Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap!

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held his government together and bolstered its internal legitimacy by promising “total victory” over Israel’s enemies — from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran. But with his coalition trailing in the polls ahead of October’s election, Local Call editor Meron Rapoport writes, the costs of Israel’s ever-expanding wars are coming back to bite him.

Under Israel’s watch, Palestinian gangs are sowing chaos in the West Bank. Sami Sawalmeh reports on how the Israeli army is turning a blind eye to these armed criminals while constraining Palestinian police, thus “engineering lawlessness” in order to deepen its control over the territory (originally published on Local Call).

The West Bank is also experiencing an intensified Israeli assault on the healthcare system. Ghada Majadli explains how targeting life-sustaining infrastructure — and the institutions long tied to the struggle against Israel’s colonial domination — is part of an effort to push Palestinians off their land.

Sliman Mansour, one of the most important Palestinian artists of recent generations, died earlier this week. Abed Abou Shhadeh penned a tribute to the man who connected Palestinians to themselves, creating the visual language that allowed so many to imagine their land, history, and peoplehood (originally published on Local Call).

A spate of recent killings in the West Bank have resulted from armed Israeli settlers “hiking” close to Palestinian villages, aiming to expand Jewish presence and curtail Palestinian freedom of movement. As Aharon Porath and Roei Kleitman point out, this phenomenon is nothing new — but it is becoming more deadly (originally published on Local Call).

And in the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, human rights lawyer Sahar Francis discusses what happens to Palestinians inside Israeli prisons. She has spent decades defending Palestinian detainees, but she says the situation since October 7 is unlike anything she has ever seen.

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