Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! 

One year ago, Israel launched Operation Iron Wall, expelling 40,000 Palestinians from the Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams refugee camps in the West Bank and launching a campaign of mass demolition. Majd Jawad reported how Israel is preparing permanent control of the camps by paving military roads — while refugees wait not only to return, but to reclaim the rights the camps preserved.

Ahmed Ahmed wrote from Gaza about how despite the ceasefire, Israel’s continued siege has only allowed a trickle of aid into the Strip: Palestinians report a dire lack of healthy food, medicine, and winter shelter, while a new ban on humanitarian groups will push the enclave to the brink.

A closer look at Germany’s decision in August to partially halt its export approvals for arms used in Gaza — which were restored a few weeks after the October ceasefire — reveals that Germany never stopped arming Israel’s genocide. And along with a new bilateral cybersecurity deal, as Hanno Hauenstein argued, there is little ambiguity about Germany’s stance: not accountability, but normalization.

With the Israeli general elections approaching later this year, Local Call editor Meron Rapoport discussed an emerging political consensus: the desire to return to October 6. Despite the spectacular collapse of Netanyahu’s ‘conflict management’ doctrine, both he and his staunchest critics are campaigning on its revival.

Samah Salaime interviewed UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese about what gives her hope — why she believes Israel’s impunity won’t last forever, and how international law can find a way out of its current crisis — while responding to criticism over her stance on October 7.

And on the latest episode of the +972 Podcast, Ghousoon Bisharat spoke with MK Aida Touma-Suleiman, who reflected on a decade inside the Knesset, the epidemic of organized crime and violence within Arab localities, and the limits of trying to fight within a system built to exclude Palestinian citizens.

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