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Arab World

Israel Approves West Bank Residency for 4,000 Undocumented Palestinians

Israeli soldiers check a Palestinian woman as she waits to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem, to attend the second Friday prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on April 23, 2021. (AP)
Israeli soldiers check a Palestinian woman as she waits to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem, to attend the second Friday prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on April 23, 2021. (AP)
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Israel Approves West Bank Residency for 4,000 Undocumented Palestinians

Israeli soldiers check a Palestinian woman as she waits to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem, to attend the second Friday prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on April 23, 2021. (AP)
Israeli soldiers check a Palestinian woman as she waits to cross the Qalandiya checkpoint between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem, to attend the second Friday prayers in the al-Aqsa mosque during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan on April 23, 2021. (AP)

Israel announced on Tuesday that it approved registration as West Bank residents for some 4,000 Palestinians who have been living for years in the Israeli-occupied territory without official status.

The decision affects 2,800 former inhabitants of the Gaza Strip who left the enclave after the Hamas movement seized it in internal Palestinian fighting in 2007, Israel's COGAT liaison office to the Palestinians said.

Some 1,200 other Palestinians, among them undocumented spouses and children of West Bank residents, will also receive official standing.

Inclusion in the Palestinian Population Registry, which Israel controls, will enable the group to receive identification cards. The documentation will enable passage through Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank, an area captured in a 1967 war.

Israel describes the roadblocks, condemned by Palestinians and rights groups as restricting freedom of movement, as a security necessity.

On Twitter, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said he approved the 4,000 residency registrations as a humanitarian gesture and "as part of my policy to strengthen the economy and improve the lives of Palestinians" in the West Bank.

Hussein Al Sheikh, a senior official of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank, said on Twitter that the 4,000 "obtained their right to citizenship" and would receive identification cards.

Under interim Israeli-Palestinian peace deals that established the PA, Israel committed to approve the residency in the West Bank and Gaza of some 4,000 new spouses of local residents each year under a family reunification program.

Israel suspended the approvals when the Palestinian uprising erupted in 2000. It granted some 32,000 reunification permits in 2008 and 2009, but largely froze the process, save for a smattering of humanitarian cases, since then.

Gantz gave the new approvals some seven weeks after holding talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah. It was the highest-level meeting between Abbas and an Israeli minister to be made public since Israel's new government was formed in June.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a far-right politician, opposes the creation of a Palestinian state, a divisive issue his cross-partisan government is unlikely to pursue. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014.

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Arab World

Gaza’s Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt Reopens for Limited Traffic in Key Step for Ceasefire

01 February 2026, Palestinian Territories, Khan Younis: Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrive in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, after passing through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
01 February 2026, Palestinian Territories, Khan Younis: Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrive in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, after passing through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
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Gaza’s Rafah Border Crossing with Egypt Reopens for Limited Traffic in Key Step for Ceasefire

01 February 2026, Palestinian Territories, Khan Younis: Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrive in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, after passing through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
01 February 2026, Palestinian Territories, Khan Younis: Trucks carrying humanitarian aid arrive in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, after passing through the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa

Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt reopened on Monday for limited traffic, a key step as the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire moves ahead, according to Egyptian and Israeli security officials.

An Egyptian official said 50 Palestinians would cross in each direction in the first day of the crossing’s operation. The official, involved in talks related the implementation of the ceasefire deal, spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue.

State-run Egyptian media and an Israeli security official also confirmed the reopening, which for now at least, is largely symbolic. Few people will be allowed to travel in either direction, and no goods will be allowed to enter.

About 20,000 Palestinian children and adults needing medical care hope to leave devastated Gaza via the crossing, according to Gaza health officials. Thousands of other Palestinians outside the territory hope to enter and return home.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also said that Israel will allow 50 patients a day to leave. An official involved in the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the diplomatic talks, said each patient would be allowed to travel with two relatives, while some 50 people who left Gaza during the war would be allowed to return each day.

The Egyptian health ministry said in a statement on Monday that 150 hospitals across the country have been prepared to receive Palestinian patients and wounded who will be evacuated from Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

Israel has said it and Egypt will vet people for exit and entry through the crossing, which will be supervised by European Union border patrol agents with a small Palestinian presence. The numbers of travelers are expected to increase over time, if the system is successful.

Israeli troops seized the Rafah crossing in May 2024, calling it part of efforts to combat arms-smuggling for the Hamas group. The crossing was briefly opened for the evacuation of medical patients during a ceasefire in early 2025. Israel had resisted reopening the Rafah crossing, but the recovery of the remains of the last hostage in Gaza last week cleared the way to move forward.

The reopening is a key step as last year’s US-brokered ceasefire agreement that took effect on Oct. 10 moves into its second phase.

Before the war, Rafah was the main crossing for people moving in and out of Gaza. The territory’s handful of other crossings are all shared with Israel. Under the ceasefire terms, Israel’s military controls the area between the Rafah crossing and the zone where most Palestinians live.

Fearing that Israel could use the crossing to push Palestinians out of the enclave, Egypt has repeatedly said it must be open for them to enter and exit Gaza.

The current ceasefire halted more than two years of war between Israel and Hamas that began with the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The truce’s first phase called for the exchange of all hostages held in Gaza for hundreds of Palestinians held by Israel, an increase in badly needed humanitarian aid and a partial pullback of Israeli troops.

The second phase of the ceasefire deal is more complicated. It calls for installing the new Palestinian committee to govern Gaza, deploying an international security force, disarming Hamas and taking steps to begin rebuilding.

Arab World

Iraq Starts Investigations into ISIS Detainees Moved from Syria

A member of the Popular Mobilization Forces stands guard near a concrete wall at the Iraqi-Syrian border in Al-Qaim, west of Iraq on January 23, 2026. (AFP)
A member of the Popular Mobilization Forces stands guard near a concrete wall at the Iraqi-Syrian border in Al-Qaim, west of Iraq on January 23, 2026. (AFP)
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Iraq Starts Investigations into ISIS Detainees Moved from Syria

A member of the Popular Mobilization Forces stands guard near a concrete wall at the Iraqi-Syrian border in Al-Qaim, west of Iraq on January 23, 2026. (AFP)
A member of the Popular Mobilization Forces stands guard near a concrete wall at the Iraqi-Syrian border in Al-Qaim, west of Iraq on January 23, 2026. (AFP)

Iraq's judiciary announced on Monday it has begun its investigations into more than 1,300 ISIS group detainees who were transferred from Syria as part of a US operation.

"Investigation proceedings have started with 1,387 members of the ISIS terrorist organization who were recently transferred from the Syrian territory," the judiciary's media office said in a statement.

"Under the supervision of the head of Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council, several judges specializing in counterterrorism started the investigation."

Those detainees are among 7,000 ISIS suspects, previously held by Syrian Kurdish fighters, whom the US military said it would transfer to Iraq after Syrian government forces recaptured Kurdish-held territory.

They include Syrians, Iraqis and Europeans, among other nationalities, according to several Iraqi security sources.

In 2014, ISIS swept across Syria and Iraq, committing massacres. Backed by US-led forces, Iraq proclaimed the defeat of ISIS in the country in 2017, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) ultimately beat back the group in Syria two years later.

The SDF went on to jail thousands of suspected extremists and detain tens of thousands of their relatives in camps.

Last month, the United States said the purpose of its alliance with Kurdish forces in Syria had largely expired, as Damascus pressed an offensive to take back territory long held by the SDF.

In Iraq, where many prisons are packed with ISIS suspects, courts have handed down hundreds of death sentences and life terms to people convicted of terrorism offences, including many foreign fighters.

Iraq's judiciary said its investigation procedures "will comply with national laws and international standards".

Arab World

Israel Fears SDF-Like Agreement in South Syria

A resident greets Syrian government forces south of Hasakah, in northeastern Syria, on Jan. 20, 2026. (Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP) 
A resident greets Syrian government forces south of Hasakah, in northeastern Syria, on Jan. 20, 2026. (Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP) 
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Israel Fears SDF-Like Agreement in South Syria

A resident greets Syrian government forces south of Hasakah, in northeastern Syria, on Jan. 20, 2026. (Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP) 
A resident greets Syrian government forces south of Hasakah, in northeastern Syria, on Jan. 20, 2026. (Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP) 

As the United States seeks to activate the joint Syrian-Israeli Mechanism Committee and invite it to meet again within the next two weeks, political sources in Tel Aviv revealed that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is further disputing with Washington over Damascus.

The government considers the US policy in Syria as “silly and not compatible with the nature of the broiling Middle East,” the sources said.

According to far-right newspaper Makor Rishon, “Israel expressed frustration with the US administration's policy in Syria, including Washington’s support and confidence in the rule of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who has not yet proven he cleared his past associated to the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.”

Misgav Institute Fellow, Dr. Elie Klutstein, wrote that Washington is looking out for its own interests in Syria while placing Israel's security interests on the sidelines.

Klutstein said the Israeli government should confront Washington to insist on its interests at any cost.

Israel fears the new regime in Syria succeeds at consolidating itself. Tel Aviv bets on an ethnically and sectarian fragmented country and could not support the idea of a “united Syria.”

Israel is particularly angered by an agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian government in the north, that would guarantee the unity of the Syrian territory.

Today, Israel also fears al-Sharaa government will reach a similar agreement with the Druze in the province of Sweida, south of the country.

The majority of Druze leaders in the south are concerned with the unity of Syria, and are ready to ink an agreement with the government in return of guarantees that attacks by its forces will not be repeated.

The leaders also argue that only a small Druze community opposes al-Sharaa regime and therefore, will eventually succumb to an agreement if the government is serious in granting them minority rights.

Last week, Hebrew media outlets said the comprehensive agreement between Kurdish-led Syrian SDF factions and the Syrian government to integrate with the Syrian army is not an arrangement between two equal parties.

“This is a Kurdish submission to Ahmed al-Sharaa that happened after government supporters dismantled the SDF from the inside, and brought several factions closer to the regime,” the Hebrew media wrote.

Earlier, US sources said Türkiye informed the US administration it supports a centralized Syrian state and rejects any Kurdish canton in the northeast.

In return, Israel’s government conveyed to Washington its opposition to a centralized Syria, preferring a federal model.

Sources said Netanyahu is angered by the outcome in northeastern Syria and considers US Special Envoy to Syria tom Barrack biased toward Ankara.

The Israeli circles see Türkiye as the 'biggest winner' from the collapse of the SDF.

Therefore, the Israeli government reiterated that it will not accept Turkish troop presence in Syria and insists on protecting Druze communities in southern Syria.

Tel Aviv’s response to the agreement between SDF forces and al-Sharaa’s government was translated on Friday, when Israeli forces entered two locations in southern Syria: the Saida al-Hanout village in the southern Quneitra countryside and the village of Samdaniya al-Sharqiya in the northern Quneitra countryside.

An Israeli patrol, consisting of seven military vehicles, erected a barrier west the village of Saida in Hanout, before withdrawing from the area.

This development came while the US plans to invite the joint Syrian-Israeli Mechanism Committee to again meet in Amman within the next two weeks and resume direct official talks between the two countries.

The joint fusion mechanism -- a dedicated communication cell -- aims to facilitate immediate and ongoing coordination on the two countries’ intelligence sharing, military de-escalation and diplomatic engagement under the supervision of the United States.