Dozens of people have been killed and injured in fighting between Pakistan and Afghan forces on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both sides traded fire and blamed each other for the escalation, as tensions between the neighbouring countries continue to rise.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in court to testify in his corruption trial, days after U.S. President Trump called for him to be pardoned. Protesters outside the court demanded the trial continue as a test of Israel’s democracy. Netanyahu denies all charges.
Israel’s war on Gaza has not ended with the pullback of its tanks or the falling silent of its warplanes. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands of homes reduced to rubble, and some two million people driven from their homes. Yet the greatest danger may still lie ahead, for Israel intends to continue the war in another form, one that no longer requires its army.
In the vacuum left by Israel’s destruction, a grim new reality is unfolding. Armed militias are emerging, exploiting the collapse of social order and the deepening suffering of the people. These groups, which once claimed the mantle of “resistance” to the occupier, are increasingly turning their weapons inward. Rather than working to aid the defence of the homeland, they are seeking to impose control through violence, turning Palestinian pain into a currency for factional and political gain. Gaza, long under siege, once lived in suffocating isolation yet remained largely safe within its own walls. People feared Israeli air attacks, not criminal gangs or the gun of a neighbour. Today, fear has multiplied, from the occupation and from within.
The killing of journalist Saleh Aljafarawi in Gaza City’s Sabra neighbourhood stands as one of the most ominous signs of this new phase. The 28-year-old reporter, who had long documented Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and faced repeated death threats for his work, was shot dead days after the ceasefire, not by Israeli soldiers or drones but by Palestinian gunmen. His murder exposed the war’s continuation by other means: Israel has turned Palestinians against each other, spurring a cycle of fear and bloodshed that serves its occupation even in the absence of its soldiers.
Israel’s logic here is clear. It has long relied on an old colonial strategy: Divide and rule. A society consumed by internal violence cannot stand united against its occupier. By cynically fostering the rise of militias, Israel achieves two aims: Weakening Palestinian unity and reducing the burden on its own army. It avoids direct costs and international scrutiny, while Gaza continues to bleed from within.
The armed gangs now spreading fear in Gaza are not defenders of the homeland but Israel’s collaborators, serving its occupation under a different name. They were empowered during the war to act where Israel could not always act openly. Yet Israel’s history with Palestinians who serve its interests is clear: It uses them, then discards them. Once their purpose is fulfilled, collaborators are cast aside, disarmed or destroyed, left with neither honour nor protection. He who turns his gun on his own people may think himself powerful, but his fate is always the same: Rejection by his people, by history and even by the occupier who once used him.
For Palestinians, the consequences are nothing short of catastrophic. Liberation cannot be built on fear. When resistance loses its moral clarity, when it becomes indistinguishable from oppression, it collapses in legitimacy. The Palestinian cause has never been only about survival; it has always been about dignity, justice and freedom. These values cannot endure in a society where citizens fear not only Israeli aircraft but also armed locals who now terrorise their streets, serving both their own interests and the occupier’s. The region’s history bears witness: From Lebanon to Iraq, external powers have repeatedly exploited militias to fragment societies. Once unleashed, these forces rarely serve their people; their loyalties drift instead towards factional power, personal gain or foreign patrons.
The task before Palestinians is both urgent and existential: To prevent Gaza from sliding into a land ruled by militias rather than united under the banner of liberation. This requires a strong civilian will that refuses to legitimise such groups, political leadership that places national unity above factional interest, and international awareness that occupation destroys not only through bombs and siege, but also by tearing apart the social fabric and turning society into a battlefield of internal conflict.
The people of Gaza have already shown extraordinary courage and resilience. They have endured siege, relentless bombardment and mass displacement. They should not now be asked to endure the humiliation of being ruled by armed gangs who serve their own interests while claiming to act for their people. The strength of the Palestinian struggle has always rested on its moral clarity, a people demanding freedom against all odds. That clarity must not be surrendered to those who replace solidarity with fear and justice with domination.
Israel may hope to wage its war by proxy, imagining a Gaza where its people fight each other instead of resisting occupation. Yet Palestinians still have a choice. They can reject the path of militias and affirm that their cause is greater than any faction and stronger than those who place power above principle. The true danger today is not only Israeli air attacks but the erosion of the very essence of Palestinian nationalism: The conviction that liberation must belong to everyone and must never come at the cost of freedom or human dignity.
Occupied West Bank, Palestine – Close to Tulkarem, on the outskirts of the Nur Shams refugee camp, grey apartment blocks sit empty. Abandoned cars are strewn amid rubble where homes once stood. Shops are silent, streaked black where flames licked against the windows.
Amid escalating violence by settlers from illegal Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military has intensified its efforts to forcibly displace the tens of thousands of Palestinians who live in the Nur Shams and Tulkarem refugee camps.
An unprecedented ground assault, replete with bulldozers, arson, and sniper fire, has made life impossible for the people there, most of whom have been pushed out to shelters or other villages.
In the nearly empty Nur Shams camp, Israeli soldiers stand on rooftops, aim their sniper rifles from windows, and patrol empty streets with searchlights.
Sometimes, the green dot from a weapon’s laser sight dances across the bodies of the few remaining, unarmed residents as they walk by.
Since January, the Israeli military’s violent “Operation Iron Wall” has displaced some 32,000 residents of the Tulkarem, Nur Shams and Jenin refugee camps, according to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
The Israeli army, which has designated both camps as closed military areas, is likely to stay there for months and fire on anyone who enters.
Palestinian families have submitted more than 400 requests to Israel to retrieve their belongings from their homes, but none have been approved, according to the UN.
Abdel’s* family is one of the few that Israeli soldiers have allowed to remain.
He, his wife, and his mother sit tensely in their front room; his three daughters are at school. They are permanently on edge because the soldiers have established a temporary barracks next to their home.
Since early February, the soldiers have forced him to work for them without pay, fixing their electricity, internet or air conditioning, and bringing them food, any time of day or night, usually at his own expense.
He is constantly afraid that the soldiers will burst into their home at any moment. “We don’t want anything. Just a safe life,” he tells Al Jazeera.
“I can’t go out with my children,” says Abdel. “I can’t even go out with my wife. We’re deprived of … even the simplest necessities of life.”
In late January, soldiers raided Abdel’s house, destroying furniture and possessions and forcing the family out of their home, which is just outside the Tulkarem refugee camp, for 10 days.
When they returned, Abdel says he was told: “We won’t throw you out of the house as long as you help us.”
“One of them even said, ‘I am your lord, you are here to serve me.’”
Since then, Abdel has obeyed their orders to keep his family safe. He estimates he is forced to spend 1,500 shekels ($440) a month on the soldiers.
“If I don’t do what they tell me, they will destroy the house,” he frets.
He says he knows the soldiers’ threats are real because, as he speaks, a house in the camp just 500 metres (about 550 yards) away is burning, sending up clouds of smoke.
All his neighbours have been displaced, and some of their homes have been burned or trashed to the point of being uninhabitable.
Abdel walks around the corner to his neighbour Nihad’s home, which was also taken over by soldiers for a while but sits empty now, surrounded by half-burned possessions, including personal documents, set alight by Israeli soldiers.
In April, Israeli soldiers stormed into Nihad’s home at 3am, and ordered him, his wife, and three children at gunpoint to leave within five minutes. The soldiers moved in for the following 75 days, using it as a barracks.
Nihad, who refused to give his family name for fear of reprisals from Israel, says he was ordered to stay away but came back anyway to survey the damage.
Together, the two men pick through the wreckage. Nihad tells Abdel the home he loves is unrecognisable, that he and his family have lost everything.
Soldiers smashed everything they could find, even the washing machine’s circuits, tore up electrical boxes, broke toilets and knocked down doors.
The soldiers slept in his children’s beds and scattered infants’ clothing across the floor. Rubbish and debris are strewn through every room; a bird has nested in the shower.
The soldiers set up a sniper outpost in the stairwell ringed with sandbags, and left the walls daubed with the names of Israeli soldiers and their patrol schedules in Hebrew. The words “F*** Hamas” in English are scrawled in lipstick across a dresser mirror.
This kind of damage, Abdel says, shows the consequences of defying the soldiers’ demands.
Nihad is far from the only victim. The Israeli military has destroyed hundreds of homes in the camps and adjoining neighbourhoods during its raids.
It also damaged critical infrastructure, including water and electricity networks.
In July, Israel’s High Court froze a military order for the demolition of 104 residential buildings, comprising some 400 homes, in Tulkarem.
But the next day, it amended its ruling to permit the army to demolish for “overriding security considerations” – effectively giving it broad discretion to continue.
Adalah, an Israel-based legal centre for Arab minority rights, has been petitioning against the demolitions.
In July, the centre submitted an expert opinion from the Israeli human rights organisation Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights to the Supreme Court, showing that 162 buildings had been demolished – far more than the number in the order.
Adalah’s investigation found that the demolitions had so far “erased” about one-third of the built-up area in the northern sector of Tulkarem, and made other areas unlivable, according to Miriam Azem, Adalah’s international advocacy coordinator.
The court rejected Adalah’s petition on July 25, asserting that “the demolition order was lawful and necessary, upholding the military commander’s broad discretion and limited judicial review”, Azem tells Al Jazeera.
Abdel has no means to object – angering the soldiers would mean putting himself at the mercy of a military force with a long history of demolishing, detaining and killing.
Israel is now demolishing homes in the West Bank at the fastest rate since the 1967 War, partly thanks to equipment from the United States.
At the beginning of the year, the Israeli army had just two or three Caterpillar bulldozers, which are produced in Texas.
Now they have 10, according to Suleiman Suhairi, a member of Tulkarem’s Popular Committee, which acts as a liaison between the refugee camp and external bodies, such as the UN.
Residents say the Israeli army is also increasingly committing arson, burning residential homes rather than bulldozing them.
“Every day, they burn two or three houses,” Suhairi said, speaking in early July.
The burnings increased in June, but the soldiers claim they have nothing to do with it, Suhairi says.
To prevent arson, residents now try to remove or cut off their cookers, which are often used to start fires, says Suhairi, explaining that firefighters and homeowners say soldiers light all the burners and throw a blanket on them to start the blaze.
“The patterns of exploitation Palestinians face today in the West Bank represent an intensification of an ongoing strategy designed to make life unbearable,” says Ihab Maharmeh, a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, which focuses on Palestinian workers and displacement.
“Israeli authorities are effectively transforming everyday life and livelihoods in the West Bank into a form of warfare.”
Nur Arafeh, a fellow with the Malcolm H Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, says Abdel’s story “exemplifies the colonial mentality that underpins Israel’s occupation – one rooted in supremacy, domination, oppression and the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians”.
“The soldier’s language”, referring to himself as Abdel’s “lord”, “reveals the profound power asymmetries at play, whereby the threat of expulsion is used as a coercive and exploitative tool to force compliance and free labour”, Arafeh says.
Al Jazeera contacted the Israeli army and the Government Press Office for comment on the allegations of arson and coerced labour, but received no response.
On a hill above Nur Shams, more than 130 members of 17 families have taken shelter in a government-run school-turned refugee camp. Each family occupies one room, and all share one toilet.
The shelter is privately funded, which helps fill the gaps left as local humanitarian agencies struggle to meet needs with limited funding.
In the shelter, life continues: families hang laundry on lines; they grow chilli peppers and herbs in pots. Those who have fled there are just a short walk from their old homes, but a world away from their former lives.
Standing on the third-floor balcony, a man draped in a keffiyeh looks at his former home, just visible between two apartment buildings but unreachable now, empty. Those who try to go back to their homes in the camp risk being shot at and possibly killed.
Most families displaced from the camps end up renting temporary accommodation in the area – Mohamed Kamel, his wife, and their four children are now living in a rented home.
Israeli soldiers forced Kamel and his family out of their home at gunpoint five months and two days before he spoke to Al Jazeera in July. He knows because he counts the days.
The day they left, it was pouring with rain, and they were given just two minutes to leave. They lost everything: every piece of clothing, every toy, even their young daughter’s teddy bear. They walked for hours to a neighbouring village, carrying Kamel’s injured mother on a stretcher as she had recently broken her leg in a fall.
Kamel had lived all 40 years of his life in the family home. Now, the family is renting an apartment in the neighbouring village.
When Kamel tried to return to fetch his car, which he needed for work, he was shot at by soldiers and barely escaped with his life.
Many people here have lost loved ones. Of the 198 Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the start of the year, 78 are from Jenin and Tulkarem.
Even Abdel is not safe.
The fires largely stopped by early August, and in mid-August, the soldiers near his home moved to a different barracks, and he briefly found relief from their demands and harassment.
But 10 days later, Abdel was arrested and detained for a month. While he was being held, his wife, kids and mother were expelled from their home.
About a week after that, Israel rounded up about 1,500 residents of Tulkarem, including children. Abdel was released days later.
“They were difficult days, as I was brutally beaten. I’m still in pain.”
“I’m exhausted and sad,” Abdel says of not being able to return to their home. The family is renting an apartment nearby now.
“We don’t know what the future will hold,” he says. “Things are getting worse.”
Dozens of dilapidated stone buildings are all that remain of the once-thriving border village of Martoli, in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. Nestled in the Johar Valley and surrounded by Himalayan peaks, the most notable being Nanda Devi, once considered the tallest mountain in the world, this village had traded sugar, lentils, spices, and cloth for salt and wool with Tibetans across the border.
The nomadic inhabitants of several villages spent the winter months in the plains gathering goods to be traded with Tibetans in the summer. However, the border was sealed following an armed conflict between India and China in 1962, disrupting life in the high villages and leaving people with little incentive to return.
Kishan Singh, 77, was 14 when he left with his family to settle in the lower village of Thal. He still returns to Martoli every summer to till the land and cultivate buckwheat, strawberries, and black cumin.
His ancestral home has no roof, so he sleeps in a neighbour’s abandoned house during the six months he spends in this village.
“I enjoy being in the mountains and the land here is very fertile,” he says.
In late autumn, he hires mules to transport his harvest to his home in the plains, where he sells it at a modest profit.
The largest of the Johar Valley villages had about 1,500 people at its peak in the early 1960s. Martoli had about 500 residents then, while some of the dozen or so other villages had 10 to 15 homes each.
Now, only three or four people return to Martoli each summer.
A few villagers are returning in summer to the nearby villages of Laspa, Ghanghar, and Rilkot, as they can now travel by vehicle to within a few kilometres (miles) of their villages on a recently built unpaved road.
Riot police used tear gas and water cannons to break up pro-Palestinian protests at Israel’s World Cup qualifier against Italy. Defeat for Israel in the match effectively ended the team’s hopes of automatic qualification.