cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40135957

Dec 10, 2025

As the men approached, I asked one of them who he was. They looked like soldiers, but the vehicles in which they arrived had yellow civilian license plates. These masked assailants were members of the hagmar— settler reservist militias formally attached to the Israeli army and tasked with “security” in West Bank settlements.

The men dragged me behind a fence where four of them beat me until I required hospitalization. They stole the phone of an International Solidarity Mission activist who tried to record the attack.

My host, Abu Safi, who was 84, had little choice but to leave his home after that raid by the hagmar. The family packed up their belongings accumulated over decades in the house and moved to a nearby location in Area B. Abu Safi died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

Peter Link

2025-12-10 16:03:06

How Israel Organizes and Arms Settler Militias to Terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank

Dec 10, 2025

As the men approached, I asked one of them who he was. They looked like soldiers, but the vehicles in which they arrived had yellow civilian license plates. These masked assailants were members of the hagmar— settler reservist militias formally attached to the Israeli army and tasked with “security” in West Bank settlements.

The men dragged me behind a fence where four of them beat me until I required hospitalization. They stole the phone of an International Solidarity Mission activist who tried to record the attack.

My host, Abu Safi, who was 84, had little choice but to leave his home after that raid by the hagmar. The family packed up their belongings accumulated over decades in the house and moved to a nearby location in Area B. Abu Safi died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

How Israel Organizes and Arms Settler Militias to Terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank

What often appears as sporadic settler violence is in fact an organized system with an official structure fully operating as intended.

^{Drop Site News}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/40135957

Dec 10, 2025

As the men approached, I asked one of them who he was. They looked like soldiers, but the vehicles in which they arrived had yellow civilian license plates. These masked assailants were members of the hagmar— settler reservist militias formally attached to the Israeli army and tasked with “security” in West Bank settlements.

The men dragged me behind a fence where four of them beat me until I required hospitalization. They stole the phone of an International Solidarity Mission activist who tried to record the attack.

My host, Abu Safi, who was 84, had little choice but to leave his home after that raid by the hagmar. The family packed up their belongings accumulated over decades in the house and moved to a nearby location in Area B. Abu Safi died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

Peter Link

2025-12-10 16:03:06

How Israel Organizes and Arms Settler Militias to Terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank

Dec 10, 2025

As the men approached, I asked one of them who he was. They looked like soldiers, but the vehicles in which they arrived had yellow civilian license plates. These masked assailants were members of the hagmar— settler reservist militias formally attached to the Israeli army and tasked with “security” in West Bank settlements.

The men dragged me behind a fence where four of them beat me until I required hospitalization. They stole the phone of an International Solidarity Mission activist who tried to record the attack.

My host, Abu Safi, who was 84, had little choice but to leave his home after that raid by the hagmar. The family packed up their belongings accumulated over decades in the house and moved to a nearby location in Area B. Abu Safi died of a heart attack soon afterwards.

How Israel Organizes and Arms Settler Militias to Terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank

What often appears as sporadic settler violence is in fact an organized system with an official structure fully operating as intended.

^{Drop Site News}

Canadians tend to think of far-right extremism and white nationalism as a strictly American problem, adopting an “it couldn’t happen here” mindset, or seeing it as a lunatic fringe that should just be ignored. But these movements are gaining a foothold in mainstream culture, and the structure for that to happen has been in this country since its inception.

White supremacy arrived in Canada in the fifteenth century, with the first Europeans. Since then, Canada has waged a cultural and literal genocide against Indigenous peoples, including the horrors perpetrated as early as 1831 at Christian church- and government-sponsored residential schools, which were designed to strip children from their families and their culture, with the last federally run residential school closing in 1996. In 1911, the government passed an order-in-council to ban Black immigrants from entering Canada (it was never invoked). In 1921, the Ku Klux Klan formed its first Canadian chapter. In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of a movie theatre. The last segregated school in Canada didn’t close until 1983.

The late 2010s brought with them the “alt-right” era, a term coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer to differentiate his views from traditional American conservatism. Originally characterized by online trolling, the “alt-right” was a random and reactionary series of chats, pages, memes, and shitposting accounts—mainly from the US—as well as a loose collection of more serious actors like the Proud Boys and Atomwaffen. Over the years, its membership has become increasingly public, participating in rallies and engaging in acts of violence in the real world. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a new iteration has emerged in Canada: Diagolon.

IT WAS STILL LIGHT OUT when the attacks occurred. In just forty-five minutes, a slim, dark-haired man wearing a Jets jersey sexually assaulted three nurses and a teenager in and around Winnipeg’s largest hospital, the Health Sciences Centre (HSC), on July 2, according to police.

While officers searched for the suspect, hospital workers finished their shifts and walked back to their vehicles, unaware a predator was at large. Later, police would report that a third woman was assaulted that night in the area, by the same man. Staff didn’t learn what happened until the following day.

For HSC employees, these assaults weren’t an aberration. They were a tipping point after years of increasing violence against hospital staff. In a 2024 survey, one-third of physicians at HSC reported experiencing an average of eleven safety episodes in the previous year, almost double the provincial rate. A safety episode can include threats, violence, sexual assault, and harassment. HSC alone accounted for nearly half of all reported assaults on Manitoba doctors. Physicians described being punched, kicked, spat on, and bombarded with verbal abuse. The danger follows them outside the hospital into walkways and parking lots, where some have been chased and attacked coming to and from the job.

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Bolivia’s new right-wing government said Tuesday that it restored diplomatic relations with Israel, the latest sign of the dramatic geopolitical realignment underway in the South American country that was once among the most vocal critics of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Aramayo met his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar in Washington and signed a declaration agreeing to revive bilateral ties, which Bolivia’s previous left-wing government severed two years ago over Israel’s devastating campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Aramayo, as well as Bolivian Economy Minister José Gabriel Espinoza, launched this week into a whirlwind of meetings with American officials as their government works to warm long-chilly relations with the United States and unravel nearly two decades of hard-line, anti-Western policies under the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS

When protests over Morales’ disputed 2019 reelection prompted him to resign under pressure from the military, a right-wing interim government took over and restored full diplomatic relations with the U.S. and Israel as it sought to undo many of Morales’ popular policies.

But 2020 elections brought the MAS party back to power with the presidency of Luis Arce, who in 2023 once again cut ties with Israel in protest over its military actions in Gaza.