Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has approved the issuance of gun licences to Israelis in 18 additional illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as the right-wing government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushes to expand illegal outposts that undermine prospects for a two-state solution.
“The importance of the decision lies in the fact that these settlements will now be able to submit applications for a personal weapon licence,” Ben-Gvir, a far-right minister, wrote on Telegram on Wednesday, claiming that the efforts were to “enhance self-defence and increase personal security”.
Israeli settlers have been emboldened by a wide-scale armament programme spearheaded at the start of Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip by Ben-Gvir, and the near-total impunity they enjoy when carrying out attacks.
Israelis living illegally in the occupied West Bank have been armed with military-grade weapons ranging from US-made M16s to pistols and drones. Israeli authorities maintain that holding arms is necessary for their safety, but local and international organisations have long documented the organised, forced displacement of Palestinians from their ancestral lands.




The Israeli military is turning the yellow line that demarcates the more than half of the Gaza Strip it occupies and controls into a physical border. Analysis of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture shows that the Israeli military has begun constructing earth berms—large, raised mounds of earth—in areas along the yellow line to create a physical separation between the Palestinian population forced to live in the western half of the enclave, and Israeli forces who occupy the eastern half.
Air-defense sirens wailed and explosions shook Kyiv early Saturday as Russia launched one of its heaviest assaults in months – just hours after Ukrainian, Russian, and US negotiators convened in Abu Dhabi for peace talks.
For over four decades, Republican presidents have banned U.S. funds from going to groups that provide or promote abortion — and Democratic presidents have reversed the ban.
The US military said on Friday that it carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing two people.
New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has received a baby box from the Scottish government after modelling part of his election campaign on Edinburgh’s example of providing each expectant mother with a set of essentials.
Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Allen, who were arrested and charged for their role in an anti-ICE demonstration that disrupted Sunday church services in St Paul, Minnesota, have been released.
Nearly 70 years after a Texas Black man was executed in a case that prosecutors now say was based on false evidence and was riddled with racial bias, officials have declared that he was innocent of the killing of a white woman in Dallas.
The decision by Donald Trump’s justice department to conduct no investigation into the deadly use of force by Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, a Minneapolis resident who was moving her car out of the way of federal agents when he opened fire, reportedly distressed federal prosecutors and a leader of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, according to reporting from MSNOW and the New York Times.





























