06/11/2026
On 28 October 2026,, an Israeli drone fired two missiles into a Ministry of Economy work site on the al-Rasheed Coastal Road in al-Mawasi, west of Rafah. The site had one function: to inspect, register, and coordinate the trucks carrying commercial goods and humanitarian aid through the Kerem Shalom crossing. It was, in the language of relief agencies, a piece of the lifeline. By the time the smoke cleared, three men on duty were dead — Mahmoud Sobhi Soliman Abu Ne'mah, 50, Mohammed Hamas Shreiki al-Sultan, 42, and Hammam Jaber al-Sayed Abu Lebdah, 31. Thirty-eight others were wounded, seven of them critically. One of those seven, Wessam 'Ezzat Mohammed Sultan, 50, died roughly six hours later.
The site was a place where traders and their representatives came to complete the commercial transactions that, in the strange economy of besieged Gaza, still constitute what is left of survival.
The strike was not an anomaly. It was the centrepiece of a 72-hour campaign. Between 26 and 28 October, Israeli forces killed ten Palestinians across the Strip, among them Tahani Mohammed Sa'id Shalalfah, a six-year-old girl, who died at dawn on 27 October of critical injuries sustained the previous day when soldiers along the "Yellow Line" southwest of Gaza City opened fire — a shooting that killed three Palestinians, including a girl, at the time. Anas Akram Mohammed al-Hamaydah, 31, was killed in his tent inside al-Ribat College. Mohammed 'Elian Yousif al-Bayouk, 33, was killed on the rooftop of a school sheltering displaced people. Haitham Na'im Mahmoud Farahat, 30, was wounded when a quadcopter dropped a bomb on a small boat some hundred meters offshore. Mahmoud Sameeh Mahmoud al-Harsh, 28, was shot dead at 18:30 standing in the middle of al-Hojah Street in Jabalia camp. Ahmed Yasin Fayez Bseiso, 44, died on 27 October of injuries he had carried since 18 October, when a drone found him near Palestine Stadium. An unidentified Palestinian man was targeted at 10:25 on al-Rasheed Coastal Road; his dismembered body was not recovered for nearly eight hours, until a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, accompanied by the International Committee of the Red Cross, could coordinate its evacuation to Nasser Medical Complex.
These are the names apartheid leaves behind.
Meanwhile, some 150 kilometers to the north, around thirty settlers — several of them armed — walked into the Ein a-Duyuk a-Tahta neighbourhood of Jericho and took possession of eight buildings. The move was backed by the Nachala movement and the Binyamin Regional Council. According to human rights activists present at the scene, the settlers assaulted and robbed two Israeli activists and shot a Palestinian man in the leg. The houses, the settlers say, were purchased from their Palestinian owners. The defence minister's transaction permit — required by law for any such sale in Area C — has not been produced.
Last February the cabinet moved to eliminate the permit requirement altogether; no corresponding order has yet appeared in the official legislation databases. The legal scaffolding, in other words, is being improvised to match the facts on the ground.
These are not two stories. They are the same story, told in two registers.
In Rafah, the apparatus of apartheid is aerial: drones, missiles, the targeting of the very civil infrastructure — the aid coordination site, the school shelter, the fishing boat — that allows Palestinian life to continue. In Jericho, the apparatus is terrestrial: fenced streets, broken doors, a gate cutting off an entire neighborhood, a settlement inserted into the urban fabric under armed guard. In both places the objective is identical. To make Palestinian life unlivable. To make Palestinian movement impossible. To make Palestinian self-organization — whether the regulation of aid trucks or the ownership of a house — a target.
The Jericho precedent is already written. The settlers arriving in Ein a-Duyuk a-Tahta have, since the establishment of the "Palaces Farm" outpost two years ago, demolished some thirteen Palestinian homes in the neighbourhood — in February and July alone. Their route runs from an illegal outpost toward an archaeological site, the Hasmonean Palaces, some five hundred meters away, to which the Netanyahu government had just allocated NIS 20 million. The archaeology is the alibi; the outpost is the instrument; the houses are the prize. On Israeli election day settlers arrived with fencing equipment and infrastructure cables, broke into homes, stole equipment, and erected a gate blocking access to an entire street. By the time families moved in this week, the ground had been prepared.
Peace Now has warned that a settlement inside Jericho would reproduce Hebron. There, an Israeli presence inserted into the heart of a Palestinian city for some thirty years has produced constant friction, permanent violence, the closure of entire streets to Palestinians, the displacement of thousands, and the imposition of what Israeli human rights organizations themselves now call, without qualification, an apartheid regime. To replicate Hebron in Jericho — under a caretaker government that has received no mandate from the public — is to declare, in the plainest possible terms, that the project is not paused for elections, not paused for ceasefire talks, not paused for the relief agencies still trying to feed Gaza. It is to declare that the project is permanent.
And the Gaza operation declares the same thing from the sky. The strike on the Ministry of Economy site is the most revealing of the recent attacks, because it cannot be explained by any military logic. The site was not a military target. It was a logistics node. The men killed were clerks, coordinators, traders — the people who, under conditions of siege, manage the difference between a truckload of flour reaching a bakery and a bakery closing forever. To bomb such a site is not to fight a war. It is to dismantle the last institutions through which Palestinian civil society can feed itself, so that what remains is a population entirely dependent on whatever the occupier permits to enter. This is the architecture of famine as policy. It is also the architecture of apartheid: a regime under which the governed have no right to organize their own subsistence, and any attempt to do so is treated as a threat.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has called on the international community to take "concrete and effective action." Peace Now has called on the IDF to evacuate the Jericho settlement "immediately." Both calls are necessary. Neither is sufficient. The same state that bombs an aid coordination site in Rafah is the state that authorizes — or refuses to disavow — the arming of settlers in Jericho. The same caretaker government that allocates NIS 20 million to an archaeological pretext is the government under whose command a six-year-old girl is shot at dawn on the perimeter of a camp. The international community cannot meaningfully respond to one without responding to the other, because the perpetrators are the same, the legal framework shielding them is the same, and the regime they are constructing — from the coast of Rafah to the streets of Jericho, with Hebron as its template — is one and the same.
What is being built, day by day, missile by missile, fence by fence, is a single contiguous reality: one regime, governing two populations, on one piece of land, with two sets of rights and two sets of risks. There is a word for that. The word has been used by Israeli organizations, by Palestinian organizations, by international human rights organizations, and, increasingly, by the courts of states that once refused to hear it. The word is apartheid. To bomb the Ministry of Economy site in al-Mawasi is to enforce it. To plant a settlement in Ein a-Duyuk a-Tahta is to extend it. To do both in the same week, in the same breath, under the same flag, is to announce it.
