Israel violated the ceasefire, while Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian woman and a US journalist, and Israeli rioters shut down a soccer match.
By Prem Thakker, Reposted from Zeteo, October 25, 2025
Imagine a country where kids are taught to sing songs about genocide, where prominent politicians and pundits go on national television to echo Nazi rhetoric, and where polls show a majority of the public wanting the expulsion of an ethnic minority. Well, of course, you don’t have to imagine such a country. It’s Israel. And yet, according to Donald Trump’s peace plan, it’s Gaza, not Israel, that needs to be “deradicalized.”
The very first bullet in Trump’s 20-point “peace plan” states: “Gaza will be a de-radicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” The plan says nothing about de-radicalizing Israel, which, in addition to carrying out a genocidal assault and blockade on Gaza, has attacked seven of its neighbors in the past two years. And it only took hours for Israel to violate it.
In the two weeks since the ceasefire was signed, Israeli forces have killed at least 93 Palestinians in the enclave, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
It should come as no surprise that the Trump plan would almost immediately lead to Israeli violations. If a government spends two years committing a genocide, with unconditional support from the US, how seriously would it then treat a deal to stop committing said genocide, if it’s also brokered by the US, which still pretends it was never a genocide in the first place?
What is a “peace plan” if the party that has all the power isn’t forced to end its violent occupation and root out its radical elements?
Violent Mob of Combatant-Aged Men
The Trump peace plan is solely concerned with Israel’s war on Gaza. And yet, Israeli violence runs rampant in the West Bank, where Palestinians are under occupation and subject to Israeli settlers seeking to steal more land away, under the protection of the Israeli military.
On October 19, a mob of Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya attacked an American journalist and bludgeoned a Palestinian woman.
The journalist Jasper Nathaniel said the Israeli military “lured” him and Palestinian farmers into an ambush by the settler mob, and then sped off. Harrowing footage shows Nathaniel fleeing from the violent mob of combatant-aged Israeli men.
Additional footage Nathaniel recorded shows the moment one of the men viciously attacked the Palestinian woman, Afaf Abu Alia, a 55-year-old mother of five, as she picked olives on her land. She was sent to the intensive care unit and is now reportedly in stable condition.
This week, the Israeli violence reached a grim milestone: at least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli forces pushed the toll over the top on Tuesday by killing Muhammad al-Hallaq, a 10-year-old boy, as he played soccer with his friends.
“He loved birds, and he told me he wanted to be a heart doctor. He used to say this all the time,” the boy’s mom tearfully told the BBC.
Even if Trump doesn’t care about the horrific murder of a 10-year-old, surely he’d care about putting an end to the radicalized elements of Israeli society responsible for targeting US citizens like Nathaniel, or the killing of at least six Americans in the West Bank over the last two years?
…right?
Violence on the Pitch
This week, on the same day that the mob attacked Nathaniel and the Palestinian woman in the occupied West Bank, Israeli police had to shut down a soccer match in Tel Aviv. Why? Because of violent rioting by fans.
The match between rivals Hapoel Tel Aviv and Maccabi Tel Aviv, set for Sunday, had to be shut down as fans threw flares and smoke grenades onto the pitch. Forty-two people were reportedly injured, including five police officers. Police said they shut the match down due to the “risk to human life,” prompting thousands to be evacuated. Some sources report that the police themselves instigated violence against fans of Hapoel, which has a reputation for a more left-wing fan base, relative to Maccabi fans.
Remarkably, this happened in the midst of ongoing controversy surrounding Maccabi fans.
Last week, city officials in Birmingham, England, barred Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending a match against Aston Villa next month. The officials cited intelligence and previous episodes, including violent clashes and hate crimes Maccabi fans were involved in during a 2024 match in Amsterdam. (This doesn’t include other episodes, like a mob of Israeli fans brutally beating a man carrying a Palestinian flag in Greece.)
After the ban, pro-Israel groups and officials in the UK government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, mobilized in full force to slam the decision as “antisemitic,” seeking to reverse it.
But their efforts to defend the Israeli fans were interrupted just days later by the violent riots in Tel Aviv.
“De-radicalize” Whom?
These are not isolated episodes. In the past two years alone, radical elements of Israeli society have been on full display.
Israeli forces have bombed medical and humanitarian workers from dozens of nations, and detained humanitarians seeking to deliver aid to millions of starving people. Israeli soldiers have taken gleeful selfies in the underwear of the women whose houses they’ve demolished. Bands of Israeli settlers and civilians have blocked aid from entering Gaza, even as recently as this month.
Mobs of Israeli lawmakers and soldiers invaded a military court and rioted against police after they detained soldiers who allegedly raped a prisoner. Some of the most prominent politicians and TV personalities have expressed rhetoric on a daily basis indistinguishable from that of the Nazis (declarations ranging from “Gaza should be wiped off the face of the earth” to “not a single Gazan child should remain”).
This sadly trickles down, teaching children to hate – or fear – their neighbors: Israeli children have blocked aid into Gaza, harassed and threatened teachers who expressed sympathy for Palestinians, mocked Palestinian suffering on TikTok, and sung “we will annihilate everyone” in Gaza (a song ironically entitled “The Friendship Song 2023”).
And it all can’t simply be attributed to Netanyahu – Israeli opposition leaders are just as racist and genocidal as the current prime minister, and represent troubling views aligned with Israeli society more broadly. A poll earlier this year showed 82% of Jewish Israelis support the ethnic cleansing, or expulsion, of Palestinians from Gaza.
These attitudes are the result of Israel’s foundational project necessitating Palestinian oppression. As Israeli politician Ofer Cassif has noted: “Israel was established on an anti-egalitarian platform because once you define a state, any state, as being a state that belongs to just one portion of the population… this is not a real democracy because it undermines the very essence of equality,” he said last year. “In that sense, I think that Israel should better be called an ethnocracy rather than a democracy,” he added.
The “peace plan” itself was already absurd in myriad ways. No accountability measures. No acknowledgment of Israel’s apartheid apparatus. No consequences for Israel’s genocide. No guarantee of Palestinian self-determination (unless you count a “Board of Peace” led by Trump and ex-UK PM and Iraq invader Tony Blair as a positive move in that regard).
The Trump plan’s focus on “de-radicalizing” Gaza only further illustrates the farce of it all, no less when the deal itself breaks down as radical Israeli violence continues to abound, from the soccer pitch to the West Bank.
Prem Thakker is Zeteo’s Political Correspondent & Columnist.
RELATED:
- Israeli settlements, fiscal policies have forcibly reshaped the West Bank since October 2023
- Gaza can be healed, but not by the same hands that destroyed her
- Palestinians in Gaza Struggle to Retrieve Their Dead With Little More Than Hammers
- The ‘General of Bloodshed’ in the West Bank Is Israel’s Moral Face
- American beaten to death by Israeli settlers in the West Bank
