Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! 

On Monday evening, an Israeli settler shot dead the Palestinian activist and longtime +972 contributor Awdah Hathaleen in his community of Umm Al-Khair, in the southern occupied West Bank. With eyewitness testimony and an analysis of video footage, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham and Oren Ziv showed that contrary to the settler’s account, Hathaleen was gunned down in cold blood.

Mohammed Mhawish argued that Israel’s new aid concessions aim to deflect international outrage and merely offer Gazans survival on a leash. Israel’s strategy is clear: maintain enough control to kill with impunity, and enough relief to look humane while doing it.

After 22 months of war, starvation, and systematic destruction, two of Israel’s leading human rights organizations have concluded that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip constitute genocide. Shatha Yaish spoke with B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, who abandoned their restraint to assert that Israel’s war aims to erase Palestinian life — now and in the future.

Oren Ziv revealed (originally published on Local Call) that Avraham Zarviv, a reserve Israeli army bulldozer operator, has an unenforced demolition order on his own home in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Zarviv has emerged as Israel’s destroyer-in-chief in Gaza, who has publicly boasted of demolishing an average of 50 buildings per week — likely totaling thousands over the course of the war.

And as Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin’s backing, German public support for the war is plummeting. Yet in the name of atoning for Germany’s own genocidal history, Amos Brison argued, the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course — and Germany’s angel of history is screaming.

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