Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! Here’s your wrap-up of the latest articles from our contributors, including our colleagues at Local Call. 

Israeli attacks on Iran have killed at least 138 people since Friday, June 13. Retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Israel by Iran have claimed the lives of at least 13 civilians. Orly Noy argued that blind faith in military power and arrogant disdain for its regional neighbors led the Israeli public to believe it would never pay a price. But the images of destruction from Israeli cities like Rishon LeZion and Bat Yam prove otherwise. 

On June 9, Israel seized the Madleen — the Gaza-bound flotilla carrying 11 activists, a journalist, and a shipment of humanitarian aid — in international waters, before detaining and eventually deporting the passengers. As Oren Ziv reported, the Israeli media mocked the mission as a “selfie yacht” and “celebrity flotilla,” but what they saw as a “PR win” only revealed the depths of their delusion.

For Mahmoud Mushtaha, what is unfolding now in Gaza is not mere military conquest but engineered disintegration — one in which Israel actively cultivates Gaza’s collapse by empowering criminal militias, fragmenting authority, and dismantling every pillar of Palestinian social infrastructure.

For the past year and a half, Israel has imposed an increasingly suffocating system of checkpoints and roadblocks across the entire West Bank. Hala H., a mother from the community of Umm Al-Khair, wrote about her terrifying experience giving birth this past December — and how for all pregnant Palestinian women, these checkpoints have become a matter of life and death.

And Gadi Algazi argued that planned expulsion of Gaza’s population is already underway, with Israel conditioning aid delivery to force Gazans south into ‘concentration zones.’ This scheme has begun to stall, given that Israel has failed to compel hundreds of thousands in northern Gaza from leaving, but that only portends greater brutality.

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