Palestine weekly: Netanyahu hedges on Gaza roadmap

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Hamas reaffirmed its own commitment to the roadmap on the same day, demanding guarantees on the ceasefire, Israeli withdrawal, aid and reconstruction. Board of Peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov said in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 that any Israeli pullback would come incrementally from areas declared free of weapons, with international forces taking over ground Israel vacates, and that disarmament would ultimately extend to all armed groups in Gaza, not Hamas alone. Israel’s rejection of the plan was nonetheless accompanied by discernible changes on the ground. The reported number of Palestinians killed in Gaza dropped sharply, from 47 between July 27 and August 3 – which includes the days immediately after Trump’s initial disarmament agreement announcement – to eight in the following week through August 10, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israeli Army Radio reported that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Israel Katz had secretly approved rehabilitation work to rebuild basic infrastructure in eastern Rafah, with Palestinian labourers to be allowed onto the site after screening by Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency. The project, however, underpins the “Green Rafah” temporary-housing initiative. Experts fear that far from being genuine humanitarian relief, the construction will further entrench Israel’s military within Gaza and cement its fragmentation. Israel has reportedly held back caravans needed to house residents there until after its October election, despite the October 2025 “ceasefire” agreement. Yet media outlets, citing US officials, reported that the Israeli army has received no order to freeze preparations for the agreement’s second phase, with a first base for the incoming International Stabilization Force reportedly planned to begin construction in Rafah by the end of August. Netanyahu is facing competing pressure from his US allies to proceed towards the second phase, and from his far-right political allies to seize and even colonise more of Gaza as elections near. Despite the de-escalation in attacks, violence continued in the besieged Gaza Strip. Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man in Deir el-Balah on Saturday. At least five more Palestinians were wounded in the territory, including in an Israeli tank strike on tents in Khan Younis and gunfire in al-Mawasi and Gaza City. Since October’s “ceasefire”, at least 1,258 Palestinians have been killed and 4,139 wounded, while 807 bodies were recovered from rubble as of August 10. Since October 2023, when Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza, 73,386 Palestinians have been killed and 174,250 wounded, Gaza’s Health Ministry said. Gaza also held one of its largest mass funerals of the war for 112 members of the Abu Sharia and al-Hasayna families, killed in a November 2023 strike. Their remains were only recovered last week. More than 150 people from the same attack are still missing. On Saturday, crews recovered 19 more bodies, mostly women and children, from a single collapsed building after four days of manual digging, with Israel continuing to bar heavy machinery from entering Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 8,000 people remain missing under rubble across the Strip. A satellite assessment by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found that 82 percent of all structures in Gaza – more than 201,000 buildings – were still damaged or destroyed as of mid-June. Amid a series of raids across the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces launched a major, multi-day operation in Qalandiya refugee camp and neighbouring Kafr Aqab, north of occupied East Jerusalem. According to local reports, soldiers demolished a carwash, severely beat a journalist and ran over a young man with a military vehicle. By midweek, they had occupied community and government offices, forced a family from its home and blocked dawn prayers. The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society said more than 60 residents, including women and children, were detained and interrogated in homes converted to field posts. It said that a total of more than 25,600 Palestinians have been arrested across the West Bank since October 2023. By Friday’s overnight withdrawal from the Qalandiya area, Palestinian officials reported 51 injured, most from severe beatings. Separately, a 14-year-old was shot in the back in Jenin, according to the Wafa news agency. An Israeli military probe into last month’s Israeli settler attacks on Tal, in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed, undercut the pretext used to justify the raids across the occupied West Bank. Israeli investigators found that the settler hike that preceded the killings was never authorised, too few troops responded to the altercations, and they could not rule out that one of the Israelis killed was shot by Israeli soldiers, The Times of Israel reported. Thirteen new unauthorised settler outposts have gone up near Tal since, with political leadership blocking the army from removing them. New illegal outposts spread elsewhere, too. In Qusra, south of Nablus, settlers from the Jabal Ein Eina hill outpost – which has been the base for attacks on Qusra in recent months that have, at times, turned deadly – pitched a tent directly in front of a Palestinian family’s home on the town’s edge, effectively trapping the family inside. Such tactics resemble those used weeks earlier against the Tubassi family in Jalud, who were forced out after a two-week siege backed by Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Israeli ministers and parliament members laid the foundation stone for a new illegal settlement, Emek Dotan, near Arrabeh, Jenin, in a ceremony attended by 22 settler families, according to Wafa. In addition, Israeli NGO Ir Amim reported on Monday on the Israeli government recently advanced three further settlement plans in occupied East Jerusalem: approximately 650 housing units at the main entrance of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Umm Tuba; approximately 450 housing units in the heart of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Umm Lison; and an additional 2,300 housing units to expand the illegal settlement of Gilo, which would further cut occupied East Jerusalem off from the Bethlehem and the southern West Bank area. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 2,256 attacks against Palestinians and their property in July alone – 1,458 by Israeli forces and 798 by settlers. Ramallah, el-Bireh, Nablus and Jenin were the worst affected. The week’s single rare exception to near-total impunity of settler violence came on Thursday, when prosecutors indicted the settler Yinon Levi over last year’s killing of Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen. It was the first such charge in the West Bank in more than seven years, with more than 93 percent of settler-attack investigations closed without indictment. The day after the indictment, settlers disrupted a wedding in Umm Al-Khair in what residents described to Al Jazeera as retribution. 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