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After Benjamin Netanyahu’s surprising victory in Israel’s national elections in March, he took until the last possible minute to complete the process of forming the government for his fourth term as Israel’s prime minister. For all the time he invested, despite making it just under the wire, Netanyahu ended up with a fragile, ultra-right-wing coalition and more work ahead of him to bring in at least one more party. The government Netanyahu presented to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was a bare majority of 61 seats out of the 120-seat Knesset. There are no fig leafs in this coalition, no Tzipi Livni or Ehud Barak for Netanyahu to send to talk fruitlessly with the Palestinians. One might think this would make the coalition more stable, since it consists entirely of the right wing. In this, one would be wrong.

Netanyahu is, in fact, desperate to add another party to the coalition because there is so much tension in the current majority, most visibly between Netanyahu’s Likud party and Naftali Bennett’s HaBayit HaYehudi. Likud leaders, including Netanyahu, feel that Bennett essentially held the coalition hostage to his demands. They are quite right about that, but the gambit paid off handsomely for Bennett. HaBayit HaYehudi holds a mere eight seats in the Knesset. Yet Bennett and his party will get four ministries, the deputy defense minister post, as well as the chairs of two key Knesset committees dealing with Israel’s legal system. That is what you get when you play hardball with Netanyahu, a man who likes to talk tough but who is a political creature first and foremost and quickly backs off from a high-stakes fight he is not sure he can win. As things stand, this coalition might not last the year. That is why, after Avigdor Lieberman quit his post as foreign minister and took his greatly diminished party into the opposition, Netanyahu left the post open by keeping that portfolio for himself. In reality, Netanyahu has been the foreign minister all along, so it is not an added burden for him.

On the day that Netanyahu was supposed to present his government, he was still eight seats short of a majority. Luckily for Bennett, that was the exact number of seats he controlled and he let Netanyahu know just how lucky he was. Bennett played a game of chicken with Netanyahu, pushing for more and more power within the government and knowing that Bibi was going to have a hard time saying no to anything. Bennett won, and the spoils were vast. The far-right HaBayit HaYehudi party now controls the ministries of education, agriculture, justice, and diaspora affairs. The position of deputy defense minister will also be theirs. It is even worse than it sounds. With the ministry of agriculture comes control over the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division, which funds the expansion of settlements. Uri Ariel, perhaps the most extreme pro-settler member of the Knesset, will have that portfolio.

The Israeli daily Haaretz has reported that the bill to dissolve the Knesset passed the first reading, Wednesday, in a 22 to 0 vote, preparing to head for new elections on March 17, 2015. The developments came less than a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, and Finance Minister Yair Lapid.

Haaretz said the vote came just a few hours after the bill to dissolve the Knesset passed a preliminary reading with a 84 to 0 vote, with one abstention. It added that the umbrella proposal grants the Knesset a period of three to five months to prepare for new election after the Knesset has been dissolved. There will be two more readings at the Knesset next week, and after the approval, the Knesset moves to elections recess.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu fired both Livni and Lapid after accusing them of trying to out throw him, and for defying his own polices, including his insistence that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish State, and his policies regarding the “Iranian Nuclear File.”

Everyone always asks, If there’s not going to be a Palestinian state, what does Israel plan to do with all those Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under its control? Here’s a visionary answer from an up-and-coming member of the Knesset from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, Miki Zohar, speaking on Israeli television Sunday.

That’s right, this is Zohar’s vision, on the English language program The Spin Room. The two state solution is dead. What is left is a one state solution with the Arabs here as, not as full citizenship. Because full citizenship can let them to vote to the Knesset. They will get all of the rights like every citizen except voting for the Knesset. Journalist Ami Kaufman: Is that a democracy? Yes it is a democracy because they will get full rights and all the needs to get to prospect and to succeed here in this country. But they won’t be able to vote to the Knesset. But my idea is that we can let them to vote to the Knesset with only three things that they need to do like every other citizen. One, to go the army or to go serve the country, like everyone else here in Israel is obligated to do. Journalist Tami Molad: You want 2.5 million Palestinians serving in the Israeli army? I promise you, they won’t serve in the army, they will let go the option to vote. They won’t vote to the Knesset. They would prefer not voting and not donating to this country, believe me.

It’s astonishing to think that Miki Zohar, a lawyer and religious Jew of 36, thinks he has come up with a brilliant solution, when his answer is just as old as Jim Crow and apartheid and white supremacy. The good thing about his comments is that he is expressing openly what Israel has gotten away with for decades now, governing a people who are not granted the right to vote for their government. And yet our leaders call Israel the only democracy in the Middle East. Zohar’s comments are a lot like settler Yishai Fleisher’s view of Israel’s future, published without rejoinder by the New York Times two weeks ago, in which Fleisher also dispensed with the idea of a Palestinian state– and treated Palestinians as so much human matter to be moved around by Israeli shovels. These guys are helping to create Israel’s new global image.

The Israeli ministerial committee approved a bill, on Sunday, to extend laws regulated by the Israeli Knesset into the occupied West Bank.

adings before becoming law. Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank are, as of now, formally subject to military rule. The area’s 350,000 settlers, however, are effectively under the jurisdiction of Israeli civilian courts because parliament has already applied a clutch of laws to them, primarily criminal, tax and military conscription. The new draft bill would make it mandatory for the commander to issue, within a month and a half of a law’s passage in parliament, an identically-phrased military order, effectively ensuring that all ratified legislation also applies to settlers.

Furthermore, according to the new bill, Israelis living in the occupied West Bank will be under Israeli law, while Palestinians living in the same areas would remain under military rule. Director of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, Issam Aruri, told Al Jazeera that this essentially means all Knesset permanent committees can exercise their oversight over the West Bank: “This means the Knesset may become responsible for certain parts of the West Bank, which may be a step towards the formal annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory without a formal announcement as such,” he said

Yair Lapid (Hebrew: יאיר לפיד‎‎, born 5 November 1963) is an Israeli politician, former Finance Minister and former journalist who is the Chairman of the Yesh Atid Party. He served as the Israeli Minister of Finance between 2013 and 2014. Prior to his entry into politics in 2012, he was a journalist, author, TV presenter and news anchor. The centrist Yesh Atid Party, which he founded, became the second largest party in the Knesset by winning 19 seats in its first election in 2013. The greater than anticipated results contributed to Lapid's reputation as a leading moderate. In March 2013, following his coalition agreement with Likud, Lapid was appointed as the Israeli Minister of Finance. In May 2013, Lapid ranked first on the list of the "Most Influential Jews in the World" by The Jerusalem Post

The Israeli Knesset (Parliament) announced that on Sunday July 12th, they will bring back a bill to forcibly remove 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins from their homes in the Negev desert in southern Israel.

The Israeli government has managed to force the transfer of tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins into a reservation near the city dump of Jerusalem, but 40,000 more have refused to be moved from their ancestral homes.

The bill had been tabled in 2013 after widespread international condemnation of the forced transfer plan. According to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Israeli authorities had initially approved the plan, known as the ‘Prawer Plan’, in 2011, but delayed it indefinitely after the UN and other international bodies condemned the plan. The Palestinian Bedouin communities of southern Israel have lived in their homes for hundreds of years, but when Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli government refused to recognize their villages. As such, their homes have been destroyed dozens of times by the Israeli government, each time rebuilt by the Bedouin community.

"Israel has just opened the 'floodgates', and crossed a 'very, very thick red line'." These were the words of Nickolay Mladenov, United Nations' Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, in response to the passing of a bill at the Israeli Knesset on February 7 that retroactively legalises thousands of illegal settler homes, built on stolen Palestinian land. Mladenov's job title has grown so irrelevant in recent years that it merely delineates a reference to a bygone era: a "peace process" that has ensured the further destruction of whatever remained of the Palestinian homeland. Israeli politicians' approval of the bill is indeed an end of an era. We have reached the point where we can openly declare that the so-called peace process was an illusion from the start, for Israel had no intentions of ever conceding the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. In response to the passing of the bill, many news reports alluded to the fact that the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, riding a wave of right-wing populism, was the inspiration needed by equally right-wing Israeli politicians to cross that "very, very thick red line". There is truth to that, of course. But it is hardly the whole story.

The political map of the world is vastly changing. Just weeks before Trump made his way to the Oval Office, the international community strongly condemned Israel's illegal settlements on Palestinian land occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.

That date, Trump's inauguration was the holy grail for Israel's right-wing politicians, who mobilised immediately after Trump's rise to power. Israel's intentions received additional impetus from Britain's Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May. Despite her government vote to condemn Israeli settlements at the UN, she too ranted against the US for its censure of Israel.

Days before his first meeting with US President Donald Trump this week in Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing warnings from within his right-wing coalition of “an earthquake” if he doesn’t publicly disavow his previous support of a two-state solution.

Writing on Facebook Saturday night, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who chairs the Jewish Home party, said Wednesday’s meeting with Trump will be “the test of Netanyahu’s life” and will determine Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians for years to come.

Bennett said that if the two men mention “an obligation to establish Palestine or ‘two states’ in some or other iteration, we will all feel it in our flesh for years to come. It will be an earthquake.” “International pressure, boycotts, anti-Israel reports, missiles, [building] freezes, tying the hands of our soldiers in the fight against terrorism — all this will continue and intensify,” he warned. Bennett called on the prime minister to walk back his support of Palestinian statehood, which Netanyahu first set out in a seminal 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon have ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89 billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according to recent statements by senior military officers. Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in 2013.

Some MKs asked the army’s deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, and planning directorate official Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel whether they felt there was justification for investing so much money in those preparations, said the MKs present at the meetings, who asked that their names be withheld because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said some lawmakers also asked whether the interim agreement reached between Iran and the six powers in November 2013, and the ongoing negotiations for a full nuclear accord, had caused any change in the IDF’s preparations. The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from government officials from the political echelon – meaning Netanyahu and Ya’alon – to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between Iran and the West, the three MKs said.

Ya’alon recently indicated during a speech at Tel Aviv University that his view has shifed and he is now likely to support a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, in light of his assessment that the Obama administration will not do so. “We think that the United States should be the one leading the campaign against Iran,” Ya’alon said this week. “But the U.S. has entered talks with them and unfortunately, in the haggling in the Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better. ... Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.” The second round of nuclear talks opened in Vienna on Tuesday, with the participation of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif and senior diplomats from the six powers.

Israel’s government watchdog, the state comptroller, said on Tuesday that he had opened an investigation into decisions made by military and political leaders during last summer’s 50-day war with the Hamas militant group in Gaza.The announcement was Israel’s latest effort to head off an International Criminal Court inquiry into its conduct during the war, and came days after prosecutors at the court opened a preliminary examination of possible war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, the first formal step that could lead to charges against Israelis.

A United Nations Human Rights Council commission of inquiry into Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip is underway. The state comptroller’s announcement also came as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which opposes Israeli occupation of the territories captured in 1967, published a report criticizing what it said were failures of the Israeli military’s system for warning Gaza’s citizens of impending strikes during the fighting last summer. It also faulted the military for a lack of safe evacuation routes and for strikes against rescue teams.

The International Criminal Court generally takes on only cases concerning countries that are unwilling or unable to investigate their own actions. In a statement, the Israeli state comptroller, Joseph Haim Shapira, highlighted this point as what was apparently a motivating factor in beginning his inquiry.

After six weeks of hype, the morning after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress feels a bit anticlimactic.

Here in Israel —well, how much is left to say? Every aspect of the speech has been discussed for weeks, except for its substance, and it was fairly light on that. With an early election looming on March 17, politicians have already staked out their positions. Hundreds of retired generals and security officials came out this week in sharp opposition to Netanyahu. The key question in Israel now is not what Netanyahu said, but how long everyone keeps talking about it. Despite the controversy, the prime minister wants to keep the story in the headlines. Recent polls have not been encouraging for his Likud party. A Knesset Channel survey released hours before the speech showed him winning just 21 seats; his main center-left competitor, the Zionist Camp, was polling at 24.

Two weeks before the election, voters are defecting for centrist parties focused on the economy, which remains their top priority: 56 percent of Israelis told the Knesset Channel they will vote on socioeconomic issues, compared with 30 percent on Iran’s nuclear program. Likud is keen to avoid these issues; indeed, it hasn’t even bothered to release an economic platform. After six years in office, Netanyahu is widely seen as responsible for the skyrocketing cost of living. The party believes that it can win an extra seat, perhaps two, by keeping the focus on Iran. It sounds trivial—but in a 120-seat legislature divided amongst eleven parties, that small boost could give Netanyahu the margin he needs to form the next government. Isaac Herzog, the main challenger for the premiership, delivered a brief rebuttal last night from a town near the Gaza border. “The painful truth is that, behind the applause, Netanyahu remains alone. And the negotiations with Iran will continue without any Israeli involvement,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his current government became incapable of running the country’s affairs, and that he intends to dissolve the Israeli parliament (Knesset), to arrange new general elections as soon as possible. His statements came in a press conference he held, on Tuesday evening, hours after he fired Finance Minister Yair Lapid, and Justice Minister, Tizipi Livni.

For the clearest distillation of Israeli political thinking there is no better place to start than at the top. Haaretz‘s Barak Ravid reports on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message to a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that although he doesn’t want a binational state, “at this time we need to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future.” MKs who took part in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting — where the prime minister spoke — told Haaretz that Netanyahu turned to the politicians and said, hinting at the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination: “These days, there is talk about what would happen if this or that person would have remained. It’s irrelevant; there are movements here of religion and Islam that have nothing to do with us.” Netanyahu then turned to opposition MKs and said: “You think there is a magic wand here, but I disagree. I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword — yes.” There you have it. Israel has every intention to control all of the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea even with the acknowledgement that this means it will “forever live by the sword,” meaning endless conflict and bloodshed.

The announcement today by Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman at the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, that the Trump administration warned Israel that imposing sovereignty over the West Bank would cause an “immediate crisis” between the U.S. and Israel, is spreading like wildfire. Newsweek reported the warning pointed to “a red line for the Trump administration in its relationship with the Israeli government”: “We received a direct message… imposing Israeli sovereignty [on the West Bank] would mean an immediate crisis with the new administration,” Lieberman told the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “The coalition should clearly state that there is no intention to impose [Israeli] sovereignty.” The warning came after Likud KM Miki Zohar, who advocates annexation, stated on Israeli television Channel i24 last night that the two state solution was “dead” and Palestinians, while not having full citizenship, would nonetheless enjoy rights like every citizen, except for the right to vote for the Knesset — unless they serve in the army or to “serve the country” which he hastened to assure viewers they would not do. Lieberman noted he’d been getting calls from “all of the world wanting to know if this is the position of the coalition,” continuing, “[W]e need to separate from the Palestinians and not to integrate them. The decision to annex Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] would mean the integration of 2.7 million Palestinians in Israel.” Rather confusing messaging from the Trump administration. Just last month Trump said he’d be “happy” with a one state solution “if Israel and the Palestinians are happy”. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later walked that back, saying that the policy was still, two-state solution. Maybe Trump heard Palestinians are not happy. We may be hearing more on this latest development soon as Lieberman is due to meet with top U.S. administration officials this week in Washington.

PARIS - Arnaud Mimran, the main suspect in the great theft dubbed “the sting operation of the century,” testified on Thursday at a Paris court that he funded expenses of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in France, as well as directly funding election campaign expenses amounting to one million Euros. Netnahyahu vehemently denied the report. According to the law governing campaign contributions and instructions issued by the state comptroller, a Knesset candidate is entitled to accept donations from any individual totaling no more than 11,480 shekels ($2,970). In elections for leadership of a party or in internal party primaries, in which there are more than 50,000 voters, a candidate can accept individual donations of up to 45,880 shekels ($11,870). Mimran is suspected of stealing at least 282 million euros from the French Finance Ministry through a deception involving the rolling over value-added tax in deals relating to carbon dioxide capping. The focus of the court discussion on Thursday was to determine whether senior figures have succeeded until now in protecting Mimran from being indicted. In this context, Mimran’s close relations with Benjamin Netanyahu came up.

A joint investigation by Haaretz and the French website Mediapart, published last month, showed that Mimran financed vacations for Netanyahu and his family in the Alps and on the French Riviera. Mimran also lent Netanyahu his apartment in the 16th arrondissement in Paris,  taking him to a prestigious nightclub during Netanyahu’s  visit to Paris. Arnaud’s name features prominently in the list of foreign donors that was compiled by Netanyahu on the eve of his return to power, as published by journalist Raviv Drucker on Channel 10 News. In addition to these expenses, Mimran has now testified that he signed a cheque for financing an earlier Netanyahu election campaign, in 2001, as far as he remembers.  “I financed him to the tune of about one million euros,” he said. Mimran’s declaration came while he was being questioned on the witness stand about the extent of his expenses. His testimony revealed that most of his assets are not registered in his name. He explained to the judge: “The Rolls Royce is in my wife’s name, the McLaren is in my sister’s name. Only the Ferrari and Maserati are registered in my name.” This playing innocent caused quite a furor in the courtroom.

Meretz Party head, Israeli Member of Knesset (MK) Zehava Gal-On, stated Saturday that the theory of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of running the conflict has failed, and added that the only solution is ending this conflict through a political solution. “Israel cannot just ignore the Quartet Committee report,” Gal-On said, “Israel must understand that the only solution to stopping the attacks and the escalation is reaching a political soliton to the conflict, and ending this occupation.” “The conflict is running us; the recent attacks and threats have proven that the calm we’ve seen was temporary,” the Israeli official said, “Netanyahu’s theory of running the conflict has completely collapsed, and now this conflict is running us.” The Israeli MK also said that what several politicians are proposing is the use of more military force, and iron fist policies that only kill hope. “What they are suggesting is not different than witchcraft and deception,” she added, “It’s like placing a small bandage on a severed hand.”

In its July 1st report, the Quartet Committee (UN, Russia, EU and USA) reiterated the need for a negotiated two-state solution as the only way to reach a lasting peace agreement that ensures Israel’s security and the meets the Palestinian aspirations of independence and sovereignty, by ending the occupation that began in 1967, and resolving all permanent status issues. It also denounced the “ongoing construction and expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories”, and the Palestinian Authority’s “lack of control in Gaza, and called on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to resume meaningful negotiations that resolve all final status issues.” The Quartet Committee also called on the Israelis and Palestinians to “independently demonstrate, through policies and actions, a genuine commitment to the two-state solution and refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of final status negotiation.”

A slip of the tongue from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month is worthy of attention. In an unprepared response to a Likud Knesset member, Netanyahu said: “What I’m willing to give to the Palestinians is not exactly a state with full authority, but rather a state-minus, which is why the Palestinians don’t agree [to it].”

This almost never happens to Netanyahu. He is calculated, in contrast to Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman who once threatened to execute Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and destroy his movement. In his public appearances, Netanyahu’s statements are carefully worded. His mind operates mechanically, and it is for this reason that a slip of the tongue warrants attention. He has given away more than he intended to. Netanyahu’s words need to be tied back his stance during the negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as part of the 2013-4 peace talks initiated by then-Secretary of State John Kerry. Netanyahu’s position was that even following an agreement, Israel would retain security control over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea over the coming decades. The best case scenario for the Palestinians would have been a severely handicapped state. What would a less ideal scenario have looked like? In order to answer that question, we must also look at Netanyahu’s support for the Formalization Law and for settlement expansion, two processes he has pushed forward with since Donald Trump entered the White House. The significance of these processes, territorially-speaking, is the end of the “temporary” occupation and the effective annexation of around 60 percent of the West Bank.

Where Netanyahu differs from Jewish Home head Naftali Bennett is in the type and reach of annexation, not in the principle of annexation itself. Bennett wants to advance from legal to practical annexation as soon as possible. Netanyahu is more cautious. He first of all wants de facto annexation, and to do it in stages so that the world and the Palestinians can adjust to the new reality.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday stepped up his rhetoric against Israel over its deadly air offensive on Gaza when he compared Israel to Adolf Hitler, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday stepped up his rhetoric against Israel over its deadly air offensive on Gaza when he compared Israel to Adolf Hitler, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday stepped up his rhetoric against Israel over its deadly air offensive on Gaza when he compared Israel to Adolf Hitler, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported.

Israeli Major-General Giora Eiland has urged that all food and water be cut off to Gaza’s nearly 1.8 million Palestinian residents – a major war crime and precisely the “starve or surrender” policy which the United States has condemned when used in Syria. Eiland, the Israeli government’s former national security advisor, argues that Gaza should be considered an enemy “state.” “Since Gaza is in fact a state in a military confrontation with us, the proper way to put pressure on them is to bring to a full stop the supplies from Israel to Gaza, not only of electricity and fuel, but also of food and water,” he wrote in a Hebrew-language op-ed on Mako, a website affiliated with Israel’s Channel 2 television. “A state cannot simultaneously attack and feed the enemy, while he is shooting at you, because this gives the other country a breathing space – and again I am referring to Gaza as a country, because the regime there is supported by its people,” Eiland adds.

Eiland appears to believe that the fiction that Gaza is a sovereign “state” would somehow lessen culpability for what would amount to massive war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.” Under international law, Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza has not ended its military occupation of the territory because Gaza remains under the “effective control” of Israel. Yet Israel has long violated its obligation by deliberately restricting the basic needs of Gaza’s population and deliberately destroying their food sources including agricultural land, poultry and dairy farms.

Israel’s deliberate attacks on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure have created a “water disaster,” already depriving every single person of access to a safe and secure supply of water. Israel’s brutal siege is precisely what the Palestinian resistance in Gaza is currently fighting to end.

In the United States and Europe, it is unchallenged in political and media circles that intelligence documents purporting to be from a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program for which the IAEA long demanded an Iranian explanation are genuine.   But evidence has continued to accumulate that the documents - sometimes called the “laptop documents” because they were said to have been on a laptop computer belonging to one of the participants in the program - were fabricated by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency (Mossad).  We now know that the documents did not come from an Iranian participant in the alleged project, as the media were led to believe for years; they were turned over to German intelligence by the anti-regime Iranian terrorist organisation, Mujahedeen E Khalq, (MEK). I first reported this in 2008 and have now confirmed from an authoritative German source in my book on the Iran nuclear issue. The MEK was well known to have been a client of the Mossad, serving to launder Israeli intelligence claims that the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves.

Although it has never been mentioned in news media, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General, Mohamed El Baradei recalled in his memoirs that he was doubtful of the authenticity of the documents. “No one knew if any of this was real,” he wrote in reference to the laptop documents. Another former senior IAEA official told me, “It just really didn’t add up.  It made more sense that this information originated in another country.”  And as I have detailed in articles and in my book, key documents in the collection bear clear indications of fabrication. Support for that virtually unknown part of the Iran nuclear story has come from a surprising source: a popular Israeli account, celebrating the successes of the Mossad’s covert operations. “Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service,” first published in Hebrew in 2010, and then published in English in 2012, was Israel’s best-selling book for months in 2010. But not only does it acknowledge that it was indeed the MEK that delivered the documents, it also suggests that at least some of the documents came from the Mossad.  

The co-authors of the book are far from critics of Israel’s policy toward Iran; One of the co-authors, Michael Bar-Zohar, is a well-connected former member of the Israeli Knesset and former paratrooper, who had previously written an authorised biography of Shimon Peres, as well as the biography of Isser Harel, the Mossad chief who presided over the kidnapping of Adolph Eichmann in Argentina. Much of what Bar-Zohar chronicled in the book had already been reported earlier by Israeli journalists - especially Ronen Bergman of the daily Yedioth Ahronoth.  In fact, Bergman accused Bar-Zohar of plagiarising his articles for much of the book, while changing only a few words.  But one thing that Bar-Zohar and co-author Nisham Mishal did not get from other Israeli journalists, was the role of the Mossad in regard to the laptop documents.