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On Tuesday, senior Israeli national security officials convened an urgently called meeting to revisit a long-stalled, highly controversial plan to push Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip, Israel’s leading daily newspaper Haaretz has confirmed. The gathering, organized by Shmuel Ben Ezra, head of Israel’s National Security Council, brought together top representatives from the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet internal security agency, and the Mossad external intelligence service, with discussions centered on advancing what officials frame as “encouraging voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s civilian population.

Multiple participants told Haaretz that the urgency of the meeting took many defense officials by surprise, as the idea of displacing Palestinians from Gaza has been floated dozens of times in Israeli political circles for years without ever moving forward due to insurmountable international and practical barriers. Most notably, Mossad officials confirmed during the discussions that the agency has not identified a single sovereign nation willing to accept large numbers of displaced Palestinian refugees from Gaza. One senior anonymous official stressed that there has been no shift in the global stance that would make this plan feasible, noting that any large-scale population transfer would require unprecedented, complex coordination across the international community that currently has no support.

The renewed push for the plan has sparked speculation among Israeli security circles. One unnamed security source told Haaretz that it cannot be ruled out that the reactivation of discussions is part of a potential political “compensation” package that former U.S. President Donald Trump offered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the wake of a U.S.-Iran agreement. Regardless of the political motivation, a senior member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee bluntly told the outlet that the entire proposal lacks any political or international legitimacy or feasibility, due to unified opposition from Arab states and the overwhelming majority of the global community.

Calls for the forced or incentivized expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza have grown louder in mainstream Israeli political discourse since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Top members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, including the prime minister himself, and cabinet ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, have all publicly endorsed the idea, with rhetoric echoing through the ruling Likud party. Most recently, in 2025, Katz established a dedicated government directorate within his ministry to manage what it calls the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza residents, and just last month Katz publicly reaffirmed his stance that the expulsion of Gaza’s Palestinian population will take place “at the appropriate time.”

Public opinion polling conducted last year by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that more than 70 percent of Likud voters support the policy of expelling Palestinians from their historical homeland. Support for population transfer extends beyond Gaza to the occupied West Bank, according to comments this week from senior Likud lawmaker and Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi.

Vaturi made his extreme views explicit during an interview with Israeli Channel 14 News on Tuesday, stating that Jewish citizens of Israel will never achieve peace “until we expel all the Arabs from this area” of the West Bank, which Israel refers to by the biblical names Judea and Samaria. “There should not be any Arabs there at all,” Vaturi said, adding that expanding illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territory is the only path to what he calls peace in the Land of Israel.

In the same interview, Vaturi doubled down on his call for mass displacement, saying: “It is now necessary to discuss where Arabs should be removed and where Jews should be settled. That’s what needs to be done to strengthen Israel. There is no other way; they all need to be expelled from here.” This is far from the first time Vaturi has publicly endorsed the expulsion of Palestinians. Back in November 2025, he stated that ultranationalist rabbi Meir Kahane, who famously called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, was correct in his ideology. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack, Vaturi also made incendiary comments calling for the Israeli military to “separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza” and publicly called to “burn Gaza” to the ground. Political analysts have noted that Vaturi’s open endorsement of population transfer, a policy widely classified as ethnic cleansing under international law, demonstrates how extreme ultranationalist views that were once on the fringe of Israeli politics have become fully mainstream within the ruling Likud party, indistinguishable from the ideology of far-right factions like Otzma Yehudit.

As Andy Burnham prepares to take office as Britain’s next prime minister – a transition widely expected to be complete by July 17 – the Labour Party front-runner has made a high-profile key appointment, reportedly offering the critical role of chief of staff to former Blair and Brown-era minister James Purnell. Multiple sources confirm Purnell has signaled he will accept the position, which would place him as Burnham’s closest senior advisor in Downing Street.

The selection of Purnell, a veteran Labour figure with cross-sector experience spanning government, public broadcasting and corporate lobbying, underscores Burnham’s broader strategy of assembling a unifying administration that draws talent from across the ideological divides of the UK Labour Party. Purnell, long identified as a figure on the centre-right of Labour, has a long personal history with Burnham: the pair shared a parliamentary office when both served as junior ministers during Tony Blair’s premiership in the 2000s.

Most recently, Purnell held the position of chief executive at Flint Global, a major London-based lobbying firm. He stepped down from his director role at the firm earlier this week to clear the way for the Downing Street appointment. Purnell’s career path also includes a four-year stint as director of strategy at the BBC starting in 2013, and senior cabinet roles in previous Labour governments, including Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and senior positions at the Department for Work and Pensions.

A point of particular note in Purnell’s political background is his longstanding connection to Middle East policy: he served two years as chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel parliamentary lobbying group, and voted in favor of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. During his 2002 chairmanship of LFI, Purnell undertook an official visit to Israel, where he documented on-the-ground observations that included both moments of cross-community cooperation between Israeli kibbutz members and nearby Arab villagers, and the violence that had already become an endemic part of the conflict. He met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the trip, and wrote at the time that while peace would require mutual goodwill, progress depended entirely on the Palestinian Authority cracking down on militant activity – while also acknowledging the deep economic deprivation faced by Palestinians in Jerusalem, where he noted average annual incomes fell below $1,000 and rising malnutrition had become a crisis.

Burnham’s own approach to Middle East policy adds layers of context to Purnell’s appointment. Like many current Labour MPs, Burnham has been a member of LFI, but he also holds longstanding ties to the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), a group that advocates for Palestinian rights, and undertook a fact-finding visit to the occupied West Bank with the organization in 2012. Burnham broke publicly with Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership in October 2023, when as Mayor of Greater Manchester he joined London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Scottish Labour Leader Anas Sarwar to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war, taking a far more critical stance on Israel than the party’s frontbench at the time.

In recent weeks, Burnham has largely avoided public comment on foreign policy, a strategic choice aligned with his campaign for a parliamentary seat in Makerfield, a majority working-class constituency where local political observers say the party views foreign policy discussion as unhelpful to securing a by-election win. But as Burnham accelerates preparations for his premiership following Starmer’s expected departure, foreign policy is set to return to the forefront of his agenda.

Political commentators have noted that Burnham may look to adopt a firmer, more critical policy toward Israel to distinguish his premiership from Starmer’s tenure, and to win back left-leaning Labour voters who have shifted their support to the Green Party or independent candidates in recent years. As of yet, Burnham has not confirmed his pick for foreign secretary, and further senior appointments are expected to be announced in the coming days as the transition of power continues to unfold. Burnham’s emerging team already reflects a balance of competing factions within Labour: it includes Josh Simons, former director of the centrist think tank Labour Together widely credited with delivering Starmer’s Labour leadership win, as well as MP Louise Haigh, who has been publicly identified as a target of internal factional opposition from Labour Together.

A sharp new rift has opened within European Union diplomatic circles after former European Union Vice President Josep Borrell publicly accused the bloc of abandoning its current High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas to curry favor with Israel. The controversy ignited last week when leaked details of a confidential May meeting between Kallas and Mexican officials emerged, revealing the EU’s top diplomat had drawn a parallel between Israel’s governance of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and the apartheid regime that ruled South Africa between 1948 and the early 1990s.

According to multiple sources including Euractiv, which first broke details of the closed-door talks held during Kallas’ May 20–22 trip to Mexico City as part of a senior EU delegation, Kallas referenced her 2023 visit to Johannesburg’s apartheid museum to frame the comparison. The revelation immediately sparked fierce backlash from Israeli officials, with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar announcing he would suspend all diplomatic contact with Kallas over the remarks.

Just days after Israel’s punitive move, the EU confirmed it would send Dubravka Suica, the bloc’s Commissioner for Mediterranean and Demographic Affairs, on a scheduled visit to Tel Aviv. It is this decision that drew Borrell’s scathing rebuke in a post to the social platform X on Wednesday. In his critique, Borrell pointed out that after Israel declared Kallas persona non grata over claims of antisemitic sentiment, a fellow EU official traveled to Tel Aviv just one day later, exchanged cordial pleasantries with Saar, and failed to issue any public rebuke of Israel’s actions against Kallas. “What a fine display of ‘solidarity and coordination’ in the EU,” Borrell wrote, his words laced with biting irony.

The leak of Kallas’ private comments has also laid bare a stark contradiction in her public approach to international affairs: while Kallas’ private remarks aligned her with critics who label Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, she has repeatedly and publicly backed Israel’s claim to “self-defense” amid the ongoing military campaign that has left Gaza under deadly bombardment, crippling siege, and mass displacement. This duality has drawn accusations of selective application of international law from critics, who note Kallas has taken an uncompromisingly hard line on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, pushing for sweeping, harsh sanctions against Moscow.

The controversy also amplifies long-simmering discontent among progressive factions in the European Parliament, who have already attacked the EU’s response to the Gaza crisis as weak and hypocritical when compared to the bloc’s swift, forceful reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These progressive lawmakers have ramped up calls for sweeping action from Brussels, including the imposition of tougher sanctions on Israeli officials, the formal suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and an end to the bloc’s longstanding political protection of Israel on the international stage.

On Tuesday, Israeli police detained and interrogated a long-serving prominent Palestinian community leader, a move that has drawn widespread condemnation as the latest escalation in a sweeping crackdown on political organizing among Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Mohammad Barakeh, who previously led the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel — the leading umbrella group representing Palestinian citizens of Israel operating outside of formal parliamentary structures — was taken into custody from his residential home in the northern Israeli town of Shefa-Amr, the committee confirmed. Despite Barakeh’s formal objections, Israeli authorities forced him to attend the interrogation at a police station located in Ariel, an Israeli settlement built on illegally occupied land in the West Bank. The committee has labeled the choice of this interrogation location as a deliberate and calculated provocation.

Barakeh, who represented Palestinian interests as a member of the Israeli Knesset from 1999 to 2015, spent roughly four hours in questioning over a public speech he delivered in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian territories, in 2022. As of Tuesday, Israeli authorities had not publicly specified what portion or claim of the speech they are investigating. During processing, Barakeh was fingerprinted and photographed before being released by a court, which attached a series of restrictive bail conditions to his release.

In an official statement following the detention, the High Follow-Up Committee framed the action as an attempt to intimidate the entire Palestinian community within Israel. The organization called the case “another dangerous episode in a series of political persecutions aimed at intimidating our Arab community and deterring it from its political activity and legitimate struggle against occupation, racism and political repression.”

After the interrogation concluded, Barakeh appeared before the Petah Tikva Magistrates’ Court, which issued a set of binding restrictions: a ban on all domestic and international travel through the end of October, an order to surrender his passport, and a 30-day ban on any entry to the occupied West Bank. Israeli law enforcement also seized two of Barakeh’s personal mobile phones, with investigators claiming the devices are required for ongoing case work.

Barakeh’s legal counsel, Khaled Zabarqa, confirmed that his client rejects the legitimacy of the majority of the court-imposed restrictions. Adalah, the leading Israeli rights organization focused on protecting minority rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, is currently preparing a legal appeal to challenge both the bail conditions and the unlawful seizure of Barakeh’s personal devices. Adalah representatives also noted that Barakeh previously declined to attend interrogation at the Ariel location, and police have yet to provide a clear legal justification for holding the questioning inside the occupied West Bank settlement.

Multiple Palestinian political parties inside Israel have issued formal condemnations of the detention. Hadash, a long-standing Palestinian-led political party, called the interrogation a deliberate “political and security interrogation” that forms part of a broader coordinated campaign targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel and their elected political leadership. The party warned of “a fascist push to tighten the grip on the Arab public in the country and on its representative institutions, foremost among them the High Follow-Up Committee, to silence the national democratic voice opposing occupation, settlement expansion and racism.”

Balad, another prominent Palestinian-led political party in Israel, also joined in condemnation, noting that the detention reflects sustained and ongoing efforts to suppress all forms of legitimate Palestinian political activity within Israel’s borders. In a statement, the party said: “The targeting of Muhammad Barakeh is a targeting of the Arab public and its right to organise, engage in political activity and pursue democratic struggle. These policies will not succeed in silencing our people or deterring them from continuing to defend their national and civil rights in the face of occupation policies, racism, and the escalating incitement from the mouthpieces of the fascist right in Israel.”

A heated free speech and political controversy has erupted at the University of Oxford, where the president of the world-famous Oxford Union debating society, Arwa Elrayess, has publicly condemned pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) after the organization reported her to British police over comments she made about Palestinian resistance that Elrayess says were deliberately taken out of context.

The 20-year-old president, who has Palestinian heritage and spent part of her childhood in the Gaza Strip, has only held the leadership role of the prestigious student society for two months when the controversy unfolded. The incident traces back to private messages Elrayess exchanged in a WhatsApp group chat last September, which were leaked to mainstream media and published widely earlier this month.

Following the leak, Elrayess faced widespread public accusations that she had voiced support for Hamas, which is listed as a proscribed terrorist organization under United Kingdom law. A close reading of the full conversation, however, shows Elrayess never endorsed Hamas’ actions. In her messages, she explicitly pushed back against claims that she was justifying the group’s violence, offering a broader historical analysis of how resistance movements are framed by Western powers. She noted that “any resistance group will inevitably be deemed a ‘terrorist’ organisation by the West until they achieve their liberation (by which time, they’ll be lauded as heroes, as history has repeatedly proven),” pointing to the example of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, which was labeled a terrorist group by Britain during the apartheid era before being embraced as a legitimate liberation movement after apartheid’s collapse.

When another group chat member argued that Hamas’ actions were too excessive to qualify as a liberation struggle, Elrayess responded that “the severity of resistance is often proportional to the severity of oppression.” She observed that numerous nonviolent Palestinian resistance efforts over decades had resulted only in massacres and no political progress, clarifying, “This is not to justify anything but just to point out that it’s quite rich to allow for decades of oppression and massacres, only to be shocked when the resistance movement responds with proportional severity.” After being challenged on the use of “proportional” to describe the group’s actions, she added that “some would argue it’s less than proportional. Have you seen what Israel has put Palestinians through for decades?” before stressing, “Proportional does not mean right by the way.”

Elrayess has repeatedly issued a clear public condemnation of violence against all civilians: “I condemn Hamas’ targeting of innocent civilians, just as I condemn the targeting of innocent civilians by the IDF or any other actor,” she stated earlier this month, emphasizing this has been her consistent position. Under UK law, supporting or glorifying a proscribed terrorist organization is a criminal offense, and a full review of Elrayess’ comments confirms she never advocated for or glorified Hamas.

Despite this, UKLFI filed a police complaint against Elrayess, claiming her remarks could radicalize other students and amounted to normalizing and legitimizing a banned terrorist group. A spokesperson for Thames Valley Police confirmed the force is aware of the complaint and is currently assessing the allegation in coordination with Counter Terrorism Policing South East. As of her latest statement, Elrayess says she has not been contacted by any law enforcement officials.

The leak of Elrayess’ private messages coincided with another recent free speech controversy at the Oxford Union, after the 20-year-old invited progressive American political commentators Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker to address the society. The UK government blocked the pair from entering the country, widely reported to be over their public criticism of Israeli policy. In response, Elrayess upheld her commitment to open debate by allowing the pair to speak to the union via live stream. Just last week, she again defended the principle of free speech by agreeing to debate far-right activist Tommy Robinson on the motion “Should the West be suspicious of Islam?” despite large protests from left-wing student groups; Elrayess won the debate, defeating Robinson’s position.

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Elrayess accused UKLFI and allied pro-Israel voices of coordinating with sympathetic UK media outlets to run sensationalized, false stories that paint her as an extremist, terrorist sympathizer, and antisemite. “These are slurs, directed at a young politically active Palestinian woman who chooses to use her platform to spotlight issues that matter to my family and my community, and that I believe should matter to the public at large,” she said. “In my opinion, this is nothing more than an attempt to suppress voices like mine and to deny me the right to express my views – a strategy that groups like UK Lawyers for Israel have deployed for some time because they know they cannot successfully challenge the facts of the matter.”

Data from the European Legal Support Centre backs up Elrayess’ claims about UKLFI’s long-standing strategy targeting Palestine solidarity activists. Founded in 2011, UKLFI has led efforts to discredit and pressure individuals and organizations that criticize Israeli policy or express support for Palestinian rights. The group is listed 128 times in the center’s Britain Index of Repression database, which tracks the systematic suppression of Palestine solidarity activism across the UK. The center finds that UKLFI has helped create a “chilling environment” where activists and organizations scale back or abandon entirely lawful pro-Palestine work out of fear of legal retaliation. In most cases, UKLFI acts as an initiating or escalating actor against Palestine solidarity activity, using complaint letters, legal threats, and public pressure to push universities, schools, employers, and public bodies to launch disciplinary investigations or cancel planned events.

Earlier this month, Elrayess defeated a motion of no confidence tabled against her presidency of the Oxford Union. Speaking from the union’s debating chamber, she pushed back against what she described as constant, unfair targeting of Palestinian voices: “it was disappointing that at every stage of my existence as a Palestinian there seems to always be this post-mortem vilification of Palestinians in any way shape or form,” she said. “Our very existence is something that is scary and something that needs to be criticised and something that needs to be vilified. They attribute things to us that are false and defamatory. And it is non-stop, it is never ending and I am sick of it. I have had to grow up with this idea in the back of my mind that I have to be so careful about every single little thing I say… because God forbid someone takes something out of context and puts it in the Telegraph.”

Middle East Eye has reached out to UKLFI to request comment on the complaint against Elrayess.

In a stark warning delivered at the Jerusalem-based JNS International Policy Summit on Tuesday, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister and a senior member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, upended long-standing regional threat framing by declaring that Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the new Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa pose a far greater danger to Israeli security than Iran.

Chikli argued that the long-feared regional bloc of Iran’s Shiite-led government, Bashar al-Assad’s former Syrian administration and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has reached the end of its operational dominance. In its place, he claimed, a new coordinated “Muslim Brotherhood axis” has emerged, linking Turkey, Syria and Qatar. “It is better to open your eyes now to this shifting threat,” Chikli told the summit audience.

The far-right politician doubled down on his earlier bellicose rhetoric against the new Syrian leadership, which grew out of a former al-Qaeda affiliate that seized control of Damascus in late 2024. “There is no path to peace between Israel and a jihadist regime rooted in the ideology of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, whose core goal is the seizure of unified Jerusalem,” he said. This marks a continuation of Chikli’s prior warnings, in which he labeled the bloc a “radical Sunni axis of evil” that included Pakistan alongside Turkey and Qatar, and predicted an inevitable future war between Israel and Syria.

Chikli’s comments are not an isolated outburst; they reflect a growing hardening of Israeli official rhetoric toward Ankara, amid escalating bilateral tensions between the two regional powers. In recent months, multiple high-profile Israeli politicians across the governing coalition and opposition have moved to classify Turkey as a hostile actor. Earlier this June, fellow Likud lawmaker Ariel Kellner formally labeled Turkey an “enemy state.” Last month, Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar called on the Israeli government to adopt an official enemy designation for Ankara, warning that Turkey would face devastating military damage in any future conflict with Israel. Even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a leading opposition figure, echoed this framing back in February, arguing that “Turkey is the new Iran.”

The shifting threat assessment also echoes analysis from mainstream Israeli media. In an editorial published the same day as Chikli’s summit address, the major Israeli newspaper Maariv concluded that Turkey now represents a more significant long-term challenge to Israeli national security than Iran. The outlet cited Turkey’s rapidly expanding military capabilities, booming domestic defense industry and growing regional influence across the Middle East as key factors driving this re-evaluation, noting that Israeli security policymakers are increasingly prioritizing Ankara’s growing power alongside long-standing traditional threats from Iran and its former allies.

The remarks come as bilateral tensions between Turkey and Israel have surged in recent weeks. Erdogan himself recently warned that Israeli military strikes in Syria and Lebanon pose a direct national security threat to Turkey, raising fears of an unintended direct confrontation between the two countries.

In a bombshell revelation at the JNS International Policy Summit held in Jerusalem on Tuesday, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has publicly confirmed that he orchestrated a covert operation to smuggle tens of thousands of Starlink internet receivers into Iran. The operation, Bennett explained, was specifically designed to support anti-government demonstrators in the country, who repeatedly face state-ordered internet shutdowns during periods of unrest.

Bennett laid out the core logic behind the initiative, noting that Iranian authorities uniformly cut off digital communications every time large-scale protests erupt. By getting Starlink receivers into the hands of activists, the project aimed to guarantee uninterrupted access to the internet and social media platforms even during shutdowns, allowing protest organizers to coordinate their actions and, ultimately, challenge the ruling Islamic Republic.

However, Bennett made scathing accusations against the current administration led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming the program was halted due to what he called the government’s incompetence. When large-scale anti-government protests swept Iran starting in late December, the pre-positioned communications infrastructure that Bennett’s team had worked to deploy was never put in place, he said.

The unrest, which began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar as a response to soaring inflation, rapidly escalated in January, evolving into a nationwide movement expressing broad anger at the Islamic Republic’s governance. Thousands of people lost their lives during the crackdown on demonstrations. While most fatalities have been linked to violent crackdowns by Iranian police and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), separate allegations have circulated claiming that Israeli operatives infiltrated the protests and that anti-government activists were responsible for the deaths of Iranian security personnel and civilians.

Bennett’s remarks come at a pivotal diplomatic moment, as U.S. and Iranian negotiators continue talks aimed at ending the ongoing conflict that broke out in February, when joint Israeli-U.S. military strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Over the weekend, the U.S. took a significant step forward in negotiations, temporarily suspending sanctions on Iran during a new round of talks. U.S. Vice President JD Vance described the recent discussions as yielding “good progress.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the Treasury Department has issued a 60-day general license that temporarily lifts sanctions through August 21, authorizing Iranian oil production and commercial sales for the duration of the truce talks. All transactions completed under this license must be conducted in U.S. dollars, according to the official announcement.