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A controversial act of vandalism by a sitting Israeli parliamentarian has triggered widespread political fallout this week, after an Israeli Knesset member from the far-right Religious Zionism party smashed a prominent Palestinian memorial in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, drawing condemnation from across the country’s political divide.

Zvi Sukkot, who chairs the Knesset’s influential Education Committee and is affiliated with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right faction, was captured on camera striking the Palestinian Martyrs’ Monument in Madama, a small village located south of Nablus, with a sledgehammer. In a video of the incident posted to his Facebook account, Sukkot justified his action by claiming the memorial honored two Palestinian militants who had killed Israeli civilians, arguing that the structure had no place standing in the region. He added that leaving the memorial intact risked radicalizing local children passing the site, encouraging them to seek martyrdom themselves.

The incident unfolded with Israeli military personnel present at the scene, despite the Israeli Defense Forces later issuing an official statement disavowing any authorization for the demolition. According to Israel’s public broadcaster Kan 11, military forces had conducted raids across multiple Palestinian villages in the broader Nablus area after Sukkot submitted a formal request to inspect a series of memorials in Beita, Burin, and Madama. The IDF clarified that the destruction of the Madama monument had never gone through required official approval protocols, and that troops on the ground moved to halt the vandalism once it became clear what was happening. In a sharply worded rebuke, the military accused Sukkot and his team of acting “in a deceptive and manipulative manner,” noting that their unauthorized actions had put Israeli soldiers at unnecessary risk. Even so, the IDF reaffirmed its longstanding policy of regularly demolishing Palestinian memorials labeled as “symbols of incitement,” framing these actions as a core component of Israel’s counterterrorism operations.

In response to the military’s criticism, Sukkot’s office said the lawmaker had moved forward independently after the army failed to act on repeated demands to remove the memorial. Footage from the scene confirms that multiple members of Sukkot’s staff joined him in the vandalism, and his spokesperson Yossi Rainer even published a photo on the social platform X showing himself holding a sledgehammer in front of the partially destroyed structure.

Local village leaders have pushed back against the IDF’s account of the incident. Rami Nassar, head of the Madama village council, told Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the memorial had stood at the site for roughly 20 years without incident, despite consistent Israeli pressure to have it removed over the decades. Nassar added that threats against the monument had grown more severe in recent weeks, with unidentified Israelis seen measuring the structure several weeks prior to the attack. Contradicting the military’s claim that troops halted the demolition, Nassar said Israeli soldiers simply stood by and allowed Sukkot and his team to damage the memorial unimpeded.

Sukkot’s targeted campaign against Palestinian memorials in the area launched at least two weeks before Tuesday’s attack. Eleven days prior to the incident, he published a video filmed outside Madama calling for the mass removal of all monuments honoring Palestinian fighters across the region. “The time has come to smash these memorials,” Sukkot stated in the earlier clip, adding that every monument “in memory of the terrorists here and in other villages must be destroyed and broken.”

The release of footage from Tuesday’s vandalism has drawn fierce criticism from across Israel’s political spectrum, with opposition figures arguing that the incident is proof that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition has allowed rampant lawlessness to take hold in the occupied West Bank. “Sukkot’s behaviour is a disgrace for someone who claims to represent the public and be a leader,” veteran opposition politician and former Israeli army chief Gadi Eisenkot wrote on X. Eisenkot charged that Netanyahu “allows anarchists” like Sukkot “to do whatever they please, endangering security in the settlements and harming Israel’s standing in the world.”

Yair Golan, leader of the Israeli opposition party The Democrats, went even further in his criticism, saying that Sukkot “should be behind bars, not in Israel’s Knesset.” “For this coalition, flames are a working method,” Golan said, against a backdrop of repeated Israeli military warnings that the incident could spark widespread escalation in the already volatile West Bank. “As long as the public is afraid and fighting amongst itself, they can continue to rule,” he added.

Even some figures within the ruling coalition voiced criticism of Sukkot’s actions, though many stopped short of full condemnation. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar noted that Sukkot and other elected lawmakers “are not the sovereign” in the occupied West Bank, emphasizing that “decisions must be made and carried out by the state and its authorities.”

Tuesday’s incident is far from the first time Sukkot has been recorded vandalizing Palestinian property. Just one month earlier, the Knesset member published footage of himself damaging infrastructure at the Islamic Orphanage Secondary School in Jerusalem’s Old City. In June, he led an incursion into a Palestinian school in the northern Israeli town of Tuba-Zangariyye, where he attempted to break into the school building using a circular saw.

On a quiet day tending to his generations-old olive grove in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian farmer Ahmed Zeidat’s routine turned into a violent confrontation that has become an all-too-common reality for communities in the Jenin area. As Zeidat cared for his trees, a group of Israeli settlers charged at him, beating him in the face and stomach before he fled the scene on his tractor, with the attackers in close pursuit. When Israeli soldiers finally stepped in to separate the parties, they made a shocking choice: they removed the settlers from the land, but placed Zeidat in custody.

When Zeidat questioned the military officer about his detention, he was given a blunt answer that laid bare the shifting territorial reality of the region: he was being held for trespassing on private Israeli land. Bewildered by the claim that his own inherited property had been reclassified, Zeidat pushed back. “This land is mine. How did it become private, and who does it belong to?” he recalled asking. The soldier’s reply left no room for ambiguity: “It belongs to us, and you’re not allowed to enter it.” After a short period in detention, Zeidat was released, but issued a permanent ban from returning to the land he had spent decades cultivating. “My land, the fruit of my labour and toil, is forbidden to me,” Zeidat told Middle East Eye. “It used to give me 600 kilos of pure olive oil. Now I look at it from afar. I can’t even look, because my heart aches.”

For Palestinian communities across Jenin and its surrounding villages, Zeidat’s experience is no longer an isolated incident. It is part of a rapidly accelerating push to expand Israeli settlements that upends a decades-old status quo in the northern West Bank. When Israel unilaterally disengaged from the region in 2005, it dismantled four local settlements – Ganim, Kadim, Homesh and Sa-Nur – leaving most Palestinian communities in the area free from regular direct confrontation with settlers. That changed entirely after the current Israeli government took office in late 2022, which has overseen a sharp uptick in settlement construction and expansion across the entire West Bank. In and around Jenin, Israeli authorities have moved to re-establish the four evacuated settlements, approve new residential sites, and build out the military infrastructure required to secure these new outposts.

Palestinian leaders and activists warn that the end goal is to encircle Jenin with a growing ring of settlements and military bases, cutting the city off from its neighboring villages and tightening Israel’s total control over both land and Palestinian movement in the region. According to Tariq Ighbaria, director of the Jenin-based Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission (CWRC), Israel has approved 11 entirely new settlements in the Jenin area in addition to reviving the four abandoned sites. Settler families have already begun moving into some of the completed sites, while construction of access roads and supporting infrastructure is ongoing across the region.

In late July alone, the Israeli military issued 15 military orders seizing nearly 200 dunams of privately owned Palestinian farmland in Jenin, local settlement monitors confirm. Israeli daily Haaretz later reported that the seized land will be used to connect two new settlements south of Jenin, Noa and Emek Dotan. What makes this seizure particularly unprecedented is its location: the land falls under Area A, a classification defined by the 1993 Oslo Accords that is supposed to be under full civilian and security control of the Palestinian Authority. Kerem Navot, an Israeli anti-settlement monitoring organization, confirmed that this marks the first time the Israeli military has used land seizure orders in Area A to advance illegal settlement expansion, rather than for explicit military purposes.

This breach of the Oslo framework extends beyond land seizures. In June, Haaretz reported that the Israeli military is constructing a permanent military base in the center of Jenin city – the first permanent military outpost built in Area A since the accords were signed. Anonymous sources told the outlet that a core purpose of the new base is to provide security for Israeli settlers returning to the region.

“The landscape of Jenin has changed significantly in recent months due to the return of settlers,” Ighbaria explained. Large swathes of prime Palestinian agricultural land, including centuries-old olive groves, have already been cleared to make way for construction sites, as bulldozers carve new access roads and military installations into the hills. “Bulldozing operations are also continuing in the mountains of Masliya and Qabatiya, while a military base is being constructed in the Jabriyat neighbourhood, classified as Area A and located in the heart of Jenin,” he added.

Ighbaria warned that the total amount of land effectively taken from Palestinian control far exceeds the acreage listed in individual seizure orders. “If 200 dunams are confiscated to construct a road linking two settlements, the road and its security perimeter could effectively lead to the seizure of hundreds of additional dunams, perhaps reaching 600 or 700,” he said. The expanding Israeli-controlled road network has already fundamentally disrupted Palestinian movement across the region, cutting off surrounding villages from Jenin city and severing traditional travel links between Jenin and nearby Palestinian cities including Nablus, Tulkarm and Tubas. For residents of multiple surrounding villages, traveling to Jenin for work, healthcare or education has become increasingly dangerous and difficult, with unregulated settler travel through agricultural land adding to the daily risk of confrontation. “What is happening represents a complete change to the geography of Jenin,” Ighbaria said, describing a growing network of connected settlements and outposts that encircle Palestinian population centers and steadily bring more land under exclusive Israeli control.

The human and economic cost of this rapid expansion is already devastating for Palestinian families whose livelihoods depend on access to their land. South of Jenin, on the Arraba Plain, vineyard owner Tariq al-Shaer was forced to prematurely harvest and sell his entire crop at a wholesale discount after receiving an official order that his 15-year-old vineyard would be demolished and bulldozed. The six-dunum farm, which is home to roughly 750 grapevines, provided a stable income for al-Shaer’s family and 15 additional local workers. “Harvesting the grapes feels like cutting a piece of my soul,” al-Shaer said. “My family and I have worked so hard on this, and no one can help us keep it. The Israeli decision has been made, and that’s final.”

Between the villages of Marqa and Qabatiya, Mohammed Abu Mualla and his brothers received a similar order to demolish their poultry farm, which is also located in Area A. “They gave us only seven days to remove it, and we were forced to do so for fear of its demolition and the destruction of its contents,” Abu Mualla said. “The notice came as a complete surprise to us.”

Land seizures have been paired with widespread demolition orders targeting Palestinian-owned commercial and residential structures, clearing space for new settlement roads and infrastructure. On August 11, Israeli bulldozers demolished 12 Palestinian commercial warehouses in the village of Anza, south of Jenin. The structures stood along a main road that Israeli authorities plan to reroute to serve settler traffic. Hisham Sadaqa, head of Anza’s village council, told Middle East Eye that the village is uniquely vulnerable due to its position along the key Jenin-Nablus road, which will form a critical link between the revived settlements.

The very next day, Israeli forces demolished 27 additional small shops in Deir Abu Daif, east of Jenin. Among the destroyed structures was a new shop built six months earlier by Mohammed Mahamid, who built the business to support his family after he became unable to work due to poor health. “Building these shops cost me 180,000 shekels ($60,000), and my health condition doesn’t allow me to find other work,” Mahamid said. “I hoped the shops would be my source of income so I could settle down, but everything is gone.”

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees civilian affairs in the West Bank and has long pushed for widespread annexation of Palestinian territory, openly celebrated the demolitions on social media, calling them “a step towards resuming settlement activity” in the former Ganim and Kadim settlement areas.

Political analyst and researcher Sanaa Zakarna argues that these recent developments go far beyond expanding settlement activity – they represent a deliberate dismantling of the Oslo Accords framework on the ground. By targeting Area A, which was explicitly designated for full Palestinian control, Israel is erasing the core territorial agreements that have shaped the region for nearly 30 years. Zakarna explained that Israel is leveraging current political and regional conditions to advance long-standing plans to fragment the West Bank into a series of isolated Palestinian cantons, cut off from one another and surrounded by Israeli-controlled territory.

In 2017, Smotrich published what he called “Israel’s Decisive Plan”, a policy blueprint explicitly designed to eliminate Palestinian national aspirations. A core pillar of the plan is the cantonization of the West Bank, splitting the Palestinian population into disconnected, geographically isolated enclaves. Last year, Smotrich went further, unveiling a formal proposal to annex 82 percent of the West Bank to Israel, extending Israeli sovereignty over almost the entire territory while confining the six major Palestinian population centers – Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm, Jericho and Hebron – into separate, disconnected cantons.

Zakarna noted that Jenin’s unique geographic position makes it a key priority for Israel’s settlement strategy. The city sits just a short distance from the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line that marks Israel’s pre-1967 border, and is surrounded by strategically critical transport routes and existing military sites. It is also the center of a thriving agricultural economy, with the fertile Marj Ibn Amer plain, extensive farmland and local stone quarries providing livelihoods for tens of thousands of residents. “Controlling the land means weakening the population’s ability to produce and imposing further economic and security restrictions on them, gradually forcing them to leave,” Zakarna said.

In a sharp escalation of cross-Pacific tensions ahead of a high-stakes bilateral leadership meeting, China issued a formal warning Tuesday that it will respond with reciprocal measures if the United States extends its Iran-focused sanctions campaign to target Chinese enterprises. The diplomatic alert comes one day after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled a new round of penalties designed to further isolate Iran, threatening any nations maintaining trade ties with Tehran with expulsion from the U.S. dollar-centered global financial system.

According to reporting from the Financial Times, Chinese officials have explicitly cautioned against sweeping expansions of secondary sanctions to Chinese businesses, with a foreign ministry spokesperson confirming that China will enact “all necessary measures” to safeguard its national and commercial interests. The spokesperson reaffirmed China’s longstanding stance opposing unilateral sanctions implemented without formal authorization from the United Nations Security Council, and urged all parties to de-escalate tensions and restart diplomatic negotiations to resolve the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict.

The latest U.S. sanctions package targets 60 individuals, corporate entities and vessels, including a small number of entities based in mainland China and Hong Kong. Notably, the measures stopped short of penalizing major Chinese banks that have long been suspected of facilitating trade in Iranian crude oil. When pressed for details on potential future sanctions against large Chinese financial institutions Monday, Bessent stated that no entity is immune from U.S. penalties, though he declined to name specific countries, institutions, or a timeline for potential additional action.

The prospect of broad sanctions on major Chinese companies represents an especially sensitive flashpoint for bilateral relations. For years, China has been the world’s largest purchaser of Iranian crude oil, purchasing approximately 90 percent of Iran’s total oil exports. Most of these purchases flow through smaller independent Chinese refiners widely known as “teapots,” while large state-owned Chinese refiners have largely avoided trading in sanctioned Iranian crude. Even so, Iranian oil shipments to China have dropped dramatically since the U.S. reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports in mid-July.

A full-scale expansion of sanctions against Chinese entities comes at a particularly precarious moment for U.S.-China relations, with just weeks remaining until the expected meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. The two leaders are scheduled to discuss the fragile long-term trade truce the two sides reached last year. To prepare for potential escalations, Beijing has already built out an extensive legal framework that enables it to retaliate against foreign sanctions that harm Chinese companies.

For the U.S., the risks of escalating this dispute are substantial. China holds a dominant market share in the global supply of multiple critical minerals that are core inputs for U.S. manufacturing and high-tech industries. Past Chinese export restrictions have already demonstrated Beijing’s willingness to leverage its control over these critical supply chains as leverage during trade disputes.

Peking University international relations scholar Wang Dong told the Financial Times that it remains unclear whether Washington’s threat of expanded secondary sanctions is primarily a negotiating tactic to pressure Iran, or if it will eventually lead to broad penalties targeting Chinese entities. Even so, Wang confirmed that Beijing is prepared to defend its core economic interests if Chinese entities are targeted.

Beyond its direct trade ties with Iran, China is also working to prevent the wider U.S.-Iran conflict from disrupting global energy supplies across the Middle East. While Iranian crude remains important to China’s energy mix, Beijing also relies heavily on Saudi Arabia and Iraq for oil imports, meaning sustained disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz poses broad economic risks for China. Provisional data from analytics firm Vortexa, cited by Reuters, shows that daily shipping traffic through the strait fell to around five million barrels on Monday, down from more than 20 million barrels before the latest escalation of the Iran conflict.

In recent diplomatic outreach, President Xi Jinping has held meetings with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has held talks with his Kuwaiti counterpart, with regional conflicts topping the agenda for both discussions. Nanjing University international relations expert Zhu Feng told the FT that Beijing has no intention of being drawn directly into the U.S.-Iran conflict, but is growing increasingly concerned about the economic fallout from sustained disruption to shipping and trade in the Persian Gulf. Zhu added that Beijing has consistently encouraged Tehran to engage in ongoing diplomatic negotiations to resolve the standoff.