Traffic was at a standstill outside of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, as sunset neared and hungry residents were forced to trickle through an Israeli checkpoint to get home and break their fasts.
The Israeli military had sealed the city off from the outside world. Just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched their joint war on Iran, Israeli settlers have ramped up their violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli forces have imposed a near-total closure of municipal centers, shutting gates and restricting crossings without warning or perceptible logic.
“This is not something new. It happened in June during the Twelve Day War, and it’s kicking off again,” Tatarsky said. “But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”
A week later, on March 7, there was still only one checkpoint out of Ramallah open, forcing all traffic through a bottleneck that passes by the Beit El settlement and through the Jalazone refugee camp. This is the only route for Palestinians living in Ramallah to access Route 60, the main thoroughfare connecting Palestinian communities in the south to those in the north.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, estimates that settler attacks have increased 25 percent since the start of the conflict. Israeli settlers have killed six Palestinians since the start of the war with Iran, including three in one incident in the West Bank community of Khirbet Abu Falah, east of Ramallah.
Israeli settlers shot Fare’ Hamayel and Thaer Hamayel, and a third man, Mohammad Murra, died of suffocation from tear gas deployed by Israeli forces.
As the world’s attention remains on Iran, solidarity activists said that Israeli settlers appear to feel they have additional impunity to conduct attacks.
“They will be treated as heroes by their supporters, by their society,” Etkes said. “And the government will do nothing about it.”
But what’s different this time is that Israel is also blocking roads — not only disconnecting Palestinians from Area C, but also blocking roads between Palestinian villages.”
Serious question, why would they need to block villages from each other? I know safety/security is the bullshit excuse, but what is the actual reason?
Seems impossible not to notice some similarities:
Raymond’s team continued to document from above, watching as the RSF built a fifty-seven-kilometre-long wall around El Fasher in the fall of 2025, essentially sealing the city. Raymond kept trying to raise the alarm, no longer hampered by needing government sign-off to go public.
A resistance committee of El Fasher residents and activists issued a statement begging for help. “We write, we scream, we plead; but it seems our words fall into a void,” the statement said, according to a BBC report. “There are no aid planes, no humanitarian airlifts, no real international movement and no ground efforts to break the siege.”
On October 26, 2025, the RSF finally overtook El Fasher in a killing spree. Its forces were now in control of all of Darfur. The total death toll is still unknown, but more than 150,000 El Fasher residents are unaccounted for. One week later, the UN Human Rights Council’s independent fact-finding mission shifted its focus to El Fasher, where survivor testimony led investigators to describe the city as a “crime scene.” On February 19, they declared that the massacre bears “the hallmarks of genocide.”
“It’s very simple,” Raymond says. “In this case, a decision was made—and I was present for some of it—by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, that the diplomatic, economic, and security relationship with the United Arab Emirates matters more than the lives of these people in Darfur.”
Don’t mean to sound too “alarmist,” but it seems pretty obvious to me that the U.S. getting involved in Iran (in addition to serving as a distraction from about a million other things), also gives Trump cover for escalating violent crackdowns on American civil liberties in the name of safety.
I would expect a similar escalation by Netenyahu, and in terms of government sanctioned violence against civilians, he’s already several miles ahead of Trump. Not that it’s a contest, but thinking realistically, where does Netenyahu go from here?
The whole world witnessed starving people being mowed down with gunfire while trying to reach the U.S.-Israeli approved food banks that Trump helped set up. You cannot deny the reality witnessed by the entire world, just because it conflicts with your own desire to believe it couldn’t be true.
When the world took notice of that video, things appeared to de-escalate slightly. However, now the world is distracted again.
But he did it anyway?
Netenyahu, Trump, and MsB chose to do this, knowing they would fail. For some reason, each of these authoritarian dictators saw benefit to themselves, at the expense of their country.
Why wouldn’t Netenyahu just plan to pick up where he left off, after being interrupted by the world refusing to look away?