Defense minister says Israel will launch 'all-out war' against senior PA officials, terror infrastructure if an October 7-style attack is planned • Statement follows stabbing attack near Kusra
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz seen in the Knesset plenum, December 16, 2024(photo credit: CHAIM GOLDBERG/FLASH90)
Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have directed the IDF to target senior Palestinian Authority (PA) officials in an "all-out war" on terrorism in the West Bank, should Israel identify a plan to launch an "October-7 style" attack on Israeli forces and Jewish settlements.
"If the security apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority and the bodies associated with them launch, or we know for certain that they are about to launch, an October 7-style terrorist attack against forces and Jewish settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I instructed the IDF to prepare to launch an all-out war against senior officials and mechanisms of the [Palestinian] Authority, the bodies associated with them, and against all terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria - in order to quickly bring about their complete defeat," Katz said.
We will not allow for a return of a reality of a continued intifada spanning years, as was the case in the past," the defense minister continued.
"Instead, we will launch a comprehensive campaign against the Authority and all terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, including the elimination of senior officials, the evacuation of residents of the cities and villages from which terrorist activity will be carried out, the elimination of terrorists, the destruction of all terrorist infrastructures in place, and the remaining The IDF will be in the area to be evacuated."
A Palestinian police officer sitting in a vehicle keeps guard, in Jenin in the West Bank, July 12, 2023 (credit: REUTERS/RANEEN SAWAFTA)
“No terrorist can hide," Netanyahu said in a separate statement. "I commend our heroic fighters who engaged the enemy and eliminated the terrorist who carried out the attack in Samaria. I wish a complete recovery to the farm owner who was wounded in the attack."
"We will continue to eliminate terrorists, hunt down those who dispatch them, and destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria. Anyone who tries to threaten the State of Israel and its citizens will pay a heavy price.”
IDF launches exercises testing military readiness on all fronts
Since Sunday, the IDF has launched several exercises to test combat readiness in case of an October 7-style attack on several fronts, including the surprise Operation Dawn 2.0 and Operations Advancing the Wall and Southern Wind in the Eilat area and along Israel's western border.
The situation in the West Bank is particularly volatile.
On Sunday, troops from the Menashe Brigade operated in the village of Aqaba in northern Samaria. During the operation, a rocket and weapons were discovered, including an M16 rifle and large quantities of explosives intended for the production of bombs.
Sunday's operation followed a series of foiled attacks in recent days in the West Bank, including the arrest on Friday of a five-member terrorist cell in the Qabatiya area.
A rifle and ammunition were found in the cell's possession, and the assessment was that its members were preparing to carry out a major attack in the northern West Bank.
The release of the findings follows the “turning the guns” warning issued by the JCFA on July 15, when a study noted the buildup of the PA's military capabilities.
Supporters of the Palestinian Fatah movement gather with flags for a rally ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of its establishment in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank on December 31, 2024.(photo credit: FLASH90)
A majority of Israelis fear that an October 7-style terrorist attack may originate from the West Bank, according to findings released by the Jerusalem Center for Foreign Affairs and Security (JCFA) on Monday.
The findings show that 77% of Israelis, including 86% of Jewish Israelis, are afraid that Palestinian Authority security forces could conduct a large-scale attack much like Hamas did on October 7, 2023.
The study further found that 75% of Jewish Israelis, among 67% of all Israelis, oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines.
Earlier on Monday, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that, should Israel identify a plan to launch an "October-7 style" attack, he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have directed the IDF to target senior PA officials in an "all-out war" on terrorism in the West Bank.
"If the security apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority and the bodies associated with them launch, or we know for certain that they are about to launch, an October 7-style terrorist attack against forces and Jewish settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I instructed the IDF to prepare to launch an all-out war against senior officials and mechanisms of the [Palestinian] Authority, the bodies associated with them, and against all terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria - in order to quickly bring about their complete defeat," said Katz.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz seen in the Knesset plenum, December 16, 2024 (credit: CHAIM GOLDBERG/FLASH90)
JCFA warns of potential for Oct. 7-style attack by PA in West Bank
The release of the findings follows the “turning the guns” warning issued by the JCFA on July 15, when a study by Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch noted the buildup of the PA's military capabilities.
According to Hirsch's findings, the PA security forces have grown to a size 133% larger than that permitted by the Oslo Accords, reaching a total of about 70,000 personnel, 40,000 more than the number allowed by the agreement.
The study noted that, in the West Bank, the over 50,000 armed PA personnel breach the permitted amount by approximately 400%, with their arms including rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and shoulder-launched missiles.
Four potential routes, each totaling around 22 kilometers in length, were identified by the study through which the forces could reach Israeli civilians in a relatively short period of time.
The poll was conducted in cooperation between JCFA and Lazar Research, surveying a representative sample of 703 respondents between September 2 and 4.
The military previously used jamming tools to send drones back to their place of origin, but can now eliminate a drone if it feels like a threat from a Mexican cartel.
Military officials told CBS News in an article published Monday that less than two weeks after it first used a high-energy laser weapon system to down suspicious drones, there has been a roughly 75% decrease in the number of drones probing the southern border in the Rio Grande Valley.
Reports of the new laser system emerged in February after the military used a laser to shoot a Customs and Border Protection drone in Texas, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to close down more airspace near El Paso.
Military officials said they have since had better communication with the FAA and the system officially debuted last month when the military took down three drones on Aug. 25 and 26.
The military previously used jamming tools to send drones back to their place of origin, but can now eliminate a drone if it feels like a threat from a Mexican cartel.
"When you just send it back and then it comes back up or is defeated temporarily, but the game changer is ensuring that that tool can't be used again against you," Army Col. Robert Felicio, commander of the 130th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, told CBS News.
Since the beginning of the year, the military has stopped 300 drones officials believe are linked to Mexican cartels, including eleven the laser took down over a span of ten days. It was not clear how many drones the U.S. sees each day.
Military officials also acknowledged that the drop in drones could be attributed to other things, like cartels finding alternative routes, but that the drop occurred after the laser debuted.
Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.
Report by Michigan Fair Elections Institute examined the election’s administration and the developments over last six years.
(The Center Square) -
An election integrity group has released a 720-page report investigating the 2020 election results in Michigan.
The report by the Michigan Fair Elections Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, examined the election’s administration and the developments that have occurred in the six years since the election.
It looked at statutes, court rulings, sworn testimony, official records, and FOIA-obtained documents, ultimately recommended further investigation by both federal and state authorities.
“Michigan Fair Elections Institute believed it is important to have a comprehensive accounting of election administration issues that have arisen since 2020,” Patrice Johnson, founder and chair of the institute exclusively told The Center Square. “This report is more than a recounting of Michigan’s experience of the 2020 election. The expansion of Secretary of State’s role in Michigan is ongoing; the centralization of election processes in Lansing has been incremental but it has also been unrelenting.”
The 2020 election, in which now-President Donald Trump lost to former President Joe Biden, was highly controversial.
Questions surrounding the election results and allegations of irregularities or fraud have fueled widespread debate and scrutiny. This has been especially the case in Michigan, where Trump lost by 2.8%.
Trump called out the results as recently as July, as previously reported by The Center Square.
“Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan in 2020,” Trump said during a primetime address to the nation. “It was pay, play, and cheat.”
“The purpose of the report is to document, to provide a record of how radically Michigan’s elections have changed since 2020 and to identify areas that still need investigation or legislative reform,” Johnson told The Center Square. “One of the strengths of Michigan elections is its decentralized structure. Clerks are elected officials in their own right with authority and responsibilities. We can’t let that slip away under the cover of non-legislative rule changes or opaque procedures that require citizens to ‘just trust’ the system.”
The common thread among the 15 findings is an ongoing effort by the state to centralize Michigan’s elections over the past few decades, culminating in the past several years – efforts the report called “legally unauthorized.”
“The counts document a recurring pattern that accelerated following the 2019 transition in executive leadership,” the report said. “This transition was characterized by the increasing use of executive orders and actions that bypassed constitutionally required legislative enactment.”
It added that many of its findings are echoed in a July letter from the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
“The department identified suspected deficiencies . . . all matters warranting immediate attention,” the report said. “These same statutory subjects recur throughout this report.”
Of the 15 counts, they include findings on:
• Executive and administrative oversight: “A documented pattern of election-rulemaking authority consolidated in the executive branch.”
• Voter roll maintenance
• Oversight, speech, and overseas voting
• Absentee ballot and Election Day administration
• Poll challenger access, voting systems, and canvass integrity
• Third-party involvement and physical ballot evidence
• Election infrastructure procurement
Johnson said that while the report was based on volunteer research “grounded in primary-source records,” the MFEI hopes it will lead to tangible action from lawmakers and the state to address “oversight gaps” ahead of the 2026 election, which is just 61 days away.
She argued that restoring public confidence in Michigan’s elections will ultimately require greater transparency and citizen involvement.
“Trust Michiganders. Involve citizens in a system that is transparent and open for inspection and true accountability,” Johnson told The Center Square. “That is the way to restore confidence in election administration. Transparency would likely lessen much of the complexity in our elections.”
While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by extremists is growing. The report posits that such persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place irrespective of language, ethnicity, or location. It includes incidents that take place during, or are reported on, any given month.
On April 8 the family received a WhatsApp call from a Muslim man identifying himself as Sohail Riaz, based in Dubai. He claimed Jia was in his custody and warned them against pursuing the case. Masih said Riaz had contacted her through social media and "groomed her for sexual exploitation under the guise of marriage." — Morning Star News, May 7, 2026, Pakistan.
The terrorists set fire to the church, parish buildings, and countless homes. Archbishop Antonio Juliasse described it as "a terrifying scene, houses and infrastructure destroyed, a historic parish reduced to rubble." Captured Christians were also "forced to listen to the jihadists' proclamations of hatred." Over the last nine years, more than 300 Christians have been killed, continued the archbishop, adding, "most of them with their throats slit," and "at least 117 churches and chapels destroyed, 23 of them in 2025 alone. — lanuovabq.it, May 2, 2026, Mozambique.
[A]uthorities completely demolished the Holy Mother of God Cathedral (the main Armenian Apostolic cathedral) and St. Hakob Church in Stepanakert, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Satellite imagery has confirmed both Christian sites were razed to the ground, leaving only paved or cleared ground. The cathedral, consecrated only in 2019, had been the city's primary place of worship. The demolition followed the 2023 Azerbaijani military takeover that forced more than 120,000 Armenian Christians to flee. — christianophobie.fr, May 5, 2026, Azerbaijan
Police and intelligence reports estimated more than 5,000 Muslims participated in the rioting, arson, and church attacks. Nearly 400 were initially arrested, but most, later, received bail, acquittal, or discharge. Of 336 suspects charged, only one remains in prison. — morningstarnews.org, May 22, 2026, Pakistan.
"How many more churches must be desecrated before the nation fully grasps the gravity of these acts? For when a statue of Christ or the Virgin Mary is broken, when a consecrated place is deliberately vandalized, it is not merely stone, wood, or glass that is being attacked. It is a memory, a faith, and a civilization that some seem intent on trampling." — Tribune Chrétienne, May 26, 2026, France.
According to a May 5 report, Azerbaijani authorities completely demolished the Holy Mother of God Cathedral (the main Armenian Apostolic cathedral) and St. Hakob Church in Stepanakert, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Satellite imagery has confirmed both Christian sites were razed to the ground, leaving only paved or cleared ground. Pictured: A 2019 photograph of the Holy Mother of God Cathedral in Stepanakert, Artsakh. (Photo by Nathan868/Wikimedia Commons)
The following are among the murders and abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of May 2026.
Muslim Slaughter of Christians
Nigeria: On May 3, "Muslim Fulani gunmen killed five Christians in a fresh attack on Fan village," resident Bot James reported. The victims were ambushed returning home from their businesses. Fulani assailants in the same county also killed two Christians in Kassa village on April 27 and four Christians -- while injuring five others -- in Hurum village on April 19.
On May 8, Muslim Fulani gunmen killed 13 Christians in a pre-dawn attack on the community of Ngbra Zongo in Plateau State. "The attack has left dozens of other Christians injured, hundreds of others displaced," a spokesperson for the community related. Three pregnant women were among the dead.
One resident, Lawrence Zongo, noted that the gunmen "moved from one house to another attacking the Christian victims in their homes." The same area has seen repeated assaults on Christian communities. On April 26 in the Rim area, Fulani militia killed pastor Ayuba Choji, his wife, and two children. Church leaders referred to them "martyrs whose lives were claimed by the ongoing genocide against Christians in Nigeria."
According to a May 20 report, a Christian mathematics teacher, Michael Oyedokun, was beheaded after Islamic terrorists attacked two secondary schools in Oyo State and kidnapped dozens of teachers and students. A video of the slaughter was later released. The coordinated assault targeted schools in predominantly Christian communities, with an estimated 39 pupils and seven teachers abducted.
On May 23, gunmen attacked an overnight prayer vigil at a church in Elerin village, Kwara State, killing three Christians and kidnapping 15 others. The assailants opened fire on worshippers before abducting members of the congregation and fleeing into nearby bushland.
On May 31, Fulani Muslim gunmen attacked the predominantly Christian village of Gwomjang in Plateau State, killing eight Christians—four men and four women—and wounding at least 15. The assault began in the evening, shortly after church services had ended, as residents were returning home. According to eyewitnesses, the attackers opened fire on civilians, then fled.
Democratic Republic of Congo: On May 13, Muslim militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamic rebel group affiliated with ISIS, attacked Christians in Biakato, killing 21, and burning homes. A survivor recalled:
"The rebels came during the night and started tying people. Then they began killing many Christians who were crying to Jesus Christ. I had hidden myself under the bed. After that, I started hearing loud pangas (large knives) on Christian bodies and the cries of many people crying for help."
On May 19, the same terrorist group killed at least 17 Christians in Mambasa villages, as the region was also grappling with a fierce Ebola outbreak, compounding the humanitarian crisis.
On May 30, the same Islamic terror group killed at least seven more Christians in an overnight attack on the Ngadi neighborhood of Beni. The victims were prevented from escaping, then executed. One survivor recalled,
"They woke us up and, with an Islamic shout—'Allahu Akbar'—the shooting started, and people began to be slaughtered like animals. In the midst of the chaos, I managed to escape the camp. ... We are Pygmies. We do not know anything about politics, but they are killing us."
Kenya: According to a May 1 report, armed Muslim Somali herders stormed Kwa Kamari in Mwingi North, Kitui County, killing seven Christian farmers and burning their homes. One person was left in critical condition. A witness recalled: "It was noise at first, men chanting in Arabic, then gunshots, then shouting, then people running."
A community farmer said: "These people are driving us from our own homes and farms. They kill mercilessly, leaving families turning to prayer, not knowing their fate."
According to a May 5 report, Somali terrorists, as they moved through grazing routes along local farmland, randomly shot and killed 14-year-old Christian James Mutemi. "No parent should go through this," a church leader said. The boy's mother said:
"He was my only hope. Since my husband passed away last year, he was the one I was looking up to. He was my firstborn. Now I am left with only one child, and I don't know how I will move forward. Please remember us in prayer."
The report adds:
"While Kenya is a predominantly Christian country, they often face persecution in the east, where Somali Muslims are intolerant of those who profess faith in Christ."
Pakistan: According to a May 27 report, Silas, an 18-year-old Christian, succumbed to gunshot wounds a few days after Muslim men opened fire on him and another Christian youth. Pastor Imran Amanat condemned the killing, warning,
"Christians in Pakistan continue to live in fear. Violence, harassment, and discrimination against minorities must not be ignored."
Community members described the shooting as "another painful example of the insecurity faced by Christians" and criticized what they saw as an inadequate response from authorities.
Ukraine: According to a May 23 report, the day after Easter Sunday (Orthodox calendar) a Christian was attacked "by two other men of another faith," after greeting those around him with the traditional Easter proclamation, "Christ is risen!" According to one report, the greeting "provoked the anger of a 19-year-old visitor of a different faith." An argument followed, during which the man "decided to kill his Christian adversary" by repeatedly stabbing him in the neck and abdomen. The attackers fled only after "assuring that their adversary was no longer alive." The victim survived the assault—barely. Prosecutors requested, and the court ordered, that the two suspects be held in pretrial detention without the possibility of bail. If convicted, they face life imprisonment. A pixelated image of the two bearded suspects suggests possible Middle Eastern and/or Chechnyan origins.
"Being known as a Christian in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan brings lethal danger... The Taliban reportedly searched door to door and through smartphones, hunting for any signs of Christian conversion.... In reality, there are still believers. But they live completely underground... [Christian worship] survives in silence and fear..... Even in Western countries, the struggle does not fully end... When other Afghans realize someone is not Muslim, reactions can change instantly... Many never fully feel safe, even after reaching the West. Being an Afghan Christian is not just a religious identity. It is a condition of constant caution... Even outside Afghanistan, the fear does not disappear."
Pakistan: The Muslim Abduction, Rape, and Forced Conversion of Christian Girls
On May 6, a court rejected the official government birth record of Sonia Tariq, a Christian girl who was abducted as a minor, pressured to convert to Islam, and forced into marriage. Although Sonia claimed she was 20, had converted voluntarily, and did not wish to return to her Christian family, Supreme Court attorney, Saqib Jillani, said those statements were made under duress, and that Sonia was only 13 when she began working at a Lahore beauty parlor, where she was pressured to embrace Islam. After she disappeared on Nov. 7, 2024, her father initially reported her missing. "A few days later," said Jillani, "Nadeem named Sonia's Muslim co-worker, Ayesha Akram, her father Akram Barkat and another person, Zulfiqar Dogar, accusing them of abducting her for sexual exploitation under the guise of Islamic conversion and marriage." Sonia's father said police repeatedly refused to help recover her:
"They kept telling me that she had converted to Islam and married of her own free will. They did not show us any evidence of her marriage but kept pressuring me to stop searching for her. It is quite clear that she is under their influence and pressure, which is why she insists on staying with them."
According to a May 11 report, another Christian girl, 16-year-old Jia Liaqat, disappeared from her family home in Punjab while her parents were working in a Muslim landowner's fields. "We immediately filed a First Information Report (FIR) regarding Jia's abduction with the Burewala Police Station the same day," her father Liaqat Masih of the Anglican Church of Pakistan, said, "but the police did not make any effort to trace her whereabouts." On April 8 the family received a WhatsApp call from a Muslim man identifying himself as Sohail Riaz, based in Dubai. He claimed Jia was in his custody and warned them against pursuing the case. Masih said Riaz had contacted her through social media and "groomed her for sexual exploitation under the guise of marriage."
Police later informed the family that she had been converted to Islam and entered into an online Nikah (Islamic marriage) with Riaz on April 15. After the family complained about police inaction, the officers grew hostile. On May 4 Jia appeared before a magistrate without her family present and stated she was an adult who had converted to Islam and married Riaz of her own free will. The suspects were released. "There's no justice for the poor in our country, especially for those belonging to minority communities," Masih said:
"My daughter is a minor and cannot legally marry, but neither the police nor the court felt the need to verify her age. Every day we worry about what will happen to her if we cannot rescue her from the custody of her abductors."
On May 12, "a married Muslim abducted a 14-year-old [Christian] girl... forcibly converted her to Islam and married her, exploiting her medical and mental health vulnerabilities to sexually abuse." Nisha Bibi's father, Abbas Masih of a local Brethren church, said CCTV showed her leaving with a middle-aged man later identified as 41-year-old married Muslim Arshad Habib, who already had three wives and children from those marriages. "My daughter's medical condition made her an easy target," Masih said. Police later presented documents claiming Nisha had converted to Islam and married Habib three days later. "We were shocked to see an alleged conversion certificate and marriage documents presented as proof that my daughter willingly converted and married the accused," Masih said. "These documents appear to have been fabricated to shield him from criminal prosecution." The family's lawyer, Zunara Patrick, said a purported magistrate statement claimed that the 14-year-old Nisha was actually 18, had converted and married voluntarily, and sought protection from her family. Patrick rejected it as fraudulent:
"These actions indicate a deliberate pattern of targeting vulnerable young women for sexual exploitation. In this case, the accused appears to have used religious conversion and marriage as a cover to avoid prosecution."
Muslim Attacks on Converts to Christianity
Somalia: On May 28, four Muslim relatives severely beat a 22-year-old Somali Christian woman, Sofia Ahmed, for leaving Islam and embracing Christianity. Sofia was attacked at her home after her uncle repeatedly questioned her about her faith. When he returned with three other male relatives and again demanded to know if she had converted to Christianity, Ahmed said, "I kept quiet," at which point they immediately jumped her. According to the report:
"The relatives beat her with sticks and struck her nose with a sharp object... The attack drew the attention of neighbors who came in large numbers, seized the assailants and called police. Officers arrived and arrested the four men, but Ahmed's Muslim parents intervened and persuaded police to release them..."
According to a local Christian leader,
"Family members later advocated for the release of the suspects, believing the actions were justified because of Ahmed's decision to leave Islam and embrace Christianity."
Sofia underwent two surgeries and, last reported, was still hospitalized.
Uganda: On May 2, Muslim in-laws of a recent convert to Christianity lured him to their home and beat him unconscious. Ochora Awali, a 28-year-old father of one, was last reported as still receiving hospital treatment for serious head injuries. Awali converted to Christianity on December 31 during a prayer gathering. After his conversion, his wife left with their child to live with her parents. On May 2 his brother-in-law, Werikhe Aramanzan, called claiming the child was critically ill. "He pretended to be crying on the phone so that I could believe the situation was serious," Awali said. The concerned father rushed to the home with his church pastor. Upon arrival the in-laws told him to enter alone:
"They started asking me why I left Islam and joined Christianity. They accused me of bringing shame to the family and spoiling their daughter."
Before he could fully respond, several relatives attacked him. "One jumped on me and started boxing me, while others entered with sticks and beat me badly," Awali said. The beating left him unconscious. The pastor fled for help. When Awali regained consciousness, he was in a clinic, crying in pain, unsure who had brought him there or where his friend was.
A May 21 report disclosed that two Christian converts were finally released after spending nearly two years in prison "following their decision to leave Islam and embrace Christianity." Their imprisonment had begun after relatives and other members of the Muslim community falsely connected them to a criminal case in order to punish them for abandoning Islam. Their case highlights how imprisonment, legal harassment, and pressure from families and local communities can be used against those who embrace Christianity. Rather than abandoning their new faith, the converts remained steadfast throughout their incarceration.
Muslim Attacks on Christian Churches
Mozambique: On April 30, jihadists affiliated with the Islamic State torched the historic Catholic church of St. Louis of Montfort in Meza. The terrorists set fire to the church, parish buildings, and countless homes. Archbishop Antonio Juliasse described it as "a terrifying scene, houses and infrastructure destroyed, a historic parish reduced to rubble." Captured Christians were also "forced to listen to the jihadists' proclamations of hatred." Over the last nine years, more than 300 Christians have been killed, continued the archbishop, adding, "most of them with their throats slit," and "at least 117 churches and chapels destroyed, 23 of them in 2025 alone.
Nigeria: According to a May 20 report, armed Fulani herders ransacked and partially burned the Catholic Church of Saint James the Greater in Adu, Taraba State. They "attacked the church, causing significant damage: broken windows, vandalized parish buildings, and the priest's residence was damaged." The assault was described as "precise and coordinated," matching a security warning issued four days earlier.
Syria: According to a May 13 statement from the Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo, a potential disaster was narrowly averted in the Muslim majority nation, when a suspicious object fell from a hearse transporting the body of a parishioner to St. Ephrem the Syrian Cathedral for a funeral. What fell was described as "a small, strange object, wrapped in a black bag and securely sealed with clear tape." After the hearse arrived, police and security forces were summoned, closed the road, and called in a bomb squad, suspecting it "might be an explosive device."
Indonesia: According to a May 4 report, the Toraja Church congregation in Sungai Keledang was blocked from constructing a house of worship despite completing all administrative and technical requirements in 2025, including recommendations from the Interfaith Harmony Forum and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Local government withheld the building permit due to opposition from local community groups, who held banners that read, "We, all Muslims, strongly reject the establishment of a church/prayer house or any activities in our neighborhood." Rev. Hendra Kusuma of the National Alliance for Freedom of Religion and Belief said:
"If every church that meets the requirements is denied a permit due to pressure from rejection, how long will the church receive its rights and justice?"
Pastor Meliasni Panggalo said:
"Our services are held outdoors, next to, under the pastorate. The congregation desperately needs a permanent church building so that worship services are not disturbed by the weather."
On Sunday, May 24, Muslims again disrupted Christian worship when members of the Islamic Jihad Front (FJI) and other local Muslims forced a Christian church to halt its Sunday service in Yogyakarta. The mob entered the church, shouted "Allahu Akbar," and threatened worshippers, while police just looked on, prompting the congregation to flee. One Muslim member of the mob warned,
"If the police weren't there, you wouldn't be standing here forever. If the police leave you for more than 24 hours, I will burn this church down."
A church member recalled, "Suddenly, they entered the building, wearing FJI T-shirts and jackets. They forced us to stop the service. There were many children and elderly people in the church, and the atmosphere was very tense."
According to a May 15 report, construction of the Indonesian Pentecostal Church (GPI) in Tanjung Senang Village, Bandar Lampung, Indonesia, has been blocked for 22 years since plans began in 2004, when the building under construction was torched. No one was ever arrested.
Azerbaijan: According to a May 5 report, authorities completely demolished the Holy Mother of God Cathedral (the main Armenian Apostolic cathedral) and St. Hakob Church in Stepanakert, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Satellite imagery has confirmed both Christian sites were razed to the ground, leaving only paved or cleared ground. The cathedral, consecrated only in 2019, had been the city's primary place of worship. The demolition followed the 2023 Azerbaijani military takeover that forced more than 120,000 Armenian Christians to flee. Armenian sources described it as part of a deliberate campaign to erase Christian Armenian spiritual presence and historical memory from the region.
Pakistan: A May 22 report noted that police, despite a Supreme Court order on March 31 to do so, as well as vast video and photo evidence, failed to arrest most suspects in Muslim mob attacks on dozens of churches and Christian homes in Jaranwala, Punjab, on August 16, 2023. The violence erupted after two Christians were accused of desecrating the Koran and insulting Islam's prophet—allegations a court later ruled were fabricated after a personal dispute. Rev. Khalid Mukhtar, whose parish house was destroyed, said:
"Despite providing police with video and photographic evidence identifying many of those involved, there has been no meaningful progress in arrests. We have met senior police officials several times since the ruling, but their assurances have not translated into concrete action."
Police and intelligence reports estimated more than 5,000 Muslims participated in the rioting, arson, and church attacks. Nearly 400 were initially arrested, but most later received bail, acquittal, or discharge. Of 336 suspects charged, only one remains in prison.
France: On May 4, vandals decapitated a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus in Poleymieux-au-Mont-d'Or, near Lyon. The heads of both figures were smashed, removed, and found at the base of the monument. Mayor Corinne Cardona condemned the attack as "absolutely scandalous and appalling." Local residents also reacted with shock and anger over the desecration.
On May 25, intruders vandalized the Church of Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens in Mérens, damaging statues, scattering liturgical objects across the floor, and breaking at least one stained-glass window. The church remains an active place of Catholic worship, regularly used for baptisms, marriages, funerals, and Mass. Discussing the daily desecration of churches in France, the Tribune Chrétienne asked:
"How many more churches must be desecrated before the nation fully grasps the gravity of these acts? For when a statue of Christ or the Virgin Mary is broken, when a consecrated place is deliberately vandalized, it is not merely stone, wood, or glass that is being attacked. It is a memory, a faith, and a civilization that some seem intent on trampling."
"Following similar incidents in Frosinone – involving a statue of the Virgin Mary and one of Padre Pio – in another town in Lazio, two Christian statues located in oratories were found decapitated in mid-April. CCTV footage implicates a woman, her head covered with a hood, wearing glasses."
Several generations of girls have been raised to believe that a woman's independence and mental health constitutionally override any dependent's claim on her.
This past week, the nation was, once again, bitterly and politically divided over an episode that should, by all rights, have had nothing to do with politics. The courtroom proceedings involving a woman accused of killing her own children and then attempting to kill herself should have been “news” only to those morbidly fascinated by human nature at its worst and most vulnerable moments. Instead, however, the omnipresence of politics in our society turned the trial of Lindsay Clancy into a national obsession for a few days, at least. Left-leaning women lined up in support of the murderous mother, insisting that she was not legally responsible for those murders, that she had suffered a bout of postpartum psychosis and, therefore, did not have the capacity to understand the iniquity and severity of her actions.
Right-leaning commentators—men and women—reacted in turn to the fervency of Clancy’s supporters. Murder is murder, they insisted. Moreover, the evidence suggested premeditation, not a psychotic break. Of course, what really bothered those on the right, Clancy’s detractors, was the very existence of those on the left, Clancy’s supporters. The fact that there exists an organized, animated, and sizable contingent of people who would consciously choose to lionize a child-murderer and to lend her their political, spiritual, and financial support served as proof that there is something profoundly wrong in our society, something ugly, something monstrous.
Part of this, of course, is the familiar story of the politicization of everything, the incidental but defining characteristic of classical, post-Enlightenment liberalism that turns every issue or disagreement into a competition between factions. A bigger part of it, though, is the direct, intentional politicization of everything having to do with women, which started as a cultural movement in the 1960s and morphed into the creation of an entirely new constitutional order.
It is fitting, in a way, that the conclusion of the Clancy trial took place during the same week in which Gloria Steinem died. Steinem was the most prominent and publicly important figure in the second wave of feminism. Others—like Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer—were more important to the movement intellectually. But Steinem was its public face, the engaging, attractive face of a movement that often embraced unattractive ideas.
Second-wave feminism gave us the now ubiquitous term for the notion that everything in our lives is political, whether we like it or not. Whereas classical liberalism provided the forces that made everything political, second-wave feminism gave women—and society more generally—permission to embrace those forces. Whereas the politicization of all things had previously been viewed as a negative, destructive development, second-wave feminism turned it into a mantra and, as such, a social ethos. “The personal is political” is a phrase that is most commonly attributed to the second-wave feminist activist Carol Hanisch, but, as she has said repeatedly, she did not invent it. It had been circulating throughout feminist circles for some time, and she merely put it into print. As Steinem herself once said, attempting to pin down the originator of the phrase was akin to trying to identify the author of the term “World War II.” The “personal is political” was, simply, the animating spirit behind the 1960s feminist revival.
That revival, of course, reached its apex on January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Roe v. Wade. Roe did two things. First, it operationalized the yearnings of second-wave feminism, giving women complete control over their bodies and their sexuality, turning all decisions about sex, motherhood, and, by extension, reliance on males into a “choice,” something that they could freely and unilaterally decide, without input or interference from anyone else. Second, and more importantly, Roe changed the entirety of the American constitutional order, creating out of whole cloth (or judicial robe cloth, if you prefer) a new and inviolable negative right that applied to only half of the population.
Almost unarguably, the most important aspect of the abortion debate in this country was the means by which it was decided. Abortion had been a highly and heatedly debated issue throughout the previous decade across the West. In all nations but one, the matter was settled by political means, i.e., legislatures wrote and passed laws, making abortion a part of the political process and the legal code. Ironically, while second-wave feminism sought to politicize everything else, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe took abortion out of the political realm and placed it in an even higher realm, the realm of constitutional rights. In so doing, it changed the way abortion was perceived by its supporters.
When the Court rewrote the abortion laws of the states by virtue of its conclusion that abortion was protected under the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments, what it did was to create a constitutional right to abortion. The fundamental human rights traditionally associated with the Bill of Rights—speech, religion, arms, speedy trial, etc.—suddenly had a new and fully equal companion right, the right to an abortion. Indeed, some scholars, most notably Russell Hittinger, argued that between Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court established a regime in which abortion was the preeminent and defining right in the constitutional order. Hittinger, who was then the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and a Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa, put it this way thirty years ago:
In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. “If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined,” the Court declared, “then so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.”
What this meant in the real world was that the second-wave feminists and other supporters of “choice”—those who defined their politics in terms of “women’s issues” and the rights of women—came to see abortion not as a fundamental right, but as the fundamental right, the one to which all other rights were subordinate. Abortion and Roe redefined the constitutional order for a significant percentage of the population.
Today, when abortion advocates and others on the left accuse the GOP of “taking away women’s rights” through judicial appointments and state laws banning or restricting abortion, they’re not entirely wrong. In 2022, when the Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it did, in fact, expunge from the record a fundamental constitutional right. That this “right” was illegitimate and didn’t belong on the record in the first place was—and still is—irrelevant to them. They were conditioned by Roe to believe that they had a right to full autonomy over their own bodies, regardless of the harm that autonomy might do to anyone else. This is precisely why the reaction to Dobbs has predominantly been moral outrage. They believe they have had their rights diminished, and they believe that rational, legalistic counterarguments express insufficient indignation at this injustice.
A few weeks ago, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, which made abortion up to birth legal in the state. Conservatives online were horrified at the picture of the signing ceremony, in which Healey and her women supporters were all smiling and applauding. This, the commenters said, was ghoulish at the very least. How could anyone smile at the legalization of killing a nearly full-term child? That’s a fair sentiment from the pro-life side, of course, but it misses the point being celebrated by the other side. To them, it was a celebration of the restoration of their fundamental rights, a reinstatement of civil liberties that had been taken from them.
All of this—the politicization of everything, the de-politicization of abortion rights by Roe, the elimination of fundamental rights by Republicans, and the hope of the restoration of those rights—plays into the Lindsay Clancy ordeal as well.
To be clear, no one in or around the Clancy trial has suggested that infanticide should be legal or that Lindsay Clancy was simply exercising her constitutional rights. Nevertheless, that doctrinaire, rights-based infrastructure that undergirds the Left’s post-Roe constitutional framework did not and could not remain delimited to the abortion context. Because of Roe, several generations of girls have been raised to believe that a woman’s independence and mental health constitutionally override any dependent’s claim on her. It is hardly unexpected that they would reach for that same framework when a new yet unrelated cause places a woman’s interests side by side with her dependent’s death.
In other words, Roe conditioned a broader impulse, one in which a woman’s autonomy and psychological state are the primary moral variables by which her decisions must be judged. The life of her “dependent”—a fetus, not a child—constitutes a secondary consideration.
The Clancy case provides a genuine, real-world instance of that impulse extending beyond the confines of the abortion debate. “Believe her,” Lindsay’s supporters demand. “She needed help, after all.” To them, her suffering and her alleged mistreatment at the hands of the men in her life focus the moral failings in the case on them, rather than on her. They express little or no concern about Callan, Dawson, and Cora. They do not see them as independent people whose lives were ended. Rather, they see her children as bit players in her drama. This is very much the context and framing of the abortion debate.
In the end, the real issue here is that the lives of three children have been almost entirely devalued. In part, because of the profound and enduring impact of Roe on our culture, Callan, Dawson, and Cora Clancy are all but forgotten by their mother’s supporters. Regardless of one’s beliefs about abortion, this is callous and ugly at the very least. The Burger Court did real damage to the nation in 1973, damage that will not be undone easily.
Photo: Plymouth, MA - August 20: Supporters of Lindsay Clancy gather outside of Plymouth Superior Court on August 20, 2026. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Stephen Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Beijing put a city in the flood path. And they’re in the process of doing it again.
Let’s put a couple of myths to bed right away. One, the Tibet-Nepal flood wasn’t caused by climate change. The glacier fell because the bedrock under it fell. Two, Chinese engineering projects did not make the rock cliff fall. But Beijing did something worse: it put a city in the flood path. And it’s in the process of doing it again.
Last week, a wall of ice and rock split off from a part of the Himalayas called Langtang Lirung, dammed the river below for ten minutes, and then gave way to a 70 mph flow of boulders, ice, rock, water, and mud. The flood hit Nepal and the Chinese border settlement at Gyirong.
The usual climate grifters immediately proclaimed it the result of melting glaciers. News media obediently brayed that until you give up your gas stove and your SUV, similar disasters will usher in the end of days. Unfortunately for “the narrative,” clear satellite photos showed within days that the rock under the glacier split from the cliff face, and the ice rode along.
The next question was whether China’s huge engineering projects triggered the collapse. They did not. The rock fell because of Himalayan geology.
The Rock Gave Way
The Himalayas are the edge of one of the most active tectonic plates in the world. The mountain bedrock is composed of bands of the Earth’s crust with built-in planes of weakness. Rockfalls happen constantly. Even large falls like this one happen several times a decade. This was different because of the death toll.
The Death Toll Was a Policy Choice
We saw dramatic footage of an imposing structure being washed away by the rushing waters. That was the border post of Gyirong and its customs and immigration control facilities. It was built by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the border between Tibet and Nepal to make a political point. This was the CCP’s way of marking territory and establishing Chinese claims to Tibet. The trouble was that the roads, buildings, and settlements were built in the floodplain. This is typical of Communist disregard for human life.
The CCP claims the port was for commerce, a way to connect far-flung parts of China. But once the rock face fell into the river valley, the dam of rock and ice it formed lasted only six minutes. Then that dam broke, and the gorge delivered the flood to the only flat ground—the ground Beijing paved.
Beijing is responsible for the death toll because CCP officials put people, buses, and a showpiece gateway where a Himalayan gorge sends its surplus rock.
Now Look at Medog
The real lesson applies to the next gorge.
About 150 miles away, in a bigger, steeper, longer canyon, China is building a cascade of five hydroelectric stations on the Yarlung Tsangpo River at Medog. This is the largest hydropower project in the history of the world. The rock of the surrounding gorges is the same found at Langtang. Cliff faces there fail on the same schedule. Landslides and debris flows are constant and inevitable.
A project of that size will require years of camps, roads, tunnels, worker housing, and concrete. The five dams will be designed for floods and earthquakes. Supporting infrastructure cannot be designed, however, for a mountain that moves several miles in six minutes.
The Medog dam project is intended for political power: to generate electricity on a scale undreamed of, to power AI that will develop doomsday weapons and establish more complete control of the population. It is intended to exercise regional dominance by controlling the water flow downstream to India and Bangladesh. It is intended to buttress China’s claim that Tibet is its interior province. And the potential human cost is considered insignificant.
Stop Building in the Floodway
China should scale down the Medog complex. Not to keep peace with India, or as a concession to Tibetan exile groups, but because the eastern Himalayan gorges are a poor receptacle for millions of tons of concrete. The Himalaya will keep splitting along its geologic planes. That is what foliated rock does when a continent is still moving. The Party can’t stop it. It only controls how many people are in the way.
Langtang Lirung already answered the engineering question. The political question is whether Beijing has learned anything.
Stop building in the floodplains of these narrow gorges. The toll in terms of human life is too great a price.
Photo: An aerial view shows houses damaged and deluged in sludge in the aftermath of flash floods at Trishuli Center in Nepal's Nuwakot district on September 1, 2026. Devastating floods on the China-Nepal border have killed at least 987 people in Nepal, the disaster authority said on September 1, taking overall deaths to more than 1,000. (Photo by Arun SANKAR / AFP via Getty Images)
Bart Marcois is a former career Foreign Service officer and was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs. He produces daily commentaries at youtube.com/@AMinuteWithBart.
Are we supposed to conclude that antisemitism, which history has proved time and again is innately genocidal, is a minor irritant when compared to our collective carbon footprint?
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Credit: Michigan Department of Attorney General.
In the space of one month, Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, has issued two extraordinary statements with profound implications for Jewish life in America.
On July 30, she said she would not be attending the Michigan Democratic Party’s nominating convention in August because she feared for her safety as a Jew. “I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” she admitted candidly.
Nessel, a progressive, rightly won a great deal of applause from within the Jewish community for identifying an ugly truth about antisemitism in the current iteration of the Democratic Party that is still too painful for many of her fellow Jews to acknowledge. Her words left no doubt that what the party’s pro-Palestinian factions sell as a political critique of Zionism and Israel is actually a sledgehammer that slams into all Jews, regardless of their beliefs or affiliation.
In a subsequent interview with David Frum of The Atlantic, Nessel emphasized that the hostility she is dealing with has been incubated over the past three years. “Things changed in so many different ways after Oct. 7,” she said. “And then it wasn’t just, basically, I would say mentally unstable people on the far right that were threatening me or other Jews, but now it became really a both-sides situation, and I began to perceive an enormous amount of antisemitism within the Democratic Party.”
Actually, the problem among the Democratic Party’s progressive and socialist factions long predates the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, as a careful survey of the last 20 years would demonstrate. But leave that aside for the moment, since the latest twist in the Nessel saga should focus American Jews squarely on the future and not on the past that got us here.
Speaking to Jewish Democrats on the last weekend in August at an event in support of the antisemitic Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Nessel did not back down from her previous condemnation of the tide of Jew-hatred in her party. What she did was far worse; she held up a white flag to the antisemites by arguing that if there is a tension between Jewish survival and the survival of humanity overall, then human survival comes first.
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” she declared. She then asked: “What is defending the historic homeland of our ancestors and demanding that candidates acknowledge its right to exist, if the planet upon which it rests is no longer inhabitable?”
The first observation to be made about this argument is simply that it is deeply stupid. The choice that Nessel is articulating—either Jewish survival or human survival—exists only in her head. And it fails to address the key point: If she is somehow correct that Jews may have to accede to their own sacrifice in order to save humanity, then what has humanity become? Why should preventing environmental devastation require Jews to surrender who we are, or worse, our very physical existence?
Moreover, what are we supposed to conclude? That antisemitism, which history has proved time and again is innately genocidal, is a minor irritant when compared to our collective carbon footprint?
Nessel is also seemingly unaware that her argument can be taken in the diametrically opposite direction. If sacrificing Judaism and Jewishness is a necessary compromise to secure the survival of the human race, then aren’t we Jews entitled to ask whether humanity is worth preserving if it cannot tolerate the existence of one single, small Jewish state? Why are Jews obliged to care about a world that, yet again, spits on us and our aspirations? Why, in such conditions, should we be forced to embrace a universalist ideology? Why, frankly, should we not react in tribal terms?
At the same time, Nessel inadvertently touched on something very valuable. By insisting that Jews face this stark choice, she was perhaps channeling the logic of the anti-Zionist mutation of antisemitism, which holds that the Jewish state must be destroyed and that Jews outside must be “de-Zionized.”
Some supporters of the Palestinian cause in the West, particularly Jewish ones, might protest that this outcome is not what they want, and that those who say otherwise are an unrepresentative fringe. This is wishful thinking; the fringe is now the mainstream.
When individuals like Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian children’s author, describe Jews in Nazi terms as “parasites” and “monsters,” as she frequently does, or when Rahmeh Aladwan, a Palestinian doctor based in the United Kingdom, denounces the “Amidah” prayer Jews recite in every service as evidence of their genocidal intentions, we should make no mistake, they are speaking for the entire movement. Their goal is to eliminate Jews, Judaism and Israel. The only question Jews should be asking themselves is whether we will let them.
Nessel’s answer to that is clearly “yes.” It’s possible that she believes by saying so, she will dilute the hatred of people who fantasize about incarcerating her and every other Jew—male and female, young and old, black, brown and white—in a “re-education” camp where they will “unlearn” their Zionism.
As I’ve argued in this column on many occasions, these tendencies will only become more widespread should the conflict in Gaza reignite. Israel has arrived at a key moment: Either Hamas will disarm voluntarily, as required by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803, or the Israel Defense Forces will be compelled to make them. On this point, there can be no compromise.
For my part, I refuse to bow to the demands made of Jews by antisemitic non-Jews and their Jewish collaborators to commit suicide or else. I will defy them by any means necessary. Because when we said “Never Again” after the Shoah, we meant it. Didn’t we?
Ben Cohen is a research fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), specializing in international organizations, Europe-Middle East relations and global antisemitism/anti-Zionism. A London-born journalist with 30 years of experience, he previously worked for BBC World and has contributed to Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet and Congressional Quarterly. He was a senior correspondent at The Algemeiner for more than a decade and is a weekly columnist for JNS. Cohen has reported from conflict zones worldwide and held leadership roles at the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee. His books include Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through 21st Century Antisemitism.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons last week the UK needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank.
Israeli families attend an inauguration ceremony for the new settlement of Maale Arugot in Gush Etzion in the West Bank, September 2, 2026(photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
The United Kingdom will announce a ban on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, sources told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
The news is not exactly unexpected: Foreign Minister Ed Miliband already stated on August 19 that he would be setting out a comprehensive set of measures in "the coming weeks."
Nevertheless, the timing of the expected announcement, just days before Jewish New Year, may shock British Jews.
Tuesday's announcement is likely to take place in the afternoon, after a 9:30 a.m. Westminster Hall debate on Jewish safety.
The new measures will likely include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband arrives to attend a cabinet meeting after the summer recess at 10 Downing Street in London, Britain, September 1, 2026 (credit: REUTERS/TOBY MELVILLE)
Jewish groups, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, have expressed concerns that the sanctions could further damage the UK-Israel relationship and have a harmful impact on UK Jews.
UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said the UK government’s intended sanctions will be "counterproductive and even endanger such a vision of peace.”
The chief rabbi added that many in the community view the measures with deep dismay, warning they risk spiraling into a de facto boycott of Israel and threatening the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Palestinian workers.
Mirvis also noted that “these measures will also disproportionately affect British Jews because of our close religious, family, charitable, and educational ties to Israel."
New Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat warned in The Telegraph on Sunday that damaging diplomatic relations with the Jewish state could lead to harm for British citizens.
He said terrorist attacks on British soil had been foiled by the UK’s security services as a direct result of Israeli intelligence sources sharing information with their British counterparts.
Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, told the Post on Monday: "We have shown that a general ban on imports of goods produced in areas of Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria into the UK would contravene World Trade Organization agreements, bilateral agreements between the UK and Israel, and EU law which continues to apply in relation to Northern Ireland."
"Such a ban would also be counter-productive since it would harm the Palestinian economy and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians," he said.
"However, UK government policy towards Israel is driven not by rational consideration but by rage based on false stories about Israel which they and their supporters gullibly believe. The situation in the UK seems to be reverting to the Middle Ages."
Additionally, on Monday, Downing Street confirmed to the Telegraph that UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has not spoken to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since becoming Prime Minister 50 days ago.
This comes despite the UK Government pressing ahead with plans to impose fresh sanctions on the Jewish state.
The Post reached out to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which declined to comment at the moment. The Post did not hear back from 10 Downing Street at the time of writing.
