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A controversial real estate event promoting properties in Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements has sparked fierce debate in New York City, drawing condemnation from Mayor Zohran Mamdani and mass demonstrations from pro-Palestinian activists this week. The expo, hosted Tuesday at Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue, marked the second such event held at the venue since November, showcasing homes in the Israeli settlements of Kfar Eldad and Karnei Shomron alongside guidance for buyers on tax and mortgage arrangements.

Under international law, Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank is deemed illegal by the United Nations, and all Israeli settlements constructed on occupied Palestinian territory are classified as unlawful. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits occupying powers from transferring their own civilian populations into occupied territory, a core legal principle that underpins global opposition to Israeli settlement expansion.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, one day after the event, Mamdani made clear his firm opposition to the expo. “When we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land, which includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law, that is something that I firmly disagree with,” the mayor said. He added that the event ran counter to the views of most New Yorkers, noting that settlement expansion is a core driver of the ongoing displacement of Palestinian people from their ancestral land.

Hundreds of demonstrators organized by the Palestinian advocacy group Pal-Awda gathered near the synagogue Tuesday to protest the event. A heavy deployment of NYPD officers and barricades corralled the crowd a full block away from the venue, and Pal-Awda issued a scathing statement Wednesday accusing police of widespread excessive force. The organization claims law enforcement violently kettled and barricaded peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters while allowing pro-Zionist counter-protesters to operate freely, adding that officers used pepper spray on demonstrators and physically assaulted attendees through aggressive grabbing and shoving.

Video footage provided to independent outlet Middle East Eye by Pal-Awda captured a tense late-night standoff, with officers shouting orders for protesters to pull back from the barricades as the crowd pushed against the barriers. In his remarks Wednesday, Mamdani struck a careful balance, affirming that the city upholds the fundamental right to peaceful protest while also guaranteeing that all New Yorkers can access houses of worship safely. The mayor declined to criticize police conduct, saying officers “ensured [both rights] yesterday.”

The incident comes amid long-simmering tension over the Mamdani administration’s approach to policing pro-Palestinian activism. Before his inauguration in January, the mayor confirmed he would retain outgoing Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a move that drew condemnation from more than 100 grassroots organizations across the country in December. Critics argue Tisch has overseen a harsh crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and note she hails from one of New York’s wealthiest and most politically influential families. In their December statement, the advocacy groups said retaining Tisch aligns the Mamdani administration with the NYPD’s long history of racialized policing, surveillance and political repression, representing a retreat from the justice and liberation values the mayor campaigned on.

Pal-Awda has also leveled a separate legal criticism against the expo, saying organizers required entry to be cleared through a stringent vetting process that uses religious and political screening criteria. The group argues these requirements violate the U.S. Fair Housing Act and federal anti-discrimination laws, particularly for the event’s Manhattan-based real estate offerings that were only open to a pre-approved select group. Pal-Awda condemned what it called “shameful that Zionist agencies continue to hide their illegal activities in houses of worship.”

The controversy is not the first effort by Palestinian advocates to challenge the marketing of occupied West Bank land to New York residents. Back in March 2024, Palestinian lawyers and advocates submitted an official demand letter to New York’s attorney general, calling for a formal audit and investigation into these sales. A demand letter typically serves as the final step before legal action is filed, and Pal-Awda confirmed this week that no official response has been received from the attorney general’s office.

In his Wednesday remarks, Mamdani also sought to draw a clear line between political criticism of Israeli government policy and religious bigotry, reaffirming that “there is no tolerance for antisemitism” in New York City. “Critique of the policies of a government are very much separate from bigotry towards the people of a specific religious faith,” he said.

Against the backdrop of relentless conflict and widespread destruction across Gaza, a small, determined group of Palestinian women volunteers is waging a quiet, urgent battle to save one of Gaza’s most significant cultural treasures from total loss. Their mission centers on the centuries-old library of the Great Omari Mosque, a historic institution reduced to rubble by repeated Israeli bombardment amid the ongoing Gaza genocide.

Raneem Mousa, a 35-year-old master’s graduate in Arabic language, is one of the volunteer leads on this improvised rescue effort. As she carefully dislodges a water-damaged volume from a war-shattered shelf, she uses a simple hand brush to sweep away decades of dust mixed with rubble and shrapnel before passing the text to a teammate for a gentle wipe down. The recovered book is then carried to the group’s self-designated “safest corner” — a tiny, makeshift holding space tucked away in the damaged mosque, where all salvageable texts are stored.

When Mousa first arrived at the site after the most recent strikes, the scene was one of total devastation. “The library was filled with shrapnel, rubble, and dung from stray animals taking shelter,” she recalled in an interview with Middle East Eye. “Hundreds of shattered books and torn papers were scattered on the ground, covered in stones.”

The volunteers, all affiliated with Gaza City’s Eyes on Heritage Institute, have framed their work as a “first-aid mission” to stabilize and preserve whatever can be saved from the library’s irreplaceable collection. Working without any specialized conservation tools, professional cleaning supplies, or formal institutional support, the group has relied on the most basic of materials: dry cloths, simple household brushes, and open air to dry waterlogged volumes damaged by seasonal rain.

The Great Omari Mosque itself carries profound historical weight: as Gaza’s largest and oldest place of worship, it sits on a site that has hosted sacred structures for millennia, evolving from a Philistine temple to a Roman place of worship, then a Byzantine church, before being converted to a mosque in the 13th century. Its library, ranked the third-largest in all Palestine, once held roughly 20,000 volumes, including 187 rare manuscripts, some of which dated back more than 500 years. Over the course of the ongoing conflict, Israeli forces have bombed the mosque at least three times, leaving the structure in ruins and the library’s collection decimated.

Despite the crippling challenges of ongoing siege, mass displacement, and a total lack of resources, Mousa and her teammates refuse to abandon their work. For them, this effort is about far more than saving old books: it is a defense of Palestinian identity and historical claims to their land. “This library has an educational and historical value that underscores the Palestinian historical right to their home,” Mousa explained.

Time is not on their side. Months of exposure to Gaza’s humid, wet winter conditions have accelerated decay, with fungi growing on paper pages and the ink slowly eroding away. “Every time a page crumbles in my hand, I feel a pang of guilt, as if a witness to history is dying,” Mousa said.

Every step of the rescue work is an exercise in improvisation and sacrifice. Coordinated via a simple WhatsApp group chat, volunteers must arrange trips to the mosque amid conditions that have made travel across Gaza nearly impossible: most of the territory’s population is displaced, nearly all vehicles have been destroyed, and fuel is so scarce that even short journeys cost more than most Gazans can afford. Mousa herself lost her home in Jabalia, northern Gaza, to an Israeli strike, and now lives in a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah — a displacement that leaves her constantly worried about being able to afford the trip to continue her work.

The group also lacks safe storage for the books they recover. All volunteers live in overcrowded temporary shelters, so there is no space to move salvaged volumes off-site. The small corner they have set aside in the damaged mosque remains under constant threat from the elements. “We often have to clean them again because the building is still in ruins and offers no real protection,” Mousa noted. “We are racing against the weather; the winter rain and wet wind are just as much an enemy as the bombs were.”

Mousa says the group’s long-term hope is to secure international funding for proper storage shelves, professional conservation materials, and the equipment needed to digitize the entire surviving collection, preserving these texts digitally even if the physical copies are lost. “People in Gaza have always taken pride in education and culture,” she said. “If we, the educated generation, do not protect these books, who will preserve them for those who come after us?”

Haneen al-Amasi, 33, director of the all-women Eyes on Heritage Institute, founded the organization in 2009 with a core mission: to rescue, restore, and digitize rare books, manuscripts, and historical documents across Gaza, to safeguard Palestinian cultural heritage for future generations. It was not until a brief ceasefire in March 2025 that al-Amasi was able to visit the Great Omari Mosque library for the first time since the current conflict began — and she said she was unprepared for the scale of the destruction. “Entire archives of books, manuscripts and historical documents were burned or shattered in Israeli attacks,” she told Middle East Eye. “Many others were damaged, eaten by rodents, or taken by displaced people to be used as fuel amid severe gas shortages in Gaza.”

Many of the lost and damaged texts are irreplaceable: original documents recording centuries of Palestinian life, including scholarly works on jurisprudence, geography, and social customs, with many capturing unique details of life in the Palestinian territories before the 1948 Nakba.

Al-Amasi argues that the deliberate targeting of libraries and cultural institutions is part of a broader Israeli campaign to erase Palestinian collective memory by destroying the physical evidence of their history and connection to the land. This is not the first time the institute has lost its work to Israeli strikes: during the 2014 Gaza offensive, the group’s original office in eastern Gaza City was bombed, killing five volunteer women who had fled their homes in Shujaiya and taken shelter in the building, and destroying hundreds of books and manuscripts that the team had already archived.

After that attack, the devastated but determined team rebuilt their operations in a new location, and over the following years managed to recover and digitize hundreds more rare manuscripts, some dating back to the medieval period. In September 2025, that second office was also destroyed in an Israeli air strike. “Once again, we lost our library,” al-Amasi said simply.

Even after repeated loss, the group has refused to end their work. “We feel it is our duty to keep striving to preserve and revive Palestinian cultural heritage in Gaza,” al-Amasi said. She has reached out to multiple international humanitarian and cultural organizations to request support, but says most global actors prioritize immediate needs like food and medical care in Gaza, ignoring the crisis facing Palestinian cultural heritage. “I believe cultural heritage is just as important,” she emphasized. “Future generations in Palestine will ask what we did to preserve our history.”

Back at the Great Omari Mosque, the volunteers continue their slow, painstaking work, even as violence and crisis unfold around them. Al-Amasi recalls a time before the current war, when Gaza’s schoolchildren took part in regular reading competitions at the mosque library, an event that drew eager crowds of young learners. Today, Gaza’s children spend their days queuing for food aid and clean water, growing up surrounded by constant trauma from war. “By saving these books, we are trying to ensure that when the war ends, our children have something to read other than news of death,” al-Amasi said.

Fresh analysis of declassified satellite imagery has uncovered that the true scale of damage inflicted by Iranian strikes on United States military infrastructure across the Middle East has been dramatically understated in earlier public disclosures and media reporting, according to a sweeping new investigation.

The Washington Post’s inquiry, which cross-referenced high-resolution satellite data with on-the-ground intelligence, has concluded that Iranian aerial attacks have damaged or completely destroyed at least 228 distinct structures and pieces of military equipment at US-operated sites throughout the region since the outbreak of the current conflict in late February. The targeted assets include critical military infrastructure: aircraft hangars, troop barracks, fuel storage depots, fixed-wing aircraft, and high-value radar, communications, and air defense systems that underpin US military operations in the Gulf.

The outlet’s findings confirm that the total scope of destruction far exceeds the casualty and damage figures that the US government has previously acknowledged publicly. To date, Iranian attacks have claimed the lives of seven US service members: six based in Kuwait and one in Saudi Arabia, while more than 400 additional troops have sustained a range of injuries from the strikes, according to the investigation.

The wave of Iranian strikes across regional targets was launched in response to the joint US-Israeli assault on Iran, which has killed more than 3,500 Iranian people, per data compiled by Hrana, a US-based Iranian human rights organization. The majority of Iranian counterattacks have focused on US military assets positioned across Gulf Cooperation Council states.

On Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates confirmed that Iran had launched a second consecutive day of strikes on its territory, unleashing a heavy barrage of drone and missile attacks. Abu Dhabi officials added that one of the strikes ignited a large fire at an oil refinery in Fujairah, leaving three Indian nationals wounded.

The escalation comes amid chaotic shifts in US military strategy around the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Iran closed the strategic waterway in response to the US-Israeli assault, triggering a global energy crisis. An estimated 20% of the world’s daily crude oil shipments and a fifth of global liquefied natural gas supplies pass through the strait, which sits between Iran and Oman. The International Energy Agency has confirmed that the closure has caused the largest single loss of global energy supply in history, cutting more than 10 million barrels of daily oil output from global markets and reducing worldwide LNG supplies by one-fifth.

Just one day after the Pentagon launched a new escorted shipping operation through the strait dubbed “Project Freedom” – a mission supported by more than 100 aircraft and roughly 15,000 US military personnel, according to US Central Command – former President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he was halting the operation in an unexpected move to pursue a negotiated agreement with Iran to de-escalate the conflict.

Deep in the fertile Baqa’a Valley east of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 68-year-old Palestinian farmer Zuhur Tarwa stood frozen in disbelief when Israeli military markings suddenly stretched across the vineyard she had nurtured for years alongside her two daughters. For seasons, the couple’s 200 grapevines had grown lush with broad green foliage, building anticipation of a bountiful annual harvest. That harvest never came: first the official confiscation order arrived, and within days, bulldozers rolled onto the land.

“They razed the entire plot, uprooting every grapevine and every other crop we had growing,” Tarwa told Middle East Eye in an interview days after the destruction. “All we are left with now is grief at this empty sight.”

Tarwa’s family’s devastating loss is not an isolated incident. It is part of a growing, systematic pattern of land seizure unfolding across Hebron, a region long celebrated for growing some of the finest grapes in the Middle East. The Israeli military has recently seized large tracts of privately owned Palestinian agricultural land to expand Route 60, a major highway that connects Israeli settlements scattered across the West Bank. The 235-kilometer road expansion project has already required the seizure of tens of thousands of dunams of Palestinian-held land, according to local and official records.

Bulldozing operations began earlier this week across multiple districts of Hebron, with local grassroots sources confirming that at least 400 dunams of productive vineyards, holding roughly 40,000 mature grapevines, have been destroyed so far. Tarwa’s daughters owned 2.8 dunams of the seized land; adjacent property belonging to Tarwa’s brother-in-law has already been reduced from a thriving cultivated vineyard to barren, cleared dirt. “Nothing can stop their plans or their heavy machinery,” Tarwa said. “We are powerless here—all we can do is mourn what we’ve lost.”

For Hebron’s Palestinian communities, grapes are far more than just a commercial crop. They are a centuries-old symbol of cultural identity, deeply rooted in the land, and a core source of household income for hundreds of families. Grapes rank as Palestine’s second-largest agricultural product, only behind olives, with dozens of families in the al-Baqa’a Valley relying entirely on grape cultivation to make ends meet. The entire Baqa’a region, which spans roughly 10,000 dunams of fertile soil stretching from Beit Einun and Bani Na’im to the Qizoun area, counts among the most productive vineyard regions in the entire West Bank.

For decades, Israeli forces and civilian settlers have targeted Palestinian olive groves, destroying a critical livelihood asset for thousands of families across the occupied territories. In recent years, this systematic pressure has expanded to include vineyards, concentrated heavily in the Hebron and Bethlehem regions. The latest round of bulldozing and land seizure comes just weeks ahead of the annual grape harvest, compounding the financial and emotional harm for affected farming households.

Atta Jaber, an anti-settlement activist who owns family vineyards in the Baqa’a Valley, explained that the ongoing confiscations and destruction are a deliberate strategy to force Palestinian farmers off their ancestral land. Jaber’s own family has cultivated grapes in the region for more than a century, and has already lost swathes of property to previous Israeli seizures: part of their land was taken in 1970 to build the Kiryat Arba settlement, with additional land seized in 1985 for the construction of the Kharsina settlement. Beyond the loss of farmland, the expansion of settlements has also led to home demolitions and the displacement of dozens of local Palestinian families.

“In 1995, Israeli bulldozers suddenly arrived to pave the first iteration of Route 60 through our land,” Jaber recalled. “That was our third major loss after the two settlements were established, and it cut off the livelihoods of nearly 800 Palestinian families in this area alone.” Before the latest round of uprooting, Jaber’s vineyard generated a minimum of 60,000 Israeli shekels, around $20,000, in annual income, money that supported his entire extended family. “I care for my grapevines like my own children,” he said. “We have no other source of income here—this is how we were raised, and what we pass down to our children: the land is everything, it is our livelihood and our future. But Israel is systematically destroying all of that.”

Data collected by Palestinian advocacy groups confirms that the targeting of Palestinian fruit trees by Israeli forces and settlers has escalated sharply in recent years, shifting from scattered, isolated incidents to a consistent, systematic pattern across multiple regions of the West Bank. Figures from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission show that approximately 35,273 olive, grape, and fig trees were either uprooted, damaged, or poisoned in 2025 alone—a statistic that highlights the severe damage to Palestinian farmers’ livelihoods and the wider agricultural sector of the occupied territories.

Across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, tens of thousands of dunams of land are dedicated to grape cultivation. According to Mahmoud Fatafta, spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, Hebron and its surrounding northern regions alone hold around 37,500 dunams of cultivated grapevines. In the Baqa’a Valley specifically, roughly 1,300 dunams are planted with grape vines, producing an estimated 13,000 tonnes of table grapes and 1,000 tonnes of grape leaves for commercial sale each year, Fatafta told Middle East Eye.

Despite the region’s natural fertility and generations of agricultural expertise, Palestinian agricultural officials warn that the grape sector now faces existential threats, including repeated land confiscations that have shrunk total cultivated areas, as well as ongoing attacks on vineyards and farmers by Israeli settlers. Fatafta confirmed that around 200 dunams of vines have already been bulldozed and uprooted in al-Baqa’a, warning that destruction operations are continuing in what he calls a deliberate, systematic campaign to eliminate Palestinian vineyard cultivation in the region.

Tensions in one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints have taken a sudden turn, after former U.S. President Donald Trump announced a temporary halt to Washington’s newly launched naval escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz. The pause, he says, comes amid unexpected signals that a breakthrough in a negotiated agreement with Iran could be close at hand.

Launched just days earlier amid an ongoing Iranian blockade of the strategic waterway, the U.S. mission — codenamed Operation Project Freedom — was framed by the Trump administration as an effort to free commercial vessels blocked by Tehran and secure safe passage for global maritime traffic. In a post to his Truth Social platform, Trump clarified that while the naval escort operation will be paused for a short window, the existing economic blockade on Iran will stay fully in place, unchanged.

The pause was agreed following a request from Pakistan and other partner nations, Trump explained, to create space for negotiators to work toward finalizing and signing a new agreement between Washington and Tehran. A spokesperson for U.S. Central Command (Centcom) had previously characterized the initiative as a targeted temporary mission to protect maritime transit, designed to create what officials called a “safe corridor” and “security umbrella” spanning the strait. The spokesperson added that the U.S. had already received encouraging feedback from international shipowners and maritime insurance providers ahead of the pause. The operation, which drew on a force of more than 100 aircraft and roughly 15,000 military personnel, was billed by Trump when it launched on Sunday as a humanitarian mission to retrieve vessels that Tehran had barred from exiting the waterway. At that time, the president issued a sharp warning to Iran, stating that any attempt to interfere with the operation would trigger an immediate U.S. military response.

The days leading up to the pause have been marked by competing, conflicting claims of military clashes between the two nations. Shortly after Trump’s initial warning, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that Iranian forces had hit a U.S. warship with two missiles as it moved through the strait. Trump quickly denied the report the following Monday, and instead claimed that only a South Korean-flagged vessel had been struck, adding that U.S. forces had destroyed seven Iranian fast-attack boats operating in the Gulf. Iran has since denied Trump’s account of the clash.

Located between Iran on its northern coast and Oman to the south, the Strait of Hormuz is widely recognized as the world’s most vital energy chokepoint. Roughly one-fifth of the globe’s daily crude oil and global liquefied natural gas supplies transit through the narrow waterway, making any disruption to shipping there a critical concern for global energy markets. The International Energy Agency has previously noted that a full or prolonged closure of the strait would cause the largest global supply disruption in history, cutting off more than 10 million barrels of daily oil output and reducing global LNG supplies by 20 percent.

Trump’s announcement of the operational pause comes against a backdrop of steadily escalating regional tensions, even after a regional ceasefire went into effect on April 8. Just days before the pause, U.S. military forces claimed to have targeted multiple Iranian vessels operating in the strait. Separately, the United Arab Emirates’ defense ministry has accused Iran of carrying out back-to-back days of missile and drone attacks on Emirati territory. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson has rejected those accusations as entirely unfounded, insisting that all recent Iranian military action has been directed solely at U.S. targets. The spokesperson added in an official statement that Iran will not hesitate to take all necessary and appropriate measures to defend its core national interests and territorial security.