Palestinian

A Palestinian man in a red cap walks down the narrow alleyway in Nablus’s old city towards a group of Israeli soldiers, clearly unarmed.

He attempts to talk to the soldiers, who had flooded into the occupied West Bank city in the early hours of Tuesday as part of Israel’s latest military raid – believed to be the largest carried out in Nablus in two years.

The soldiers immediately kick and shove the man – 40-year-old Nidal Umairah – before his brother walks over, attempting to intervene. Gunfire follows, and soon the two brothers are lying dead.

Nidal and his brother 35-year-old brother Khaled were the latest victims of Israel in the West Bank, after they were killed late on Tuesday. It is unclear which brother had initially been detained, but witnesses were adamant that the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers was an unnecessary escalation that led to the deaths of yet more Palestinians.

Ghassan Hamdan, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Nablus, was at the scene of the killings.

“There were at least 12 soldiers and they all fired their automatic machine guns at once,” said Hamdan.

After the two men fell to the ground [medics] asked the soldiers if we could treat their wounds. They answered by firing at all of us.”

“We all took cover behind the walls of the old city,” he told Al Jazeera.

Hamza Abu Hajar, a paramedic at the scene, said that the Umairah brother who had initially approached the Israeli soldiers had been trying to go to his house to move his family out and away from the Israeli raid.

“They lifted his shirt up to prove he was unarmed,” Abu Hajar said. “They then started shooting at him, and at us as well.”

The Israeli army said it acted in self-defence after one of the Umairah brothers tried to seize a weapon from a soldier. It said that four soldiers had been injured in the incident.

West Bank raids

The raid in Nablus, which lasted more than 24 hours, is the latest Israel has conducted in the West Bank.

Israel has taken advantage of the world’s focus on its own war on Gaza since October 2023 to escalate its land theft and violence in the West Bank.

During that span, Israel has killed at least 930 people in the West Bank, 24 of whom were from Nablus, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Many of these deaths are the result of violent Israeli raids ostensibly aimed at clamping down on Palestinian fighters in the West Bank, but which have resulted in mass destruction and thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes.

According to Hamdan, Israeli troops mainly targeted Nablus’s old city by storming into hundreds of homes in the middle of the night. Dozens of people were also reportedly arrested.

Young people in the city protested by burning tyres and throwing rocks at Israeli troops, yet they were met with heavy tear gas, injuring at least 80 Palestinians in the raid.

In the past, Palestinian protesters have been imprisoned on “terrorism” charges or shot and killed for simply resisting Israel’s occupation by throwing rocks or defying Israeli soldiers.

This time around, the Israelis classified the entire old city in Nablus as a closed military zone for 24 hours. No ambulances or medics were allowed inside to aid distressed residents, said Hamdan.

“Nobody was allowed in or out. Nobody was allowed to make any movement at all. We [as medics] could not enter the area during the entire raid to try and help people in need,” he told Al Jazeera.

Assault and vandalism

During the raid, Israeli troops stormed into several apartments after blowing off door hinges with explosives.

Umm Hassan, a 58-year-old resident who did not want to give her full name, recalls feeling terrified when several Israeli soldiers broke into her home.

About five months ago, her husband passed away from cancer, an illness that also claimed two of her children years ago.

Umm Hassan is also battling cancer, yet she said Israeli soldiers showed her no mercy. They flipped her television on the ground, broke windows and tossed her paintings off the walls and onto the living room floor.

They even vandalised her books by throwing them on the ground, including the Quran.

“I told them to leave me alone. I was alone and so scared. There was nobody to protect me,” Umm Hassan told Al Jazeera.

Another woman, Rola, said that Israeli soldiers stormed into her home two times in the span of six hours during the raid.

When Israeli soldiers returned the second time, Rola said that they attacked her elderly father, hitting him on the head and chest with the butts of their guns.

Rola described her three nieces and nephews – all small children – cowering with fear as Israeli soldiers vandalised and destroyed their home.

“The second time they came to our home, they put us all in a room and we weren’t able to leave the room from 8am until 3:30pm,” said Rola.

“We [Palestinians] always talk about being resilient. But the reality is when Israeli soldiers come into your private home, then you get very scared. It’s natural. We are humans and humans get scared,” she told Al Jazeera.

Psychological warfare

More than 80 Palestinians received treatment from the Palestine Red Crescent Society during the raid, 25 of them as a result of gunshot wounds.

While Israel says its raid was “precise”, inhabitants of Nablus say that the attack on the city was the latest attempt to intimidate and frighten Palestinians.

“Honestly, what were Israeli soldiers searching for in my home? What did they think they were going to find?” asked Rola. “The reason for their raids [violence] is to uphold the [illegal] occupation.”

20 Palestinian children have been evacuated by the World Health Organization to receive urgent medical treatment abroad. Dr. Alaa al-Najjar and her surviving son are amongst those being evacuated. Her husband and nine other children were killed when an Israeli strike hit their home.

Israel says it plans to build 22 new illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank – the largest number approved to be built at one time.

Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich says the settlements are intended to block the creation of a Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army continues its expanded offensive, destroying homes, roads and facilities, such as waterways and hospitals, essentially making areas of the occupied West Bank uninhabitable.

And settler violence against civilians, including destroying crops and uprooting trees, is at an all-time high, according to the UN.

Europe has hit back against the move to build more illegal settlements by threatening sanctions. But can they have a real impact?

What does this mean for millions of Palestinians? And is a Palestinian state now becoming nearly impossible?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Xavier Abu Eid – Political analyst and a former adviser to the PLO’s negotiation team

Ori Goldberg- an Israeli author, academic, and political commentator

Salman Shaikh – CEO of The Shaikh Group, an organisation working on diplomacy and mediation in the Middle East

Beirut, Lebanon – For decades, Palestinian groups in Lebanon have run their affairs themselves. In the refugee camps established for Palestinians displaced by Israel in 1948 and 1967, Palestinian factions have overseen security and many have retained their arms.

Those days, however, appear to be coming to a close. Instead, the Lebanese state is attempting to take advantage of a period of weakness for the Iran-backed group Hezbollah, as it struggles to regroup from its war with Israel, to exercise its power over the country.

Lebanon’s new government – formed in February and led by former International Court of Justice judge Nawaf Salam – has the backing of regional and international powers to disarm all non-state actors. That includes the many Palestinian groups that have carried arms since a 1969 agreement that allowed them to have autonomy in the 12 official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

And on Wednesday, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas gave his blessing during a visit to Lebanon. A joint statement from Abbas and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun declared that both sides had agreed that the existence of “weapons outside the control of the Lebanese state has ended”.

“Abu Mazen [Abbas] came to say that we are guests in Lebanon and not above Lebanese authority,” Mustafa Abu Harb, an official with Fatah, the largest political faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), told Al Jazeera. “We do not accept weapons in the hands of anyone other than the Lebanese state.”

Is Hamas on board?

Abbas, on his first trip to Lebanon since 2017, also met Prime Minister Salam and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to discuss the challenging prospect of disarming Palestinian factions in Lebanon and improving the rights and conditions of the estimated 270,000 Palestinians in the country.

Palestinians in Lebanon do not have the legal right to work in a number of professions, they may not own property or businesses and cannot access public service employment or the use of public services, such as healthcare and social security, according to UNRWA, the United Nations body created in 1948 for Palestinian refugees.

“We reaffirm our previous position that the presence of weapons in the camps outside the framework of the state weakens Lebanon and also harms the Palestinian cause,” Abbas said in the meeting with Aoun, according to the Palestinian state news agency Wafa.

However, questions remain as to whether the divisive Abbas, who has not faced an election since 2005, has the authority to disarm the different Palestinian groups.

A senior Hamas official in Lebanon, Ali Barakeh, told the AFP news agency on Wednesday that he hoped the talks between Abbas and Aoun would go further than just Palestinian groups’ disarmament.

“We affirm our respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty, security and stability, and at the same time, we demand the provision of civil and human rights for our Palestinian people in Lebanon,” Barakeh said.

Hamas, which – along with Hezbollah – is considered part of the wider Iranian-allied “axis of resistance” network, has already cooperated with the Lebanese state on at least one occasion since the ceasefire with Israel. In May, the Palestinian group handed over a fighter suspected of firing rockets at Israel, according to the Lebanese army, and called them “individual acts”.

The group has also said it respects the ceasefire and is willing to work with the Lebanese state.

‘Not our president’

Over the course of his two-decade reign, Abbas’s popularity among Palestinians in Lebanon has sharply eroded.

That lack of support can be seen in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, where posters of Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, as well as Hamas’s spokesperson, Abu Obeida, can be seen far more than those of the PA leader.

“None of the Palestinians, except Fatah, claim that he’s our president,” Majdi Majzoub, a community leader in Beirut’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, Shatila, said. “This president doesn’t honour us and doesn’t represent us because he supports the occupation and adopts the occupation’s decisions.”

Aside from Abbas’s unpopularity, other factors may lead to a pushback against any attempt to disarm Palestinian groups in Lebanon.

Nicholas Blanford, a nonresident senior fellow with the US-based think tank Atlantic Council, said it “could be interpreted as a win for the Israelis if the Palestinians … were obliged to give [their weapons] up”.

Blanford also pointed out that defenders of the continued presence of armed Palestinian groups in Lebanon point to events such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were killed over two days by right-wing Christian nationalist forces with Israeli support in 1982.

Blanford, however, believes that the consensus is moving towards the disarmament of at least heavy weaponry from the Palestinian factions in Lebanon, and that some Palestinians welcome the move.

“We as a Palestinian people certainly welcome [the initiative] because things have changed,” Majzoub said.

Majzoub said bad-faith actors have taken advantage of the Lebanese state’s lack of authority over the Palestinian camps to avoid being held accountable for crimes.

Lebanon’s armed forces rarely enter the Palestinian refugee camps.

In 2007, the army besieged the Nahr al-Bared camp in north Lebanon and clashed with the Fatah al-Islam group, which was based in the camp. Hundreds died in the battle, which left large swaths of the camp uninhabitable.

The Lebanese army has also, on occasion, infiltrated camps to arrest individuals.

The security situation can at times be tense in the camps, as it is in other parts of Lebanon.

On Monday, local media reported that armed clashes between rival drug dealers in Beirut’s Shatila camp forced residents to flee.

Among the worst incidents in the past few years were the large-scale battles that erupted in the summer of 2023 between armed groups in Ein el-Hilweh camp, in southern Lebanon, after a botched assassination attempt on a Fatah official. More than two dozen people were killed in the fighting before a ceasefire was negotiated.

Carrying weapons in the camps was once seen as a right of resistance. But after more than seven decades of displacement and insecurity, some Palestinians in Lebanon today feel that carrying arms is undercutting their struggle for liberation.

“Palestinian weapons have become a threat to the Palestinian revolution,” Majzoub said. “Now, it is better for us to live under the protection of the Lebanese state.”

On 1 December, Netflix began streaming Farha (2021) worldwide, despite immense pressure directed at the platform to prevent its debut. The film is director Darin J. Sallam’s first full-length feature and chronicles the coming-of-age story of its heroine, Farha, a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager who possesses a voracious appetite for books and learning. Farha’s cultural background is that of a villager – her Arabic dialect infused with the authenticity often associated with Palestinian grandparents, particularly the generation born in the decade just before or that of the Nakba itself. Yet, what makes Farha a distinguished heroine isn’t necessarily her linguistic veracity, it is her bravery and her desire to pursue her education at a school in the neighbouring city. At the start of the film, she is seen at one with the land, collecting water from the local spring, eating figs straight from the communal trees and collecting almonds in her satchel, still intact and unpeeled. She goes through the motions of her chores in the village, but her mind often wanders into the literary worlds of the books she reads, novels gifted to her by her best friend Fareeda, who is from a city-dwelling family not far from the village from which Farha hails.

The first scenes of the film show Farha as a dreamer, a girl who urges her father, a man of mayoral standing, to register her in the city’s school. Her father is hesitant as he believes her economic livelihood is best secured through the arrangement of marriage and that the local Quran recitation learning groups provided by the Sheikh are a sufficient education. Still, Farha fights for her desire to learn and secures the support of many an ally in her extended family and community to finally convince her father. On the eve of the Nakba, he signs her enrolment certificate. Throughout the film, there are peripheral present-absent signifiers of just how troubling the situation in Palestine has become. Talk of resistance tactics and meetings between rebels and the officials hint that the historical events of the Nakba and its tragedy are on the cusp of eruption. These more politicised characters weave in and out of frames of the film, infiltrating the scenes with reminders, only to give way to Farha’s experience, which remains at the centre. Slowly but surely, the viewer’s understanding expands organically with Farha’s, and we see that this curious girl, who had very little understanding of the depth of this dire situation, is forced to contend with its brutality as a witness and as a survivor of violence, loss and dispossession. In fact, Farha’s father hides her in a closet where she remains trapped throughout the most violent moments that befall her village, and she is left alone to deal with the aftermath.

The film was produced by TaleBox, a production company co-founded by Sallam and producer Deema Azar. Ayah Jardaneh also served as the producer of the film. The film likewise received support from Laika Film & Television, Chimney, The Jordan Film Fund – Royal Film Commission, the Swedish Film Institute and the Red Sea Film Fund (an initiative of the Red Sea Film Festival). It remains a largely Jordanian-based initiative, highlighting the lived experience of Palestine and Palestinians, with support from European-based organisations. On a political level, Farha has depicted the tragedy of the Nakba for the first time through film and employs what the late Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, has called the “permission to narrate” the Palestinian experience against many odds.

OPINION: Israel’s terror against Gaza’s children on Netflix

In response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its aftermath, Said penned “Permission to Narrate” for the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1984. In it, he notes: “A disciplinary communications apparatus exists in the West both for overlooking most of the basic things that might present Israel in a bad light and for punishing those who try to tell the truth.” In short, Said’s argument can be summed up as such: despite declassified archives, countless human rights reports, international organisation inquiries and both official and ethnographic accounts of Palestinian plight and dispossession from Nakba to diaspora and from Nakba to military occupation, the Palestinians have been denied the right to narrate their own stories. They have also been denied the privilege of seeing their experience reflected back at them through film and literature and, by extension, preventing them from experiencing the catharsis that comes with artistic acknowledgement and representation. Farha has granted the Palestinian diaspora permission to narrate this story on one of the world’s largest entertainment streaming platforms. More importantly, Farha’s story has been recounted, in numerous iterations and manifestations, 700,000 times by the first generation of the dispossessed. The trauma of that memory remains forever fixed in the minds of the descendants of those who were forcibly displaced – a global diasporic population of nearly six million people and counting – approximately half of the total population of 12 million Palestinians across the historical homeland and outside of it. This population has been classified by the international community, despite its many failures towards it, as ipso facto stateless.

Palestinian’s culture and heritage is the best weapon against the Occupation – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

While on the one hand, Farha has been hailed by many viewers as an incredible feat, it comes as no surprise that the film has been targeted by Israeli officials and has caused outrage. Israel’s Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman issued a statement condemning Netflix, stating his belief that: “It’s crazy that Netflix decided to stream a movie whose whole purpose is to create a false pretence and cite against Israeli soldiers.” Though Farha has been screened globally in many film festivals and series since its debut in 2021, at venues such as Dubai-based Cinema Akil and intentional film festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival, the Red Sea Film Festival and others, it is its recent reincarnation on Netflix and its screening at Saraya, a theatre in Jaffa that has caused the most outrage towards the film. The Israeli government has threatened to act against Saraya and has encouraged a mass exodus of subscribers to Netflix. While many regional and international news networks hail the film for its artistic and historical merits, there is also a cacophony of discordant opinions about it, with publications like Fox News and The Times of Israel labelling the film as “terrible” or as “lies and libels”, whilst other major publishers such as The New York Times tiptoe around the film’s representations, selecting its words carefully to maintain its readership. Sites such as IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes have seen an onslaught of divided reviews: either five-star glowing recommendations from the film’s supporters or comments of rage and disbelief from its detractors.

In all the opinions emerging in the now global conversation surrounding this film, there has been no mention of Sallam’s other smaller work, The Parrot, a 2016 short film she co-directed with Amjad Al-Rasheed. In eighteen powerful minutes, The Parrot follows the story of a Tunisian Jewish family who arrives in Haifa and takes up residence in a home belonging to a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox family. Their clothing, blue-tinted walls and Christian iconography, which borrow heavily from the aesthetic and colour-scape of local churches, are left behind by the displaced family. The breakfast and tea on the table are still hot, and the new occupants, played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabry as Rachel and Palestinian citizen of Israel Ashraf Barhom as Mousa, are haunted by the spectre of the family that once lived there and by the constant echoes of the parrot that was left behind and calls out after the Palestinian boy who owned him asking for a kiss. The parrot also repeats “where are you?” and “why are you looking at me like that” incessantly.

OPINION: Healing with humour, Palestinian comedians strike a chord in occupied cities

Yet, for viewers who are unaware of the Nakba, this imagery and the story of Palestinian displacement remain subliminal. Instead, what takes centre stage is the othering of Eastern Jews who find themselves in Euro-Israeli modernity, one that they can’t quite figure out. As such, by the end of the short film, many viewers would engage in a conversation about the depiction of an intense encounter between the Tunisian Jewish family and their Ashkenazi neighbours, who look at the architecture and structure of the house in Haifa with envy, bewildered at how Eastern Jews, othered and orientalised, had acquired such luck. The film is as much a critique of ethnic relations among Israelis as it is about the Palestinian exodus, and, like Farha, it tells a tragic tale through beautifully directed cinematography and crafted set and costume designs. The pleasing nature of Sallam’s use of pastels, verdure and white stone almost works as an antidote to the harsh emotional blow to the nerves that her cinematic tales have delivered thus far and will continue to do in the future.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Process launched after visit by Palestinian President Abbas, who said weapons ‘hurt’ Lebanon and Palestine cause.

A joint Lebanese-Palestinian committee tasked with the removal of weapons held by Palestinian factions in Lebanon’s refugee camps has met for the first time to begin hashing out a timetable for disarming the groups.

The Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee, a government body serving as interlocutor between Palestinian refugees and officials, met on Friday with Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in attendance.

The group said that “participants agreed to launch a process for the disarmament of weapons according to a specific timetable”.

It added that it also aimed to take steps to “enhance the economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees”.

A Lebanese government source told the news agency AFP that disarmament in the country’s 12 official camps for Palestinian refugees, which host multiple Palestinian factions, including Fatah, its rivals Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a range of other groups, could begin in mid-June.

Under a decades-old agreement, Lebanese authorities do not control the camps, where security is managed by Palestinian factions.

The meeting comes as the Lebanese government faces increasing international pressure to remove weapons from the Iran-aligned Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel last year.

“The message is clear. There is a new era, a new balance of power, and a new leadership in Lebanon, which is pushing ahead with monopolising arms in the hands of the state,” said Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut.

“It has already begun to dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, and the next phase appears to be the disarmament of Palestinian groups in camps before it addresses the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons in the rest of the country,” she said.

Earlier this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, dominated by his Fatah party, visited Lebanon and said in a speech that the weapons in the camps “hurt Lebanon and the Palestinian cause”.

During Abbas’s visit, he and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun announced an agreement that Palestinian factions would not use Lebanon as a launchpad for any attacks against Israel, and that weapons would be consolidated under the authority of the Lebanese government.

Al Jazeera’s Khodr signalled that several factions appeared to be against disarmement.

“While Abbas’s Palestinian Authority may be recognised internationally as the representative body of the Palestinian people, there are many armed groups, among them, Hamas and [Palestinian] Islamic Jihad, who … believe in armed struggle against Israel,” she said.

“Without consensus among the factions, stability could remain elusive.”

NEW YORK — Less than three weeks after his release from an immigration jail, the Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi strode across the graduation stage at Columbia University on Monday morning, savoring a moment the Trump administration had fought to make impossible.

Draped in a keffiyeh, Mahdawi, 34, paused to listen to the swell of cheers from his fellow graduates. Then he joined a vigil just outside Columbia’s gates, raising a photograph of his classmate Mahmoud Khalil, who remains in federal custody.

“It’s very mixed emotions,” Mahdawi told The Associated Press. “The Trump administration wanted to rob me of this opportunity. They wanted me to be in a prison, in prison clothes, to not have education and to not have joy or celebration.”

Mahdawi, a 34-year-old legal resident of the U.S., was detained during an April 14 citizenship interview in Vermont, part of the widening federal crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists.

He was released two weeks later by a judge, who likened the government’s actions to McCarthyist repression. Federal officials have not accused Mahdawi of committing a crime but argued that he and other student activists should be deported for beliefs that may undermine U.S. foreign policy.

For Mahdawi, who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Columbia’s School of General Studies, the graduation marked a bittersweet return to a university that he says has betrayed him and other students.

“The senior administration is selling the soul of this university to the Trump administration, participating in the destruction and the degradation of our democracy,” Mahdawi said.

He pointed to Columbia’s decision to acquiesce to the Trump administration’s demands — including placing its Middle Eastern studies department under new leadership — as well as its failure to speak out against his and Khalil’s arrest.

He said Columbia’s leadership had denied his pleas for protection prior to his arrest, then ignored his attorney’s request for a letter supporting his release from jail.

A spokesperson for Columbia University did not return an emailed inquiry.

Mahdawi was born in a refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and moved to the United States in 2014. At Columbia, he organized campus protests, led a Buddhist association and co-founded the Palestinian Student Union with Khalil.

Khalil would have received his diploma from a Columbia master’s program in international studies later this week. He remains jailed in Louisiana as he awaits a decision from a federal judge about his possible release.

As he prepares for a lengthy legal battle, Mahdawi faces his own uncertain future. He was previously admitted to a master’s degree program at Columbia, where he planned to study “peacekeeping and conflict resolution” in the fall. But he is reconsidering his options after learning this month that he would not receive financial aid.

For now, he said, he would continue to advocate for the Palestinian cause, buoyed by the support he says he has received from the larger Columbia community.

“When I went on the stage, the message was very clear and loud: They are cheering up for the idea of justice, for the idea of peace, for the idea of equality, for the idea of humanity, and nothing will stop us from continuing to do that. Not the Trump administration nor Columbia University,” he said.

The School of General Studies graduation comes two days before Columbia’s university-wide commencement, as colleges across the country are bracing for possible disruptions.

Last week, New York University announced it would withhold the diploma of a student speaker who criticized Israel’s attacks on Palestinians in his graduation speech.

Offenhartz writes for the Associated Press.

What happened in Palestine in 1948?

Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

Having secured the support of the British government for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, on May 14, 1948, as soon as the British Mandate expired, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israeli war.

Zionist military forces expelled at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. The remaining 22 percent was divided into what are now the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

The fighting continued until January 1949 when an armistice agreement between Israel and Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria was forged. The 1949 Armistice Line is also known as the Green Line and is the generally recognised boundary between Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line is also referred to as the (pre-) 1967 borders, before Israel occupied the rest of Palestine during the 1967 war.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict that continues to shape every part of Palestinians’ lives.

Mapping the Palestinian villages Israel destroyed

Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces committed one of the most infamous massacres of the war in the village of Deir Yassin on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. More than 110 men, women and children were killed by members of the pre-Israeli state Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist paramilitary organisations.

Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sitta documented detailed records of what happened to these 530 villages in his book, The Atlas of Palestine.

Where are Palestinian refugees today?

Some six million registered Palestinian refugees live in at least 58 camps located throughout Palestine and neighbouring countries.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides assistance and operates hundreds of schools and health facilities for at least 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, 1.5 million refugees in Gaza, 870,000 refugees in the occupied West Bank, 570,000 refugees in Syria and 480,000 refugees in Lebanon.

The largest camps in each are Baqa’a in Jordan, Jabalia in Gaza, Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Yarmouk in Syria, and Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon.

More than 70 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees. About 1.5 million refugees live in eight refugee camps around the Gaza Strip.

According to international law, refugees have the right to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced. Many Palestinians still hope to return to Palestine.

The plight of Palestinian refugees is the longest unresolved refugee problem in the world.

The poet gets the prestigious award for New Yorker essays ‘on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’ amid war.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has been targeted by pro-Israel groups in the United States for deportation, has won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

Abu Toha received the prestigious award on Monday for essays published in The New Yorker “on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience” of the war.

“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha wrote on social media. “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”

The comment appears to be a tribute to his fellow Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza in December 2023. Alareer’s final poem was titled, “If I must die, let it be a tale”.

Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2023 before being released to Egypt and subsequently moving to the US.

“In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories – the people and places and things that helped me remember,” Abu Toha wrote in one of his New Yorker essays.

“I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.”

In recent months, right-wing groups in the US have called for deporting Abu Toha amid a campaign by President Donald Trump cracking down non-citizens critical of Israel. The author cancelled events at universities in recent months, citing fears for his safety.

I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.

Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale pic.twitter.com/VP6RsPY6vz

— Mosab Abu Toha (@MosabAbuToha) May 5, 2025

The Palestinian poet told Al Jazeera’s The Take podcast in December that the feeling of inability to help people in Gaza has been “devastating”.

“Imagine that you are with your parents, with your siblings and their children in a school shelter in Gaza,” Abu Toha said. “You are unable to protect anyone. You are unable to provide them with any food, with any water, with any medicine. But now you are in the United States, the country that is funding the genocide. So, it is heartbreaking.”

In other Pulitzer categories, New York Times won prizes for explanatory reporting, local reporting, international coverage and breaking news photography on Monday.

With the four awards, the New York-based newspaper received the most prizes from Pulitzer’s 14 journalism contests this year.

Winners of the award, named after the Hungarian-American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, are selected by a board of journalists and academics and announced at Columbia University annually.

The New York Times received the international reporting prize for its coverage of the conflict in Sudan, edging out The Washington Post, which was a finalist in the category for its “documented Israeli atrocities” in Gaza, including investigations into the killings of Palestinian medics and journalists.

The Post won the breaking news prize for its coverage of the Trump assassination attempt during a campaign rally last year. The Reuters news agency took the investigative reporting award for a “boldly reported expose of lax regulation in the US and abroad that makes fentanyl”.

Israeli soldiers and settlers have harassed a Palestinian activist featured in a recent BBC documentary that has received praise for shedding light on the plight of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

As the world’s attention has been fixed on Israel’s 18-month war on Gaza, settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem have spiked, forcing Palestinians to flee their homes. A lack of Israeli police action has further emboldened settlers, who cite the Torah in claiming rights over Palestinian lands.

Issa Amro, who was featured in The Settlers documentary made by British-American journalist and broadcaster Louis Theroux, released footage online showing how armed soldiers and settlers raided his house in Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

Amro said police also threatened him with arrest and told him not to file a complaint in what he said is another instance of apartheid imposed by Israel in the West Bank. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have accused Israel of practising apartheid in occupied territory.

Amro added on Sunday that the Israeli settlers who attacked him a day earlier told him United States President Donald Trump backed them. The settlers felt “emboldened because of the Trump administration’s blind support”, the activist said.

Theroux said he and his team have remained in regular contact with Amro.

. @Issaamro who featured in The Settlers has posted videos of his latest harassment by settlers and soldiers. Our team has been in regular contact with him since the documentary and over the last 24 hours. We are continuing to monitor the situation. https://t.co/asEWKkVX5h

— Louis Theroux (@louistheroux) May 4, 2025

The BBC documentary, a follow-up to Theroux’s 2012 film The Ultra Zionists, reflects on how the situation has evolved in occupied Palestinian territory.

While conducting interviews with Palestinian and Israeli figures, the documentary explored how the settler population has grown significantly and how new military outposts and Israeli infrastructure have expanded across Palestinian territories, often with direct state support.

It delves into the religious and ideological motivations behind the Israeli expansion, which has led to mass displacement of Palestinians and violent clashes, and it questions the legality and morality of the occupation as courts rule that it undermines international laws and norms.

“You bring Jewish families [to the occupied West Bank], you live Jewish life, and this will bring light instead of darkness. And this is how the state of Israel was established, and this is what we want to do in Gaza,” Daniella Weiss, a key member of the Israeli settler movement for decades, says in the documentary.

Weiss, who has enjoyed support from a number of Israeli rabbis as well, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “happy” about the settler expansion. Netanyahu has opposed the Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza and occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Settlers are Israeli citizens who live on private Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They now number more than 700,000. All Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law.

Settlements and their expansions are seen as the biggest hurdle in the realisation of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state living side by side with Israel.

The United Nations General Assembly last year called on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territory. This came months after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the Israeli presence in Palestinian territory is ‘”unlawful”.

Theroux himself was harassed as well when making part of the documentary in Hebron when Israeli soldiers approached him and tried to make him leave the area.

The harassment of Amro comes shortly after Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, was attacked by Israeli settlers in his home in the West Bank village of Susya.

Armed and masked settlers vandalised his home and vehicle in late March and injured Ballal. While receiving treatment in an ambulance, Israeli soldiers blindfolded and arrested the filmmaker, who was later released without charge.

Like the harassment of Amro on Saturday, that attack was also seen as retaliation for the documentary’s international acclaim and its efforts to show the struggles of Palestinians in the West Bank.

The incidents have also further highlighted the dangers faced by journalists and filmmakers under Israeli occupation at a time when Israel has killed more than 200 media workers in the Gaza Strip.

UNICEF says children face ‘growing risk of starvation, illness and death’ as Israel bars food and other aid deliveries.

Thousands of Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip are facing an increased threat of starvation, the United Nations has warned, as Israel’s continued blockade of food, water and other critical supplies to the besieged and bombarded coastal territory enters its third month.

The UN’s child rights agency (UNICEF) said on Friday that more than 9,000 children had been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of the year.

But the situation has worsened since Israel imposed a total blockade on the Palestinian enclave in early March.

“For two months, children in the Gaza Strip have faced relentless bombardments while being deprived of essential goods, services and lifesaving care,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.

“With each passing day of the aid blockade, they face the growing risk of starvation, illness and death – nothing can justify this.”

Israel has blocked all humanitarian assistance from reaching Palestinians in Gaza since March 2, spurring international condemnation.

The UN’s World Food Programme said last week that its food supplies had been “depleted” amid the siege, warning that community kitchens upon which thousands of Palestinians rely would be forced to close.

“We don’t ask if food is nutritious or not, if it’s fresh or good; that’s a luxury, we just want to fill the stomachs of our children,” a displaced Palestinian parent recently told Amnesty International about the crisis. “I don’t want my child to die hungry.”

The Israeli government has said its blockade is intended to put pressure on Palestinian group Hamas to release captives held in Gaza. But it has not led to any more releases since the fleeting ceasefire earlier this year, which saw Palestinian prisoners exchanged for Israeli captives.

Meanwhile, Hamas official Abdel Rahman Shadid on Friday accused Israel of using starvation as a “deliberate weapon of war” against Palestinians.

“Children are dying from the lack of milk, not just from bombs,” Shadid said in a statement published on the group’s Telegram channel.

Legal experts and human rights groups have noted that, as an occupying power, Israel has an obligation under international law to provide food and other assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

They have condemned the blockade as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of all ages are experiencing high levels of food insecurity in Gaza, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, a global hunger watchdog.

Amjad Shawa, director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, told Al Jazeera that the situation is worsening quickly as health facilities lack the supplies needed to treat children grappling with malnutrition.

“We have no food supplies or supplementary materials or medications for these children,” Shawa told Al Jazeera from Gaza City. “There is high concern that we will witness more casualties in the coming few days,” he added.

At Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, Dr Ahmed Abu Nasir said the situation has become worse than ever due to the blockade.

“Children are in their growing stage and badly need certain nutrients, including proteins and fats,” the paediatrician told Al Jazeera. “These are not available in the Gaza Strip, particularly in the north.”

More than 52,400 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023, according to figures from the Gaza Health Ministry.

The death of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi, a Palestinian American, has shone a light on instances of anti-Arab hate.

A United States man has been sentenced to 53 years in prison for the fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy, after being found guilty of hate crime charges and murder.

Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak announced the sentence on Friday in the case of 73-year-old Illinois landlord Joseph Czuba.

On October 14, 2023, just days after the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, Czuba attacked two of his tenants, Hanan Shaheen and her young son Wadee Alfayoumi.

Police say Czuba arrived at their door angry about the war and proceeded to force his way inside, strangling Shaheen and holding her down before pulling out a military-style knife.

Shaheen suffered more than a dozen stab wounds before escaping to a bathroom to call 911 for help. Alfayoumi, meanwhile, was stabbed 26 times. He did not survive.

Czuba’s trial featured audio from Shaheen’s panicked 911 call, as well as testimony from the mother herself. Speaking from the witness stand in English and Arabic, she described Czuba becoming increasingly paranoid and Islamophobic as the war progressed.

For nearly two years before the attack, the family had rented a pair of bedrooms in Czuba’s house in Plainville, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

But after the war began on October 7, Shaheen recalled Czuba telling her to move out of her lodgings because Muslims were not welcome.

Then, during the attack, she once again heard him citing her Muslim faith. “He told me ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen.

The incident was one of the highest-profile acts of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence in the US after the war in Gaza broke out.

But advocates say it is part of a trend of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic hate that has swept the country in recent months.

After the attack, police found Czuba sitting on the ground outside of the home, his hands and body bloody. Czuba pleaded not guilty, and his defence team has sought to vacate his conviction on the grounds that the prosecution played to the jury’s emotions.

Some of the images of the crime scene were so graphic that the judge ordered the court’s television screens to be turned away from the audience. Jury members heard Shaheen telling 911 operators in fear, “The landlord is killing me and my baby!”

During his opening statements, Michael Fitzgerald, the assistant state’s attorney for Will County, described Alfayoumi’s final moments as full of horror.

“He could not escape,” Fitzgerald said. “If it wasn’t enough that this defendant killed that little boy, he left the knife in the little boy’s body.”

In February, the jury took less than 90 minutes to return a guilty verdict.

On Friday, Judge Bertani-Tomczak rejected the defence’s bid to overturn the conviction. In announcing the sentence, she called Czuba’s actions “brutal” and “heinous”.

She said a 30-year prison sentence was given for Alfayoumi’s murder, plus another 20 years for the attack on his mother and three years for committing a hate crime.

Alfayoumi’s great-uncle, Mahmoud Yousef, was the only family member to speak at the sentencing hearing. He said no amount of prison time could ever make up for the loss his family has suffered.

He also explained that Alfayoumi had seen Czuba as a grandfather figure, and he questioned what “fake news” about the war in Gaza could have prompted such violence.

“Some people are bringing this war to this country,” Yousef said. “We cannot do that. We can’t bring the war here. We cannot bring hatred to this country.”

In March, the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a report saying it had received 8,658 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents in the last year alone, a 7.6 percent rise.

It was the highest tally the group had recorded since it began collecting data in 1996.