Nazhat Shameem Khan claims some staff are facing ‘banking difficulties’ but their work is unaffected

The deputy prosecutor of the international criminal court has said new US sanctions are beginning to take effect on its staff but insisted they have not hindered the court’s work.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced the sanctions this month, accusing the ICC – a frequent target of the Trump administration – of being a “rogue court” and declaring: “Either the ICC will end its threats, or we will end the ICC.”

Israel is heading to the polls for the first time since the 7 October attacks and concerns about national security are dominating the campaign. Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a significant challenge from the former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot as voters weigh up who is best placed to protect the country. In Tel Aviv, the Guardian's Will Christou discovers a deepening generational divide, with many younger voters saying that Netanyahu has not gone far enough in Gaza.

After Brody called out the ‘death and misery’ in Palestine, the Netflix hit’s Jewish creator said they don’t see eye to eye

The creator of the hit Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This has responded to star Adam Brody’s recent support of Palestine amid the Israel-Gaza war.

“Everyone is entitled to a different opinion,” Erin Foster said in an interview with the Not Skinny Not Fat podcast when asked about Brody calling for a free Palestine.

Investigation suggests American company Axon still supplies Israel with Taser weapons despite evidence they have been used to torture prisoners

The soldiers drag the man into a section of the prison known as Hell’s Wing, a metaphor for its notoriety for acts of brutality. Shoving him violently into a corner, they take a step back before one of them draws his weapon and fires two rubber bullets at his body. The man, a double amputee, collapses to the floor.

After tying him up tightly, the soldiers continue their assault until one of them pulls a stun gun from its holster. The soldier approaches the man, brandishing the gun, before applying it to his body, engulfing him in an electric shock.

Only a clear opposition victory would let us begin to heal, strengthen democracy and establish Palestinian rights

• Dahlia Scheindlin is a Tel Aviv-based political analyst

Israel’s 27 October election is fast approaching, with little clarity about who will win. But Benjamin Netanyahu is more likely to lose. His polling is poor, and the fractious opposition parties may yet find a way to form the next government.

What would such a government do? Most of the Zionist opposition parties, the frontrunners to lead such a coalition, have offered bromides about good governance and unifying the country. Others have focused on more specific plans to establish a state commission of inquiry into the government’s failures around the attacks of 7 October 2023, and end the exemption from military service enjoyed by most ultra-Orthodox Jewish men.

Dahlia Scheindlin is a Tel Aviv-based political analyst and author of The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel

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Rights groups say the planned 1.4km route, which ends at compound run by far-right settler group Elad, will displace Palestinians and reshape the cultural landscape

A fifth foreign company has pulled out of a plan to build a cable car from West to East Jerusalem that threatens to involve the seizure of land and property rights from dozens of Palestinian families along its route, but local authorities insist the scheme is proceeding as planned.

The project appeared to have stalled for four years until late September, just weeks before Israel’s 27 October elections, when the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) issued a notice of intent to award a contract without a public tender to ROPES, a cable car engineering consultancy based in South Tyrol, Italy.

A biographer’s affecting account of prominent critics of Zionism, from Hannah Arendt to Nan Goldin

“Everyone in America – at least as far as I knew – was a Zionist,” recalls Benjamin Moser, “especially but not only if you were Jewish.” A Pulitzer-winning biographer of Susan Sontag, he remembers being brought up short in his 20s, when a friend described Israel as “a bunch of foreigners who had no business in the Middle East” and Zionism as a “terrible mistake”. Moser, who recently turned 50, admits: “I was not even aware that Zionism was controversial.” The shift in perspective culminated in a visit to the occupied territories in 2016, during which he found “the reality of the occupation of Palestine … deranging”.

His new book includes 12 portraits of Jewish figures who have opposed Zionism, a movement formed in the late 19th century to advocate for the creation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. It is contentious to oppose Zionism today, but Moser wants contemporary Jewish activists to “feel less alone” by showing that debates about Zionism were once mainstream in Jewish communal life. While around 90% of American Jews now support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (although fewer identify as Zionists), fewer than 1% belonged to the largest American Zionist organisation in 1914. The first character study is of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, who thought that Judaism offered a vision of a world beyond the devastating nationalism of the first world war. The book closes with a moving account of the photographer Nan Goldin, who spoke out, at considerable cost, as the assault on Gaza began in 2023 following the October 7th attacks.

Whether or not Netanyahu can hold on to power, Israelis are expected to vote in a more rightwing Knesset

Four decades ago, when the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane won a single seat in Israel’s Knesset, other legislators passed a law to prevent him running again, left the chamber when he rose to speak and worked together to block discussion of his ethnonationalist proposals.

These ranged from mass expulsions of Palestinians to apartheid provisions such as segregated beaches and the criminalisation of sex between Jews and gentiles.

Film interviewing military insiders about mass killing of civilians in Gaza wins widespread praise around the world

Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”.

NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.

Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor discuss their new documentary, NAZA, which exposes the AI systems that the Israeli military uses to rain down strikes on Gaza, causing the mass killing of civilians. Based on the testimony of 24 military insiders, the documentary caused uproar in Israel, with the government threatening to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship. The Guardian's Annie Kelly talks to the directors about how the film was made, and the price they paid for speaking out

Film’s executive producer talks about first time he watched film detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza

The director Jonathan Glazer said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, an award-winning documentary about Israel’s systems of mass killing in the war on Gaza.

Glazer appeared on a panel at NAZA’s UK premiere in London on Thursday night alongside key figures behind the documentary, including its Israeli co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

Authors withdraw book planned for young readers after disputes with editors over characterizations of 7 October

A book on Palestine for young readers was pulled at Penguin Random House just before its scheduled release, following editorial disputes between the publisher and the book’s Palestinian American authors over their account of Palestinian history.

In November 2024, Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, signed the book deal with Alana Hadid, a philanthropist, activist and older sister of models Bella and Gigi, and Jenan Matari, an author and communications strategist. The book was promoted for release in September this year.

Twenty arrested in first march since Ed Miliband declared UK’s position was that Israel’s occupation of West Bank was unlawful

Thousands of people have gathered in central London to express their support for Palestinians after three years of “genocide” carried out against them by Israel.

The demonstrators, many wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestine flags, gathered on the Embankment at midday on Saturday. Some carried placards reading “End the genocide” and “Free Palestine” as they marched towards parliament. A bride and groom appeared to be among those in attendance and a two-minute silence was held to reflect on the lives lost in Gaza.

A whirlpool of violence has engulfed everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. Meanwhile, the west has destroyed any political authority it once had

There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. For Gaza, for Israel, for the wider Middle East, and for everyone else too. Not all hinge points in history are obvious at the time. Three years on from the day it began, and precisely one year since a supposed ceasefire was agreed, this one is now impossible to ignore.

The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.

Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer

While Israel’s actions against Palestinians intensify public anger, the bloc remains paralysed along familiar fault lines

When the British government announced sweeping sanctions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements and condemned “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank by state-backed “settler terrorists”, some EU diplomats hoped this dramatic shift in UK government policy towards Israel would have a galvanising effect on the rest of Europe. So far, it has not.

Although France and Canada joined the UK in pledging to ban goods from illegal settlements and impose sanctions on “those who facilitate them or profit from them”, there has not yet been a wider ripple effect.

Embassies post links to hastily produced online film echoing style of real Guardian documentary about mass killings of Gaza civilians

The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings.

The real documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries.

UK and Israel back away from full diplomatic confrontation, though British presence in Palestine will be much reduced

Israel and the UK have backed away from a full-scale diplomatic confrontation, with Britain announcing it is rebranding its consulate general ⁠building in ⁠East Jerusalem ​as a UK mission, a move that will result in UK diplomats leaving Israel, with only seven to remain in the building. Among those leaving is the consul general, Helen Winterton.

The change was forced on the UK by the Israeli government as punishment for the decision by the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, last month to ban trade with illegal settlements and introduce a tougher sanctions regime against those who aided the building of settlements. The UK is seeking to protect the two-state solution as the best means of ending the Israel-Palestine conflict.

People tell of lives changed beyond recognition after the 7 October attacks by Hamas three years ago and the subsequent Israeli offensive

Ahmed Ishtaiwi has six chairs. They are cheap and plastic and battered, but they are among the 43-year-old driver and mechanic’s most valuable possessions.

Benjamin Davis appealing against dismissal from FAO, after being accused by director general of playing ‘political games’

A former senior UN food agency official has alleged he was fired last week for his work highlighting hunger in Gaza, and has launched an appeal against his dismissal.

Benjamin Davis said the leadership of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had refused to renew his contract as director of its rural transformation and gender equality division because his team had published a brief on hunger in Gaza and held a seminar on the subject last year, and because he had taken part in weekly “moment of silence” vigils on FAO grounds for those killed.