It has been another momentous and distressing year in Israel-Palestine. Israel’s genocide in Gaza has waxed and waned without ever fully abating; Israeli state-backed settler pogroms have reached record heights, intensifying efforts to ethnically cleanse the West Bank; and the Israeli government’s crusade on the civil liberties of its own citizens has been unrelenting.
Here at +972 Magazine, it was our investigations that got the most attention from readers this year — from the leaked Israeli intelligence database indicating that 83 percent of Gaza’s dead were civilians, to the revelation that the Israeli army was weaponizing toxic byproducts from its bombs to asphyxiate Hamas militants, killing Israeli hostages in the process. But we wanted to give our readers a chance to return to other articles they may have missed during the whirlwind of the past 12 months.
Out of almost 250 pieces published on +972 this year — ranging from reports, analyses, and op-eds to interviews, mini-documentaries, and podcasts — we’ve put together a selection that stood out most to our team. We hope you’ll read them, share them, and keep following along for the year ahead.
Ghousoon Bisharat (Editor-in-Chief)
‘The most peaceful person’: Umm Al-Khair mourns activist slain by Israeli settler (by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Oren Ziv)
The killing of Awdah Hathaleen by an Israeli settler was not merely a news story for us at +972. He was a friend and a colleague, who had written for the magazine for years about the nonviolent struggle of his small village against the giant Israeli apartheid machine.
I met Awdah a couple of times in Umm Al-Khair. He always welcomed me with a big smile and an angry tone — not anger at me, but rather at the reality he so desperately wanted to change. Awdah was always there to help, always generous with his time and care.
The byline on this story deepened the pain. It was written by three of Awdah’s friends at the magazine: Basel Adra, who lives in a nearby village, and Oren Ziv and Yuval Abraham, who rushed there as soon as they heard the news. Reading their words about the murder of their friend was devastating. What still fills me with fury is that Awdah’s killer remains free, despite the shooting having been filmed from multiple angles.
A few weeks ago, we finally changed Awdah’s bio on +972 to the past tense, and added the sentence: “In July 2025, he was shot dead by an Israeli settler.” It took us five months to formalize the fact that he is no longer with us — perhaps because, in our hearts, he remains alive with a big smile.
Ben Reiff (Deputy Editor)
‘I haven’t been here in 40 years’: Emotional reunions as Druze cross Israel-Syria fence (by Oren Ziv)
Good-news stories have been in short supply of late, but this one, from July, offered a rare fragment of hope in an otherwise bleak year. Heeding the call of their community’s spiritual leader, thousands of Druze demonstrated on the Israeli side of the border with Syria in the occupied Golan (or Jawlan) Heights, in response to the killing of their brethren on the other side of the fence. Amid the chaos, over 1,000 protesters flooded through a relatively unguarded and usually impenetrable gate, crossing into Syria for the first time in decades.
When Israel occupied the Jawlan from Syria in 1967, the new militarized border split apart thousands of Druze families. But over a period of several hours in July, as captured by Oren Ziv in photos that are as striking as the testimonies themselves, Druze from both sides of the border took advantage of the unprecedented breach to reunite with relatives, including nuclear family members, from whom they had long been separated. This sudden rupture in the colonial order — albeit brief, and in a context of yet more suffering — provided a glimpse of what the region once was, and how it could still be.
Jonathan Adler (Senior Editor)
How Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream (by Natasha Soffer-Roth)
Since taking up his post in January as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter has made the rounds on primetime American television — from Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper on CNN, to ABC, NBC, and PBS — usually to spout the most egregious Israeli propaganda. Yet while some anchors have given Leiter space to speak about his personal loss (his son Moshe was killed in combat in Gaza), none have thought it relevant to mention other details of his past: The Pennsylvania native was a member of the the far-right Jewish Defense League, a formerly U.S.-designated terrorist group founded by the extremist American rabbi Meir Kahane, who moved to Israel in the 1970s and became a leader in the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank.
These are some of the details Natasha Soffer-Roth unearthed in her deep dive into how Kahanism found its way into the Israeli political mainstream, illuminating the decades-long trajectory of the extreme right’s rise to power. While international condemnation often targets the most brazen and culpable Israeli officials — from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — such a focus on individual actors can obscure how Kahanism has so thoroughly pervaded the Israeli political sphere and state institutions. And if one could claim that genocidal rhetoric has always been a part of Israeli politics, as Soffer-Roth argues, what is new is that rhetoric and policy are now one and the same, epitomized by the total destruction of Gaza.
Amos Brison (Editor)
The tears of Gaza’s men are an act of rebellion (by Abdallah Aljazzar)
“One day, as I walk away from our tent, my youngest sister asks me where [our brother] Nour is. I can’t lie to her again, but I also can’t destroy what little hope she’s built. I collect pieces of wood and broken metal, pretending it’s for fire or rebuilding, when what I’m really doing is keeping my hands busy so my heart doesn’t burst.”
Throughout the past two years, media coverage of the unimaginable realities endured by residents of the Gaza Strip has often reduced Gazan men to archetypes — of militant resistance, steadfastness, or abstracted pain and suffering. Abdallah Aljazzar’s essay does something rare in coverage of the genocide: It insists on interiority. Rather than portraying Palestinian men as symbols, it dwells in the inherent complexities of being human in general, and a man in particular, under conditions designed to strip that humanity away.
Combining his own experience of “entering manhood under bombardment,” surviving repeated wars, and living through the loss of loved ones with interviews with other Gazan men, Aljazzar shows how a new form of masculinity is being forged in the ruins. Though this “reclaiming of manhood” is imposed from above by Israeli bombs and decades of systematic deprivation, Aljazzar frames it as an act of rebellion against dehumanization. By refusing the demand for stoic silence amid impossibly harsh conditions, he shows how acts of care — changing a diaper in a tent or sharing grief with strangers — become forms of resistance, and how the fight to remain human is no less urgent than the struggle to survive.
Dikla Taylor-Sheinman (Editor)
Between a revolution and a whisper (by Thawra Abukhdeir)
In my work as an editor, it’s usually easy to maintain a certain professional distance from writers. But while working with Thawra on this piece, something unfamiliar happened: The comments section of our shared Google doc slowly began to resemble an exchange of personal messages. That shift felt less like a breach of formality than a response to the work itself, to the care the piece demanded, and the need to get its emotional texture right with both sensitivity and precision.
Thawra’s piece is more personal than almost anything else you’ll read on +972. The political terrain it covers — Israel’s crackdown on its Palestinian citizens, the occasionally fraught relationship between Palestinians of the 1948 territories, the West Bank and Gaza, and the diaspora, and the expanding apparatus of surveillance — will be familiar to our readers. Where the piece truly distinguishes itself, however, is in how vividly it renders the embodied experience of internalizing state violence; how self-censorship becomes a default mode of survival; how passing, at times, as a member of the occupying society exposes one to its most unguarded, candid expressions of anti-Palestinian racism; and how citizenship is performed in the negative sense, as a form of belonging contingent on silence.
Alaa Salama (Audience Engagement Manager)
Israel is waging a holocaust in Gaza. Denazification is our only remedy (by Orly Noy)
When hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the so-called judicial reform in 2023, I was struck by a contradiction. So, I thought, Israelis can organize. They can protest for weeks on end. They can disrupt business as usual. They can endure police violence. And yet, for decades, they have kept silent or actively participated while their government committed heinous crime after heinous crime, from the Nakba to the endless wars on Gaza, all in their name and for their immediate benefit.
Orly Noy’s article offers a rare glimpse not only into a deeply moral voice — that of a Jewish-Iranian woman brought to Israel as a child — but into what it looks like to face reality head-on, to call things by their name, and to refuse the comfort of moral hedging or political sensitivity. This refusal is not a lack of sensitivity; it is its highest form. There’s sensitivity, and bravery, in insisting on looking directly at a problem when so many prefer to look away.
For Orly, stopping the genocide in Gaza is the urgent priority. But pressing is the question of what comes next: What does it mean to live in, and with, a society of millions of Jewish Israelis that will forever be marked by having unapologetically committed a genocide, and whose existence has always rested on ethnic cleansing and Jewish supremacy? She does not shy away from offering an answer: Any real solution, whatever shape it takes, must include confronting the monstrosities of the past and present, and taking responsibility for rectifying them.
Jennifer Cutler (Podcast Producer)
PODCAST: What happened to the Palestinian popular struggle? (with Munther Amira)
It is hard to pinpoint when the phrase “Our existence is resistance” began to sound like a moral shortcut rather than an analytical claim — emotionally affirming, but intellectually thin, substituting endurance for political action. But when Munther Amira says that “our existence here is part of the resistance,” he is not romanticizing survival or sidestepping questions of strategy, failure, or power. He speaks from a lifetime of struggle, reflecting on the different ways resistance can take shape and the personal costs of pursuing it nonviolently. In that moment, the phrase stopped feeling like a slogan and regained its original weight.
This, I think, is what The +972 Podcast is all about: grounding stories in lived experience and revealing the complexity and stakes of resistance. This episode combines insight, history, and the human dimension of activism in a way that stayed with me long after the conversation — and I think it will for you too.
Charlotte Ritz-Jack (Editorial Fellow)
The genocide through their eyes (featuring +972’s Gaza reporters)
This visually striking timeline provides an account of Israel’s war on Gaza from the perspective of +972’s team of freelance journalists inside the Strip. As we deliberated over which articles to include, it was important to trace how Israel made this war a genocide that targets all of Gazan society: bombing civilian structures, transforming humanitarian aid into a death trap, re-engineering Gaza’s geography, and strictly controlling the population’s every move.
Most importantly, the timeline stands as a tribute to the Palestinian journalists who have continued to report for two years while facing constant threats to their lives, displacement, starvation, and loss of loved ones. With the international media barred from entering the Strip, Palestinian journalists have worked as the world’s only window into the slaughter — and been targeted for it. At least 250 journalists were killed, making this the deadliest war for journalists ever recorded. The work of Gaza’s journalists is an archive of inhumanity that we all have a responsibility to witness.
