On the Agenda

Israel’s extremist and unchecked government has opened a new front with Iran as its crimes in Gaza and the West Bank continue. While millions in Israel and Iran face missile attacks, most Palestinians within Israel, the West Bank, and Jerusalem are defenseless, with their communities lacking shelters. We caution: Israel will exploit the current situation to intensify harm to Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and everywhere under its control.

On Wednesday, 19 March 2025, roughly half an hour past midnight, about 10–15 customers were sitting at the Abu Dawud internet café in ‘Ein Beit al-Maa Refugee Camp (al-’Ein R.C.) in northwestern Nablus. One customer, ‘Udai Qatoni (23), bought a sandwich and went out to the street to eat it. He leaned up against a car that a man who was apparently wanted by Israeli security forces had parked in front of the café just minutes earlier. Suddenly, a volley of gunshots rang out. Qatoni and the car he was leaning against were hit. Qatoni cried out for help and tried to crawl back toward the café. The café owner, Hussein Abu Dawud (36), and his cousin Saber Abu Dawud (42), went over to help ‘Udai inside. However, when they reached the café’s doorstep, another volley was fired at them, hitting Qatoni again and injuring Saber Abu Dawud in the shoulder and arm. At that point, Qatoni was still alive and managed to say a few words.

Rimas ‘Amuri, 13, lived with her family in the al-Jabriyat neighborhood in the southern part of Jenin Refugee Camp. At around 3:00 P.M. on 21 February 2025, about a month after the military incursion into the camp began, Rimas asked her mother for permission to go to her uncle’s house next door to visit her cousins. No clashes were taking place in the neighborhood at the time, but just as Rimas turned onto the path leading to her uncle’s house, about 20 meters from her own home, a group of five or six soldiers fired at her from a distance of 30 to 40 meters. Rimas was hit in the back and collapsed to the ground, crying out for help.

On Sunday, 6 April 2025, at around 6:20 P.M. (standard time), Israeli soldiers directed a barrage of fire at three Palestinian teens who were in an almond grove on the northern edge of Turmusaya, about 30 meters from Route 60. Apparently, at least one of the boys threw a stone toward the road prior to the shooting. The soldiers, who had been likely lying in ambush on the other side of the road, fired more than thirty bullets at the boys, hitting all three. One of the boys, ‘Amer Rabi’ (14), immediately fell to the ground. The other two, one wounded in the thigh and groin and the other in the abdomen, managed to escape and called a friend, who drove them to a clinic in the nearby town of Abu Falah. As the soldiers kept firing, they were unable to evacuate their friend, who remained lying on the ground. After a short while, soldiers reached him and apparently tried to administer first aid, but he died of his wounds. The soldiers then removed his body from the scene.

On 21 April 2025, settlers set up an outpost on a hill on land belonging to the town of Sinjil in Ramallah District. When town residents went to the area to drive them out, the settlers attacked them with stones and pushed them back towards the town. One settler fired shots at a group of residents without hitting anyone. The settlers chased the residents towards the town, burned a Bedouin tent compound to the ground, stole sheep from it, and set fire to a farming shed and to other property in the town’s fields…

On Saturday, 25 January 2025, at around 8:30 P.M., Ahmad Sawalmeh, 42, and his son ‘Udai, 19, the eldest of five, went to the family’s bakery to bake bread for the family and for a neighbor. The bakery is located in the al-Hashashin neighborhood, at the southwestern edge of Balata Refugee Camp, about 50 meters from their home. While they were there, they found out a military force was approaching the neighborhood and decided to go home, to avoid being stranded if the raid took a while...

On 27 January 2025, military, Border Police and Shin Bet forces raided the city of Tulkarm and nearby refugee camps as part of Operation Iron Wall, announced by Israel on 21 January 2025. The operation, which initially focused on Jenin, was expanded on 27 January 2025 to include Tulkarm and Tulkarm R.C., and about a week and a half later, on 8 February 2025, Israeli forces also raided nearby Nur Shams R.C. After hearing about what was happening in Tulkarm R.C. and Jenin R.C., some residents of Nur Shams decided to flee before the army forces actively expelled them. Eight-month-pregnant Sundus Shalabi (20), her husband Yazan Abu Shu’lah (26), and his brother Bilal (20) were among them...

On 27 January 2025, military, Border Police, and Shin Bet forces raided the city of Tulkarm and nearby refugee camps as part of Operation Iron Wall, which was announced by Israel on 21 January and initially focused on the Jenin area. On 28 January, at around 6:30 P.M., Iyad Rajab, 41, was socializing with neighbors on the third floor of their apartment building in central Tulkarm when his son Sadam, 10, went out to the building’s front entrance to speak to his mother on the phone. Security camera footage documented Sadam standing at the doorway with a phone in his hand, and then sustaining a shot and falling down, screaming and writhing in pain. About two minutes later, his father hobbled over on crutches, which he was using after surgery, and with the help of other residents, dragged Sadam a few meters away to protect him from the continued shooting continued. By then, Sadam had stopped moving.

In the early hours of Tuesday, 18 March 2025, several dozen young Palestinians were sitting in a café in the Kafr Saba neighborhood of eastern Qalqilyah. The café, called a-Saha, is in a covered temporary structure, with tables outside in a fenced yard. Around 2:20 A.M., about 20 officers from the Gidonim unit of the Israeli police arrived in a small truck and a pickup with Palestinian license plates, coming from the direction of a-Salam Street. The officers exited the vehicles, ran toward the crowded café and began shooting live rounds at it. A few minutes later, about seven more vehicles of Israeli forces arrived.

For two months now, Israel has been blocking the entry of food and humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, deliberately starving over two million people, including more than one million children. On 16 April, Defense Minister Katz declared Israel would continue to block the entry of food and aid into Gaza, effectively admitting it is using starvation as a method of warfare. On 25 April, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that its food warehouses in Gaza were now empty...

B’Tselem has recently investigated several incidents in which Israeli forces were documented desecrating and mutilating Palestinians' bodies in the West Bank. Ample footage from the ongoing fighting in Gaza shows this practice is pervasive there as well: running over bodies with military vehicles, scooping and burying bodies using bulldozers, and more. The increased prevalence of these actions is another manifestation of the dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli public opinion, a process that has rapidly accelerated since the war began in October 2023.

Since March 18, Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, more than 300 of them children, in indiscriminate bombings. For a month now, it has been starving the population and blocking any entry of supplies and aid. Flour has run out. Since the war began, Israel has killed more than 1,000 members of medical, defense and aid teams in Gaza. Recently Israeli soldiers killed 15 medical and aid personnel and buried them in mass graves. Clinics have been bombed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. The Israeli chief of staff Zamir is planning to conquer Gaza, the defense minister Katz is forming a bureau for ‘voluntary emigration’, and Netanyahu has declared Israel is seizing territory. With US support and tacit approval from the EU and the rest of the world – Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip.