Two things happened this week that read, at first, like unrelated items on a news feed: Israeli settlers built at least six new outposts across the West Bank within days of a fatal clash, and the International Criminal Court removed the prosecutor who indicted Benjamin Netanyahu. They are not unrelated. One needed the other.

Start with the West Bank. Friday’s killing of two Israelis and four Palestinians in the village of Tel/Til — after a Palestinian confronted armed settlers who had stormed the village and, in the scuffle, seized one of their rifles — became the pretext for the most sweeping escalation since the Gaza ceasefire. Within days, settlers established at least six new outposts across the Ramallah, Salfit and Nablus governorates, backed by army presence and cabinet-level announcements of new colony construction. This is not opportunism. Mondoweiss reports a formal shift underway in Israeli security doctrine: settler violence, long treated by the military establishment as a destabilising liability, is being reframed as a security asset ahead of elections. Army officers privately worry that Palestinian restraint under the current wave of attacks “might not continue indefinitely” — which is itself a tell. The doctrine assumes restraint as a variable to be managed, not a right to be protected.

What actually happened to the man Israel blamed for triggering the clash matters here too. A four-video analysis by +972 Magazine found that Sheikh Farouk Ramadan — the Palestinian who briefly held the seized rifle — was unarmed and had already dropped it when he was shot dead, directly contradicting the army’s public claim that it had “neutralised the terrorist.” Settler attacks were already at a UN-tracked record before Friday: 1,835 incidents in 2025, up 27% on the year prior, with 6,200 Palestinians displaced by settler violence and access restrictions since January 2023. The pattern repeats with enough regularity to call it a cycle: provocation, a killing framed as self-defence regardless of what the footage shows, then land seizure formalised as fact on the ground.

That cycle depends on nobody being able to make it expensive. Which is where the ICC comes in. On the same stretch of days, the Assembly of States Parties voted 82–13 to remove Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan from office — the first removal of a sitting ICC prosecutor in the court’s 24-year history — over 2024 misconduct allegations that a year-long UN oversight investigation did not, in the end, substantiate. Khan is the prosecutor who issued the 2024 arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, which drew personal US sanctions against him and a pledge from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to dismantle the court “brick by brick.” UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was blunt about the timing: Khan’s removal, she wrote, “lines up neatly with the fight to neutralise Netanyahu’s arrest warrant,” pointing to reporting that Israel’s foreign minister ran a dedicated task force to secure the vote. “Coincidence,” she added, “is a luxury international law can no longer afford.”

Put the two stories next to each other and the argument makes itself. A doctrine that depends on settler violence being treated as security policy rather than criminality needs exactly one thing to keep functioning: no external body with the standing to call it what it is. The ICC was that body, however imperfectly. Its own chief prosecutor is now gone by a vote engineered, on the available reporting, by the government most exposed by his warrants — in the same week that government’s settlers were laying claim to fresh West Bank land under a doctrine daring anyone to stop them. For a country whose own government took Israel to the ICJ over Gaza, the parallel collapse of the ICC’s capacity to act isn’t a footnote in someone else’s institutional drama. It is the removal of the one mechanism that made land seizure and impunity cost something on paper, in the same week both were being tested at scale.

Also from this week’s feed: