IsraelPalestine

Hamas has turned over the remains of two more deceased Israeli captives from Gaza, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced, as the Palestinian group accused Israel of continuing to commit ceasefire violations and repudiating the commitments made to peace mediators.

“Israel has received, via the Red Cross, the bodies of two hostages”, which were returned to Israeli security forces in Gaza, Netanyahu’s office said in a post on the X social media platform early on Sunday.

The prime minister’s office said the families of the Israeli captives have been updated on the return of the remains, although no names have been released so far.

The office said the two bodies have been transferred to the Israeli National Centre of Forensic Medicine, and “upon completion of the identification process, formal notification will be delivered to the families”.

“The effort to return our hostages is ongoing and will not cease until the last hostage is returned,” the prime minister’s office added.

With the handover late on Saturday, Hamas has now returned the remains of 12 of the 28 captives who died in Gaza, a key demand by Israel in the week-old ceasefire deal to end the two-year war.

According to the deal, Hamas was to return all of the Israeli captives – both the living and the dead – within 72 hours of its signing. In exchange, Israel was to release 360 bodies of deceased Palestinians and some 2,000 prisoners.

Hamas has said the widespread devastation in the Palestinian territory and the Israeli military’s continuing control of certain parts of Gaza have slowed the recovery of the bodies of deceased captives.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said Palestinian authorities do not have adequate equipment to help with the search for captives’ bodies beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings.

“It’s very difficult, with recovery teams on the ground facing extraordinary challenges. [They have] no bulldozers, no trucks, no cranes and no heavy equipment… to speed up the process and help with the recovery and return of bodies,” Mahmoud said.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, who is reporting from Amman, Jordan, because Al Jazeera is banned from Israel and the occupied West Bank, said that Netanyahu’s government has known “for some time” that the recovery of bodies of captives would be “an incredibly difficult and daunting task”.

Netanyahu, however, has accused Hamas of not doing enough to return the remains of the 28 and that all of the bodies need to be returned immediately, Salhut said.

“Until that happens, that’s when Israel is going to honour more of the commitments of the ceasefire, like letting in more humanitarian assistance, talking about opening the Rafah border crossing,” she said.

For days, Hamas and Israel have traded blame over violations of the US-mediated ceasefire.

On Saturday, Hamas accused the Netanyahu government of “fabricating flimsy pretexts” to not follow through on its commitments to the peace deal, as well as denouncing Israel’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt as “a blatant violation” of the agreement.

On Friday, Israeli forces killed 11 members of a single family, including seven children, in an attack east of Gaza City.

The Palestinian Embassy in Egypt announced earlier on Saturday that the Rafah crossing, the main gateway for people in Gaza to leave and enter the enclave, would reopen on Monday.

But Netanyahu said the border crossing would remain closed until Hamas hands over the bodies of all the deceased Israeli captives.

The delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza also remains slow despite the ceasefire deal.

On Saturday, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said it had enough humanitarian food supplies to feed Gaza for three months, but trucks carrying the life-saving cargo are unable to enter Gaza and are stuck in warehouses in Jordan and Egypt.

“We must be allowed to get all this aid into Gaza without delay,” UNRWA said, adding that it also has equipment to provide shelter to as many as 1.3 million people.

Hamas agreed to return all of the Israeli captives – both the living and the dead – within 72 hours of signing a ceasefire deal with Israel.

It has been more than a week, and 18 bodies have yet to be handed over.

The Palestinian group is calling for heavy machinery to retrieve the remains.

It accuses Israel of purposely hampering the search, while Israel insists that Hamas is dragging its feet.

All the while, the lives of Palestinians in Gaza depend on the return of Israel’s dead.

Will Israel resume the war? And is the US prepared to give it the green light?

Presenter: Tom McRae

Guests:

Ori Goldberg – Israeli political commentator

Xavier Abu Eid – political analyst

Mehmet Celik – editorial co-ordinator at the Daily Sabah

Does grassroots organising have the power to hold governments and corporations accountable for genocide? And where does the US labour movement stand today?

This week on Upfront Marc Lamont Hill speaks to labour organiser and activist Chris Smalls, who cofounded Amazon’s first US labour union.

Smalls has also been a vocal critic of the United States’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza and argues that labour unions in the country have a role to play to stop Israel:

“If our dock workers did the same as our brothers and sisters overseas, we wouldn’t see a genocide,” he says.

Cameroon-flagged tanker issues distress call about 60 nautical miles (110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar in Gulf of Aden.

A ship has caught fire in the Gulf of Aden off Yemen after being struck by a projectile, the British military said, with one report suggesting its crew was preparing to abandon the vessel.

The incident on Saturday comes as Yemen’s Houthi rebels have maintained their military campaign of attacking ships through the Red Sea corridor in solidarity with Palestinians under fire in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

The Houthis did not immediately claim an attack, though it can take them hours or even days to do so.

The British military’s United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) a centre issued an alert about the vessel, describing the incident as taking place some 210km (130 miles) east of Aden.

“A vessel has been hit by an unknown projectile, resulting with a fire,” the UKMTO said. “Authorities are investigating.”

The maritime security firm Ambrey described the ship as a Cameroon-flagged tanker that issued a distress call as it passed about 60 nautical miles (equivalent to 110km) south of Yemen’s Ahwar while en route from Sohar, Oman, to Djibouti.

It said radio traffic suggested the crew was preparing to abandon ship, and a search-and-rescue effort was under way.

Ambrey said the tanker was not believed to be linked to the target profile of Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis.

The group has launched numerous attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since 2023, targeting ships they deem linked to Israel or its supporters.

The attacks have disrupted trade flows through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

But no attacks have been claimed by the rebel group since the ceasefire began in Gaza on October 10.

The rebels’ most recent attack hit the Dutch-flagged cargo ship Minervagracht on September 29, killing one crew member on board and wounding another. The Houthi campaign against shipping has killed at least nine mariners and seen four ships sunk.

Israel has repeatedly struck what it says are Houthi targets in Yemen in recent months, killing dozens of Yemeni civilians. The Houthis have fired missiles towards Israel, most intercepted, but some breaking past Israel’s much-vaunted US-supplied air defences and causing injuries and disruptions at airports.

On Thursday, Israel claimed responsibility for killing the Houthi military’s Chief of Staff Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Ghamari.

The Houthis said in a statement that the conflict with Israel had not ended and that Israel will “receive its deterrent punishment for the crimes it has committed”.

In August, Israel said it targeted senior figures from the group, including al-Ghamari, in air strikes on the capital Sanaa that killed the prime minister of Yemen’s Houthi-run government and several other ministers.

It has been a week since the ceasefire was announced in Gaza. When we heard the news in the occupied West Bank, we celebrated. We felt relief and hope that the genocide is finally over. But we also realised that there is no ceasefire for us.

The daily violence we have been subjected to for decades is showing no signs of abating. Since October 7, 2023, the brutality of our occupier has only intensified. Today, life in the West Bank has become almost impossible.

Violence, dispossession and paralysis

After the ceasefire deal was announced, a friend’s little daughter cheered; she then asked to go with her grandparents to pick olives. He told her that it would be difficult to do, to which she responded, “Why? Isn’t the war over?”

How do you explain to a child that the war ending in Gaza does not mean Palestinian families in the West Bank still can access their land to harvest olives? People still cannot reach their groves because of barriers set up by the Israeli military or they fear attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or both.

There are daily violent assaults on Palestinian farmers and their land. Since October 7, 2023, there have been 7,154 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestian people and property – some of them deadly.

Almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settler mobs, including 212 children; more than 10,000 Palestinians have been displaced. Settlers and soldiers have destroyed 37,237 olive trees since October 7, 2023.

Even life in urban areas has become unbearable.

As a resident of Rawabi, a city north of Ramallah, I, too, feel the suffocation of the occupation every day.

If I need to travel outside my city to run errands, shop, obtain official paperwork, or anything else, I could get stuck at a checkpoint for hours and never make it to my destination. There are four iron gates, a military tower, and a barrier between Rawabi and Ramallah; they can make the 10-minute trip between Rawabi and Ramallah last an eternity.

Throughout the West Bank, there are 916 Israeli barriers, barriers and iron gates, 243 of which were constructed after October 7, 2023. These open and close at the Israeli army’s whim, meaning a Palestinian can get stuck at one barrier for hours. This disrupts every aspect of life – from family visits to urgent medical care to school attendance and transportation of goods.

We have also been denied access to Jerusalem and thus our freedom of worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Few Palestinians are given the special permits needed to enter the city. We last had access to Jerusalem more than 20 years ago. This means an entire generation of young people know nothing about the city except from the pictures and stories told by their parents and grandparents.

Even at night, the Palestinians are not left alone by the occupation. Any Palestinian home may be subject to a raid by the Israeli army, with soldiers breaking the front door, terrorising the family inside and detaining without charge some of its members. Neighbours would, too, be terrorised with Israeli soldiers firing tear gas canisters for no reason, just to cause more suffering.

The right to a normal life—to worship, to spend quality time with friends and family, to move freely, to access regular medical care and education —are all denied to the Palestinians in the West Bank.

The spectre of annexation

Over the decades since the occupation of 1967, Israel has managed to control almost half of the land of the West Bank. It has done so by constructing settlements and confiscating land from its Palestinian owners by declaring it either “state land” or “military zone”. The theft of Palestinian land accelerated after October 7; at least 12,300 acres (4,9787 hectares) were seized in two years.

In many cases, confiscated land is used to establish new settlement outposts or to expand existing settlements.

Settlement construction in the West Bank is not random. Rather, land is selected in a way that encircles Palestinian villages and towns, creating a settlement belt around them that prevents any form of geographical continuity between Palestinian territories, thus thwarting the dream of a future state.

To maintain these illegal settlements, Israel has also laid its hands on the West Bank’s natural resources. It has seized almost all water resources. This has ensured a massive water reservoir in the West Bank to serve the settlement expansion.

For the Palestinians, this has been disastrous. They are now almost completely dependent on Israeli water company “Mekorot”, which gives very small quotas of water to densely populated Palestinian areas, while settlers receive several times the Palestinian share per capita.

Every summer, when drought settles in, Palestinians are forced to buy extra water at exorbitant prices from Mekorot. Meanwhile, Palestinian wells and rain water tanks are often attacked and destroyed.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has accelerated its efforts to carry out annexation. We feel that the seizure of Area C – an area established by the Oslo Accords where Israel has full civilian and security control – is imminent. This would mean razing Palestinian villages and communities and expelling people towards Area A, which constitutes just 18 percent of the West Bank. Area B will follow. The process of forced expulsion has already started with Bedouin communities in the two areas.

This is our reality here in the West Bank. While peace conferences and meetings were held and peace in the Middle East is declared, we know nothing of it. Every day, every hour, every minute, we are harassed, intimidated, dispossessed and killed.

For decades, Israel has rejected political solutions and pursued a policy of controlling land, people, and resources. It has continued to wage war on us even when its bombardment has stopped. The only way to achieve true peace is to acknowledge the occupation and end it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Strike on civilian vehicle by Israeli military in Gaza City marks deadliest violation of eight-day ceasefire with Hamas.

Israeli forces have killed 11 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza, the deadliest single violation of the fragile ceasefire since it took effect eight days ago.

The attack happened on Friday evening when a tank shell was fired by Israeli forces at a civilian vehicle carrying the Abu Shaaban family in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to Gaza’s civil defence.

Seven children and three women were among those killed when the Israeli military fired on the vehicle as the family attempted to reach their home to inspect it, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal said in a statement.

“They could have been warned or dealt with differently,” Basal said, adding that “what happened confirms that the occupation is still thirsty for blood, and insists on committing crimes against innocent civilians.”

Hamas condemned what it called a “massacre” and said the family was targeted without justification. The group called on United States President Donald Trump and mediators to pressure Israel to respect the ceasefire agreement.

In that attack, Israeli soldiers opened fire on people who crossed the so-called “yellow line”, the demarcation to which Israel’s military was supposed to pull back under the ceasefire terms.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from Gaza, said many Palestinians lack internet access and are unaware of where Israeli forces remain positioned along the demarcation lines, putting families at risk.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said that the yellow lines in Gaza will be soon marked out for clarity.

Israeli forces remain in control of approximately 53 percent of Gaza, Khoudary said.

As the exchange of captives for Palestinian prisoners under the provisions of the deal has continued, Israel has killed at least 28 Palestinians, and heavily restricted the flow of desperately needed aid, including food and medical supplies.

Last week, Israeli forces killed five Palestinians in the Shujayea neighbourhood, also in Gaza City.

Israel has continued to seal the Rafah crossing with Egypt and blocked other key border crossings, preventing large-scale aid deliveries into the enclave.

The United Nations warned this week that aid convoys are struggling to reach famine-hit areas, with 49 percent of people accessing less than six litres of drinking water per day – well below emergency standards.

The World Food Programme said it has brought an average of 560 tonnes of food daily into Gaza since the ceasefire began, far below what is needed to address widespread malnutrition and prevent famine.

Hamas has said it remains committed to the ceasefire terms, including returning the remains of Israeli captives still under Gaza’s rubble.

The group handed over the body of another captive on Friday evening, bringing the total to 10 since the truce began. Hamas said it needs heavy machinery and excavation equipment to retrieve more remains, but Israel has blocked their entry.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said by blocking heavy equipment and machinery from entering, Israel is creating “a challenge for the residents of Gaza who are experienced and have the expertise to search and to dig out bodies from under the rubble” with that type of equipment.

Hamas has handed over the remains of an additional captive it recovered in the ravaged Gaza Strip, as the Palestinian group urges mediators and the international community to pressure Israel to open border crossings and allow aid in.

The armed wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, said in a statement on Friday that its fighters handed over the remains at 11pm local time (20:00 GMT), without elaborating on where the body was retrieved.

According to the group, the remains were pulled out earlier in the day and were those of an “occupation prisoner”, suggesting they belonged to an Israeli rather than one of the captives of several other nationalities also taken by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed a short while later that Israel had received the coffin of a captive after it was handed over to the Red Cross by Hamas in Gaza.

The coffin will be transferred to Israel’s Ministry of Health’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, where a formal identification process will be conducted before the family is informed.

The Israeli military requested that “the public act with sensitivity and wait for the official identification”. It also added that “Hamas is required to uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the deceased hostages”.

Hamas has said it’s committed to the terms of the United States-mediated ceasefire deal, including the handover of captive bodies still unaccounted for under Gaza’s ruins. It has repeatedly said it has returned all the bodies it was able to recover, but needs help locating remaining captives trapped under the rubble following Israeli strikes.

“There are still 18 bodies held inside Gaza,” said Al Jazeera’s Hamda Salhut, reporting from Amman on Friday. “Hamas says that they’re waiting for the assistance they need in the help in the form of heavy machinery and teams on the ground.”

Israel is ‘not cooperating’

Former Israeli ambassador Alon Liel said the return of the bodies of the dead captives is being treated very emotionally in the country, creating pressure on the government.

He said many Israelis believed that Hamas was cheating on the ceasefire agreement by not returning all the bodies of the deceased captives. “There is a lot of anger,” Liel said.

In a statement earlier on Friday, Hamas said some captives’ remains were in tunnels or buildings that were later destroyed by Israel, and that heavy machinery was required to dig through rubble to retrieve them. It blamed Israel for the delay, saying it had not allowed any new bulldozers into the Gaza Strip.

Most heavy equipment in Gaza was destroyed during the war, leaving only a limited number as Palestinians try to clear massive amounts of rubble across the bombarded territory.

Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Amman, said Israel is “not cooperating with countries that are lending help to possibly look for those remains”.

“Turkiye, for example, was ready to send 81 experts in the retrieval of bodies, and Israel has not allowed it to enter. It has also not allowed it to provide equipment that could possibly facilitate that,” Odeh said.

On Friday, two bulldozers ploughed up pits in the earth as Hamas searched for captives’ remains in Hamad City, a complex of apartment towers in Khan Younis. Israeli forces repeatedly bombarded the towers during the war, toppling some, and troops conducted a weeklong raid there in March 2024.

US President Donald Trump has warned Hamas that he would greenlight Israel to resume the war on Gaza if the group does not live up to its end of the deal and return all captives’ bodies, totalling 28. So far in the past days, Hamas handed over the remains of nine captives, along with a 10th body that Israel claims was not that of a captive.

The return of the 10th dead captive on Friday comes as Gaza’s civil defence said more than 10,000 slain Palestinians remain trapped under debris and rubble across the enclave. Only 280 have so far been retrieved.

Hamas has urged mediators to ensure the increased flow of essential aid into Gaza, expedite the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and start reconstruction. Despite the ceasefire deal agreed last week, Israel has yet to allow the entry of aid in scale and is still operating in about half of the Gaza Strip, as attacks continue in some areas.

Two years of Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians – including 20,000 children.

For now, the bombing campaign has largely halted after a ceasefire was agreed last week.

But the Israeli military’s actions in the past 24 months were livestreamed, documented and archived in unprecedented detail.

In September, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. And this week, South Africa said the ceasefire will not affect its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

But the ICJ lacks the resources to carry out arrests unless United Nations member countries decide to act.

So, will Israel be held accountable, or will impunity become the new norm?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Sawsan Zaher – Palestinian human rights lawyer

Dr Mads Gilbert – Researcher and medical doctor who has worked in Palestinian healthcare for more than 30 years

Neve Gordon – Professor of international law at Queen Mary University of London

Widespread regional anger over Israel’s war on Gaza, and beyond, will likely prove a major obstacle to any further signatories to the accords.

United States President Donald Trump has said he expects an expansion of the Abraham Accords soon and hopes Saudi Arabia will join the pact that normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and some Arab states, one week into the all-encompassing and fragile Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in. I think when Saudi Arabia goes in, everybody goes in,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Friday on Fox Business Network.

The US president called the pact a “miracle” and “amazing” and hailed the United Arab Emirates’s signing of it.

The “Abraham Accords” secured agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

“It’ll help bring long-lasting peace to the Middle East,” Trump claimed with his signature bombast.

But there are several factors at play since the original iteration of the accords, signed with fanfare at the White House during Trump’s first term as president in 2020.

Israel has carried out a two-year genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, escalated its harsh assault on the occupied West Bank, and beyond Palestine, bombed six countries in the region this year, including key Gulf Arab mediator Qatar, the huge diplomatic fallout from which effectively helped Trump force Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza.

An emergency summit of Arab and Muslim countries held in Doha in September, in the wake of the attack, staunchly declared its solidarity with Qatar and condemned Israel’s bombing of the Qatari capital.

The extraordinary joint session between the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) gathered nearly 60 member states. Leaders said the meeting marked a critical moment to deliver a united message following what they described as an unprecedented escalation by Israel.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision of a “Greater Israel”, has also been roundly condemned by Arab and Muslim countries, and involves hegemonic designs on Lebanese and Syrian territory, among others. Syrian President al-Sharaa, while welcoming Washington’s moves to end its international isolation, has not been warm to the idea of signing up to the Abraham Accords.

Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Naim Qassem appealed to Saudi Arabia in recent weeks to mend relations with the Lebanese armed group, aligned with Iran, and build a common front against Israel.

An August survey from the Washington Institute, a pro-Israel think tank in the US, found that 81 percent of Saudi respondents viewed the prospect of normalising relations with Israel negatively.

A Foreign Affairs and Arab Barometer poll from June came to similar findings: in Morocco, one of the Abraham Accords signatories, support for the deal fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 13 percent in the months after Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Saudi Arabia has also repeatedly asserted its commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative, which conditions recognition of Israel on resolving the plight of Palestinians and establishing a Palestinian state.

Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt remains closed as Trump threatens Hamas over gang clashes.

Gaza is often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, trapped between Israel’s blockade, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

The Rafah border post is the only crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip: a strategic gateway to the outside world.

In 2007, Israel imposed an air, land, and sea blockade on Gaza.

Human Rights Watch says the closure of the Rafah crossing has devastated Gaza’s economy, contributed to the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and enabled Israel’s system of apartheid – and that was long before Israel’s devastating war.

And despite the United States-brokered ceasefire, Israel has threatened to keep the crossing shut because of delays in returning the remains of its captives.

So, if and when the crossing reopens, how will it operate and who will be in charge?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Mustafa Barghouti – Secretary-General at the Palestinian National Initiative

Tahani Mustafa – Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations

Rob Geist Pinfold – Lecturer of International Security at King’s College London

Arab Barghouti tells Al Jazeera Israel wants to ‘silence’ his father amid reports Israeli guards beat him last month.

The son of prominent Palestinian political leader Marwan Barghouti says he fears for his father’s life in Israeli prison amid witness reports that he was beaten by guards last month.

In an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday, Arab Barghouti accused Israel of targeting his father because he is a unifying figure among Palestinians.

“We do fear for my father’s life,” Arab said from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

Earlier this week, the family told media outlets that they had received testimonies from Palestinian detainees released as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal that Barghouti was beaten by guards in mid-September as he was being transferred between two Israeli prisons.

Arab told Al Jazeera that the attack is the fourth time since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023 that his father has been assaulted in Israeli detention.

“They are targeting him,” said Arab, explaining that Israel sees his father as “a danger” because of his ability to bring Palestinians together.

A prominent member of Fatah, the Palestinian political faction that dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs limited parts of the occupied West Bank, Barghouti has been in Israeli prison since the early 2000s.

He is serving five life sentences plus 40 years on murder and attempted murder charges, which he has consistently denied.

A Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll from May found that Barghouti was the most popular Palestinian leader, garnering more support than Hamas official Khaled Meshaal and PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinians had called for Barghouti to be released as part of the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, but Israel refused to free him.

As part of the deal, Israel released 250 Palestinians serving life sentences, several of whom were sent into exile abroad. About 1,700 Palestinians who were detained in Gaza and transferred to Israeli detention facilities during the Gaza war were also freed.

One of the released prisoners, Mohammad al-Ardah, told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israeli forces would carry out “barbaric” raids in the prisons each week, severely beating Palestinian detainees.

“The latest reports we heard about the great leader Marwan Barghouti is that they broke three of his ribs,” al-Ardah said.

The Israeli authorities have denied that Barghouti was beaten in September, with the Israel Prison Service telling BBC News that it “operates in accordance with the law, while ensuring the safety and health of all inmates”.

But Arab, Barghouti’s son, said the Israeli authorities have no credibility.

He also pointed to an August video that showed far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir threatening Barghouti in prison, as evidence that the Israeli government is trying to “silence” his father’s voice.

“We know that [Ben-Gvir] showed him an electric chair on his phone and he told him, ‘This is your fate’ … If that’s not a threat to his life, I don’t know what is,” Arab told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Barghouti’s son said the family has repeatedly asked Israel to allow international lawyers and the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit his father in prison, but their requests have been denied.

“They see him as a danger … because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence. He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community, as well,” Arab said.

“They [Israel] know what my father represents, and they don’t want that. They don’t want a partner for peace.”

Hackers took over the PA system at Harrisburg International Airport in Pennsylvania, broadcasting a pro-Palestine message and insults against the leaders of the US and Israel. Similar incidents were reported at three Canadian airports on the same day.

‘The big war may be over, but what about the many smaller wars that still await us here?’ Al Jazeera’s Maram Humaid explains the difficult decisions facing Palestinians in Gaza living amid the rubble and navigating on-going violence.

Thousands of Palestinian prisoners – most of them detained without charge – have been released from Israeli jails as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Reunions saw a mix of joy and sadness after people heard about the conditions and mistreatment their loved ones endured.

Hundreds more were forced into exile by Israel.

And the majority return to rubble in Gaza, and others risk being arrested again in the occupied West Bank.

So, is it possible for former Palestinian prisoners to embrace freedom with life under occupation and the scars of Israeli detention?

Presenter: Sami Zeidan

Guests:

Milena Ansari – Israel and Palestine Researcher at Human Rights Watch

Basil Farraj – Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, specialising in political prisoners and carceral violence

Fadia Barghouti – English Supervisor at the Palestinian Ministry of Education

Israel continues to restrict aid entering Gaza, saying Hamas has not met its end of deal to release all bodies of captives.

‘Not only has our past been destroyed but so has our future.’ A Palestinian journalist broke down into tears as he returned to northern Gaza to find his family home as a pile of rubble. Many Palestinians returning to the area are finding nothing left but destruction following Israel’s war.

US President Donald Trump says Hamas may need to be disarmed ‘violently’ as part of the Gaza peace plan. Hamas has so far not agreed publicly to give up its weapons. Soraya Lennie looks at the key questions over how the process is supposed to work.

After two years in an Israeli jail, Yousef Salem set out on a journey to his house in Gaza. The former detainee, who says he was tortured during his time in captivity, was confronted by the devastation of Israel’s onslaught when he finally arrived home. This is his story.

Riot police used tear gas and water cannons to break up pro-Palestinian protests at Israel’s World Cup qualifier against Italy. Defeat for Israel in the match effectively ended the team’s hopes of automatic qualification.