Saturday, July 18, 2026

Israeli ministers announce plans for new illegal settlements in Gaza and West Bank

Israeli ministers announce plans for new illegal settlements in Gaza and West Bank

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/18/israel-plan-new-illegal-settlements-gaza-west-bank-occupied-palestine 

 

A group of people erect the metal frame of a building on a rocky ridge
Israeli settlers building a new outpost near the Palestinian village of Azmut in the occupied West Bank on Friday. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

Israeli ministers announce plans for new illegal settlements in Gaza and West Bank

Defence minister seeks three ‘Nahal’ outposts in Gaza as top commander says Israel now controls 65% of the strip, violating Trump ceasefire deal

Israel’s defence and finance ministers announced plans for three illegal settlements in Gaza and more than $400m (£300m) in funding to expand construction in the occupied West Bank, as Israel’s military commander for the region celebrated violent outposts as his “security partners”.

Ilhan Karajeh in a headscarf examines damaged plant stems in a field with hills in the background
Palestinians brace as Israeli settler figures in coalition seek to cement West Bank gains before election
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With national elections scheduled for 27 October, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is racing to expand control of land in occupied Palestine and drive out Palestinians before its mandate expires.

The defence minister, Israel Katz, said he intended to set up three “Nahal” outposts in northern Gaza, a type of military community that for decades has paved the way for Israeli civilian settlements.

The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced 1.3bn shekels (£318m) in funding for dozens of new Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The cabinet allocated the money last month but kept the decision secret because of expected US opposition, Israeli media reported.

Maj Gen Avi Bluth, who commands Israeli forces in the West Bank, told residents of extremist outposts that he “appreciates their work” and considered them to be partners in security with the military.

Bluth, who grew up in a West Bank settlement himself, spoke on Wednesday at a meeting of the euphemistically named Farms Association, which represents settlements that are illegal even under Israeli law.

These play a key role in campaigns of terror that have driven Palestinians from their homes and lands across the occupied West Bank.

Dozens from Israel’s political and military elite, including two former prime ministers and former heads of all its security services, have threatened legal action against their government over support for Jewish terrorism in the West Bank.

“Settler violence is state violence,” the UN human rights office for Palestine said in a new report published this week that detailed how Israel used settlers to lead annexation efforts, while systematic impunity for perpetrators ensured violence could grow unchecked.

Hagit Ofran, from the Israeli activist group Peace Now, said bulldozers were working on at least seven settlements that would be populated before polling day. “The government is on a reckless pre-election sprint to raid the public purse in order to create facts on the ground,” Ofran said.

Katz outlined his settlement plans for Gaza during a visit to Israeli-controlled parts of the territory. He has also pushed for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza through the large-scale migration of Palestinians. “I intend to establish three Nahal outposts, which is also a military entity, in those places that were [Israeli settlements] in northern Gaza,” he told Channel 14 TV.

Israeli bulldozers prepare land on a hillside. Temporary cabin structures are lined up above the ridge.
Israeli bulldozers prepare land for the construction of the new settlement of Dotan Valley near the West Bank city of Jenin. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA

Nahal outposts were not intended for military use in the long term, said Dror Etkes, the founder of the advocacy group Kerem Navot, which monitors Israel’s land grab in the occupied West Bank. “The military is only the first phase, which aims to prepare it for future settlement,” he said. “All together, dozens of Israeli settlements in the West Bank were established in this way.”

Nahal settlements were first established in border regions in the 1950s, including surrounding the Gaza Strip, Etkes said. From 1967, the same system was used in the occupied West Bank, initially along the Jordan valley and then spreading to other areas.

Smotrich also said last month that plans for three settlements in Gaza were complete and work could begin as soon as Netanyahu gave a green light. The prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment on Katz’s plans.

Katz also told Channel 14 that he “felt good” seeing the wasteland of rubble that had replaced Palestinian homes and communities in most of Israeli-occupied Gaza.

Men stand on a rocky hillside to position a large metal star and Israeli flag. To the side of them is a corrugated iron container with the blue star sprayed on its sides.
Israeli settlers work on Friday to build a new outpost at the Palestinian village of Azmut in the occupied West Bank. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

Israel now controls 65% of Gaza, Israel’s deputy chief of staff, Maj Gen Tamir Yadai, told Katz in an on-camera briefing. This is far beyond the 53% agreed under the ceasefire brokered last year by the US president, Donald Trump.

About 2 million Palestinians who survived Israel’s war of annihilation are crowded into the remaining third of Gaza’s territory.

“I don’t know how to describe this, other than victory, when you control 65% of the territory, when you have killed over 70,000 terrorists here,” Yadai said.

His figures appeared to label 21,000 Palestinian children killed by Israeli attacks as “terrorists”, including more than 1,000 babies who never reached their first birthday.

Israel’s military has recognised that a database of Gaza’s war dead compiled by Palestinian health authorities is broadly accurate. It contains more than 73,000 people listed by name, with their Israeli-issued ID number.

More than 21,000 were children; more than 10,000 were women under 60 years old, and more than 5,000 were elderly people. Asked whether Yadai’s data counted women, children and elderly people as “terrorists”, the Israeli military declined to comment directly.

A spokesperson said the military was still assessing casualty numbers in Gaza, and despite Yadai’s comments to Katz, had not briefed civilian officials on this issue.

“The IDF is currently conducting a staff assessment regarding the breakdown and categorisation of its casualties. The process has not yet been completed and has not been presented to the political echelon,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson declined to comment on Bluth’s backing for settler militants and said decisions on settlements were a political issue.

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What do Trump’s declassified election conspiracy documents show — and how much was known already?

 

What do Trump’s declassified election conspiracy documents show — and how much was known already?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-fact-check-election-speech-b3016584.html 

What do Trump’s declassified election conspiracy documents show — and how much was known already?

Newly published materials largely rehash previous intelligence while president fails to offer evidence of fraud that cost him 2020

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Trump throws US elections into chaos with ‘declassified’ voter fraud conspiracy claims

President Donald Trump has spent more than a decade spreading false and inflated claims about election outcomes and how the nation’s elections are run. His primetime address on Thursday was no exception.

The president alleged “shocking vulnerabilities in election infrastructure” and claimed our “election system” is “dangerously” exposed to “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”

But it appears much of the newly declassified material he announced Thursday evening echoes or reinterprets previously disclosed information that was already known to intelligence officials, including during his first administration.

Importantly, nothing in the materials supports any allegations that any votes were manipulated by fraud or foreign actors to have changed election outcomes.

Election officials and voting rights advocates fear the president’s remarks, which he says are meant to protect elections, will instead continue to sow deep distrust in their legitimacy to serve his own interests.

President Donald Trump outlined four findings from newly declassified reports that largely revisit previous intelligence about the nation’s election infrastructure
President Donald Trump outlined four findings from newly declassified reports that largely revisit previous intelligence about the nation’s election infrastructure (AFP/Getty)

"Once again, President Trump is attempting to undermine public confidence in our elections by repeating blatant, outlandish lies,” according to Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project. “He promised the nation ‘really big news,’ and instead used a primetime spot to spew the same tired rhetoric to shake Americans’ confidence in their own elections.”

Election vulnerabilities

In its declassified report, the White House claims American election infrastructure is vulnerable to interference from five foreign powers.

The nation’s intelligence community determined in January 2020 that China, Iran, Russia and North Korea “have the capability to access and potentially manipulate” U.S. election data, like centralized voter registration databases, but noted that it “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.”

A long-running thesis among election conspiracy theorists claims election technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic were deployed in the U.S. to rig elections for Democrats. Those claims were also raised during an infamous news conference featuring Trump-allied lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — which were later at the center of several successful defamation lawsuits brought by the companies.

The Trump administration’s analysis contends that Venezuelan officials have “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” to influence election outcomes, but did not determine there is evidence for “large-scale electronic fraud” in the country. The analysis determined that Venezuelan officials did not have the ability to manipulate votes outside the country.

“Neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government had the capability to manipulate the outcome of an election outside Venezuela,” according to the analysis.

Geoff Halte, an election security fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology who spent 10 years working for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stressed that “just because a vulnerability exists doesn’t prove that it’s been exploited, let alone that an exploitation altered something technically during an election.”

“Proving whether voting systems have been exploited in an election requires evidence. But the public should be aware that neither a mountain of documents nor technically complex claims are enough to credibly prove that an election security incident actually occurred,” he said Thursday.

But to date, “no evidence has shown that vulnerabilities in voting systems have been exploited to alter election outcomes in the U.S.”

China

In his address, Trump claimed Beijing “carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.”

That information includes “names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.”

Virtually anyone can buy up huge swaths of voter data, which is publicly available by many states. It doesn’t appear there is any evidence indicating China used the data to manipulate results, but China has a long and well-documented history and reputation among intelligence agencies of vacuuming up American data.

Trump has long sought to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections by elevating baseless or misleading claims about the ballots cast and how they are run
Trump has long sought to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections by elevating baseless or misleading claims about the ballots cast and how they are run (Getty)

Trump also said newly declassified intelligence — which was obtained in 2020 but “buried by rogue bureaucrats" while he was president — includes an alleged attempt to “manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.”

The president appeared to misleadingly describe a 2020 memo from the FBI’s Albany, New York office that allegedly discovered China’s plans to send out thousands of fake driver’s licenses. Agents at the time had questioned whether it was a bogus tip or if the source was reliable, and there is no evidence that any votes were fraudulently cast a result.

That memo was released by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley’s office last year.

But Trump’s remarks revived a narrative that has been central to his political career. The president's persistent claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and rigged against him fueled January 6 riots, sustained partisan investigations intended to reverse the outcomes in states he lost, inspired Republican-led legislation in nearly every state to change how elections are run, and formed the basis of his 2024 campaign.

“We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” intelligence officials wrote in their 2021 report.

“We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits,” they added.

Foreign actors were more successful in their attempts to “spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and results,” they wrote.

Last year, Trump issued an executive order stating that “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election.”

Voter fraud

In his remarks, Trump alleged a “pay, play, and cheat” scheme in Michigan, where “some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people's names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced.”

But an investigation into that alleged scheme, which was first alerted to law enforcement officials by an election worker, has long been known to authorities and prosecutors. No fraudulent votes or registrations were discovered.

Trump has repeatedly framed the spurious idea of widespread noncitizen voting to urge passage of the SAVE Act ahead of midterm elections with the balance of power in Congress, and fate of his remaining years in office, at stake
Trump has repeatedly framed the spurious idea of widespread noncitizen voting to urge passage of the SAVE Act ahead of midterm elections with the balance of power in Congress, and fate of his remaining years in office, at stake (Getty)

Interviews published by the White House which had not previously been released to the public spell out the alleged scheme, though it does not appear any fraudulent voter registrations resulted in fake ballots — which would be noticed by election workers.

The investigation was referred to the FBI, though election officials contend the process has shown how election security works: election officials flag irregularities to authorities and they investigate.

The FBI closed the probe last year after investigators “did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

Noncitizen voters

A persistent myth that millions of noncitizens are voting in federal elections — with the support of Democratic officials seeking to replace electorates — is driving the president’s demand for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which would impose nationwide voter ID requirements and establish onerous in-person voting requirements that would make it more difficult to participate in elections by voting by mail.

According to the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has identified roughly 250,000 noncitizens who were on voter rolls in several states, including California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

The agency determined 28,000 noncitizens were registered to vote, a figure that drew from data in 25 states that processed more than 68 million registration records in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

Under Trump, Homeland Security has initiated a government-wide sweep of records to states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status through the SAVE system. Election administrators have reported significant errors that have misidentified scores of eligible voters.

 

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