There Was No Cover-Up of Hamas’s Sexual Violence on October 7

One thing is true: Hamas and other Palestinian militants committed unspeakable sexual violence against Israeli civilians on October 7. “The full scale of the assault is yet to be uncovered,” according to a position paper published by Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a nongovernmental organization.

Two things are not true: That the October 7 rapes and sexual mutilation were ignored or covered up by the United Nations gender-equality organization U.N. Women and a conspiracy of Western feminists, global human rights organizations, and U.S. progressives. Or that behind this alleged rape denial lies antisemitism: “#MeToo, except if you’re a Jew.”

How a Palestinian teen’s release exposed Israeli mistreatment of prisoners

Israeli officials were displeased when Mohammed Nazal, an 18-year-old Palestinian, described his ordeal in Israeli prisons after being released as part of a truce agreement with Hamas last week.

The teenager from the town of Qabatiya in the occupied West Bank told Arab and Western media how he was beaten and denied medical assistance, but this was refuted by Israeli authorities who tried to paint him as a liar.

His testimonies and medical records have now been verified by Al Jazeera’s fact-checking agency, Sanad, providing further evidence of the brutal mistreatment Palestinians suffer in Israeli prisons that has only exacerbated since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7.

Eight-year-old boy among four reported dead in Israeli raid on Jenin

Four people, including two children, were reportedly killed during a major Israeli incursion into the West Bank city of Jenin that the Israel Defense Forces said was aimed at suppressing jihadist activity.

Adam Samer al-Ghoul, eight, and Basil Suleiman Abu al-Wafa, 15, were shot dead during the fighting, Palestinian officials said, while the IDF said a terror leader and his associate had been found dead after their building was attacked.

Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha detained by Israelis in Gaza, family says

A celebrated Palestinian poet and author, Mosab Abu Toha, has been detained by Israeli forces while trying to leave Gaza, according to his friends and family.

Abu Toha had been told by US officials that he and his family would be able to cross into Egypt, as one of his children is an American citizen. They were on the way from north to south Gaza, heading for the Rafah crossing point on Sunday, when he was rounded up along with other Palestinian men at an Israeli military checkpoint and taken away.

Apartheid South Africa reached a tipping point, Israel will, too

Writing on October 27, the Associated Press’s Josef Federman shared some stark observations: “Just three weeks into the deadliest war between Israel and Hamas, it already is clear that the bloodshed has flipped long-standing assumptions in Israel and the region upside down. Israel’s military and intelligence services were exposed as incompetent and ill-prepared … Israelis’ sense of personal security was shattered.”

Even if many older paradigms have collapsed, as some observers have pointed out, Israel has turned with a vengeance to a familiar one: overwhelming brutal violence.

'It's not about Hamas,' say West Bank Palestinians amid growing violence and anguish

Nineteen-year-old Rabia Odeh flits through the darkened corridors of her family's house in the Palestinian village of Qusra, south of Nablus, with a nervous energy.  

Her skin is pale against a black hijab as she steps around broken glass on the floor under a bullet hole through the window above a staircase. 

She's heading for the roof to point out more evidence of an attack by hard-line Jewish settlers on Oct. 11, four days after Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and taking about 240 people hostage.

Israel arrests Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi in occupied West Bank raids

Israeli forces have arrested Ahed Tamimi, a prominent 22-year-old Palestinian activist, for “inciting terrorism”.

They announced the arrest on Monday following another round of overnight raids and fighting in the occupied West Bank. Violence has been spilling over into the territory since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last month.

Al Jazeera correspondent Zein Basravi reported multiple raids by the Israeli army across the West Bank, including in the village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah, where Ahed Tamimi was arrested.

Who are Israeli settlers, and why do they live on Palestinian lands?

Since Israel unleashed its brutal bombing campaign in Gaza on October 7 in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack, settler attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem have more than doubled from an average of three to eight incidents a day, according to the United Nations.

The spike in settler attacks have forced hundreds of Palestinians to flee their homes in the past three weeks amid the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 9,500 people.

So, who are the settlers and where do they live?

‘Unsafe in own home’: Israeli settlers spread terror in South Hebron Hills

Khirbet Zanuta, occupied West Bank — Amin Hamed al-Hadhrat took a break from taking down his family’s home in the South Hebron Hills, crying. “I know in a day or two I’m going to live somewhere else, but I still can’t imagine it happening,” the 37-year-old said. “All I know is living here. All my father knew was living here. I don’t know what it is like to live anywhere else.”

This week, al-Hadhrat’s village of shepherds, Khirbet Zanuta, joined the growing swell of Palestinian Bedouin villages forcibly emptied since October 7 due to violent attacks from armed Israeli settlers often wearing Israeli military uniforms.

Israel Is Arming Fascist Militias to Suppress Dissent, Suspended Knesset Member Warns

On October 19, an Israeli Parliament ethics committee suspended Knesset member Ofer Cassif for 45 days after he warned that an “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces is underway. Cassif is an ex-professor in political science and philosophy with a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He has represented the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash-Ta’al) coalition in the Knesset since 2019.

Israel Has 10,000 Palestinian Prisoners and Faces Allegations of Rampant Abuse

Groups supporting Palestinian political prisoners are demanding that the International Committee of the Red Cross intervene on behalf of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza and occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank who are now incarcerated by Israeli occupation forces.

The call for action follows the deaths of two recently arrested Palestinian men, and it also comes in response to allegations from advocates for political prisoners of arbitrary detention, retaliatory beatings, medical neglect, solitary confinement, and other forms of abuse.

UN report: 80% of Gaza inhabitants relied on international aid before war

Israel’s blockade hollowed out Gaza’s economy and left 80% of its inhabitants dependent on international aid even before the current crisis erupted, the UN has said.

In a report outlining conditions in the Palestinian territory last year, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) said two-thirds of Gaza’s population was living in poverty, while its unemployment rate of 45% was one of the highest in the world.

Israel doubles number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 in two weeks

Ramallah, occupied West Bank – Israel has arrested so many Palestinians in the two weeks since the start of its bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip that it has doubled the number of Palestinians in its custody.

There were about 5,200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons prior to October 7 when the Palestinian armed resistance group Hamas launched an attack on Israel, which responded almost immediately with a relentless bombing campaign.

Israel’s ‘war against Gaza’s children’ explained

One child is killed every 15 minutes in the Israeli bombings of Gaza, according to a Palestinian NGO, highlighting the toll the current war has exacted on children.

More than 100 children have been killed every day since Israel started bombing the besieged Palestinian enclave on October 7 in the wake of the deadly Hamas attack. More than 3,400 Palestinians have been killed in the deadliest Israeli assault in decades.

“We are witnessing a genocide in real time,” a spokesperson for The Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) said.

A letter to Europe from a Palestinian

Dear Europeans,

I, like millions of Palestinians, am living through the worst nightmare of yet another round of mass death and destruction unleashed on our people – something you would often simply call “an escalation” of the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict”.

As I write these lines, al-Ahli Hospital was bombed, killing hundreds of children, men and women, who had sought safety on the premises of the hospital. Hours earlier, the news of the death of my friend Mohammed Mokhiemar, his wife Safaa, and their three-month-old baby Elyana reached me.

Not Israel’s 9/11, but a Prison Riot

The world has been struggling to find a good historical parallel for the vicious and horrific surprise attack Hamas launched against Israel on October 7.

It is often said that 10/7 is the new 9/11. But 10/7 was more like a prison riot.

For nearly two decades, the Gaza Strip has been bottled up and almost completely blocked off. It has been widely compared to an open-air prison. Israel and the United States have tried to seal Gaza, isolating its nearly 2 million residents on a tiny, impoverished strip of land. Washington and Tel Aviv thought that would let them keep Hamas at arm’s length.

Israeli Settlers Take Advantage of Gaza Chaos to Attack Palestinians in West Bank

While the world focuses on the Hamas massacre in Israel and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, settlers in the West Bank are taking advantage of the chaos to attack and expel Palestinians from small villages.

Settlers — Israeli Jews living in the occupied West Bank — and soldiers have killed 51 Palestinians in the West Bank since Saturday, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah. At least two villages, Al-Qanub and Wadi Al-Sik, have been entirely depopulated as a result of the violence by Israeli settlers.

From hubris to humiliation: The 10 hours that shocked Israel

A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a boastful speech at the United Nations, announcing the establishment of a new Middle East centred around Israel and its new Arab partners, the Palestinians, whom he totally omitted from his fantasy regional map, dealt him and Israel a fatal blow, politically and strategically.

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas launched a meticulously planned, well-executed lightning incursion from Gaza into Israel, by air, sea and land. In tandem with thousands of missiles fired towards Israeli targets, hundreds of Palestinian fighters attacked Israeli military and civilian areas in the southern part of the country, which led to the killing of at least 100 Israelis and the capture of dozens of Israeli soldiers and civilians as hostages.

Israelis kill four Palestinians in occupied West Bank confrontations

Four Palestinians have been killed in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, three at the hands of Israeli soldiers, and one by an Israeli settler, according to the Israeli military and medical officials.

Two of the men were killed near Shufa village in the Tulkarm area, Israel’s military said on Thursday, adding that a gunfight had erupted after soldiers identified a “suspicious vehicle”, and the two men shot at the settler.

On Yom Kippur, Solidarity With Palestinians Is a Sacred Act

Today, as Jewish communities across the world gather together for Yom Kippur’s collective rituals of atonement, I am thinking about how, in Jewish tradition, words are said to have a sacred power.

In the first chapter of the Torah, God creates the world itself through the power of speech. In the book of Exodus, the Israelites speak as one people at Sinai, thereby entering into a covenant with God. It is said that on Yom Kippur, the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple and utter the otherwise unspeakable Name of God — and at that moment the fate of the very world hung in the balance.