Following Hamas’ Al Aqsa Flood operation into southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, and the subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip, I began making month-long reporting trips to Israel-Palestine to cover different aspects of the war.

In October and November 2023, I documented a wave of settler and military violence across rural villages in the southern West Bank, resulting in the complete ethnic cleansing of more than 20 communities in less than 40 days—a campaign of violence and displacement that continues to this day.

In March 2024, I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who saw it as their civic and religious duty to travel south to the Nitzana and Karem Shalom border crossings, where they worked to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza’s starving population. I accompanied them, documenting their collaboration with the Israeli military, which—despite both Israeli and international law—allowed these civilians into closed military zones to obstruct aid shipments. I conducted interviews with civilians who openly expressed their genocidal ambitions, while military reservists spoke candidly about war crimes they had committed while deployed in Gaza.

These reporting trips ended in October 2024 when I was arrested by the Israeli military and incarcerated as an “enemy of the state” for factual reporting.

Previously, Israeli politicians and Knesset members weren’t able to openly advocate for turning the Gaza Strip into an exclusively Jewish Israeli enclave while still maintaining their international image as victims and framing their military actions as purely defensive. But that was changing.

My goal was to document how the resettlement movement had evolved. Tracking its shift from a fringe effort to a mainstream Israeli political cause. I planned to follow and embed with these groups, from their settlements to their demonstrations at various border checkpoints into Gaza.