This edition includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other party leaders repeatedly race-baiting against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship during and after Israel’s election campaign; Israel’s defense minister saying that Israel has forced Palestinians out of 70% of Gaza and is prepared to “finish the job,” that it has destroyed and ethnically cleansed southern Lebanon according to “the Gaza model,” and threatening to raze Gaza City to the ground; Israel’s president declaring that the cruel and inhumane conditions Israel has imposed on Palestinians held in Israeli prisons are “important and overdue” and pardoning a former Israeli soldier who was filmed murdering an incapacitated Palestinian man; Senior government ministers and party leaders campaigning on plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, boasting about turning the lives of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel “into hell” and destroying thousands of Palestinian homes, and asserting Israeli domination over the third holiest site in Islam; One of Israel’s most senior rabbis declaring it would be a “moral injustice” for parties representing Arabs to be part of Israel’s next government; And the chair of the Knesset (parliamentary) Finance Committee claiming that Jews are a “high-born people” and “the laws that apply to everyone else don’t apply to us.”
- November 6, 2026: President Isaac Herzog, who is considered a moderate in Israel, told members of the extreme right-wing Jewish Power party that the severe conditions Jewish Power leader and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has imposed on Palestinians held in Israeli prisons - most of whom are civilians and have not been charged with anything - are “important and overdue.” Human rights groups have condemned Israel’s prison system as a “network of torture camps” for Palestinians, including the widespread use of starvation, severe beatings, and rape and other forms of sexual violence, while Ben-Gvir himself has repeatedly boasted about turning the lives of imprisoned Palestinians “into hell.” At least 98 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, including from physical violence, medical neglect, and malnutrition.
- October 30, 2026: Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of the city of Safed and a member of the supreme rabbinic authority in Israel, the Chief Rabbinate Council, warned Israel’s opposition parties not to form a government that includes parties representing indigenous Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, saying it would be a “moral injustice,” declaring:
- “Form a government with [Arabs]? Give them control over budgets? Make them Health Minister, Defense Minister, Finance Minister - what?... Forming a government with them means dismantling the Jewish identity of the state and disregarding the Jewish majority in the country… You should know that, from our perspective, this is a moral injustice.”
- October 30, 2026: Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Zehut party, longtime extreme right-wing activist and former parliamentarian with Netanyahu’s Likud party, who was elected to the Knesset days earlier on a joint ticket with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, posted a video to social media accusing Palestinians with Israeli citizenship of stealing Israel’s election and threatening them with expulsion, referencing the Nakba, when some 75% of all Palestinians were driven out of their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948.
- October 29, 2026: Two days after Israel’s election, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on social media declaring that it’s forbidden to give Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who are “not loyal to the State of Israel” the right to vote. He also boasted about turning the lives of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel “into hell,” passing a death penalty law that only applies to Palestinians, and destroying 10,000 homes belonging to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in southern Israel.
- October 27, 2026: At the end of a reelection campaign marked by repeated race-baiting against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted an A.I.-generated video showing someone picking up a set of keys with a map of historic Palestine on the keychain and handing them to the leader of the United Arab List party, with the caption: “Don’t give them the keys to the country.” The following day, after most of the votes were counted showing an unprecedented number of seats won by parties representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, Netanyahu’s Likud party issued a statement making the baseless claim that: “The elections were stolen by Arab parties.”
- October 25, 2026: National Security Minister Ben-Gvir told an interviewer that Israel should “conquer” all of Gaza and send the Palestinians living there to countries like France, stating:
“If you ask me what should be done in Gaza, we should conquer the entire territory. All of it. It is our land, the Jewish people’s land. And we should encourage emigration… There are more attractive places, places looking for workers, and places where they could live more comfortably… Why not send [Palestinians in Gaza] to France, for example?”
- October 21, 2026: As part of his reelection campaign, National Security Minister Ben-Gvir released an A.I. generated video to promote his plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, depicting himself as a genie who grants the wish of a Palestinian man to leave Gaza, transporting him to Paris, where the man thanks him.
- October 17, 2026: Defense Minister Israel Katz boasted during a televised interview about systematically destroying more than 60 villages and ethnically cleansing 200,000 people in southern Lebanon, declaring, “Everything is destroyed. There are no residents there [anymore]... This is the Gaza model” to applause from the studio audience.
- October 6, 2026: National Security Minister Ben-Gvir released an election campaign video ad showing him sitting at the controls of a bulldozer and boasting of destroying a building in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem that was home to 10 Palestinian families, totaling about 60 people, declaring: “This is what governance looks like in Jerusalem… During my tenure, we demolish and demolish and demolish and demolish again… We are the masters of the house here. There is a very, very clear message here: Jerusalem is ours, the State of Israel is ours.” The building was constructed without a permit from Israel, which are almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain due to Israel’s discriminatory planning and building policies. In another post the same day, he boasted that the Israeli government had destroyed 10,000 Palestinian homes and other structures over the previous 18 months.
- October 5, 2026: Finance Minister and Minister in the Defense Ministry Bezalel Smotrich boasted about the government “cleaning” the population out of southern Lebanon, noting: “They have nowhere to return to,” adding: “by the way, the world isn’t stopping us.” He also claimed that thanks to “divine assistance” he was able to expand settlements in the West Bank while the world was focused on Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
- October 5, 2026: In an interview, Zehut party leader Feiglin criticized Netanyahu for not being tough enough on Palestinians in Gaza and called for Israel to annex the territory and drive the population out, stating: “I want to see Gaza empty… Occupation, transfer all, all the Arabs. I don’t care.”
- September 29, 2026: Finance Minister and Minister in the Defense Ministry Smotrich declared he is determined to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and to continue his “settlement revolution” by expanding it from the occupied West Bank to northern and southern Israel, where most Palestinians with Israeli citizenship live, stating: “the next step is already on the horizon: bringing the settlement revolution to the Negev [desert] and the Galilee.”
- September 28, 2026: National Security Minister Ben-Gvir entered the Noble Sanctuary Mosque complex in occupied East Jerusalem (known as the Temple Mount to Jews), the third holiest site in Islam, where he called on the government to impose full Jewish Israeli sovereignty over the site and bragged about the severe conditions he’s imposed on Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, declaring: “we are the masters of the Temple Mount! We are the masters of the prisons.”
- September 22, 2026: Defense Minister Katz said that if another Israeli soldier or civilian is taken captive Israel will expel all Palestinians remaining in Gaza City and raze it to the ground like it’s done to most of Gaza, including the cities of Rafah and Beit Hanoun, stating:
- “If a soldier or a single Israeli civilian is captured, all of Gaza City, including its homes and terror towers, will be emptied southward.” He added: “This is the language that the jihadist terror organizations in Gaza and Lebanon understand, and this is the language we speak: evacuating the population, destroying the infrastructure and taking the territory… It will be dealt with in the same way that Rafah and Beit Hanoun and 70 percent of the Gaza Strip were dealt with.”
- September 19, 2026: Hanoch Milwidsky, Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud party and Chair of the Knesset’s Finance Committee told an interviewer:
- “[Jews] are not like everybody else and that is why all the laws that apply to everyone else don’t apply to us… the Jewish people are a high-born people.”
- September 19, 2026: President Herzog granted a pardon to an Israeli soldier who was filmed murdering a wounded, incapacitated Palestinian man in 2016. The soldier was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison, a year of probation, and a demotion to private. Rights groups criticized the sentence as too lenient and an example of the impunity that soldiers and other Israelis who commit acts of violence against Palestinians enjoy. Herzog granted the pardon despite the fact that the Israeli military’s chief of staff, head of the military’s personnel directorate, and the military advocate general recommended denying it, noting the soldier had “refrained from expressing remorse and accepting responsibility for his actions.” As a result of the pardon, the killer is now able to run for political office and public service positions.
- September 17, 2026: Members of National Security Minister Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party handed out gun-shaped keychains with the slogan ‘Weapons Save Lives” to students at a high school where Ben-Gvir was taking part in an election event.
- September 16, 2026: Defense Minister Katz said that Israel has ethnically cleansed Palestinians from 70% of Gaza and is prepared to “finish the job” and implement its “migration plan” to remove Palestinians from the territory entirely, stating:
- “the IDF is prepared, once given the directive to eliminate Hamas, to finish the job so that we can also implement the migration plan.”
Previous editions