Haaretz: Israel treats Gaza as a war, the West Bank as a security dispute, and the weeks-long withholding of a Palestinian body as a procedural issue, compartmentalizing Palestinians in ways that obscure the broader project connecting them

Last month, in Lod, Israeli police shot and killed Sami Ahmed Ja’asous, a 28-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel who suffered from mental illness. Police immediately framed him as a suspected terrorist, saying he had run toward officers with a knife, but later acknowledged that other motives were being investigated. By then, though, the label had already given the state what it so often demands before the facts are established: justification.

But killing Ja’asous was not enough. The state held his body for nearly five weeks.

Prosecutors argued that the Israeli military was examining whether his corpse could be withheld for use in future negotiations over Israeli hostages and missing persons. Police then tried to limit his funeral to 50 people, prohibit prayers at the mosque and dismantle his family’s mourning tent in measures prosecutors later described as “oversight.”

The state took a dead Palestinian’s body and considered turning it into political currency. It forced his father to fight for the right to bury his son, then returned the body at night, leaving the family to choose between an immediate burial required by Islamic tradition and a funeral that the wider community could attend. The ordeal was never about oversight.

“Why do we have to bury him like thieves?” one mourner asked. Because, for the Israeli state, even Palestinian grief is treated as a threat to be contained.

Earlier this month, in Tamra, the same state arrived through another door, bearing bulldozers and demolition machinery accompanied by large police forces and special units,. After discriminatory planning policies and the failure to approve adequate master plans left residents with little possibility of building legally, dozens of homes in the city now face demolition.

First, the state suffocates Palestinian towns, restricting their boundaries as their populations grow. Then, it criminalizes the families who build homes inside the shortage it deliberately created. The bulldozer arrives last, the final iteration that allows systematic discrimination to present itself as neutral law enforcement.

Across the Green Line, Israel no longer needs even that disguise. Across the West Bank, settlers establish outposts on Palestinian land, attack their neighbors, and create the violence later used by the army as justification to close the area, remove Palestinians and entrench the settlers’ presence. In Jaba, north of Jerusalem, authorities issued demolition notices against multistory homes and agricultural structures just last week.

Last July, at Umm al-Khair, settler Yinon Levi shot and killed Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen as he was documenting the construction work threatening his community. One year later, Israeli forces disrupted Awdah’s memorial, while the man who killed him remained free, continuing to terrorize the same village.

Israel is preparing to prosecute Levi for negligent homicide, reducing the shooting of a Palestinian man defending his community to something resembling a fatal mistake. This is how the system works: settler violence creates Palestinian displacement, the army consolidates it, and the legal system launders it.

Palestinians are placed under different legal classifications so the violence against them can be discussed as separate problems. Gaza is treated as a war. The West Bank is treated as a security dispute. Demolitions inside Israel are treated as planning enforcement. A Palestinian body held for weeks becomes a procedural question.

These categories obscure the project connecting them: the consolidated effort to remove Palestinians from their land, narrow the space in which they can live and ensure that Israeli violence against them carries little or no consequence.

As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I know that citizenship does not change whose home is demolished, whose body is withheld or whose life is automatically viewed as a danger to the state. Israeli citizenship simply changes which authority signs the order – whether it is the police or military, an Israeli court or a military court..

Israel pursued dispossession long before Gaza, but the past three years have taught it that there is no crime against Palestinians so enormous that its allies will stop arming it, no body count so high that diplomatic protection will disappear, and no amount of destruction that cannot be repackaged as “security.” Israel’s allies cannot now claim surprise at that permission spreading from Gaza to hilltops in the West Bank, Palestinian towns inside Israel and a cemetery in Lod. They helped create the environment driving it.

The impunity with which Israel devastated Gaza is reshaping what the state believes it can do to Palestinians everywhere: seize more land, expel more communities, demolish more homes, protect violent settlers, fatally shoot Palestinians and then control how their families bury them.

The methods change according to geography, but the governing principle does not. The question is how many more Palestinian homes, bodies and towns Israel’s allies are willing to sacrifice before they are forced to call their complicity by its name.