Palestine weekly: Israel accelerates land grabs in Gaza, West Bank

Permanent alterations begin at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque as plans advance for settlements in Gaza, while a UN inquiry finds Israel deliberately killed Palestinian children.

Earlier this month, Israeli ministers had described their expanding colonial project in the language of intent – with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announcing the “cancellation” of the Hebron Accords, and Israeli broadcasters reporting on the government cabinet’s intended “quiet annexation” of Gaza. This week, that vision began to take physical shape.

In Hebron, Israeli forces brought heavy machinery into the Ibrahimi Mosque and began installing steel beams over its open courtyard – a structural alteration the mosque’s director called a fundamental change to the ancient site’s historic character; Israeli authorities have also blocked the Muslim call to prayer there for a week and a half.

In Gaza, Smotrich announced that the Settlement Administration he heads had “completed plans” for three settlements in the north of the Strip and called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve them. And along the so-called “Yellow Line” demarcating Israeli control within Gaza, Israeli forces pushed their cement markers further west, expanding the territory under their control.

If the Ibrahimi Mosque works were the week’s most visible construction, the quieter colonialist building happened across the West Bank’s outpost system, where the state moved to entrench settlement infrastructure that even Israeli law had viewed as illegal. Israeli authorities declared 465 dunums (0.465 square kilometers) of land near Sinjil, north of Ramallah, as “state land”, a designation the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission said was intended to retroactively legalise the Givat Haroeh outpost – converted into an official settlement in 2023 – and to stitch it into the surrounding settlement bloc along Route 60.

Settlers, meanwhile, carved new bypass roads on private Palestinian land near Kobar and Beitillu and erected fencing to seize land for a new outpost between al-Mazraa ash-Sharqiya and Kafr Malek, according to Wafa and local activist networks.

In Gaza, Israel’s land-grabbing project advanced. Smotrich said the groundwork for three northern settlements was complete, arguing Jewish settlement would form a security belt for Israeli border communities. Netanyahu, separately, said Israel was pushing towards taking 70 percent of Gaza.

The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that around midnight on June 23, near Beit Lahiya, a quadcopter reportedly dropped incend