Palestine weekly: Israel’s rightwing campaigns on anti-Palestinian abuses

Ahead of an October election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc is behind in the polls, far-right Israeli ministers have turned the machinery of occupation into campaign material over the last week – not merely as policy, but as the message itself.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose face already appears on campaign billboards across the occupied West Bank, released an AI-generated ad warning that he would do to the Negev and Galilee – areas with large Palestinian populations inside Israel – what he has done to the occupied West Bank by building Jewish settlements there under the slogan “Ahmed is right to be afraid”.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded with his own AI video depicting overweight Palestinian prisoners entering Israeli jails on an assembly line and emerging emaciated and crying. He also published a video of himself berating Palestinian women prisoners and separately planted an Israeli flag on seized United Nations agency for Palestinian refugee (UNRWA) facilities in occupied East Jerusalem.

These were not rhetorical excesses divorced from policy; each echoed recent broader government actions or pressure this week – from seizing a UN facility to a hardening right-wing push for a post-election ground operation to reoccupy Gaza City rather than proceed with Hamas’s disarmament. As the campaign rhetoric intensified, illegal outposts multiplied, demolitions and evictions continued across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Gaza’s death toll widened again beyond the narrower “targeted assassination” framing to include farmers, delivery workers, fishermen and children.

Following a brief lull leading up to talks with the Trump-appointed Board of Peace, Israel had framed a return to Gaza strikes around targeting individually named “commanders” of Hamas , though this in practice also included figures from Gaza’s police force.

This week, such pretenses were set aside as the toll widened again to Gaza’s general population. A drone killed three members of the Abdin family while they farmed land in al-Qarara on August 28. Another man was reportedly killed the next day, August 29, near Deir el-Balah. Separate strikes killed at least four people working as delivery drivers or riding electric bikes, and a quadcopter dropped a bomb on children collecting water near a road junction in Gaza City’s historic Tuffah neighborhood.

On August 30, a strike near a bakery west of Deir el-Balah killed Husam Osama Nasir and three-year-old Tim Said Mahmoud Hamdan. On August 31, two Palestinians were killed and several wounded following an Israeli airstrike targeting the entrance of a residential building near the Municipality Park in Gaza City.

Hospitals were hit as well. A drone struck a medicine warehouse inside al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah on August 29, wounding three. Hospital officials also reported that cancer medicines had run out entirely after a strike damaged the hospital’s water tanks and laboratory equipment.