With the explicit backing of the U.S. and the EU, the Greater Israel regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is escalating its efforts to eliminate the presence of Palestinian Arabs in Israel. The fraudulent “humanitarian aid” gambit for Gaza continues to provide targets in the form of desperate Gazans lining up for emergency relief, to be mowed down by IDF attacks. The IDF presence in Gaza is supplemented by a ramping up of actions against Palestinian civil society in the Occupied Territories, as settler vigilante terrorists, backed by IDF forces, continue to expand the annexation of land under both official Israeli government control and illegal settlements.
An example of this is the transfer of administrative control over the Cave of the Patriarchs Mosque in Hebron from the Palestinian Authority to the Kiryat Arba-Hebron Religious Council. The transfer order came from Israel’s Minister of Defense. The site is a holy one for Jews and Muslims, and has been the scene of intense confrontations, including a massacre of Muslim worshippers there in 1994 by an extremist from Meir Kahane’s Kach movement, which left 29 Muslim worshippers dead. The killer, Baruch Goldstein, is a personal hero of Itamar Ben-Gvir. The transfer of power has been hailed by the fanatics as an “assertion of Jewish sovereignty.” There are warnings that this may be a prelude to a shutdown of the Mosque, and an escalation aimed at the expulsion of Muslim worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
