International Glance
Amid an unforgiving global news cycle – and as nations weigh their options in responding to the yet unbuilt West Bank settlement project that would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state” – a telling sanctions-related development in Israel passed largely unnoticed outside Israeli media. In Tel Aviv, the new year began with a protest by a violent extremist settler group that has faced UK sanctions since October 2024.
The trigger was a new Israeli banking directive, rushed out to placate Israel’s hardliners, that they said did too little to shield Israelis from international sanctions.
The protest – and the response from the pro-settlement extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who himself faces sanctions from Australia, Canada and the UK – makes one thing clear: sanctions on extremist Israelis are working, and this remains true even after the Trump administration rolled back all Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers last year.
That lesson carries immediate relevance as governments now have an opportunity to give teeth to their long-standing opposition to the E1 settlement plan – a move that would fracture the territorial contiguity of the West Bank and the viability of a Palestinian state. The tenders, which seek bids from developers, call for proposals to develop 3,401 housing units in E1 – a stretch of land east of Jerusalem – and are expected to be awarded on 16 March.
Smotrich, who oversees the West Bank settlement planning body that approved the E1 settlement plan, has simultaneously waged war on the settler sanctions movement since its inception two years ago. In February 2024, Smotrich publicly browbeat Israeli banks and regulators for complying with sanctions on Israeli settlers, vowing to use “all available tools” to prevent banks from enforcing the sanctions
Colonel Oleksandr Dovgach, commander of the 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade and a Hero of Ukraine, was killed during a combat mission on the eastern front on March 9, the Ukrainian Air Force reported.
A Maronite parish priest, Father Pierre Al-Rai, was killed and at least five people were injured this afternoon by an Israeli strike on the Christian-majority village of Qlayaa in southern Lebanon. Fr Pierre al-Rahi, had stayed in the village, defying an Israeli order to leave, in order to protect his parishioners.
Israeli settlers shot and killed three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over the weekend, amid a surge in attacks since the start of the war on Iran.
Corpses lie in the streets of Mariupol. Hungry people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, trembling at the sound of Russian shells pounding this strategic port city.
