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A groundbreaking new investigation by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has concluded that the widespread sexual torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees from Gaza held in Israeli detention facilities constitutes an organized state policy, explicitly endorsed by Israel’s highest political, military and judicial authorities. The report, which was shared exclusively with Middle East Eye, draws its chilling conclusions from first-hand testimonies collected from dozens of recently released Palestinian former detainees, painting a devastating picture of systematic, institutionalized cruelty across Israel’s prison network.

Accounts from survivors center heavily on Sde Teiman, the notoriously opaque detention facility where independent monitors and legal representatives have long been barred from access. One 42-year-old female detainee from northern Gaza, who was held at the site, described being bound naked to a metal table and repeatedly raped by two masked soldiers over a 48-hour period. She told researchers she was left shackled, naked and bleeding through the night before the assaults resumed the next day, recalling that her captors filmed the entire ordeal. Later, while she was hung by her wrists during interrogation, soldiers played the footage back to her and threatened to release it publicly if she refused to cooperate with their demands. Describing the unrelenting horror of her experience, she said she begged for death and framed the abuse as “another genocide behind walls.”

Multiple male survivors shared similarly graphic accounts of brutality, often involving the use of military dogs trained to carry out sexual assault. Amir, a 35-year-old detainee also held at Sde Teiman, recalled being forced to strip naked before soldiers ordered their dogs to urinate on him and rape him. “The dog penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten,” he said. “This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.”

In another documented case, Khaled Mahajna, an attorney with the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, described an incident where a soldier inserted the nozzle of a fire extinguisher into a Palestinian prisoner’s anus before discharging its contents, causing catastrophic internal injuries and extreme, prolonged pain. Forty-three-year-old Wajdi, another former Sde Teiman detainee, recounted a days-long campaign of abuse that began when he was shackled to a metal bed and repeatedly raped by both soldiers and a trained military dog. “I felt severe pain in my anus and screamed, but every time I screamed, I was beaten. This continued for several minutes, while soldiers filmed and mocked me,” he said. “The soldier left after ejaculating inside me. I was left in a humiliating position. I wished for death. I was bleeding.” After that first assault, Wajdi said he was untied and raped by the dog, before another soldier forced him to perform oral sex and urinated on him. The repeated assaults by multiple soldiers continued for days.

Khaled Ahmed, a field researcher for Euro-Med who conducted interviews with survivors, called Wajdi’s case uniquely devastating, noting that it accumulated “almost every form of torture, physical, psychological, and moral, layered with systematic humiliation.” “It also includes the deliberate use of multiple perpetrators and trained dogs as instruments of sexual violence,” Ahmed told Middle East Eye. “The result is not a single act of abuse, but an extended pattern of cruelty designed to destroy dignity, bodily integrity, and any sense of safety. These are acts that defy comprehension.”

Survivors consistently told researchers that the assaults were filmed and carried out in purpose-built, well-resourced institutional spaces specifically designed to enable torture and sexual violence. This structural coordination, the report argues, confirms the violence is not the work of rogue individual soldiers but an institutionalized state policy.

Ahmed acknowledged that collecting these testimonies was an emotionally grueling process. “The details the survivors described and the way they relived the emotions and events were overwhelming,” he said. Many interviewees broke down into uncontrollable crying fits while recounting their experiences, and a large number of potential survivors declined to speak publicly due to fear of reprisal from Israeli authorities and deep-seated social stigma around sexual violence in Palestinian conservative society. “But what we noticed was that all of them spoke about what happened as if they were seeing it in front of them,” Ahmed said. “They remembered every detail, as though the scene had been etched into their memory and could never leave it.”

Ahmed added that the vast majority of survivors who agreed to speak with researchers were men, as women face far more severe social stigma for sexual assault, making it nearly impossible for them or their families to disclose abuse. Researchers also documented that women’s bodies are frequently weaponized to blackmail male relatives: the report includes multiple cases of sexual assault against women who have family ties to Palestinians labeled as “wanted” by Israeli authorities.

Euro-Med Monitor’s final conclusion is unambiguous: the hundreds of testimonies collected do not reflect isolated incidents of abuse, but concrete evidence of a deliberate policy supported by Israel’s most senior civilian and military leaders, either through explicit orders or tacit approval, enabled by a broader culture of complete impunity for perpetrators.

The report explains that this scale of systematic abuse has only been made possible through Israeli legislation, military directives and emergency regulations that strip detainees of all legal protections. The 2002 Unlawful Combatants Law, for example, vastly expanded Israeli military detention powers without requiring any judicial oversight, effectively removing all legal safeguards for detainees. In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, these legal frameworks have accelerated enforced disappearances of Palestinian detainees and turned Israeli detention centers into unaccountable “black holes” where human rights abuses thrive with no outside oversight. Sde Teiman, where multiple independent investigations have already documented routine torture, rape and murder, is the most prominent example of this system, as the International Committee of the Red Cross and legal representation for detainees are routinely denied access to the facility.

The report also stresses that institutional responsibility extends far beyond the soldiers who directly carry out the abuse. Medical personnel and the Israeli judicial system actively collude to cover up crimes and shield perpetrators, the investigation finds. Doctors reportedly help obscure evidence of torture by hiding injuries in official medical records, concealing perpetrators’ identities, and issuing “fit for interrogation” certificates that clear the way for further abuse. Meanwhile, the Israeli judicial system has repeatedly protected abusers by suppressing victim and witness evidence, downgrading serious felony charges to minor offenses, and dismissing cases entirely. Most notably, in March 2024, the Israeli military dropped all charges against five soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, despite leaked CCTV footage that showed soldiers surrounding the detainee and pinning him against a wall during the alleged assault.

The authors of the report argue that these widespread abuses violate the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The abuse causes severe, lasting harm to individual detainees and members of the Palestinian community, and is intentionally aimed at preventing births within the Palestinian group, all as part of a broader goal of destroying the Palestinian community in Gaza partially or fully. The report reaffirms that legal and moral responsibility for these crimes extends to Israeli leadership and state institutions that shelter perpetrators, not just the individual soldiers who carry out the assaults.

This new investigation is not the first to document widespread sexual violence against Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. Multiple independent rights groups and news organizations, including Middle East Eye, have published extensive investigations confirming the scale of the abuse. A recent United Nations inquiry went as far as accusing Israel of using sexualized torture and rape as “a method of war… to destabilize, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people.”

Ahmed explained that the systematic use of sexual violence serves a deliberate, long-term strategic purpose for Israeli authorities. “It keeps the victim trapped in a cycle of violence, unable to escape it, even after the violence has practically stopped,” he said. “It continues to accompany the victim throughout their life. The survivor keeps experiencing both physical and psychological pain, and in many cases feelings of shame, humiliation, self-blame, inferiority, loss of dignity, and a lack of safety.”

The trauma does not end with the survivor, he added: it ripples outward to damage entire families and communities. “Especially in a conservative society where anything related to sexual assault is seen as an attack on the dignity of the entire family,” Ahmed said. “It is a complex crime that deeply impacts and fractures the very fabric of society.”

Less than 24 hours after a bilateral ceasefire between Iran and the United States was supposed to take effect, the fragile truce hangs by a thread, as mutual accusations of violations and deadly Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory have plunged the Middle East into renewed uncertainty.

The core point of contention centers on whether the ceasefire applies to military operations in Lebanon, a nation that declared a national day of mourning on Thursday following a wave of Israeli airstrikes on Wednesday that killed no fewer than 200 Lebanese civilians. Washington and its closest regional ally Israel have insisted the two-week truce was never meant to curb Israeli military action against militant groups operating from Lebanese soil.

In a late Wednesday post on Truth Social, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed that American military assets, including warships, combat aircraft, additional ammunition and ground troops, would remain deployed in the region surrounding Iran until what he called “the real agreement reached is fully complied with”. Trump added that the U.S. would retain all capabilities necessary to counter what he labeled a degraded adversary.

Iran has pushed back firmly against this framing. Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X that the terms of the Iran-U.S. ceasefire are “clear and explicit”, arguing that Washington cannot simultaneously claim to uphold a truce while allowing Israel to continue its offensive in Lebanon. “The US must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both. The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the US court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments,” Araghchi said.

The dispute comes as Iran implemented a key truce-related concession earlier this week, agreeing to temporarily reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical global oil chokepoint that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily crude supplies. In line with this agreement, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced Thursday that it had mapped two alternative transit routes for vessels passing through the strait, advising ships to use these alternate paths to avoid potential sea mine hazards and guarantee maritime safety.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the American negotiating team in the first round of direct talks with Iranian officials in Islamabad, Pakistan this Saturday, clarified Wednesday that Washington never made any commitment to force Israel to halt its strikes on Lebanon. The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office echoed this position in an official statement, confirming that Israel supports the two-week suspension of strikes targeting Iran, on the condition that Tehran fully opens the Strait of Hormuz and ends all attacks against the U.S., Israel and regional allies.

The statement added that Israel backs American efforts to eliminate what it describes as Iran’s nuclear, missile and terrorist threats to the region and the wider world, and reaffirmed that the two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran explicitly excludes military operations in Lebanon.

This framing directly contradicts the initial announcement of the truce made by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who brokered the deal. When Sharif confirmed the ceasefire Wednesday, he stated that Iran, the U.S. and all their respective allies had agreed to an immediate end to hostilities across all territories, “including Lebanon and elsewhere”.

Israel’s widespread bombardment of Lebanon has drawn sharp condemnation from across the global community. France, Italy, Spain, Turkiye, Qatar and the United Kingdom have all issued statements condemning the offensive and called for Lebanon to be included in the Iran-U.S. ceasefire. Both the United Nations and Pakistan have also publicly denounced the attacks, with the Pakistani government noting that the strikes undermine international efforts to build peace and stability across the region.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warned in an official statement that the ongoing military activity in Lebanon poses a severe threat to the fragile ceasefire and broader efforts to reach a lasting, comprehensive peace in the Middle East. “The Secretary-General reiterates his call to all parties to immediately cease hostilities,” Dujarric said, adding that international law, including international humanitarian law, must be respected at all times. “Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times, and attacks directed against them are unacceptable. There is no military solution to the conflict,” he added. Guterres also renewed his call for all parties to engage through diplomatic channels and recommit to full implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, the 2006 resolution that ended the last major Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

Israeli military officials continued to expand their operations Thursday, announcing a series of new strikes and targeted killings across Lebanon and Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed it had eliminated Palestinian journalist Muhammad Samir Muhammad Washah in Gaza, claiming he operated as a Hamas terrorist while working on assignment for Al Jazeera. In Beirut, the IDF said it had killed Ali Yusuf Harshi, personal secretary to Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, accusing Harshi of playing a central role in managing Qassem’s office. The IDF added that it had also struck two key weapons crossings used by Hezbollah along the Litani River, as well as 10 weapons storage facilities, rocket launchers and command centers across southern Lebanon.

Even within Israel, the government’s decision to exclude Lebanon from the ceasefire has faced growing public pushback. Organizers have confirmed that at least 11 anti-war protests are scheduled to take place across the country this weekend, opposing both the continuation of hostilities in Lebanon and what organizers describe as “attempts by the Israeli government to undermine the ceasefire with Iran”. Omri Evron, co-director of the Israeli anti-war coalition Peace Partnership, said the ceasefire itself serves as clear confirmation of the movement’s long-held position that there is no military solution to the region’s ongoing conflicts.

On a Wednesday in Gaza City, a 40-year-old Palestinian journalist became the latest media worker killed by Israeli forces in a controversial double-tap drone strike that has reignited global outrage over the targeting of reporters in the besieged enclave. Mohammed Samir Wishah, a veteran correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher, was en route with a colleague to cover a humanitarian story when the first strike hit his personal vehicle, igniting it in flames. According to eyewitnesses and first responders who spoke to witnesses on the ground, the deadly incident followed a disturbing pattern common to Israeli strikes in Gaza: a second attack launched minutes after the first, when emergency crews and local residents had gathered to evacuate casualties.

“The vehicle was hit the first time and caught fire. When civil defence teams and ambulances arrived, clearly marked and with medical personnel present, the site was targeted again,” a paramedic who arrived at the scene shortly after the attack stated in a widely circulated social media video. He added that the bodies of those killed were left charred by the repeated blasts, and roughly 10 to 20 bystanders and first responders were injured in the second strike.

A native of the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, Wishah had built a reputation over more than a decade of reporting for his focus on underreported humanitarian stories in the territory. Colleagues confirmed he was carrying standard press equipment including his microphone when the strike hit, and had worked for Al Jazeera Mubasher since 2014. Due to the Israeli-imposed fragmentation of Gaza’s geographic areas during the ongoing conflict, Wishah had worked alone to cover all events in the central Gaza Strip, making him a well-known and trusted voice for local audiences.

Months before his killing, colleagues say Wishah was the target of a coordinated Israeli incitement campaign amid his ongoing coverage of the conflict in Gaza. In February 2024, Israeli army Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee published images on the social platform X claiming to prove Wishah’s affiliation with Hamas, labeling him a member of the armed group. A further accusation came in June 2025 from Hadeel Oueis, editor-in-chief of Jusoor News – an outlet Palestinian journalists widely allege has ties to Israeli intelligence – who claimed Wishah was secretly a member of the Qassam Brigades. Israeli writer Edy Cohen amplified the post with a public “appeal and warning.”

Colleagues have refuted all these claims, explaining that the images showing Wishah in military-style clothing were taken during production of a journalistic documentary. Wishah himself publicly challenged any party to produce evidence of armed affiliation, and Israel never released concrete proof to back up its allegations. “He was subjected to an incitement campaign launched by some social media pages affiliated with the Israeli occupation,” said Talal Mahmoud, a fellow Al Jazeera Mubasher reporter. “But he continued his work regardless; he did not hesitate for a moment to continue delivering his message.”

Shortly after Wishah’s death was confirmed, Adraee released a statement endorsing the strike, repeating the unproven claim that “Wishah was not a journalist, but a Hamas terrorist in every sense of the word.”

The killing of Wishah marks a grim milestone for press freedom in Gaza: he is the seventh Palestinian journalist killed by Israeli forces since a ceasefire agreement took effect in October, and brings the total number of journalists killed in Gaza since the start of the current conflict in October 2023 to at least 262, according to press freedom advocacy groups.

The death has sparked widespread international condemnation, with leading journalists’ organizations denouncing the attack and calling for an independent international investigation into the strike and efforts to hold perpetrators accountable. Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said Wishah’s killing fits a clear pattern of deliberate targeting of journalists by Israeli forces. “That makes Israel the biggest killer of journalists since CPJ started documenting those deaths in 1992. It has killed more journalists than any other government, any other military force, in the world,” Ginsberg told Al Jazeera. She added that the repeated killings of reporters form part of a deliberate strategy to control global information about what is unfolding in Gaza, noting “Journalists are civilians, and they should never be targeted in a war.”

Gaza-based Palestinian journalist Momen Faiz, who has himself been wounded in previous Israeli strikes, said Wishah was specifically targeted for his unflinching, exceptional on-the-ground reporting from Gaza throughout the conflict. “Mohammed was particularly excellent in live reporting, and he gave a space for humanitarian stories. He used to work under pressure for long days with limited sleeping time,” Faiz told Middle East Eye. “After conducting interviews, he often followed up with the interviewees and tried to help them.”

Faiz, who lost both legs in an Israeli strike while reporting in Rafah in 2008 and was wounded again in 2018, said all journalists in Gaza operate under the constant threat of being targeted. “After every journalist killed in Gaza, the news does not pass as mere news, but as a personal warning,” he said. “They continue to kill people they know very well are only journalists with clear press signs, vests and microphones or cameras. Israel wants to kill the witnesses to deliver a one-sided story to the world.”

In the wake of Wishah’s killing, Gaza-based journalists have taken to social media to highlight the constant danger they face, while reaffirming their commitment to continuing their reporting despite the risk. “After every journalist killed in Gaza, the news does not pass as mere news, but as a personal warning, as if death leaves its mark on our doors one by one, whispering inside each of us: you are not far away,” Gaza-based journalist Tariq Dahlan wrote in a Facebook post. “We bid farewell to our colleagues, yet we don’t have the luxury of a complete breakdown; we are compelled to carry on, not out of absolute courage, but out of loyalty to what they began, and because if their voice falls silent, everything else falls with it.”

Wishah’s killing comes amid ongoing Israeli attacks across Gaza that have pushed the territory’s population deeper into humanitarian catastrophe. Since the ceasefire agreement in October, Israeli military operations have killed at least 723 Palestinians and wounded roughly 2,000 more across the enclave. Since the start of the conflict in October 2023, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,300 Palestinians and wounded over 170,000, according to local health authorities.

An Iran-aligned cyber hacking collective known as the Handala Hack Team has announced it successfully breached the personal mobile device of Herzi Halevi, the former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, claiming to have exfiltrated upwards of 19,000 confidential files in the operation. In an official statement published to the group’s website on Thursday, the hackers revealed their infiltration of Halevi’s device was the result of a multi-year surveillance and cyber operation that granted them unfettered access to what they describe as thousands of sensitive images and video recordings from closed-door high-level security meetings.

In the bold statement, the group claimed that Israel’s most closely guarded national security assets — from top-secret military facilities and crisis command centers to operational strategic maps — have been fully exposed to their team for an extended period. The breach is being described as one of the most impactful cyber incidents targeting a senior leader in Israel’s national security establishment to date, with portions of the stolen data already circulated and reviewed by Middle East Eye. The released materials include visual evidence of previously unreported meetings between Halevi and Arab regional officials.

One undated photograph places Halevi alongside Michael Kurilla, the former head of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), at a meeting held in Qatar, where a large official portrait of Qatar’s ruling Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is clearly visible in the background. A second undated image shows Halevi visiting the iconic Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, while a released video recording captures a meeting between Halevi and Jordan’s Chief of the General Staff, Yousef Huneiti, on Jordanian soil. In the video, Halevi presents Huneiti with a historic dagger that originally belonged to a Jordanian soldier killed during the 1967 Six-Day War, a symbolic gesture that had not been reported publicly prior to the breach.

Alongside the diplomatic and security-related materials, the hacking group also released personal content pulled from Halevi’s device, including private family photos, national identification cards for Halevi and his wife, and what the group frames as embarrassing personal moments. One short video shows Halevi hiding under a piano in a private living room as a woman enters the space.

The Handala Hack Team says it is withholding a large volume of additional stolen data that has not yet been made public, including further visual proof of unreported secret meetings, detailed Israeli military strategic maps, and personal identifying information for senior Israeli military commanders. The group warned in its statement that all of this unreleased material, which includes clear, unobscured imagery of senior Israeli military personnel and combat pilots, will be published incrementally at a future time of its choosing.

This cyber breach is not an isolated incident for the Handala Hack Team, which has built a track record of targeting high-profile Israeli political and security figures. Previous claimed attacks include a breach targeting former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and a senior aide to long-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last year, the group claimed responsibility for hacking a personal device used by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, releasing hundreds of his private chat messages and a 141-page contact list that included contact details for multiple international heads of state and world leaders. Bennett acknowledged the breach of his Telegram account at the time, but noted that the released content included a mix of authentic and forged materials.

Herzi Halevi stepped down from his post as IDF Chief of Staff in March 2025, after leading Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip through the first 17 months of the ongoing conflict. He assumed the role of army chief in January 2023, while Kurilla held his position as Centcom commander from April 2022 through August 2025, placing the Qatar meeting between the two leaders within the timeframe of January 2023 to August 2025.

In a move that has deepened long-simmering tensions in the Middle East, Israel’s cabinet has quietly given final approval to 34 new Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a single decision that breaks all previous records for settlement expansion in one sitting, Israeli broadcaster i24NEWS has reported. The unprecedented step comes amid Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Iran, and marks a dramatic acceleration of territorial expansion that critics warn eliminates any remaining path to a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The total number of settlements approved in this one vote already surpasses 63 percent of the all-time annual record set just last year in 2025, when 54 new settlements were greenlit.

Under international law, all Israeli settlements constructed in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War, are formally classified as illegal. This widespread international condemnation has done little to slow expansion under the current Israeli administration, which took office in 2022. To date, the government has approved a total of 102 new settlements since 2022, alongside the creation of nearly 200 unregulated settler outposts that have since been retroactively legalized by state authorities.

According to anonymous sources who spoke to i24NEWS, Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, attended the cabinet meeting where the vote took place. While Zamir did not issue an explicit formal objection to the settlement plan, he raised clear concerns about strained military personnel allocations to secure the new sites. He recommended that the government phase the rollout, authorizing a smaller number of settlements at a time rather than launching all 34 at once.

The Israeli cabinet intentionally classified the decision initially, a move widely interpreted as an attempt to avoid sharp international backlash at a moment when relations between Israel and its key ally the United States are already strained over the war in Iran. Details of the secret approval were ultimately leaked to the public this Thursday after receiving formal clearance from Israeli military censors. While the full list of locations for the new settlements has not yet been made public, early reports indicate that several sites are located in areas of the West Bank that have never before hosted Israeli settlements, including remote zones that are rarely accessed even by regular Israeli military forces.

This aggressive push into unoccupied territory comes as settlement expansion has ramped up sharply since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in 2023. Peace Now, the leading Israeli anti-settlement peace advocacy organization, confirmed that 2025 saw a record-breaking 54 settlement approvals, shattering the previous annual record of nine set just two years prior in 2023. Twenty-six of those 2025 approvals were retroactively legalizing unauthorised settler outposts that had already been built illegally on Palestinian land. The group’s data also shows that unauthorised outpost construction surged in 2025, with 86 new outposts erected — a 39 percent increase from 2024, working out to an average of one to two new unauthorised outposts per week.

A recent United Nations report released March 17 documents the severe human cost of this accelerating expansion and rising settler aggression. Between November 2024 and October 2025 alone, the UN recorded that more than 36,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the West Bank amid a sharp spike in targeted attacks by Israeli settlers. Over the same 12-month period, 1,732 documented incidents of settler violence that resulted in Palestinian casualties or property damage were recorded — a 25 percent increase from the previous year.

In recent weeks, this violence has reached new levels of brutality. Dozens of Israeli settlers have carried out a wave of arson attacks against Palestinian property, including the burning of a Palestinian medical clinic, opened fire on civilian Palestinian residents, and vandalized a Palestinian school with hateful graffiti reading “Death to Arabs”. Data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, compiled by Agence France-Presse, shows that at least 1,050 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli military forces or settlers since October 2023, including six additional fatalities recorded since the beginning of March 2026.

Lior Amihai, executive director of Peace Now, told independent outlet Middle East Eye that the 34-settlement approval is no accident, but a deliberate step toward permanent annexation of the entire West Bank. “They’re not hiding it. They’re actually very clear about it, and this is the de facto annexation that they’re doing, taking over the territories and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians from Area C,” Amihai explained, referencing the 60 percent of the West Bank that falls under full Israeli security and civilian control. Even with the initial attempt at secrecy, likely driven by a desire to avoid international pressure amid US tensions over the Iran war, Amihai said the current Israeli government makes no attempt to hide its end goal. “This government at large does not hide its intentions to destroy the possibilities of a Palestinian state and peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.”

This latest approval marks the largest single batch of settlements ever approved by an Israeli cabinet, cementing the current government’s legacy as the most aggressively pro-expansion administration in Israeli history. The move is expected to draw sharp condemnation from the international community, though it remains to be seen if it will result in any meaningful diplomatic or economic consequences for Israel.

After weeks of devastating US-Israeli airstrikes across Iran, the announcement of a ceasefire has brought much-needed quiet to civilian communities across the country – but for a segment of Iran’s anti-establishment population that initially pinned hopes of political change on the foreign assault, the end of bombing has only delivered crushing disillusionment. For many who once framed external military action as a shortcut to systemic change, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and broken promises of targeted intervention have forced a painful reckoning.

Leila, a 25-year-old Iranian who requested a pseudonym for security reasons, is among those who now admit they were wildly wrong in their early assumptions. “I thought this was it – I thought the Islamic Republic was finally coming to an end,” she explained. Like many other opposition-aligned Iranians, she bought into the narrative that the strikes would be quick, decisive, and deliver immediate political transformation, even claiming she believed Washington and Jerusalem had already struck a post-conflict power-sharing deal with exiled opposition leader Reza Pahlavi. “I was wrong,” she says plainly.

Leila is far from alone. In the opening days of the conflict, a subset of Iranian opponents of the ruling government viewed former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as unlikely allies who could clear the path for the change they had long demanded during years of internal unrest. But as the campaign dragged on and the full scale of civilian and infrastructure damage came into view, those rosy expectations evaporated almost entirely.

Leila questions the logic of targeting the country’s basic civilian networks, pointing to the destroyed bridges, demolished railway lines, and flattened oil depots that dot the post-strike landscape. “How does that help change a government?” she asks. The contradiction between Trump’s past messaging and his eventual threats hit especially hard: back in January, at the peak of widespread anti-government protests that had been met with a brutal security crackdown, Trump took to social media to promise demonstrators that help was imminent. Just weeks before the ceasefire, he issued a terrifying public warning to Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” before backing down to agree to the pause in hostilities.

“In the span of just two months, we went from ‘help is on the way’ to threats about the destruction of Iranian civilization,” Leila said. The fallout has not only been political – it has torn apart personal relationships, too. She says she lost friendships over her decision to trust foreign powers, after she dismissed warnings from peers that Trump and Netanyahu would not act in Iran’s best interest, even accusing doubters of being sympathetic to the ruling establishment. Many of those bonds have never healed. “Now I feel like everything I believed in just collapsed,” she admits.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ali shared a nearly identical arc of hope followed by disillusionment. In the wake of the January nationwide protests – sparked by soaring inflation that escalated into widespread anti-government unrest, with conflicting death tolls putting fatalities between 3,117 (per Iranian government figures) and at least 7,015 (per the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency) – Ali came to believe external military force was the only path to change. “We thought war would finish everything,” he said. Instead, the strikes destroyed his family’s home, leaving him and his relatives homeless, though they escaped with their lives.

Ali had bought into claims that U.S. and Israeli military technology would enable precision strikes that avoided civilian casualties, targeting only regime figures and military sites. “Maybe when they realised they couldn’t change the system, they started hitting everything. Or maybe I was just naive,” he reflected.

Not all anti-establishment Iranians shared the initial optimism that foreign intervention would bring freedom. Forty-seven-year-old Maryam says she always knew the campaign would end in disaster. “Only blind people could think that a war started by Trump and Netanyahu would bring us freedom,” she argued. “Didn’t we see Gaza? Lebanon? Syria? How could anyone think this would be different?”

By the end of the strikes, U.S. and Israeli attacks had leveled critical national infrastructure: energy facilities, transportation links, steel and petrochemical plants, a Tehran synagogue, multiple hospitals, universities, schools, and hundreds of small local businesses. “Maybe we should be relieved that the explosions have stopped,” Maryam concedes. “But how do you rebuild a country after this?” She remains sharply critical of Iranians who initially backed the strikes, many of whom she says are now trying to distance themselves from their earlier support. “I cannot forgive that,” she says.

Fifty-four-year-old Abbas goes even further, arguing that the war has permanently ended any remaining political relevance for Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last monarch and a leading exiled opposition figure. “Reza Pahlavi did everything he could to reach to power,” Abbas said. “But he never condemned any of the US or Israeli attacks on Iran’s infrastructure.” He pointed to Pahlavi’s public praise for Trump, noting the opposition leader used every form of flattery to win U.S. support, only to be cast aside once Washington reached a ceasefire deal with the Tehran government. “I hope his supporters understand now: you can’t rely on someone who is willing to see his own people killed and his country destroyed just to get to power,” Abbas added.

For many ordinary Iranians, the ceasefire has brought a long-overdue sense of relief, even as deep uncertainty lingers. Thirty-four-year-old Niloufar, a Tehran resident who spent 40 days sheltering indoors to avoid airstrikes, says the announcement of a ceasefire still feels surreal. “When the ceasefire was announced, it felt unreal. Like something had lifted off my chest,” she said. “For the first time in 40 days, I was able to sleep peacefully.”

Despite the pause, sporadic explosions continue to be reported, and a recent Israeli strike in Lebanon that killed dozens has already been labeled a violation of the ceasefire terms by Iranian officials. Many Iranians remain skeptical that the truce will hold, and distrust runs deep on all sides. Thirty-one-year-old Mehdi says he trusts neither the U.S. and Israeli governments nor his own country’s ruling establishment. “I don’t trust the US or Israel. Honestly, I don’t even trust them more than our own government,” he said. He notes that negotiations were already underway before the strikes began, leaving him wondering why this round of talks should be trusted more than past efforts. “We were negotiating, then suddenly they attacked,” he said. “What if they negotiate again and then strike even harder?”

That sense of profound, widespread disillusionment defines the current moment for many opposition Iranians. Ali sums it up bluntly: “Before the war, we used to say things couldn’t get worse. Now we know they can. We thought war would solve everything. Now we know it’s not that simple.” He adds a final, sharp judgment: “And we learnt something else, too: Reza Pahlavi is a stupid and ineffective politician who shows little real concern for the lives of those of us still living inside Iran.”