Sally Rooney. (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)

+ As she was covering the Palestinian olive harvest north of Ramallah, rampaging Israeli settlers dressed in black attacked Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine. Levine, who is 63, was beaten, clubbed and repeatedly kicked as the settlers dragged her across the ground. She was taken to a hospital in Ramallah, where she was treated for a fractured rib, lacerations and bruises. One of her fingers was sliced down to the bone and will require surgery. Her attackers also stole her equipment. Israeli forces were in the area and watched as the violent attacks took place. They did nothing to stop them.

“I don’t understand how parents can raise such monsters,” Levine said. “Yes, they are Jewish terrorists, and they’re giving everyone in this country [Israel] a horrible reputation… And they won’t be prosecuted. I’m sure of it.” The Washington Post issued a statement condemning the attack: “She was wearing visible markings clearly identifying her as a journalist. We are outraged by this unwarranted attack on a journalist doing her job.”

+ With Ben-Gvir and other Israeli officials cheering them on, this has become the most brutal olive harvest yet for Palestinians in the West Bank, where the UN has recorded more than 200 violent attacks by Israeli settlers, eclipsing the previous record of 185 attacks in 2025. At least 4 Palestinians have been killed in the attacks and another 120 injured. More than 2500 olive trees have been destroyed.

+ Since October 2023, Israel has detained and imprisoned more than 2000 Palestinian children. At least 350 of them remain in custody in what the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society called “harsh conditions” that expose them to “torture, starvation and the denial of health care.”

+ Physicians for Human Rights Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture, both Israel-based human rights groups, report that Israeli prison guards are routinely shooting Palestinian prisoners and detainees with rubber bullets, striking them in the knees, legs, stomach and groin. In most instances, the prisoners are denied medical treatment after being struck.

+ On July 21, 2025, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of Gaza’s field hospitals, was shot in the leg and taken into custody by armed Israeli men in civilian clothes, as he was being filmed for a documentary by photojournalist Tamer Al-Za’anin, who was killed by the Israelis during the raid. Dr. Al-Hams has been detained at Ganot prison ever since. On October 7, Gaza’s Health Ministry and the Prisoners’ Media Office reported that Dr. Al-Hams was dragged from his cell and severely beaten on the orders of Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The beating, which took place in front of Ben-Gvir, was savage enough to fracture bones and leave Dr. Al-Hams with extreme back pain. The Prisoner’s Office called it the “harshest treatment recorded against Gaza detainees.”

+ Netanyahu wants the Israeli soldiers interviewed in Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary NAZA, on the mass killings of Palestinians, identified and criminally prosecuted. demanded the Israeli attorney general, the military chief of staff, and the head of Shin Bet “act urgently to uncover the identity of all those who are involved or appear in the libel film” and called for “the opening of a criminal investigation and prosecution.” He also urged the Knesset to pass new laws that would strip Israeli citizenship from the filmmakers and others who  “smear Israeli soldiers.”

+ Israeli forces arrested four journalists covering settler attacks on Palestinian olive harvesters in the West Bank town of Idhna, while a few miles away, other Israeli forces uprooted an olive orchard, destroyed an agricultural building and water tank in the town of Khirbet Soba.

+ Meanwhile, Israeli settlers, disguised as Israeli soldiers, broke into a Palestinian home outside of Nablus and assaulted the family, leaving several members injured before fleeing the scene.

+ According to Mohammed Abu Afash, director of Medical Relief in Gaza, at least 2,027 Palestinian patients in Gaza have died while awaiting treatment or medical evacuation abroad. Another 21,000 others need evacuation. The crossing out of Gaza has been closed for the last week.

+ Former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, now with Status, obtained audio of a combative meeting led by Bari Weiss’ handpicked foreign editor, Shayndi Raice, where she threatened to fire “insubordinate” journalists and clashed with senior correspondent Holly Williams over editorial meddling in reporting about Israel and the Occupied Territories…Tensions erupted at CBS News between veteran reporters and new editorial leaders under Bari Weiss, including a contentious editing process for Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes segment on extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank that aired October 11. Williams faced pushback on including Gaza’s nearly 75,000 death toll—mostly children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry—in a report marking the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Raice defended omitting details in a combative staff meeting on October 13, calling the Gaza mortality figure a “magic number.”

No other network or mainstream media outlet has questioned the 74,000 deaths figure as an absolute minimum…

Mirjana Spoljaric. Photo courtesy of the ICRC.

+ Mirjana Spoljaric, head of ICRC: “We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don’t apply anymore, and that there can’t be rules because of the pursuit of total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory; there has only been death and destruction, over and above what was necessary.”

+ Khaled Elgindy on “The End of Gaza,” Foreign Affairs:

A year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive. The October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, but Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, often killing civilians, including some 300 children in the past year.

The deal also envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory. Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. And yet, nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services, or even an end to daily violence. Instead, the vast majority of its inhabitants remain packed into squalid and sprawling tent cities along a tiny—and ever-shrinking—strip of coastline, plagued by disease and rodent infestations, enduring extreme shortages of food, medicine, clean water, and access to basic sanitation.

Gazans may not be in the grip of famine as they were in prior years, but the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic—and it is not sustainable. The intolerable conditions could very well lead to a further explosion of violence. They are also enabling the endgame that many Israeli leaders want: the eventual eviction of Gaza’s over two million Palestinian residents.

+ Adam Johnson: “The Atlantic, supposed beacon of free speech and liberal principles, has published 30+ articles on Hasan Piker and zero about Israel’s unprecedented killing of 230+ journalists in Gaza. Some are saying it’s because it’s run by a former volunteer IDF prison guard, but who’s to say. The Atlantic employs about 900 variations of Jonathan Chait and I don’t think it’s because the market is organically demanding even more scoldy, bad-faith ideological disciplining of the left. I suspect this has more to do with their billionaire owner and her investment portfolio.”

FYI: The majority owner of The Atlantic is Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, through her group, the Emerson Collective.

+ There have been at least 13 attacks on mosques in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem this year, including one this week when Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque outside of Jerusalem. The Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission has documented 23 incidents of arson or attempted arson targeting Palestinian mosques between January 2023 and October 11, 2026.

+ Irish novelist Sally Rooney said she will no longer allow her books to be sold in the UK because she has pledged to donate her royalties to Palestine Action, which is banned in Britain. Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, condemned the law that will keep Rooney’s books from being sold in the UK: “A world-renowned author fearing arrest and being forced to remove her books from our bookstores exposes the chilling consequences of this authoritarian law, which has been used to make over 3,700 arrests for simply holding seven-word signs.”

+ Has there ever been a time when the English haven’t tried to immiserate the Irish and the Irish haven’t told them to go fuck themselves?

+ Rooney found an unlikely supporter in Sarah Helm, who, under Britain’s repressive terrorism Act 2000, could be criminally charged for expressing her public support for Palestine Action. Helm is the partner of Jonathan Powell, the UK government’s National Security Advisor since 2024. Previously, Powell had served as chief of staff for Tony Blair.  Helm, who is an acclaimed British journalist and author of A Life in Secrets, If This Is a Woman and, significantly, it seems to me, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women, posted on her social media account “God help us authors who support Palestine and Palestine Action. Sounds like Adam [Boulton] would have all our books swept off the shelves in a jiffy.”

+ More than 3,630 people have been arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and 632 have been charged. The maximum prison sentence  under the law is 14 years.

+ According to a report by the Good Shepherd Collective, Israel has demolished 1,358 Palestinian structures in the Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank so far this year, displacing 2,019 Palestinians, 931 of them children.  

+ Roger Waters on James Hetfield, the sclerotic frontman for Metallica, who whined about rock bands taking political stands this week, while performing at the Sphere, the overpriced venue for decrepit has-beens in Vegas:

“Can we stop talking about this prick? I’m so bored with him. He’s just showing that he’s a complete prick. He’s got an IQ of about three and why we’re talking about him, I honestly don’t know, because he’s a nobody. He may have a few hundred million dollars or whatever, but he’s a prick, and he’s no musician. I heard them playing acoustic instruments, and they couldn’t. It was appalling.”