Bi-Weekly Brief – March 29, 2026

Can Israel kill its way to ‘security’?

On March 24, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy told Democracy Now! that “we are in a new era.  It is not an era of a Pax Americana…alongside all that indulgence of Israel, there were still certain brake mechanisms.  This time, Israel sees us in an era of what I would call a Pax Greater Israel. This is about how far Israel can extend its dominion, how much of a hard-power, dominant hegemon it can be in the region…Israel is still on the impunity high from its Gaza genocide, which has led us here.”  

During the first month of what Nichlas Kristof has called the “1.3-million-a-minute war” thousands have been slaughtered, an  ecological disaster has been unleashed,  dozens of cultural treasures and historic sites have been damaged and the world economy is in meltdown with implications not just for oil and gas deliveries but for the production of food. During the  month Democrats have failed three times in the Senate and once in the House to force a Congressional consideration of the war as the Constitution requires.  

Within the US, the war remains unpopular and its goals unclear among non-MAGA voters. The request by the Pentagon for a further $200 billion from Congress for war-related expenses that are already huge and the deployment of thousands of ground troops in Iran are likely to make it more so.  The resignation on March 17 of ‘American Firster’ Joe Kent as head of the National Counterterrorism Center on the grounds that Iran did not pose an “imminent threat” and that Israel had used deceptive tactics to convince Trump that it did has threatened to erode support for the war – and Israel - in the MAGA movement.  Trump’s popularity at 36% is now at a new low according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.  

But is he benefiting in other ways?  The arms industry and those profiting from insider information to play the oil futures market have been reaping billions, leaving Sen. Chris Murphy wondering if a $1.5 billion bet made just five minutes before Trump caused oil prices to decline and stocks to soar by announcing on March 23 that he was delaying attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure had been made by the President himself or a family member.   On March 20, concern about the impact of surging oil prices on the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party led Trump to lift sanctions on some of Iran’s oil shipments, giving the country the US was fighting a projected $14 billion windfall.  

While Trump appears to want out, Israel wants to push ahead with its ‘forever war’

The US and Israel appear increasingly at odds about what comes next.  When Iran refused to be intimidated by Trump’s March 21st threat that he would destroy its energy and water infrastructure in 48 hours if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened to oil shipments, Trump on March 23 extended the deadline by five days (it was subsequently extended until April 6).   At the same time he announced that negotiations were taking place (which Iran denied) to end the war.  By March 25, as the US reported making more than 10,000 strikes on Iran while Israel said it made 15,000,  Iran has reportedly dismissed what appeared to be a US 15-point plan drafted in May 2025 and offered its own five-point negotiation plan.  Jeremy Scahill’s description on Democracy Now! of what the US insists is a negotiation process and the “quagmire” the US is in is well worth a listen.  

Following an airstrike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz on March 21 , Iran fired missiles that landed within miles of Israel’s main nuclear research center near Dimona, reportedly wounding two hundred people.   On March 24 it hit the heart of Tel Aviv.  But despite this, Israel shows no lessening of its appetite for war against what Netanyahu calls the ‘axis of evil.’   As Tel Aviv-based journalist Dahlia Scheindlin writes, the war provides a timely  “deflection away from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinian right to national self-determination.”

“Drunk on impunity” Israel again smashes its way into Lebanon

The war is also providing an outlet for Israel’s expansionist impulse, with Lebanon as its immediate target.  “In the wake of the genocidal onslaught on Gaza,” writes Joelle M. Abi-Rached in the Boston Review, “Lebanon is once again being drawn into a familiar cycle: abandonment, impunity, and the normalization of violence as the language of international law and human rights is hollowed out in real time.”   

As well as repeatedly bombing Beirut, Israel is busy applying the scorched earth tactics it used in Gaza to parts of  southern Lebanon.  On March 16, it began what its army called “targeted ground operations against key Hezbollah strongholds.”  By March 21 it had killed more than 40 medical workers in attacks on 128 medical facilities and ambulances and nearly killed a British journalist and cameraman reporting from southern Lebanon. Two journalists and a cameraman were killed on March 28.  Palestinian refugees from three camps in the south – Rashidieh, Burj al-Shaali and al-Bass – are among those forced to flee north, and attacks on other camps are expected to follow.  

According to Oxfam, Israel has systematically damaged or destroyed critical water infrastructure, including reservoirs, pipe networks and pumping stations.  Bachir Ayoub, the Oxfam Country Director, said on March 24 that Israel was repeating what it did in Gaza:  “The impunity. Israel enjoyed in Gaza as it committed water war crimes is again on full display.  The world has shown Israel can do what it wants, whenever it wants, without repercussion and again it is citizens who are paying the ultimate price for this inaction.”

After claiming on March 22 that border villages in southern Lebanon would be flattened,  Defense Minister Katz declared on March 24 that its army would remain in control of Lebanon up to the Litani River,  which has long been a goal of Zionism.  He said the many hundreds of thousands of people who had been forcibly expelled would not be able to return while Finance Minister Smotrich insisted that the Litani River should become Israel’s northern border.    Before the war began, Israeli settlers had already staked their land claim by crossing into southern Lebanon to plant trees.

Israeli forces terrorize the West Bank 

On March 19, a group of 17 UN Special Rapporteurs issued a press release stating that “against the backdrop of the US-Israel aggression of Iran and Lebanon, Israel is escalating ethnic cleansing and full annexation of the West Bank…Entrapped and out of reach, entire communities live in fear of settler terrorism rampaging across the West Bank day and night…We called on States to bring the unlawful occupation to an end, in compliance with the International Court of Justice 2024 Advisory Opinion and General Assembly Resolution ES 10/25.  Tragically, States have failed to stop Israel’s crimes, emboldening its impunity and giving it carte blanche to continue its atrocities against Palestinians.” 

According to a  Guardian investigation of what some former Israeli officials (including chiefs of Mossad and Shin Bet, and former Prime Minister Olmert) call “organized Jewish terrorism,”  not a single Israeli has been prosecuted since 2020 for killing any of the more than a thousand Palestinian civilians who have been murdered since that date, at least a quarter of them children.  

Among those who will not be prosecuted are the undercover Border Police officers driving a car with a Palestinian license plate who, on March 14, killed four members of the Odeh family as they were driving home from an Eid al-Fitr shopping trip in the town of Tammun in the northern Jordan Valley.   One of the two children who survived the shooting, 11-year-old Khaled, said that the officer who pulled him out of the car beat him and declared “we killed dogs.”  The same unit had reportedly been involved in the Nov. 2025 execution of two Palestinians in Jenin who had their hands up in surrender.  

On March 27, soldiers killed 15-year-old Adham Sayed Saleh Dahman in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem and two men in Qalandiya refugee camp.  Sufian Ahmad Saleh Abu Leil was shot in the head when the army attacked the funeral for Mustafa Asaad Hamad, who had been killed by soldiers earlier in the day. More than 1,140  Palestinians have been  killed by the army and settlers in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023.

In the West Bank there was an upsurge of coordinated settler-soldier raids on scores of communities where houses and cars were set ablaze and residents were injured during Eid al-Fitr marking the end of Ramadan.    Videos of some of these attacks are posted here.   Another video allegedly shows a settler running over a Palestinian child, as the ‘Judaization’ of the West Bank goes on.

The sadistic violence that is taking place under the cover of the Iran war makes grim reading.  For example, take what happened to Suhaib Abukalkebash, a 29-year-old shepherd in Khirbet Humsa in the northern Jordan Valley.   According to an account in the March 18 New York Times, on March 13 more than 20 settlers  drove their animals towards his family encampment  as a drone flew overhead.   After 1 AM masked and club wielding settlers attacked his family, his brother’s family and an American activist who was staying with them in hopes of offering protection.  The women were dragged around by their hair and beaten, and the children were slapped and kicked.  Suhaib was forcibly stripped naked and a zip tie was placed around his penis and cinched tightly.  Before they left, the settlers said in Arabic: “If you don’t leave, we will burn you…We’ll take your children, and we will rape your women.  Go to America, go to Jordan or anywhere else, but go.”   

Matan Golan’s description of the incident in the March 16th Haaretz is more gruesome in its description of the beatings and humiliation inflicted by the settlers.   When the settlers left, they took hundreds of animals and all the valuables from the tents, including rings wrenched from the fingers of women and the passports, phones and wallets of the foreign activists staying in the encampment.  

On March 28, 12 hours after settlers set up an outpost in Tayasir near Tubas and viciously assaulted local Palestinians, soldiers arrived on the scene and, after putting CNN photojournalist Cyril Theophilos in a chokehold and knocking him to the ground,  detained CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond and his media crew.   In Diamond’s words, “Our 2-hour detention proved enlightening, showing how these soldiers are acting in service of the settler movement.” The systematic role that settler outposts have played in seizing 250,000 acres in not just Area C, but Areas B and A  of the West Bank is described in this +972 Magazine piece.

An unprecedented Ramadan

As Palestinians were being terrorized around the West Bank the spiritual solace of Ramadan was denied to the tens of thousands of worshipers who had hoped to pray in the Al- Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.  Its gates were barred to Muslims on the first day of the war.   Palestinians who hoped to hold Eid al-Fitr prayers marking Ramadan’s end within or near the compound were dispersed with stun grenades.  This is  reportedly the first time prayers had been forbidden at Al Aqsa since 1967.  Businesses in the Old City suffered a heavy economic toll when they were forced to close in the days leading up to Eid.   According to one report, Eid prayers were restricted to 80 worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.  

While ever more restrictions are imposed on Palestinians, the ‘de-Palestinization’ of Jerusalem and its surroundings is surging.  On March 24, 15 families totaling 65 people were evicted from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.  Their houses were turned over to the settler organization Ateret Cohanim which claimed they lived on land that had belonged to Jews. According to B’Tselem, “under the cover of the Israel-American offensive against Iran, Israel is expanding ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, throwing Palestinian families onto the street.”  Their eviction, the organization predicts, “marks the beginning of a wave of mass expulsions.”

In nearby Jabal al-Mukabber, Border Guards and an undercover squad killed 21-year old Qasem Amjad Shqeirat on March 25 during a “nighttime invasion” on several homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood.   The International Middle East Media Center reported that “the killing comes amid a broader escalation in Israeli invasions, home break-ins, and abductions across occupied Jerusalem, particularly in neighborhoods targeted by ongoing displacement and property-seizure campaigns.”  

On March 24, an Israeli judge ruled that 17-year-old Walid  Khalid Abdullah Ahmad, who had not been charged with any crime, had likely died of starvation in Megiddo prison the previous year.  He then closed the case.  The young man’s body has not been returned to his family. 

Inhumanity institutionalized

On March 23, Palestine TV showed images of cigarette burns and a puncture mark made by a nail on the leg of an 18-month old child who was allegedly tortured by soldiers in front of his father, Osama Abu Nassar, at a military checkpoint near the ‘yellow line’ in central Gaza in the effort to get his father to ‘confess.’   A fuller version of the incident is here.  The boy was returned to his family by the Red Cross some 10 hours later while his father was detained.  It is likely that he has endured some of the sadistic methods of torture  - brutal beatings, waterboarding, prolonged stress positions and shackling leading to amputations, rape including gang rape, starvation, sleep deprivation, the use of electric shocks and assault dogs, dehumanizing forms of humiliation - described in the recent harrowing report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Torture and genocide.  

She writes that torture, which has long been practiced by Israel “as a structural component of its apparatus of domination,” has since October 2023 “been used on an unprecedented scale as punitive collective vengeance – a clear feature of genocide.”  Torture in detention as a tool of genocide is “strategic.  It operates to degrade Palestinian bodies, fracture psychological integrity, and erode collective resilience.”  As practiced by Israel, torture is not confined to detention camps: “Israel has turned Gaza into a vast torture camp where nowhere is safe – not hospitals, homes, schools, refugee camps or even flooded tents.  Israel can strike anywhere, at any time, including during so-called ‘ceasefires,’ which have already cost more than 680 lives.  Danger and fear are perpetual.”   In the West Bank, Albanese writes, “Israeli forces and settler militias together function as an intentional system of terror, which constitutes torture targeting the social, economic and psychological fabric of Palestinian life.”  

Since July 2025, Francesca Albanese has labored under sanctions imposed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio for what he called her “malicious activities” – including recommending that the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.  What being sanctioned has meant for her and her family and its larger implications is described here.  The Trump Administration also imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, along with his two deputy prosecutors and six ICC judges.   On March 9, Khan, who was accused of sexual misconduct after he refused to drop the cases against Netanyahu and Gallant, was cleared of those allegations by  a UN three-judge panel.  

In Gaza the genocide grinds on

As Israel expands north to the Litani River, and steadily appropriates West Bank land, it has been building new military outposts in the more than half of the Gaza Strip behind the ‘yellow line’.   

In a March 25  Haaretz article featuring satellite images of some of the 32 outposts, Yarden Michaeli writes that “the IDF’s entrenchment along the line has had a deadly impact on Gaza’s population.  The area around the line is an active firing zone, with ongoing Israeli airstrikes, artillery shelling and small-arms fire.”  Some of the outposts are built where mosques and cemeteries (over 93 % of which have been destroyed by Israel) once stood.  

According to the UN, at least 224 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children,  have been slaughtered near the ‘yellow line’ as the number of Gaza’s residents killed since the mock ‘ceasefire’ began now approaches 700.  Health care workers are still being targeted and since the start of the war with Iran, at least 15 local police officers have been killed which the Government Media Office claimed is “part of a policy aimed at undermining Gaza’s civil infrastructure and weakening institutions responsible for maintaining public order.”   On a single day, March 15, Israeli air strikes reportedly killed nine police officers in a police vehicle and six other people, including a ten-year-old boy and a woman pregnant with twins.

Meanwhile, children in urgent need of medical care are dying because they cannot reach hospitals through the Rafah Crossing, which has been open only briefly since the war with Iran began. They are among the 20,000 patients – some 4,500 of them children – who are waiting to access medical treatment outside the Strip given the damage to Gaza’s hospitals and Israel’s refusal to allow into Gaza generators and critical medical supplies.

Israel had imposed a total closure on Gaza on Feb. 28 when with its US partner it launched its war on Iran.  Since then, only the border crossing at Kerem Shalom has been open on a limited basis for trucks and living conditions have become increasingly dire.  The amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza has dropped by 80% and prices in the markets have soared, leaving many to fear a return of famine.   

This post on X lists the exorbitant new ‘coordination fees’ charged by Israel and Egypt before commercial trucks can enter Gaza.  The writer adds: “These goods are allowed in for only ten traders in the Gaza Strip, who monopolize the market and drastically raise prices. By the time the goods reach ordinary civilians, prices have multiplied many times over. Enough. The world must put an end to this exploitation. Since the beginning of the war, most people in Gaza have been unemployed—where are they supposed to get the money that ends up in the pockets of traders, and in fees paid to Israel and Egypt?”

As for the humanitarian sector, on March 24 Ha’aretz reported that the Supreme Court justices intend to reject the petition filed against the government’s decision to revoke the work permits of 37 international aid organizations, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders,  because they refused to turn over the names of their local staff or because one of their employees had called for a boycott of Israel or “denied the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”   This means that aid delivery would be left to 27 largely inexperienced groups that had been cleared to work in Gaza, among them Christian evangelical organizations with close ties to Israel.

The impotence of the international community

While the war with Iran submerges Trump’s role as ‘peacemaker,’ there still appears to be a flicker of life in his charade of a ‘peace plan’ that had been approved by the UN Security Council despite its departure from international law.  On March 20, The New York Times reported that Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza, had met with Hamas leaders in Cairo to discuss the disarmament of the group. Other sources stated that Aryeh Lightstone, an aide to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, attended the Cairo meetings, and that a proposal for phased disarmament over a period of six months had been given to Hamas.  

Philippe Lazzarini, whose tenure as Commissioner-General of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) expires this month, sees little to feel hopeful about.  His bitter farewell column in the March 21st Guardian is headlined “Israel has crushed Unrwa in Gaza – and the rest of the world has done nothing.” Writing about the organization that has worked with Palestinian refugees for 75 years, and has had 390 of its employees killed and many more arbitrarily detained and tortured in Gaza and its East Jerusalem headquarters looted and set on fire as Israeli officials celebrated, Lazzarini states that “it is incomprehensible that a UN entity has been allowed to be crushed as Unrwa has, in violation of international law…It is appalling that despite Unrwa’s crucial role, the agency has not been adequately protected by the international community…The abject failure to muster an effective multilateral and international law-based response in Gaza enabled a war outside international legal boundaries – one that is now spreading across and beyond the Middle East.  This failure has normalized disdain for the rules-based international order.”

In the words of Amjad Iraqi of the International Crisis Group, “If Palestine is a laboratory for the new regional order, the world should be very worried.” 

Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine