Then-United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths speaks during a press conference on the situation in Gaza, at a U.N. office in Geneva, on November 15, 2023.

 (Photo: Jean-Guy Python/AFP via Getty Images)

“I am absolutely convinced that what’s going on in Gaza is a genocide, because the thing speaks for itself,” said Martin Griffiths.

BRETT WILKINS

Jul 24, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

Former United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths on Tuesday accused Israel of committing the century’s worst genocide in an interview published amid increasingly deadly forced starvation in Gaza and a vow by an Israeli Cabinet minister to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the strip to make way for Jewish resettlement.

“I am absolutely convinced that what’s going on in Gaza is a genocide, because the thing speaks for itself,” Griffiths, who served as the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator from 2021 to 2024, said in an interview with Middle East Eye.

“My grandchildren will be learning in school about who did what in the worst crime of the 21st century,” he predicted.

https://x.com/SondosAsem1/status/1948082294071181715?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1948082294071181715%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fmartin-griffiths-gaza

Griffiths’ remarks came amid worsening mass starvation in Gaza fueled by Israel’s blockade of the besieged strip. Gaza officials said Thursday that at least 115 Palestinians, including more than 80 children, have died of malnutrition since October 2023. Overall, at least 59,106 Palestinians have been killed and more than 142,500 others have been wounded by Israeli forces during 656 days of assault and siege. Over 14,000 Gazans are also missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble.

“There can frankly be very little doubt that we are seeing starvation and hunger as an instrument of the war,” Griffiths asserted. “There is no prior experience in my five decades of humanitarian experience that can come close to comparison to the horror we are all seeing in Gaza.”

“The U.N. announcement, based on serious hospital data, that people are fainting in the street from hunger and malnutrition, tells us all we need to know,” he added. “It is a historic fact that children die first in these circumstances. Our humanity cannot believe our eyes.”

Numerous human rights groups and U.N. experts have accused Israel of weaponizing starvation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including forced starvation and murder.

In March 2024 the International Court of Justice—which is currently weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa—ordered Israel to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into the embattled enclave and reiterated an earlier directive to prevent genocidal acts. Critics allege that Israel has ignored these orders.

Griffiths slammed the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid distribution points have been the site of numerous massacres in which more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed. Israeli officers and soldiers have said they received orders to shoot and shell desperate aid-seekers.

“This isn’t humanitarian,” Griffiths said. “It’s a lure for displacement.”

Israeli officials have openly declared their intent to conquer, indefinitely occupy, and ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians so that a plan proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump to turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” can be implemented.

On Thursday, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said that Israel’s far-right government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out.”

“All of Gaza will be Jewish,” Eliyahu vowed.

Griffiths also decried the “massive impunity” enjoyed by Israeli officials and their enablers, and warned of the dangerous precedent this sets.

“What happens in Gaza doesn’t stay in Gaza,” he said.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

BRETT WILKINS

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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24 JULY 2025/SF POLITICS/JAY BARMANN (SFist.com)

The next legal step after the Supreme Court appeared to roll over multiple times to the will of President Trump this term will be answering the question of whether his executive order barring birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants is unconstitutional.

That ruling is likely to come in the court’s next term, now that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the administration, finding that, yes, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

In the 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel, the appeals court finds that there is significant precedent for opening birthright citizenship to immigrants, specifically starting with an 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a case involving a San Francisco man who was initially denied entry back into the US after leaving, despite having been born in San Francisco in 1873.

At the time, under the racist Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese laborers were denied the ability to become US citizens, and if they returned to China and tried to come back to the US, they were denied reentry. The Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to settle the question of whether slaves or their children could be citizens, and the high court found that it extended to the children of immigrant non-citizens as well.

“Since Wong Kim Ark was decided in 1898, and until this challenged Executive Order, the Judiciary, Congress, and the Executive Branch have consistently and uniformly protected the Citizenship Clause’s explicit guarantee of birthright citizenship regardless of the immigration status of an individual’s parents,” writes Judge Ronald M. Gould for the majority.

Gould, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, was joined in the opinion by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, another Clinton appointee. A partial dissent was filed by Trump appointee Judge Patrick J. Bumatay on the grounds of standing.

The majority opinion finds that the states that sued the administration in this case, Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon, have standing because of the economic harms that would be caused by denying citizenship to those born in those states, who then count toward federal appropriations based on census data. Judge Bumatay dissented only on the question of standing, calling these harms “speculative,” but did not dissent on the larger constitutional question.

The original case was brought before a federal judge in Washington, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington, and the Ninth Circuit found that this allows them to uphold his nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s executive order. This is despite the Supreme Court ruling in June that federal judges should not wield the power of these universal injunctions, and that individual plaintiffs must bring suit against executive orders like this or join a class action. As the New York Times notes, the Supreme Court decision “left the door slightly open to universal injunctions when they were the only way to address the claim brought by the parties who sued, and the appellate judges found that this was such a case.”

The Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the claims brought by a group of pregnant mothers, saying that their case would be covered under a different jurisdiction, a federal court in New Hampshire, where a class-action suit is being heard on behalf of undocumented mothers.

Top image: The William Kenzo Nakamura Courthouse in Seattle, where the Seattle arm of the Ninth Circuit resides. Photo via Wikimedia

24 JULY 2025/SF NEWS/JOE KUKURA (SFist.com)

Safeway workers all over Central and Northern California could go on strike as soon as Saturday morning, and every Safeway north of Bakersfield could potentially have a picket line if a deal is not reached with parent company Albertsons.

Several Bay Area cities are just coming out of a garbage collector strike, but another labor strike could be looming that also affects a disproportionate number of Northern and Central California residents. KRON4 reports that unionized Safeway employees could go on strike as soon as 12:01 am Saturday morning (July 26), as 25,000 union Safeway workers might be forming picket lines come Saturday morning if they don’t get a new wage and benefit deal.

https://x.com/UFCW5/status/1947861223078563876?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1947861223078563876%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsfist.com%2F2025%2F07%2F24%2Fhuge-safeway-strike-possibly-looming-could-start-as-early-as-saturday%2F

KRON4 notes the above demonstration outside the Burlingame Safeway Wednesday afternoon. The tweet we see is from United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 5, which represents many of the workers, as does UFCW Local 8 and Local 648.

And yes, the scene above could play out at your local Safeway as soon as Saturday.

https://x.com/CaliforniaLabor/status/1948081075340951826?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1948081075340951826%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsfist.com%2F2025%2F07%2F24%2Fhuge-safeway-strike-possibly-looming-could-start-as-early-as-saturday%2F

UFCW Union Local 5 representative Jim Araby told KGO that every Safeway in Northern California could see strikes from its unionized workers. “As far south as Bakersfield, up to the Oregon border, and everything in between,” Araby told KGO. “Those workers have been working without a contract for the last few months. It will be significant enough to impact Safeway to move them at the table.”

https://x.com/EW4Democracy/status/1947706301925994925?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1947706301925994925%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsfist.com%2F2025%2F07%2F24%2Fhuge-safeway-strike-possibly-looming-could-start-as-early-as-saturday%2F

And KGO also confirms the above claim that Safeway (and parent company Alberstons) are offering replacement worker positions paying $27 an hour in anticipation of a possible strike.

Safeway has sent this same statement to multiple media organizations. “We remain committed to productive, good-faith negotiations with the UFCW locals in Northern California,” the statement says. “We have scheduled bargaining sessions this week and continue to work with a federal mediator. While we are disappointed that the Unions have indicated the possibility of a strike at some of our stores, we fully respect our associates’ right to engage in collective bargaining.”

KPIX adds a federal mediator is indeed at the bargaining table with both sides. Those negotiations are still in progress as of press time for this post Thursday afternoon, with hopes of brokering a deal before Saturday.

Related: Garbage Piling Up In Bay Area Cities as Trash Collector Strike Enters Second Week [SFist]

Image: @CaliforniaLabor via Twitter

The Chris Hedges Jul 24, 2025 Today I testified at a hearing in Trenton, New Jersey to the State Assembly and local government committee to oppose the adoption of Bill A3558 in New Jersey. The bill would accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been recognized by 35 states in the U.S., and New Jersey may soon become the 36th. Posted here is the video with slight audio touch-ups, video editing and captions. Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/ Follow The Chris Hedges Report on social media: https://linktr.ee/chrishedges Photo in thumbnail: Protest Against Anti Semitism and NSJP Conference At UCLA Members of the Jewish community and their allies protest anti-Semitism and the upcoming National Students for Justice in Palestine conference at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, California on November 6, 2018. The Los Angeles City Council called on UCLA to cancel the NSJP conference over fears that it will promote anti-Semitism. (Photo by Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

(Image from Deadline.com)

Please disseminate!

–from Gwyllm Llwydd

Photos of Besties : Besties and Bonus Besties Thank you u/ShortsAndLadders https://bashify.io/i/odQRI2

Here are all of the Epstein Files that have either been leaked or released.

https://joshwho.net/EpsteinList/gov.usc … mbined.pdf(verified court documents)

https://joshwho.net/EpsteinList/black-b … dacted.pdf(verified pre-Bondi) Trump is on page 85, or pdf pg. 80

Trump’s name is circled. The circled individuals are the ones involved in the trafficking ring according to the person who originally released the book. These people would be “The List “ Here is the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsiKUXrlcac

Here’s the flight logshttps://www.documentcloud.org/documents … s-maxwell/

—————————other Epstein Information

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles … awsuit.pdf here’s a court doc of Epstein and Trump raping a 13 yr old together.

Some people think this claim is a hoax. Here is Katies testimony on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnib-OORRRo

Jeffrey Epstein’s Ex Says He Boasted About Being a Mossad Agent https://share.google/jLMGahKlCzfV1RHZq Jeffrey Epstein and Israel have both have the same lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Dershowitz says he’s building ‘legal dream team’ to defend Israel in court and on international stage | The Times of Israel https://share.google/Lb9hDOduBWG4Elpid

Epstein Docs: https://ia600705.us.archive.org/21/items/epsteindocs/

—————————other Trump information:

Here’s trump admitting to peeping on 14-15 year old girls at around 1:40 on the Howard Stern Radio Show: https://youtu.be/iFaQL_kv_QY?si=vBs75kaxPjJJThka

Trump’s promise to his daughter: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-t … a52d2ead02 “I have a deal with her. She’s 17 and doing great ― Ivanka. She made me promise, swear to her that I would never date a girl younger than her,” Trump said. “So as she grows older, the field is getting very limited.”

Trump’s modeling agency was probably part of Jeffreys pipeline: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 … migration/

A good summary of Trump-Epstein timeline: https://thepresidential.medium.com/we-h … da67c20f75

• ⁠Much of this info can also be found on: https://theepsteindocs.com/

Feel free to do your part and spread this info around so it is never “lost”.

Reminder:

• ⁠Trump Confesses He Was ‘Sexually Attracted’ to Ivanka When She Was 13 Years Old • ⁠Donald Trump called his own daughter a ‘voluptuous piece of a**’ in yet more lewd comments threatening to derail his White House bid • ⁠Donald Trump Once Joked He and Ivanka Have “Sex” in Common • ⁠Trump’s lewd talk about daughter Ivanka in front of White House staff recalled in new book

According to The New Republic, “’Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [former Chief of Staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter,’ Taylor, who served as a Department of Homeland Security chief of staff under Trump, wrote in his book.”

• ⁠”You remind me of my daughter”: Stormy Daniels testifies that Trump compared her to Ivanka • ⁠Donald Trump’s comments about daughter raise eyebrows • ⁠Trump told Howard Stern it’s OK to call Ivanka a ‘piece of a–‘ • ⁠Trump: ‘If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her’ • ⁠Trump on Ivanka: ‘She has the ‘best body’ — and I created her’ • ⁠Trump: ‘Is it wrong to be more sexually attracted to your own daughter than your wife’? • ⁠Trump Encouraged His Own Daughter Ivanka to Release a Sex Tape, and She Was Horrified

Bonus:

• ⁠Trump: commenting on his 1-year-old daughter Tiffany’s breasts. He also says “she’s got Marla’s legs.”

Double Bonus:

For the better part of two decades starting in the late 1980s, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump swam in the same social pool. They were neighbors in Florida. They jetted from LaGuardia to Palm Beach together. They partied at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.

• ⁠https://archive.md/XK0A7#selection-655.0-655.290

and…

MC2 (pronounced MC squared) was the modeling agency that Epstein, Brunel, and the mob would use to get trafficked girls into the US with “genius visas”

• ⁠https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fas … 235085929/

and…

Nicknamed the “Einstein Visa”, the EB-1 is in theory reserved for people who are highly acclaimed in their field – the government cites Pulitzer, Oscar, and Olympic winners as examples – as well as respected academic researchers and multinational executives.

Mrs Trump began applying for the visa in 2000, when she was Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model working in New York and dating Donald Trump. She was approved in 2001, one of just five people from Slovenia to win the coveted visa that year, according to the Post.

• ⁠https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43256318

and…

While President Donald Trump has dismissed his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, The New York Times reported that Epstein has claimed he introduced Trump to his third wife, Melania.

• ⁠https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey … nia-2019-7

July 22, 2025 (zeteo@substack.com)

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, a 1-year-old child in Gaza City, faces life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, on July 21, 2025. Photo by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu via Getty Images

by Mehdi Hasan

July 23, 2025 (zeteo@substack.com)

Zeteo imagines how the next class of centrist Democrats could take all the wrong lessons from Zohran Mamdani’s historic primary campaign. Video and Read on Substack

… and declare war on the unhoused. Welcome the the Lurie budget.

By TIM REDMOND

JULY 22, 2025 (48hills.org)

After the Coalition on Homelessness held a rally and silent march for the end of democracy, the Board of Supes finally passed a budget that raises fees on people who aren’t rich, attacks the unhoused population, and allows the billionaires to escape any sacrifice at all.

The vote on the budget, as with last week, was 10-1, with only Sup. Jackie Fielder in dissent. The vote to allow the mayor to redirect affordable housing money to shelter was 8-3, with only Sups. Shamann Walton, Cheyanne Chen and Fielder in dissent. The vote to force people living in RVs out onto the streets was 9-2, with only Fielder and Walton in dissent.

This is, of course, no surprise: The first vote last week set the scene. But it cements the position that Mayor Lurie has taken, and this board, by a typical 9-2 or 8-3 majority, has accepted:

A city with more than 50 billionaires, that is among the richest cities that have ever existed in human history, has to radically cut services, raise money from fees on working people, and force the victims of all that wealth to live in even greater misery.

The Standard had a good piece today that addressed the lie that removing tent encampments makes the streets safer. A lot of people are still unhoused—and women are terrified and are increasingly surviving sexual assault.

Women living on San Francisco’s streets say they’re experiencing a spike in sexual violence as city leaders wage a crackdown on encampments. For the past year, cleaning crews, cops, and outreach workers have fanned out across the city to dismantle and dispose of tents, quickly improving street conditions but often leaving homeless people to sleep on the sidewalk or in parks, as outreach workers say shelters are constantly at or near capacity. 

“I’ve been raped more times than I’ve had consensual sex in the last year,” said a homeless woman named Rebecca. “I’ve been outside in the cold and had some guy offer me shelter, and the next thing I know, I wake up, and he’s raping me.” 

Rebecca said she was arrested this year for having a tent but has no way to pay the fine.

“I’m fucking homeless. I don’t have money like that,” she said. “Now I’ve got to go sell my body to pay the fucking citation?” 

This is what “resolving” encampments means.

This is what criminalizing poverty means.

This is what the city’s current budget and policies mean.

From the Coalition:

“The vote to overturn the supermajority requirement to move funding in Prop C not only represents a broken promise to voters, but it puts child and youth housing in serious peril,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Historically, the supermajority vote has protected against attempts to cut essential homeless family funds. All in all this is a gut punch to poor families, immigrant communities, and working class San Franciscans.” 

“It’s really hard to give stability to my children,” said Maria Guerra. “We’re living in a car, sometimes on the street. I’m suffering emotionally, and my family as well. I’m asking for the city to restore and protect the money for prop C, because we need real housing for families, for everyone.”

That same day, the Board also approved a blanket two-hour RV parking limit across San Francisco—a move that will forcibly displace hundreds of people who rely on their vehicles for survival. The Mayor’s RV ban comes at a time when immigrant communities are already under threat from escalating criminalization and federal deportation efforts. In a city of over 280,000 immigrants, the ban undermines San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city and pushes immigrant families out of their only form of housing and onto the streets, where they face increased exposure to law enforcement and potential ICE encounters. Rather than offering protection, city leaders chose to compound the dangers and harms experienced by the very people they claim to protect.

“

Everything was civil at the Board of Supes. Fielder and Walton and Chen cast their no votes. President Rafael Mandelman announced that the budget had finally passed.

Meanwhile, I got a press release from the Mayor’s Office that reads:

Mayor Daniel Lurie and the Board of Supervisors today secured a $5 million grant from the California Energy Commission to install new electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The grant, along with a $2.8 million match from the city, will fund the installation of 403 new electric vehicle charging ports at city-owned facilities and enable fueling an additional 800 light-duty electric vehicles, equivalent to roughly 40% of the city’s non-public safety light-duty fleet. With the approval of the legislation, the City Administrator’s Office will begin designing plans, purchasing the chargers, and installing them.

Electric cars, other than Teslas, are a good thing. Charging stations are a good thing. Nothing wrong with this—except that on a day when the city passed a brutal budget that will cause horrible suffering, this is the priority: Places for people who can afford nice cars to charge them more easily.

While people who are living in RVs are going to be thrown out on the streets, because the Mayor’s Office can’t find a place for them to park. Apparently, there are no $5 million grants for that.

I know that RVs aren’t a permanent solution to homelessness, and some neighborhoods complain about trash and dangerous conditions. I live in Bernal Heights, and for years, a few RVs were parked beside the hill, on a street where nobody else parks, in front of nobody’s house or business. If there was a place to park an RV where it would impact nobody, this was it. I walked (and at times ran, in my slow old-man way) my dog by them every day, and never had a problem. They were families doing the best they could; there was no garbage on the streets. No violence, no danger.

At one point, when I was jogging up the hill, two cops came by in a car and pulled over. They asked if I lived in the neighborhood. I told them I did. They asked if I was having any problems with the people in the RVs (as if they were preparing some sort of complaint).

I told them I was fine with the residents; they weren’t doing anything wrong. The street was clean; they took care of the place. “Okay,” the cop said. “But if you have any problems, you call us right away.”

I didn’t. But someone did. They are all gone now. I hope they are not living on the streets, in danger for their health and lives, but I suspect they are.

48 Hills welcomes comments in the form of letters to the editor, which you can submit here. We also invite you to join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Tim Redmond

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.

The Onion Jul 23, 2025 Become an Onion member while it’s still optional. https://membership.theonion.com/?camp…

Israeli settlers “feel that everything belongs to them,” Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, told NBC New

Video; https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/israel-jewish-settlers-west-bank-attacks-christians-rcna218617

July 18, 2025 (NBCNews.com)

By Matt Bradley

TAYBEH, West Bank — The gleaming white ruins of Taybeh’s fifth-century Church of St. George Al Khidr stand as a testament to just how long the faith has endured in the occupied West Bank’s last majority-Christian town.

But after centuries of perseverance, the Christian community now faces a modern existential threat only a few miles from where its members’ faith was forged: regular, violent harassment by Jewish settlers who would like to force them and Palestinians of other faiths to leave, and an Israeli government that often turns a blind eye to the settlers’ crimes, according to rights groups and church leaders.

Earlier this week, the ruins were fringed with ashes left from recent fires that scorched olive orchards abutting the church grounds and its next-door cemetery — blazes town leaders say were deliberately ignited by Israeli Jews during an anti-Palestinian arson attack on July 7. NBC News has asked the Israel Defense Forces and the country’s police force for comment but did not receive any response.

The settlers “feel that everything belongs to them,” Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, told NBC News on Monday. “Unfortunately, it seems to me that the [Israeli] government is silent, if not supporting them, as we saw. So they feel free to behave as they want,” he added.

The attacks near the church were small and left no casualties but they play into a worsening pattern of deadly settler abuse of Palestinians, the perpetrators of which are rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities. The Israeli government had previously said that any acts of violence by civilians are unacceptable and that individuals should not take the law into their own hands.

Settler violence targeting Palestinians in the West Bank has spiked to unusually high levels over the past several months: The United Nations has reported more than 700 incidents just in the first half of this year. It reported 216 attacks by Israel settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank for the whole of 2023.

Some have blamed this on an upswell of anti-Palestinian anger in Israel following the Hamas-led terror attacks from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. But they had already been increasing after the most right-wing government in Israeli history took office in late 2022.

“Since the establishment of this government, you have [ministers] saying, ‘Don’t apply the law on settlers,’” Nadav Weiman, executive director of “Breaking the Silence,” an Israeli organization that reports on abuses by Israel’s security services, said in an interview.

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see these videos from the West Bank and see full faces” of the settlers, said Weiman, adding that they enjoyed so much impunity that many often no longer wear masks.

Last Friday, settlers beat to death Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old American from Florida who was visiting his mom, brother and sister in the village of Sinjil. A second man identified as Mohammed al-Shalabi, 23, was also killed in the incident, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Musallet’s death sparked an angry reaction from U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — an evangelical Christian and longtime advocate for settlers’ rights to colonize Palestinian land — who in a Wednesday post on X said Israel should “aggressively investigate the murder,” which he called a “criminal and terrorist act.”

The Israel Defense Forces said last Friday that authorities were looking into the matter. Police told NBC News that several people from “both sides” had been detained at the scene on suspicion of involvement in acts of violence, and that a joint investigation had been launched by the Israel Police and IDF Military Police.

Asked for an update Thursday, the IDF said a probe by the Israel Police and the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division was ongoing. The Israel Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, settlers rarely face legal consequences for violence against Palestinians, according to a report last year from the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, which found that more than 93% of investigations between 2005 and 2023 closed without an indictment and only 3% led to a conviction.

In videos taken by eyewitnesses in Taybeh and elsewhere in the West Bank, the settlers appear to be almost exclusively young men in their teens and 20s.

But Palestinian observers say the settler group, known in Israel as “Hilltop Youth,” are just foot soldiers fronting a sophisticated, coordinated effort to settle the West Bank in such a way as to make the formation of a Palestinian state impossible.

Designating Hilltop Youth a “violent extremist group” in October, the U.S. Treasury Department appeared to echo this assessment, saying it engaged “in killings, arson, assaults, and intimidation intended to drive Palestinian communities out of the West Bank.”

The settlers have also taken to grazing their cows and sheep in Palestinian fields. Leaders of the Church of St. George Al Khidr showed NBC News videos of settlers walking their cows into the town center, where they munched on the leaves of commercial olive trees.

Rights groups including Amnesty International and the Israel-based Peace Now, B’Tselem and Kerem Navot say the settlers’ strategy is both to damage Palestinian agriculture and to incite conflicts with residents to create a pretext for violence.

Both goals are intended to push the Palestinians out, the rights groups say.

Girgis Awad, a chicken farmer in Taybeh, said Monday that heavily armed settlers recently attempted to carjack him as he returned home from work at night.

“We are often constantly exposed to situations that make difficult our movement and our daily life,” Awad said. He added that settlers were stopping him and others from traveling to their farms to transfer chicks or food.

Christianity is a constant presence in Taybeh, which is home to Greek Orthodox, Latin and Melkite Greek Catholic churches. Small shrines and steeples loom over its streets, which straddle a hilltop overlooking a pastoral expanse of olive orchards. It’s also home to the Taybeh Brewing Company, one of very few beer companies in the Muslim-majority West Bank.

The Christian minority here is more endangered than perhaps any other Palestinian community. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the number of Christian Palestinians in what was once Mandatory Palestine has shrunk from around 10% of the population to less than 1%, with many emigrating to the West.

But the settlers aren’t targeting Taybeh for its religious identity, priests here say. They want to cleanse the West Bank of its non-Jewish population, regardless of their faith.

“They don’t differ between Muslims or Christians,” said the Rev. David Khoury, the leader of Taybeh’s Greek Orthodox Church, who said he was born and raised in the town. “The settlers, they are dealing with us the same.

Matt Bradley

Matt Bradley is an international correspondent for NBC News based in Israel.

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)