Nazis in Germany in 1938  – according to Wafa, AFP and Palestinian media.

The Israeli military confirmed the mosque attacks to AFP but named no suspects; eight Arab and Muslim states condemned the attacks. The outpost from which the Jiljiliya attack originated lies inside Area A of the West Bank, which is officially off-limits to Israeli citizens.

However, the settlers’ own channels inverted the picture with a fundraising appeal for outpost firefighting gear, describing Palestinians as waging “hundreds of arson attacks” of organised “terror” against Jewish control of open land.

Alongside the rise in mosque attacks, settlers’ systemic attacks on Palestinian water systems continued as summer heat sets in. For a third consecutive week, settlers attacked the Bedouin family of Nayef Khalaife in the Arab al-Kaabneh community east of Ramallah, this time cutting both water and electricity lines. According to village mayor Marwan Sabah, settlers damaged the community of Umm Safa’s main water pipe with heavy machinery. West Bank activists also reported settlers severing pipelines around Bedouin communities in Atouf and Khan al-Ahmar, while they seized a tanker delivering water to a family in the Atouf plain.

Similar to the mosque arson trends, an Israeli newspaper report, circulated in settler networks, framed 440 Palestinian wells as unlicensed “water terror” before a Knesset committee – an inversion, Palestinian activists noted, of a reality in which Israel controls the shared aquifers under the Oslo Accords. Water access and usage by Israeli settlers have long outstripped that of what Palestinians are allotted under Israeli control.

In addition to the settler attacks, early on June 22, Palestinian activist Hamza al-Masri reported two more teenagers from Beit Ummar, Issa Awad, 19, and Rida Awad, 15, were shot dead near the Karmei Tzur settlement, and their bodies were withheld; the Israeli military said the two had thrown firebombs.