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Tensions across the Middle East escalated sharply this week as Israel launched a major new bombardment of Lebanon just as the United States and Iran hold high-stakes indirect ceasefire negotiations, drawing accusations that the offensive is deliberately intended to derail diplomatic progress. The attack, which has already left dozens dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, comes amid parallel developments exposing alleged abuses against international humanitarian activists attempting to break Israel’s years-long siege of Gaza, with organizers demanding a full investigation into direct U.S. complicity in the mistreatment of their members.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces carried out more than 120 airstrikes targeting areas across southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, in a direct violation of the 45-day ceasefire that took effect last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the government would intensify its military campaign, confirming the expansion of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon beyond the country’s previously declared “security zone.” Israeli officials have ordered residents of dozens of Lebanese villages to remain out of their homes, as the military pushes to establish a new buffer zone extending between 5 and 10 kilometers into Lebanese territory.

Lebanon’s health ministry confirmed that 31 people were killed in the Tuesday strikes, including 14 residents of the southern town of Burj al-Shamali — among them two children and three women. More than 40 others were wounded. Since Israel launched its full-scale offensive in Lebanon in early March, the death toll has climbed to over 3,200 killed and more than 9,700 injured. Even after the April truce went into effect, more than 600 people have lost their lives to ongoing violence.

Israel’s military strategy in Lebanon follows what Defense Minister Israel Katz has called the “Gaza model”: widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure to force mass displacement. Before last month’s ceasefire, more than 40,000 homes across southern Lebanon were either destroyed or damaged, with demolition operations continuing after the truce. The offensive has displaced more than 1 million Lebanese people, a humanitarian catastrophe that has gone largely underreported in global media. In response to the renewed Israeli strikes, Hezbollah launched drone attacks against Israeli targets, continuing the cross-border exchanges that have persisted through months of declared ceasefires.

The timing of the renewed offensive has sparked fierce criticism from inside and outside Israel, with many observers arguing the attack is intended to sabotage ongoing ceasefire negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. The influential far-right Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly acknowledged this framing Tuesday, stating explicitly that the entire Israeli cabinet is unified in opposing any potential peace deal that would end the current conflict. “This is an agreement that can harm the state of Israel, and we will not allow this to happen,” Ben-Gvir said in remarks to reporters, adding that the government should cut off electricity across Lebanon, occupy territory up to the Zahrani River, and return to full-scale massive war. Fellow far-right cabinet member Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich doubled down on the aggressive rhetoric, calling for Israel to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut for every Hezbollah drone attack, and expand demolitions to other major Lebanese cities if necessary.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former Israeli foreign ministry diplomat and current prominent critic of the country’s regional policy, explained that the deepening incursion into Lebanon is designed to kill both the proposed Lebanese ceasefire and the U.S.-Iran talks entirely. “Israel was “moving to bury not only the supposed ceasefire in Lebanon but also talks on Iran” because its policy “is an endless and wide regional war,” Ben-Ephraim said, adding “Israel forced the US into war and won’t let us end it.”

The negotiations, which do not include Israeli representatives, come as U.S. President Donald Trump has framed the latest round of talks as promising, even as details of the proposed framework remain contested. On Wednesday, Reuters reported, citing Iranian state television, that Tehran has received an unofficial U.S. proposal that would restore pre-war commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for a 30-day period, in exchange for a U.S. troop withdrawal from the region surrounding Iran and an end to the U.S. naval blockade. The U.S. has publicly disputed this account of the proposed framework. While Iran has condemned recent U.S. attacks as acts of bad faith and clear violations of prior ceasefire commitments, it has not walked away from the negotiating table. Nuclear issues, which were a core sticking point in earlier U.S.-Iran negotiations, have been pushed to future talks, but Iran has made clear that a lasting peace deal requires an end to Israel’s assault on Lebanon.

Separately, international activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, an organization that organizes humanitarian voyages to break Israel’s siege of Gaza, released detailed testimonies this week documenting widespread abuse, torture, and sexual assault of their members at the hands of Israeli forces after their latest flotilla was intercepted in international waters. The activists are calling for a full investigation into U.S. complicity in the abuses, noting that both the ship used by Israeli forces to detain participants and the weapons used to attack them were built and paid for by the United States government.

Testimonies from the 428 abducted participants describe brutal, systematic abuse. According to the GSF media statement, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container, where groups of three to five soldiers beat each person while other waiting captives heard their screams. One participant, Yassine Benjelloun, described being beaten repeatedly within minutes of being detained: “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on the flotilla, documented 35 participants with fractured or dislocated bones, severe head injuries including concussions and eye and ear trauma, and 14 confirmed cases of sexual assault. Dr. Jihan, who was herself assaulted, forcibly stripped of her hijab, and choked by Israeli soldiers, described the experience of being unable to treat injured captives as devastating. “Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people. But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have,” she said.

The Israeli amphibious landing ship used to detain the activists, the INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and fully financed by U.S. taxpayers. The vessel was previously used to detain participants from an earlier Gaza-bound flotilla, where dozens of activists required medical care for broken bones sustained during beatings. The weapons used against the civilian activists, including stun grenades and metal projectile rounds, were manufactured by Combined Tactical Systems, a Pennsylvania-based U.S. weapons manufacturer. GSF reports that these weapons were fired at close range into enclosed spaces at participants who were sitting or sleeping, in direct violation of the manufacturer’s own safety guidelines.

Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official who resigned in 2023 to protest U.S. arms transfers to Israel amid its war in Gaza, confirmed that the use of U.S.-origin equipment for this abuse violates U.S. law. “Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorized by law,” Paul said. “INS Nahshon‘s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.” Paul noted that the risk of misuse was clear decades ago, after the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla raid that killed nine activists, including a Turkish-American teenager, but U.S. officials continued to approve arms transfers regardless. “Anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse – whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer or a boat,” he said.

GSF emphasizes that the abuse of their members is not an isolated incident, but a direct consequence of decades of unconditional U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, which GSF says has enabled the Israeli government to commit sustained war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinian people. Successive U.S. administrations, under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have provided tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and used United Nations Security Council vetoes to block dozens of ceasefire resolutions for Gaza. Since the October 2023 Hamas attack that triggered the latest Gaza war, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza, displaced roughly 2 million more, and subjected the enclave to widespread deliberate starvation and lack of access to clean water and medicine.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are currently the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa and supported by nearly 20 United Nations member states. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. A United Nations panel of experts concluded last year that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a finding endorsed by dozens of governments, hundreds of human rights groups, and leading legal scholars, including prominent Israeli and Jewish Holocaust experts.

Flotilla organizers stressed that the abuse their members endured for a few days is nothing compared to the ongoing suffering of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention, many held without charge or trial under the country’s administrative detention system. Israeli authorities are currently investigating the deaths of dozens of Palestinian prisoners, with multiple reports of extrajudicial execution, torture, rape, and widespread sexual abuse of detained Palestinians. “What GSF participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access,” the GSF statement said.

GSF is calling on the U.S. government to open an immediate investigation into Israel’s use of U.S.-origin arms and equipment to abuse American citizens, suspend all arms transfers to Israel until the probe is complete, and end the longstanding policy of unconditional military and diplomatic support for what GSF calls a regime actively committing genocide. Legal proceedings are already active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault connected to the flotilla incident, but the U.S. government has so far declined to take any action, matching its pattern of turning a blind eye to Israeli violations of international law.

A new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has revealed that UN peacekeeping operations have fallen to their lowest resource and deployment level in a quarter-century, driven by delayed and reduced mandatory contributions from major donor nations, with the United States at the center of the trend. The findings, released ahead of the International Day of UN Peacekeepers observed Friday, paint a stark picture of eroding support for multilateral conflict management amid growing geopolitical polarization.

Last week, international headlines focused on Israeli forces intercepting a sea-bound pro-Palestinian aid flotilla heading to Gaza. What gained less immediate attention, however, was a parallel disruption 2,000 kilometers to the west, where a land-based wing of the same Global Sumud solidarity movement saw its journey to the besieged enclave collapse into detention and chaos.

More than 200 activists with the Global Sumud Convoy pushed into the 5+5 security zone outside the Libyan city of Sirte, a buffer zone established under the country’s 2020 ceasefire agreement that has remained a contested flashpoint. The group’s goal was simple: negotiate safe passage through eastern Libya to Egypt’s Rafah crossing, the primary entry point for aid into blockaded Gaza.

After days of camping in the zone, armed forces arrived at the encampment and broke up the convoy. Most participants were forcibly escorted back to the capital Tripoli under armed guard, but 10 international activists from Spain, Poland, the United States, Argentina, Uruguay, Portugal, Tunisia and Italy were taken into custody and remain held by Libyan authorities.

Speaking to Middle East Eye from her home in Johannesburg, South Africa, activist Jessica Breakey, who returned after the dismantling, described the group’s reluctance to leave their detained comrades behind. “We just didn’t want to leave without them,” she said. “It was always like we were in this together, like this convoy was moving together – and I think the worst part about the camp being dismantled and us having to go back was that we were going back without them.”

Libya has been fractured along political and geographic lines since the 2011 NATO-backed overthrow of former ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Eastern Libya is controlled by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) led by commander Khalifa Haftar, backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, while a UN-supported unity government governs the western half of the country, including Tripoli.

The Global Sumud Convoy, launched by North African activists and later joined by hundreds of international participants, set out from Mauritania with a clear mission: deliver tangible, practical aid to Gaza that would go beyond the largely symbolic impact of previous sea-based flotillas. The convoy carried seven ambulances, 10 aid trucks, 20 mobile homes, and a team of medical professionals, engineers, educators and legal observers. Its progress across North Africa was largely uneventful until it reached the Sirte security zone.

Negotiations for onward passage hit a breaking point on Sunday, when the convoy’s negotiating team was arrested. The following day, security forces arrived at the camp, forced the remaining activists onto buses at gunpoint, and even fired tear gas into a nearby mosque where some activists had taken shelter. It remains unclear which authority the security forces were directly affiliated with.

Breakey noted that the treatment in Sirte stood in sharp contrast to the warm welcome and widespread public support the convoy received from Libyan civilians on its journey from Tripoli westward. She also criticized the Libyan Red Crescent, which had publicly expressed support for the convoy but failed to attend planned negotiations with Haftar’s representatives, effectively going “missing in action” as the crisis unfolded. “It’s crazy looking back at a time when we actually were very, very hopeful,” she added.

Shortly after the raid, the eastern Libyan government’s foreign ministry announced new restrictions barring non-Libyan and non-Egyptian travelers from moving onward to Egypt. The ministry defended its actions, saying it handled the situation “within the framework of legal and humanitarian responsibility,” and claimed all detainees “are receiving the necessary care and medical and humanitarian follow-up.” It also reaffirmed Libya’s formal support for the Palestinian cause, but stressed that “respect for national sovereignty and the legal regulations governing the movement of individuals across borders is non-negotiable.”

Human rights monitors have repeatedly documented widespread abuses in areas controlled by Haftar’s LAAF. Amnesty International reports that the LAAF and its affiliated armed groups severely restrict freedom of expression and association, targeting anyone perceived as a critic or opponent of Haftar. “Libyans, as well as refugees and migrants, detained by LAAF, which exercises government-like functions in areas under its control, risk torture and other ill-treatment, as well as prolonged detention amid flagrant due process violations,” explained Sara Hashash, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Despite repeated reassurances from eastern Libyan officials, friends and fellow activists have grown increasingly anxious about the conditions and extended detention of the 10 activists. The coinciding timing of Eid al-Adha has reportedly slowed diplomatic progress and limited contact with detainees.

On Thursday, Italy’s consul general in Benghazi confirmed he had visited the two Italian detainees held at a police barracks in eastern Libya. Following the visit, eastern Libyan authorities agreed to minor improvements to detention conditions, allowing access to showers, clean clothes and better accommodation, but have not released any information about possible deportation or release procedures.

Not all criticism of the incident has come from outside the convoy: some participating activists say the mission suffered from fatal planning flaws from its start. Felipe, a 29-year-old Chilean-Palestinian activist with experience on previous sea-based aid flotillas, argues the convoy’s leadership bore partial responsibility for the outcome.

During a two-week wait in Tripoli, Felipe said it became clear that organizers had made no contingency plans for detentions or a confrontation with the LAAF. “If we were not able to go through east Libya, we should not have kept pressuring them because we were going to shift the narrative from Israel to Libya,” he said. “We were waiting in the desert for nine days doing nothing.”

He added that leadership sidelined critical voices ahead of the push into the security zone. “The day before [the raid], when they decided to go to the [eastern Libyan] border, I was not invited to the meeting because I was being critical. Their plan was basically to have a permanent camp or to do a hunger strike on the border,” he explained. Felipe added that the group was camped at an abandoned, bullet-riddled gas station that was once used by the Islamic State group, and many participants did not grasp the severity of their location or the risks. After the arrests, he argued, the convoy should have retreated to the western city of Misrata, as it had no resources or leverage to secure the detainees’ release. The entire experience, he said, left him disillusioned with land-based aid efforts: “Our people risked their lives to end the siege on Gaza… we came here and we risked our lives for nothing.”

Analysts and rights advocates warn the incident could mark the end of any future land-based aid convoys attempting to cross Libya to reach Gaza. In recent years, Haftar has repeatedly signaled his interest in building diplomatic and economic ties with Israel, including through reported secret visits to meet Israeli officials, though it is unclear whether this influenced the LAAF’s handling of the convoy.

Estelle Allemann, a legal researcher at the Mena Rights Group, called the new restrictions imposed by eastern Libyan authorities “a deeply troubling attempt to weaponise border control against humanitarian solidarity with Palestinians.” She added, “Restricting the movement of aid convoy activists under the guise of travel policy raises serious concerns about the criminalisation of civilian support for Gaza, and would fit a broader regional pattern of suppressing pro-Palestinian activism.”

Middle East Eye attempted to contact the eastern Libyan foreign ministry for additional comment, but had not received a response by the time of publication. In a formal statement released Thursday, the Maghreb Sumud Organisation, one of the convoy’s lead organizers, issued a clarification of recent events. It confirmed that all non-detained participants have been instructed to return to their home countries, with only a small team of senior officials remaining in Libya to continue diplomatic and legal efforts to secure the release of the 10 detainees and coordinate the delivery of the planned aid. The group emphasized that the Global Sumud Convoy was never intended as an act of confrontation, but rather an independent, civilian humanitarian initiative to show moral solidarity with Gazans facing ongoing siege, widespread starvation, and total humanitarian collapse.

Even as Palestinian residents of the blockaded Gaza Strip gathered to mark the holy Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha, Israeli military operations did not pause, with local authorities documenting thousands of breaches of a months-old nominal truce.

The most high-profile strike of the holiday period hit a multi-story residential building in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, carried out overnight Tuesday into Wednesday. Al Jazeera reports that as of initial casualty counts, six people have been confirmed dead in the attack.

Israeli military officials have confirmed the strike targeted Mohammed Odeh, the recently appointed leader of Hamas’s armed wing, who stepped into the role in mid-May following the death of his predecessor Izz al-Din al-Haddad. The killing of Odeh has not received official confirmation from Hamas as of Wednesday, but an anonymous Hamas source speaking to Agence France-Presse confirmed that Odeh’s wife and two children were also killed in the air raid, and that a formal funeral procession would be held Wednesday afternoon in central Gaza City.

The targeted strike is just one of thousands of truce violations that have occurred since a tentative ceasefire agreement first took effect in October, according to data from the Gaza Government Media Office. The office’s official statement released Wednesday pegs total confirmed violations at 3,005, with actions ranging from large-scale aerial bombings and deliberate strikes on civilian infrastructure to widespread home demolitions, repeated ground incursions into residential neighborhoods and ongoing small-arms fire against civilian populations.

Since the truce was signed, the ongoing Israeli operations have left a devastating toll on Gaza’s civilian population: more than 910 non-combatant Palestinians have been killed, another 2,747 have suffered injuries, and 82 additional people have been detained or abducted by Israeli forces during incursions into the enclave.

Compounding the humanitarian crisis, Israeli border restrictions have continued to block the vast majority of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, with more than 64 percent of all scheduled relief shipments denied entry as of this week. The blocked shipments include critical lifesaving supplies: food, clean drinking water, pharmaceutical products, fuel for medical generators and other basic necessities that Gaza’s population already suffers acute shortages of.

Local media reports, citing sources in Gaza’s overstretched health system, note that more than 12 additional people have been killed across the enclave in Israeli strikes over the 24-hour period ending Wednesday morning. Beyond the al-Rimal strike, Israeli forces launched new operations at dawn Wednesday: airstrikes hit areas east of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, while artillery shelling was reported in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.

This reporting is part of independent coverage from Middle East Eye, which specializes in on-the-ground reporting and analysis of the Middle East and North Africa region.

Weeks after publicly breaking ranks with Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces — the paramilitary group widely accused of perpetrating genocide in the country’s Darfur region — a top defector has appeared in new footage performing the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, triggering fierce divided debate across Sudanese digital communities.

Circulated publicly by Al Jazeera on Tuesday, the video shows Ali Rizqallah, better known by his battlefield alias Savannah, standing at the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site. He presses his palms against the structure’s iconic black kiswa cloth, offering public prayers for his war-ravaged homeland as thousands of fellow pilgrims circle the site behind him. In the audio recording of the clip, Savannah calls on God to grant unity to Sudanese forces, halt ongoing bloodshed, end the two-year civil war, lift the nation’s crippling crisis, and bring judgment against what he terms “every tyrant”.

Savannah’s defection from the RSF was first announced in a formal video statement on May 11. Just four days after that announcement, he reemerged in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, where he pledged to take up arms alongside the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) against his former comrades in the conflict zones of Kordofan and Darfur. Before his split from the group, Savannah stood among the RSF’s most powerful and high-profile field commanders. He led multiple operations that allowed the paramilitary force to seize key strategic territories across North Darfur and West Kordofan, including the critical town of al-Nahud, and has been linked to the recruitment of foreign fighters from neighboring Chad and Niger.

A former leader of an independent armed movement, Savannah was first integrated into the SAF with the rank of brigadier general under a 2013 peace deal with the government of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. He was stripped of that rank by a military court in 2021, following Bashir’s ouster from power, and only joined the RSF when the current civil war broke out in mid-April 2023. During a May 16 press conference in Khartoum, Savannah framed his initial decision to align with the RSF as one born of coercion, not ideology. He claimed he had no other option amid widespread intimidation and retaliatory campaigns targeting the families of anyone who refused to fight alongside the group, saying “I and my family were among the victims of the militia, like the rest of the Sudanese”. He has also stated he is willing to face legal accountability for any accusations brought against him.

In that same press briefing, Savannah alleged that dozens of field and tribal commanders are still being forced to fight for the RSF against their will, with the group holding their families hostage to guarantee compliance. He added that the RSF has carried out internal purges, executing several of its own commanders in recent days — naming Abdullah Hussein and senior adviser Hamid Ali as recent casualties, with additional killings documented across West Darfur. He also claimed that senior RSF figures, including operations chief Othman Mohammed Hamid (better known as Othman Amaliyat), have been placed under house arrest by the group’s leadership. Savannah predicted that a wave of large-scale defections will hit the RSF in the near future, and confirmed that he and his allied fighters are fully prepared to work toward dismantling the paramilitary organization entirely. He also noted that large stockpiles of weapons continue to flow into RSF-held territories in Darfur, though he declined to name the supplier. International observers have already documented substantial evidence pointing to the United Arab Emirates as the primary source of weapons, equipment and even Colombian mercenaries supporting the RSF.

Savannah is the fourth senior RSF commander to defect to the SAF since October 2024, following high-profile exits by Abu Aqla Keikel, Major-General al-Nour Ahmed Adam (known as al-Qubba), and field commander Bashara al-Huwaira.

The footage of his Hajj pilgrimage has split public opinion among Sudanese social media users. Some commentators have interpreted the act as a public gesture of repentance for his time with the RSF, while others have rejected any religious act as insufficient to atone for the paramilitary group’s well-documented atrocities. In a direct public message to Savannah, Sudanese journalist Sabah Ahmed wrote that the rights of RSF victims cannot be erased by performing Hajj or touching the Kaaba’s coverings, saying simply “Our rights against you have not been forgiven.”

The RSF has faced mounting international condemnation and legal consequences over atrocities committed primarily in Darfur, particularly after the group captured the North Darfur capital el-Fasher in October 2025 following a 500-day siege. The UN Security Council has already sanctioned four senior RSF commanders, with UN investigators concluding that the group’s actions carry “the hallmarks of genocide”. The United States formally recognized the RSF’s actions as genocide in January 2025, and imposed sanctions on RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. The International Criminal Court based in The Hague is currently conducting investigations into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by commanders from both the RSF and SAF since the conflict began. To date, Savannah has not been personally sanctioned by any international body.

Sudan’s civil war, which has continued unabated since April 2023, has spawned what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis. Clashes between the SAF and RSF have killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced nearly 13 million more, and left more than 40 percent of Sudan’s population facing acute life-threatening food insecurity.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, north of Ramallah in the small village of Jiljilya, Ali Kaabneh stands on the exact patch of ground where his 16-year-old son Yousef was shot and killed last Wednesday, during a joint raid by Israeli settlers and soldiers that left a once-thriving Bedouin community displaced and its livelihood stolen. In an interview with Middle East Eye, Kaabneh laid bare the devastating human cost of what he calls a deliberate campaign of state-backed displacement and plunder targeting Palestinian communities in the occupied territories.

The raid was launched in response to unconfirmed claims that 120 sheep had been stolen from an illegal Israeli settler outpost called Tzur Levavi Farm, run by the Maguri family. The outpost sits in Jabal al-Batin, a section of Area A – the part of the occupied West Bank that is nominally under the full civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority, under the terms of the Oslo Accords. All Israeli settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank are classified as illegal under international law, and this particular outpost was built on private Palestinian land belonging to the nearby villages of Sinjil and al-Mazra’a ash-Sharqiya.

Within hours of the theft report, dozens of settlers backed by uniformed Israeli soldiers launched a large-scale incursion into the three neighboring Palestinian villages of Sinjil, Jiljilya and Abwein. The armed group systematically entered local sheep pens, emptying them of livestock and seizing a total of 900 sheep from local residents. The operation was openly coordinated between Israeli security forces and settler participants, according to reporting from Israel National News (Arutz 7), a media outlet closely aligned with the Israeli settler movement. The outlet confirmed the seizure was only possible through direct collaboration between security search forces and settler civilian volunteers.

As the raid unfolded, the Israeli military deployed drones to track fleeing Palestinian herders and set up roadblocks across the entire region to guarantee unimpeded movement for the settlers and their stolen flock. Members of the Kaabneh clan, who maintained a small herding community in the wadi between Sinjil and Jiljilya, spotted the advancing group and attempted to flee with their flock toward the built-up center of Jiljilya. Military forces tracked the group via aerial surveillance, surrounded them, confiscated all their sheep, and took four Kaabneh family members into custody – including Ali Kaabneh, Yousef’s father. All four detainees were released later the same day, after no evidence linking them to the earlier sheep theft from the outpost was found.

Kaabneh, who was in detention when his son was killed, described the peaceful resistance his family offered to the theft. “We were at home working with the sheep. The settlers came under army protection,” he said. “We did not attack them, we did nothing. We moved the sheep about two kilometres away, and the army located them using drones.” Today, a circle of stones marks the spot where Yousef fell, and faint bloodstains still mark the dry earth just a few dozen meters from the main road where the stolen flock was driven away.

In a harrowing account of his son’s killing, Kaabneh said the 16-year-old was unarmed and posed no threat to the heavily armed soldiers. “The army killed my son deliberately. They shot him in the chest and he died on the spot,” he said. “He was 16 years old – what was his crime? He wanted his sheep back, and they responded by shooting him. What danger did he pose to them? He had nothing in his hands, he was unarmed. They could have arrested him, but instead they shot him. Like any child, he wanted to build a home in the future and get married. But here, during the day we worked, and at night we stood guard in shifts, without sleeping.”

Cell phone footage filmed by the family captures the moments before the shooting: several Israeli soldiers stand opposite an alley where Kaabneh and other family members gathered to protest the theft as the stolen flock passed, before multiple gunshots ring out. One of the bullets struck Yousef. Ali Kaabneh was arrested just moments after filming, and only learned of his son’s death when he was released from custody four hours later.

Fawaz Kaabneh, another local resident who had 200 sheep stolen during the raid and was also detained, said the rapid release of all detainees makes clear the allegations against them were baseless. “We were afraid they would reach the houses, so we went out. We were shocked by the number of settlers. They seized me and handed me over to the army, and from there I was transferred to the police. They took me to Sha’ar Binyamin. I told them the sheep were mine,” he said. After being questioned and released that night, Fawaz filed a formal complaint with Israeli police; in the days after the raid, the military returned roughly four dozen sheep to the village.

Iyad Ghafar, a Sinjil-based local activist who documented the entire raid, provided a step-by-step reconstruction of the coordinated operation. At 11:06 a.m., he filmed an armed settler drawing a pistol and charging toward him as he documented the stolen flock. Six minutes later, Yousef Kaabneh was shot dead by soldiers. Additional footage captured by Ghafar shows masked settlers throwing stones at Palestinian residents during the incursion. Ghafar confirmed all the stolen sheep were driven directly to the Maguri outpost, which is built inside former Palestinian agricultural structures in Area A. It is the same site where Israeli soldiers and settlers killed two young Palestinian men defending their land just last July. One of those victims was Saif al-Din Musallat, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen, who died from injuries sustained during severe beatings by the group, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Ghafar emphasized the full coordination between soldiers and settlers throughout the incursion. “It began on the edge of Sinjil, and afterwards they started attacking Jiljilya. We managed to get there in time, and I filmed the settlers and the army, and where they came from. The settlers chased us. One of them drew a weapon and came straight towards us. We got into the car and drove away. The military patrol stopped and started shooting at us – we almost died. It was a joint operation by the army and the settlers, acting together at the same time. Together they entered homes, together they chased the shepherds, together they took the flock,” he said.

Before last week’s raid, around 20 Palestinian families – roughly 200 people, all of whom are refugees originally displaced from land east of Ramallah in 1948 – lived in the small community between Jiljilya and Sinjil. Today, every last resident has fled the area, leaving behind empty sheep pens and intact tents filled with mattresses, clothing, and baby cots, abandoned in the rush to escape. Residents only returned briefly this week to collect personal belongings and rescue dogs that were left behind during the evacuation.

The Kaabneh family’s story is a stark example of the ongoing pattern of displacement and dispossession facing Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank, rights observers note. The clan has been repeatedly displaced by settler violence backed by the Israeli military over the past three years. Originally expelled from their traditional land between the Negev and Masafer Yatta in the 1948 Nakba, the family lived in Mu’arrajat Centre near the Taybeh junction until the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, when settlers and soldiers forced them to leave. Some members relocated to the outskirts of Lubban ash-Sharqiya, while others moved to the al-Batin area – where the Tzur Levavi outpost was built a year later, shortly after soldiers killed Musallat and 20-year-old Mohammad Razek Hussein al-Shalabi. The family was forced to flee again.

Ali Kaabneh and other remaining family members settled near Route 60 on the outskirts of Lubban ash-Sharqiya, but were attacked again just weeks before the Jiljilya raid. On April 6, settlers burned two cars and a tent that family members were sleeping in, injured one relative with a club, and spray-painted the far-right “Price Tag” and “Zionist Revenge” slogans on the remains of the camp. The attack was launched as retaliation for the evacuation of another illegal outpost, Ora Yisrael, built in Wadi Salfit deep inside Area B – dozens of kilometers away from the Kaabneh camp. The clan moved to their Jiljilya compound after that attack, believing that since the area is formally under Palestinian Authority control, it would be safer.

“We moved from Mu’arrajat to Lubban ash-Sharqiya. We were attacked there on 6 April, so we moved here. This is under Palestinian Authority control, so we thought it would be safer, but there is no safe place,” Ali Kaabneh said. The repeated targeting of displaced Bedouin families after relocation is not a new pattern: in April 2025, settlers who built an illegal outpost near Sinjil attacked another group of displaced residents from Wadi as-Siq, burning their vehicles and residential tents.

In conflicting official statements issued after the incident, Israeli military spokespersons attempted to downplay the military’s role in the raid. A spokesperson acknowledged the Tzur Levavi outpost is located inside Area A, but claimed soldiers only entered the area “to remove the civilians” – not to support or protect the settler operation. “Upon arriving at the scene, [Israeli army] and Border Police forces acted to remove all Israeli civilians from the village, prevent friction in the area, and recover the livestock,” the spokesperson said, adding that forces had arrested several suspects in the initial sheep theft from the outpost. The statement does not explain how forces allowed settlers to leave the area with 900 Palestinian sheep if the goal of the operation was to prevent theft and friction.

In a later update, the Israeli army acknowledged that “some of the Israelis who entered the village took animals belonging to local residents” and confirmed that approximately 40 sheep had been returned to the village, adding that “the entire incident remains under review and is still being investigated.” Israeli police, for their part, said all detained suspects were questioned and released with conditions, and that a counter-complaint filed by Palestinian residents is currently under examination “with the aim of establishing the truth.”

The incident has underscored growing international concerns over rising settler violence and state-backed land grabs in the occupied West Bank, as settlements and outposts continue to expand into Palestinian territory formally designated for Palestinian self-governance under the Oslo Accords.

A week-long nightmare of entrapment has ended in a moment of joy and relief for five villagers in Laos, as rescue teams located the group alive deep inside a waterlogged cave system.

The five had been cut off from the outside world when rising floodwaters sealed off the cave’s entrance last week, leaving families and emergency crews bracing for the worst outcome after days of relentless rescue efforts. Dramatic footage captured the exact second that search teams made contact with the trapped group, a moment that has already been shared widely across regional media.

Flood-related cave entrapments are a recurring risk in Laos’ rugged, cave-rich northern terrain during the annual monsoon season, when sudden heavy rains can rapidly fill underground passages with rushing water. In this case, steady search operations combined with a stroke of good fortune allowed rescuers to reach the group before conditions turned fatal.

Local authorities have not yet released full details on the health of the five survivors, or how they managed to sustain themselves through seven days trapped in the dark, flooded cave. But the confirmation of their survival has already been celebrated as an unexpected miracle by communities across the region, and relief efforts are now focused on extracting the group to safety and providing urgent medical care.