Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! 

In Gaza, the new year was ushered in with little relief in sight, amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and displacement in spite of the ceasefire. Ruwaida Amer reflected on holiday seasons of years past, a time of joy and reprieve from Israeli violence, and how Palestinians in the Strip are still determined to imagine brighter days.

Local Call reporter Baker Zoabi reported from Nazareth, where holiday festivities returned for the first time in two years. Yet they masked a deep rot: the Palestinian ‘capital city’ inside Israel faces rampant crime and corruption, a steep deficit, and a lack of municipal services.

With the pretext of a stolen horse, Israeli police raided, occupied, and sealed off the Bedouin village of Tarabin Al-Sana in southern Israel — and a fatal shooting was only a matter of time. Local Call reporter Oren Ziv spoke with the relatives of a 35-year-old Palestinian father killed by police last week, who detailed how National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir turned the village into a war zone.

Since the October 7 attacks, over 150,000 Israeli citizens have left the country, many of them with a one-way ticket and no plans of returning. Hila Amit interviewed several Israeli Jewish emigrants, whose testimonies point to a profound loss of faith in the Zionist project itself — one that may signal a broader systemic unraveling.

Lior Sternfeld dissected the massive protests erupting across Iran, which he argued strike at the heart of the regime’s legitimacy. And if the Islamic Republic has always shown creativity in survival, this time it faces demands that cannot be defused with material concessions.

On Dec. 24, the Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri passed away at the age of 72. In a eulogy for Bakri (originally published on Local Call), Michael Sfard noted how Israel’s courts, military, and mainstream media united to punish the Palestinian actor for giving voice to his people, but he remained unbroken to the end.

And on the latest episode of the +972 Podcast, Ben Reiff spoke with Arab Barghouti — son of Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti — about the agony of not knowing if his father would be freed in the ceasefire or killed in his cell, and why Israel still sees him as such a threat.

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