The night of April 29 to 30, the Israeli navy stormed the Global Sumud Flotillathe Israeli navy boarded the Global Sumud FlotillaApril 29, 5 p.m.

Israel released the two detainees from the Gaza Flotilla this Sunday, Catalan-Palestinian Saif Abukeshek and Brazilian Thiago Ávila, after "six brutal days," according to activists, detained in a prison in the south of the country. Abukeshek arrived this afternoon at El Prat airport, where he was received by family, friends, and fellow activists, and Ávila will fly from Egypt to Brazil. The Israeli navy arrested the two members of the civilian humanitarian mission last week, when the Israeli army stormed about twenty boats of the initiative in international waters.

After nine days detained by Israel, the Catalan-Palestinian Saif Abukeshek and the Brazilian Thiago Ávila, activists from the Flotilla heading to Gaza, will be released and expelled from the country. The Israeli army intercepted both of them in international waters while participating in a mission aimed at breaking the blockade in the Strip.

The auditorium of the University of Barcelona was too small this Friday to host the event “Law and Genocide,” with the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, Palestinian lawyer Raji Sourani, and jurist Elisenda Calvet. Organized by the European Office for Judicial Resistance (BERJ) and the Coalition Stop Complicity with Israel, the event was a vindication of international law at a time when it seems like a dead letter. Both have called for an end to the "colonial mentality" towards Palestine.

The Italian Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has called this Friday from Barcelona for an investigation into the role of the Greek authorities in the Israeli assault on the Global Sumud Flotilla last week. "How is it possible that the Greek authorities, instead of intervening to prevent Israel from committing a crime, participated in the operation? They picked up all participants except two," she said, referring to Palestinian-Catalan Saif Abukeshek and Brazilian Thiago Ávila, who are detained and prosecuted in Israel and who have reported torture through their lawyers.

The Gaza Flotilla sails again. Several boats set sail this Friday from Crete after a week ago about twenty ships were assaulted by Israel in international waters. The civil humanitarian mission thus resumes its course to Gaza. The next stop will be Turkey, where it will make a technical stop and more boats will join. It is expected that a total of more than 30 ships will sail.

Israel released most of the participants of the Flotilla this Friday that the army detained in Wednesday's assault,but is holding two spokespeople for the movement: the Palestinian-Catalan Saif Abukeshek and the Brazilian Thiago Ávila. Around 170 sailors, including about twenty Catalans, have been handed over to Greek authorities and have disembarked on the island of Crete, but the two spokespeople remain detained on the Israeli frigate where they were transferred after the assault. Benjamin Netanyahu's government has said they will be transferred to Israel for processing.

Last October, Donald Trump said he was considering asking Israel for the release of Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian to succeed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Barghouti has been imprisoned for the last 24 years of his life, convicted by a military court for ordering the deaths of five Israelis during the Second Intifada. All these years in prison have only increased his popularity, even though he has spent most of his time in isolation. In the last prisoner exchange, just a few months ago, Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out his release because he considers him too great a symbol with a future on the Palestinian political scene.

As international attention continues to be focused on tensions with Iran, the Israeli government has taken a further step in another key direction: occupation. With little media fanfare, it has approved a plan of 307 million euros to strengthen the Israeli presence in settlements in the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory that the international community continues to consider occupied by Israel.The project, planned for the period 2026-2030, aims to turn Katzrin, an Israeli settlement in the west, into "the first city of the Golan," in the words of Ze'ev Elkin, a member of the Ministry of Finance. According to various Israeli media, the plan includes investments in infrastructure, public services —such as hospitals and veterinary centers—, universities, and housing. All with a clear objective: to attract at least 3,000 Israeli families to the territory.The announcement came after a meeting in Jerusalem between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and local Golan leaders, such as Yehuda Dua and Uri Kellner. The message was unequivocal: the government not only maintains its commitment to settlements but wants to intensify it. On numerous occasions, Netanyahu has stated that the Golan will remain under Israeli control, a statement that clashes with international law. The Golan Heights have been recognized as territory occupied by Israel since 1967, after the Six-Day War, and were formally annexed in 1981."As the logic of Israel's colonial project is to obtain the land without the indigenous population, the Golan Heights are considered a successful model of expropriation and expansion, unlike the West Bank and Gaza," explains to ARA Neve Gordon, an Israeli academic specializing in politics, human rights, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a professor at Queen Mary University of London.According to him, the key lies in 1967: "The ethnic cleansing was almost complete and, as a result, there has been no sustained resistance to Israeli rule. About 130,000 Syrians fled and could not return, and only about 5,000 remained. This allowed the Golan to be integrated into both domestic law and the Israeli public imagination." The result is that, today, for a large majority of Israeli Jews —more than 90%, according to Gordon— the Golan is already part of Israel. This is a clear contrast with the West Bank, where the Palestinian presence has prevented full integration. A pattern of annexation

The expansion of settlements in the Golan is not an exception, but part of a pattern. The settlement policy deployed there presents clear parallels with what has been happening for decades in the West Bank: a combination of civilian presence and state support to consolidate control over disputed territories, always under the umbrella of security.In the West Bank, more than 700,000 Israeli settlers live today in settlements scattered throughout the territory. And the pace does not stop. In recent weeks, the government has approved 34 new settlements, in a decision that, according to the Israeli organization Peace Now, was made "secretly".Israeli media, such as Channel 24 or the newspaper Haaretz, have described the decision as the largest number of settlements ever approved in a single government session. According to this information, nine of the 34 approved settlements are existing outposts (settlements that are illegal even under Israeli law, as they are built without government authorization) which will now be retroactively legalized, while the rest have not yet been built. In total, the plan includes 20 new settlements, nine outposts, two expansions, and three nuclei that will become independent from existing settlements. Settlements and outposts vary in size, and can range from a single dwelling to multi-story building complexes.“Outposts are like settlements: an instrument of expropriation and expansion —describes Gordon—. Outposts, like settlements, are illegal under international law, but they were introduced just over two decades ago, after a US-led settlement freeze, and have ended up functioning as a tool to legitimize formal settlements: they are presented as their illegal version, when in reality both are,” he adds.The phenomenon, far from being isolated, is part of a sustained policy over time. Since 1967, settlements have been a central piece of Israeli strategy, but under Netanyahu's governments their expansion has accelerated. Israeli organizations such as ACLED or B’Tselem and analysis centers such as Chatham House warn of a simultaneous increase in settlements, land confiscations, and settler violence, especially since the start of the offensive in Gaza.Since the arrival of the current government, 103 new settlements have been approved, adding to the 127 already existing. If the legalization of outposts is added, the total in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has risen from 141 in 2022 to 210 currently, according to data cited by Al-Jazeera. In parallel, the government has allocated 119 million euros to the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions, the body responsible for authorizing these implantations.

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The residents of Bages have organized this weekend to demand that the company ICL –Israel Chemicals Limited– leave the territory. A thousand people spent the night in a camp in Callús as part of a mobilization driven by Revoltes de la Terra to denounce the environmental and social impact of this company that has been exploiting the region's salt mines since 1998. The intention is to stay for the entire weekend.

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Different civil society organizations have filed a complaint with the Prosecutor's Office against the board of directors of the company Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF), as well as against directors of six of its subsidiaries, for the company's involvement in the construction, operation and maintenance of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), which according to the complainants has allegedly contributed "to the consolidation of the illegal annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel; to the maintenance and expansion of Israel's illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory, and to the maintenance of discriminatory and inhumane practices by Israel against the Palestinian population".

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Until the 26th of this month, you have time to go to the Heartbreak Hotel theatre, in the heart of Sants, to see Return to Haifa, the magnificent adaptation of the story of the same name by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which Àlex Rigola has adapted and directed, with a cast of four actors and actresses who offer literally impressive performances: Chantal Aimée, Jordi Figueras, Ariadna Gil and Carles Roig. Return to Haifa, the original story, is a testimonial novel that recounts the reunion of a mother and father with their son twenty years after they had to abandon him, when he was just a baby, due to the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country, leaving behind all their belongings and also, often, their loved ones. This happened in 1948, just as the State of Israel was founded. The protagonist couple returns there twenty years later (Kanafani wrote the story in 1969; you can read it in Catalan in the translation by Anna Gil Bardají, published by Club Editor) to find their city again, their streets, their home, apparently as they left them, but now in the hands of the occupiers. And to meet their son. The break, the wound, is impossible to repair or heal.Return to Haifa, the play, brings all this to the stage with undeniable austerity and authority. As soon as the spectator enters the small room of the Heartbreak Hotel, they are greeted by Rigola and the four performers, and the director briefly presents the performance: he calls it theatre of urgency, conceived to provide an artistic response to one of the great political and human crises of our time: the genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the government and army of Israel in the face of the passivity, or acquiescence, or complicity, of the international community. It is literary theatre, text-based theatre: the actors and actresses serve the text scrupulously, while dramatizing it with a depth free of any affectation, at the antipodes of any temptation towards emphasis. To say that the result is breathtaking at several moments is accurate. The length of the play is just under an hour, but it reaches far and deep.The infamy of Gaza, of the West Bank, continues its course while the wars in Iran, in Lebanon, in a Middle East set ablaze by Netanyahu and Trump, two war criminals who have led the planet into a black hole full of destruction and corpses, partly for their own profit, partly for the profit of the elites who support them, partly for the delirium of the exercise of absolute and unpunished power, also continue. A little further on is Putin in Ukraine and, below, bleeding as always, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo. Faced with all this, closing oneself in one afternoon to see Return to Haifa in a theater like the Heartbreak, where everything is in close-up and where the actors cannot and do not want to hide (but neither can the spectators), may seem like a simply symbolic response. But it is not so: it is an active response, it means affirming ourselves in humanity and civilization in the face of atrocity and barbarism. And it is excellent theater, among the best that can be seen now.

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The Brazilian Thiago Ávila (1986) is one of the coordinators of the Global Sumud Flotilla, the new international flotilla that seeks to break the blockade of Gaza and the largest yet. Ávila, an activist and political analyst, was part of a previous flotilla, which was intercepted last year. The mission plans to mobilize more than eighty vessels and more than 1,000 participants from about a hundred countries. It sets sail from Barcelona in an even more dangerous context of regional war and will be accompanied, up to the exclusion zone imposed by Israel, by the ships of Open Arms and Greenpeace. Its objective: to reactivate international mobilization in support of the Palestinian people. After the farewell events this weekend at Moll de la Fusta, 41 vessels will set sail from Barcelona in the coming days bound for Gaza, when weather conditions permit. In Sicily, more boats from France and Italy will join, and more vessels will be added along the rest of the route through the Mediterranean.

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The Israeli Parliament approved this Monday one of the most controversial laws in recent years: it allows the death penalty by hanging for Palestinians convicted of terrorism offenses that have resulted in fatalities. The measure has been harshly criticized as discriminatory by European countries and human rights organizations. The new legislative text, called “death penalty for terrorists”, introduces profound changes to the Penal Code: it allows courts to impose capital punishment without the need for a prior request from the Public Prosecutor's Office and without unanimity among judges; a simple majority is sufficient. Judges will also no longer need to have a superior military rank. In Israel, capital punishment already existed for war crimes, crimes against humanity, or crimes against the Jewish people. In practice, however, the few death sentences that have been handed down have ended up being commuted to life imprisonment. The legal text, driven by the far-right party Otzma Yehudit, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, was approved with 62 votes in favor –including that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu– and 48 against. The objective is clear: “To establish the death penalty for terrorists who have perpetrated deadly attacks”, as the text literally states. Thus, any person who “intentionally causes the death of another with the aim of harming a citizen or resident of Israel, and with the intention of denying the existence of the State of Israel, may be sentenced to death or life imprisonment”, it adds.The law will be applicable to any territory under Israel's effective control and establishes a dual judicial circuit: one for civil courts within Israel and another for military courts in the West Bank, which judge Palestinians exclusively under military law. In the Israeli military courts in the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners convicted of armed operations that cause the death of an Israeli will face the mandatory death penalty, unless exceptional circumstances are detected that allow for a life sentence. In practice, the legislation will turn the death penalty into the default punishment, according to analysts. In Israeli civil courts, however, the penalty can be death or life imprisonment. In any case, those convicted will be held in separate facilities, with no right to visits except from authorized personnel, and legal consultations will be conducted solely by videoconference. As for executions, they will be carried out within a maximum of ninety days from the sentence.No avenues for appeal

Various organizations, including the Palestinian Prisoners Society, the Commission of Detainees' Affairs, the Addameer Association for Prisoner Support and Human Rights, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, denounce that this legal framework consolidates a system that specifically applies the death penalty to Palestinians and eliminates key avenues for appeal or pardon.“The law subjects Palestinian prisoners to a draconian and racist killing machine,” Sari Bachi, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), explains to ARA. “The death penalty is explicitly applied to Palestinians, but not to Jews. It is applied to those who kill with the motivation of denying the existence of the State of Israel, that is, to Palestinians. If a Jewish settler kills a Palestinian for nationalist reasons, they cannot be sentenced to death and will be tried in civilian courts with guarantees because they do not deny the Israeli state. In the case of a Palestinian, the death penalty is the default punishment within a military system with a conviction rate of 99%. This institutionalizes a regime of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians,” she adds.Along the same lines, other Israeli and Palestinian organizations – such as Adalah, the HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, B’Tselem, Parents Against Child Detention, and Zazim – also warn that the law violates international law, especially the right to life, as well as the regulations governing occupation. They recall that, according to the Hague Regulations, Israel has no sovereign authority to legislate over the population of the West Bank and must treat people living under occupation with dignity, even if they have been accused of committing crimes.“From a human rights perspective, the law largely contradicts Israeli law on dignity and liberty. Furthermore, the ninety-day period from the final verdict to execution, with virtually no room for requesting a review or other avenues, directly goes against international legal principles,” details Karen Saar, from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), to l’ARA.Following Hamas's attacks on October 7, 2023, several far-right Israeli lawmakers began pushing for the approval of this law. Minister of Security Ben-Gvir has justified that the death penalty can act as a deterrent. However, Amnesty International states that there is no evidence that capital punishment is more effective than life imprisonment in reducing crime.In recent years, human rights organizations have reported a significant increase in cases of abuse and torture in prisons and military detention centers. In December, the Israeli agency Walla! reported that 110 Palestinian prisoners had died in Israeli custody between January 23, 2023, and June 25 of last year. Before the final vote on the legislative text, the law had already generated strong opposition both internally and internationally. Experts from the UN Human Rights Council warned that the norm violated the right to life and could constitute cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment. The European Union also expressed concern, and the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom warned that the law could “undermine Israel’s democratic commitments.”

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Violent Israeli settlers attacked several West Bank villages early Sunday morning, burning cars and houses, and beating or throwing stones at Palestinian civilians. At least twelve people were injured. The incidents occurred near the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin, after an 18-year-old settler was killed on Saturday when his car collided with a Palestinian vehicle. Authorities are investigating whether it was a simple accident or a terrorist act. However, the settlers took justice into their own hands.

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Less than 100 meters from the British Museum, in the iconic London Review Bookshop, one of the first titles a customer encounters upon entering is the new edition of a 1979 classic. The PalestiniansThe book, written by journalist Jonathan Dimbleby and illustrated by photographer Don McCullin, began with a prologue explaining why the book was necessary at that time. Words that, almost half a century later, still resonate powerfully.

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Nothing new is happening in the West Bank. What's new is that it's hardly being disguised anymore.

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The Israeli government approved on Sunday the reopening of the land registration process in the occupied West Bank for the first time since 1967. This measure will allow the state to register Palestinian territories as "property of the State of Israel," according to the Justice Ministry and the state broadcaster Kan. This will expand Israel's control in the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinian Authority. advance towards the annexation of the territory

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When Donald Trump sealed the ceasefire in Gaza, he proclaimed the advent of a "golden age" for the Middle East, a promise of prosperity and peace that was supposed to transform the regionBut the reality on the ground is quite different: four months after the agreement, there have been only 17 days without Israeli attacks against the civilian population. The army has not only failed to withdraw, but is actually advancing along the "yellow line" that demarcates the territory of the Gaza Strip under Israeli control. Meanwhile, leaders and investors are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of turning Gaza, under Donald Trump's lifetime presidency, into a real estate development hub.

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Donald Trump's plan for the future of the Gaza Strip, agreed between the United States and Israel and approved by the UN Security Council, It establishes the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF) in the Palestinian territory until 2027The objective, according to the agreement, is for this military force to provide "support to the verified Palestinian police in Gaza" and contribute to "securing the border areas." Until now, no party had specified which countries would form the FIE, nor how many soldiers each state would contribute. But this Tuesday, Indonesia began to shed some light on the matter: the Asian country estimates it could contribute up to 8,000 soldiers, and asserts that a total of approximately 20,000 troops will be deployed along the Gaza Strip. However, there is still no signed public document. Indonesian presidential spokesperson Prasetyo Hadi explained that the exact number of troops has not yet been discussed, and that the figures presented by the government on Tuesday are approximations. "We are preparing in case an agreement is reached and we need to send peacekeeping forces," Hadi stated. These preparations, according to Chief of Staff Maruli Simanjuntak, would be military training exercises for the troops the country is prepared to send to Gaza.

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