A land grab the size of NYC.
The Israeli military is expanding its illegal occupation of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian land even further.
Since October 2023, Israel has taken control of an additional 1,000 sq km of territory — bigger than the entirety of New York City — that stretches across Gaza, southern Lebanon, and southern Syria.
As new borders are drawn, millions remain forcibly displaced.
What’s happening?
The extent of these land grabs isn’t reflected in the official maps released by the Israeli government following “ceasefire” deals in Gaza and Lebanon. In Syria, Israel’s illegal occupation is completely omitted from Israeli maps.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has transformed the so-called “Yellow Line” — established alongside the October 2025 “ceasefire” agreement, placing more than 60% of Gaza under Israeli military occupation — into a permanent reality, preventing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from returning to their homes.
Over seven months later, this line continues to divide Israeli-occupied Gaza — more than half of its total territory — from the rest of the enclave. And Israeli forces have continually moved the “Yellow Line” deeper into Gaza, taking control of even more land, including carrying out sweeping home demolitions in areas it does not “officially” occupy, as confirmed by satellite imagery.
The same happened in southern Lebanon after another in-name-only “ceasefire” was reached in April 2026. In the months since, the Israeli military has carried out demolitions on Lebanese land in areas that fall outside its established 570 sq km “buffer zone.”
While there is no official “yellow line” in Syria, there, too, the Israeli military is illegally occupying over 200 sq km of Syrian land, having taken unofficial control of the buffer zone that separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights — annexed illegally in 1981 — from Syria.
How is this happening?
The Israeli government’s official maps do not reflect the actual reality on the ground: That it is ever-extending its illegal buffer zones to occupy increasingly large swathes of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian land. This obfuscation is intentional.
In quietly occupying this stretch of land, the Israeli government has been able to skirt international blowback while still accomplishing two goals:
1. Expanding its theft of Arab land and its displacement of Arab people, a core tenet of Zionism, the driving ideological force of the Israeli state.
2. Appeasing its ultra-right wing base while promoting a false sense of Israeli “security.”
The Israeli state’s ability to illegally take over 1,000 sq km of Arab land speaks to the failure of international law to hold the Israeli government accountable for clear-cut war crimes.
This culture of impunity has only emboldened the Israeli government further: This week, after Trump announced that a deal had been reached for a ceasefire in Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assured that the Israeli military wasn’t going anywhere: “We have established deep security zones around the state of Israel. We did this in Gaza, in Lebanon, and in Syria… We will remain [there] as long as it takes.”
This is what Zionism has always meant in practice: Maximum land, minimum Arabs. It is the driving force behind the Israeli state’s 100+ year war on Palestinians and Palestine, from the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba to the last two and a half years of Israeli genocide in Gaza that has killed over 70,000 people and displaced millions, and it is the rationale underpinning its illegal occupation of and never-ending attacks on neighboring Arab states.
For the people living under illegal Israeli occupation, each day is a struggle to survive.
Just this week, the Israeli military shot and killed 3-year-old Rayan Abu al-Ajeen while he was being carried by his father in central Gaza — not in the officially-occupied “Yellow Line” zone, but in an area where Israel is supposedly not in direct control. Rayan is one of over 1,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect in October 2025.
Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed over 3,800 people since March, forced 1.2 million people to flee their homes, and reduced entire villages to rubble. It has carried out the same genocidal tactics that it used to decimate Gaza, including targeting hospitals, killing medical workers, and using “double-tap” strikes. The Israeli military has made at least 800 incursions into Syrian territory since December 2024, erected military outposts, demolished civilian homes, displaced entire families, and carried out random arrests.
What can our movements do?
The Palestine solidarity movement has been able to move the needle in significant ways, including moving historic numbers of Congresspeople to vote to block U.S. weapons to Israel — weapons it relies on to illegally occupy Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian land and to carry out a genocide in Gaza and a sweeping campaign of ethnic cleansing across the West Bank.
It is not enough.
May was the deadliest month in Gaza since December 2025. The Israeli government has made it clear that it has no intention of relinquishing control of Palestinian and Arab land. Top Israeli officials have said themselves that they were using Gaza as a model for Israel’s war on Lebanon. And so we must keep fighting — and bring renewed commitment, strategic rigor, and a sense of unified purpose to that fight.
Together, we have built incredible people power: a movement capable of cracking open long-held assumptions about U.S. support for Israel, capable of moving tens of thousands of people into sustained struggle for Palestinian freedom, and capable of electing and defending real champions for Palestinian rights who are fighting to force Congress to catch up with their constituents and finally cut off U.S. funding to Israel’s war machine.
The road ahead is long and the challenges before our movement are immense. But we have each other, and we have come this far together. Onwards.
Take action: Fund people, not bombs.
Simply by making calls and sending emails, you have helped our movement move a historic number of congresspeople to vote to block weapons to Israel.
We can’t let up the pressure now: Call and email your Congresspeople now, and if you already have, do it again.
Take action: NO to expanding U.S.-Israeli military cooperation.
Lawmakers in Congress are trying to massively expand military cooperation between the United States and Israel — and they’re betting on us staying silent. Too late.
Email your members of Congress now so we can reach 50,000 letters by the end of the day.
Sign up: Socialism 2026 Conference.
Join us in Chicago from September 4-7 for Socialism 2026, a four-day conference bringing together activists, organizers, and communities from around the world and featuring hundreds of participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops.
Whether you’re a seasoned radical or a new activist, come to sharpen our analysis, hone strategy, and build community together.
What we’re reading: The Palestinians dying for work
Charlotte Ritz-Jack reports for +972 Magazine about the dozens of Palestinians who have been shot and killed by Israeli forces while trying to enter Israel to find work, since Israel closed its borders to Palestinian workers in the West Bank in October 2023.
What we’re reading: Calling for a boycott of the Israeli Medical Association
Last week, The Lancet published a petition co-organized by the JVP Health Advisory Council that calls for the removal of the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association because of “its failure to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, the destruction of health-care infrastructure, and the torture and killing of health-care workers in Gaza.”
The Wire is JVP’s weekly newsletter on all things Palestine and Palestine solidarity movement. With over 150,000 subscribers, it is one of the biggest American publications dedicated to justice.
All donations to JVP will be matched by a generous group of donors until June 30, meaning if you donate $20 today, it will go 2x as far towards ensuring we can continue providing our base with the latest analysis and ways to take action.
Get The Wire
Every week, the Wire reaches tens of thousands with critical news and analysis from Palestine, the United States, and the Palestine solidarity movement — and provides ways to take action.