New measures to make it easier for NHS employers in England to take on newly qualified nurses and midwives have been announced by the government.

The move comes after warnings there are up to three times more graduates than vacancies in some areas of the health service.

The aim is to free up trusts in England to recruit more easily by cutting red tape and simplifying regulations, including allowing them to employ staff based on what they think they might need and before vacancies formally arise.

The Royal College of Nursing welcomed the move but said the test would be if students could actually find jobs. Employers said it was not clear how the new measures would be fully funded.

Health officials said there were 4,000 more nursing and midwifery graduates than vacancies. This is out of a total of 24,870 who have already graduated or are due to over the next six months.

New measures would also see some support worker posts be temporarily converted to midwifery roles to create new openings for graduates.

The Department of Health said the changes would tackle concerns about jobs after record numbers chose to train for NHS professions during the pandemic – with fewer nurses and midwives quitting.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: "It is absurd that we are training thousands of nurses and midwives every year, only to leave them without a job before their career has started.

"I am sending a clear message to every newly qualified nurse and midwife. We're here to support you from day one so you can provide the best care for patients and cut waiting lists."

The Royal College of Nursing general secretary Prof Nicola Ranger said she welcomed the news, noting it should "provide hope to students", but added a note of caution.

"When the health service urgently needs nursing staff, it was absurd to leave people in limbo," she said. "The test of this will be if students can find jobs, vacant posts are filled, and patients receive the care they deserve."

Gill Walton, chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "We're pleased that the government has listened to the voices of student midwives who are desperate to start their career, only to find those opportunities blocked.

"I know today's announcement will come as a relief to student midwife members."

But it was not clear in the announcement what extra money there might be for employers already under pressure to cut costs.

Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers which represents trusts, said it was good that staff concerns were being addressed - but added that there were questions over the finances.

He said: "It's not clear how this will be fully funded, nor what it could mean for other staff groups facing similar challenges.

"Trust budgets are already under enormous pressure. There is no spare money."

The health union Unison said ministers should also deal with a lack of opportunities for new graduates in occupational therapy as well as paramedics and other professions.

The attempts to make it easier for newly qualified nurses and midwives to get jobs comes at a time of a growing row with the government over NHS pay in England.

The Royal College of Nursing is calling for talks with ministers over pay issues after a consultative ballot of members showed a large majority opposing the 3.6% pay award. Future strike action has not been ruled out.

Another health union, the GMB, has said there will be talks on Monday at the Department of Health after its members also came out against the wage award in a ballot.

Four Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in an Israeli strike near Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital, the broadcaster has said.

Correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal were in a tent for journalists at the hospital's main gate when it was targeted, Al Jazeera reported.

A fortnight ago, it condemned the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for what it called a "campaign of incitement" against its reporters in Gaza, including al-Sharif.

Shortly after the strike, the IDF confirmed that it had struck Anas al-Sharif, posting on Telegram that he had "served as the head of a terrorist cell in Hamas".

The IDF did not mention any of the other journalists who were killed. The BBC has contacted Al Jazeera for comment.

Al-Sharif, 28, appeared to be posting on X in the moments before his death, warning of intense Israeli bombardment within Gaza City.

A post which was published after he was reported to have died appears to have been pre-written and published by a friend.

In two graphic videos of the aftermath of the strike, which have been confirmed by BBC Verify, men can be seen carrying the bodies of those who were killed. Some shout out Mohammed Qreiqeh's name, and a man wearing a press vest says that one of the bodies is that of Anas Al-Sharif.

In July, the Al Jazeera Media Network issued a statement denouncing "relentless efforts" by the IDF for an "ongoing campaign of incitement targeting Al Jazeera's correspondents and journalists in the Gaza Strip".

"The Network considers this incitement a dangerous attempt to justify the targeting of its journalists in the field," it added.

The IDF statement accused al-Sharif of posing as a journalist, and being "responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops"

It said it had previously "disclosed intelligence" confirming his military affiliation, which included "lists of terrorist training courses".

"Prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians, including the use of precise munition, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence," the statement added.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 186 journalists have been confirmed killed since the start of Israel's military offensive in Gaza in October 2023.

Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh, BBC Verify

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Four Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in an Israeli strike near Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital, the broadcaster has said.

Correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal were in a tent for journalists at the hospital's main gate when it was targeted, Al Jazeera reported.

A fortnight ago, it condemned the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for what it called a "campaign of incitement" against its reporters in Gaza, including al-Sharif.

Shortly after the strike, the IDF confirmed that it had struck Anas al-Sharif, posting on Telegram that he had "served as the head of a terrorist cell in Hamas".

The IDF did not mention any of the other journalists who were killed. The BBC has contacted Al Jazeera for comment.

Al-Sharif, 28, appeared to be posting on X in the moments before his death, warning of intense Israeli bombardment within Gaza City.

A post which was published after he was reported to have died appears to have been pre-written and published by a friend.

In two graphic videos of the aftermath of the strike, which have been confirmed by BBC Verify, men can be seen carrying the bodies of those who were killed. Some shout out Mohammed Qreiqeh's name, and a man wearing a press vest says that one of the bodies is that of Anas Al-Sharif.

In July, the Al Jazeera Media Network issued a statement denouncing "relentless efforts" by the IDF for an "ongoing campaign of incitement targeting Al Jazeera's correspondents and journalists in the Gaza Strip".

"The Network considers this incitement a dangerous attempt to justify the targeting of its journalists in the field," it added.

The IDF statement accused al-Sharif of posing as a journalist, and being "responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops"

It said it had previously "disclosed intelligence" confirming his military affiliation, which included "lists of terrorist training courses".

"Prior to the strike, steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians, including the use of precise munition, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence," the statement added.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 186 journalists have been confirmed killed since the start of Israel's military offensive in Gaza in October 2023.

Additional reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh, BBC Verify

A few days ago, India's Election Commission released updated draft electoral rolls for Bihar state, where key elections are scheduled for November, following a month-long revision of the voters' list.

But opposition parties and election charities say the exercise was rushed through - and many voters in Bihar have told the BBC that the draft rolls have wrong photos and include dead people.

The Special Intensive Revision - better known by its acronym SIR - was held from 25 June to 26 July and the commission said its officials visited each of the state's listed 78.9 million voters to verify their details. It said the last such revision was in 2003 and an update was necessary.

The new draft rolls have 72.4 million names - 6.5 million fewer than before. The commission says deletions include 2.2 million dead, 700,000 enrolled more than once and 3.6 million who have migrated from the state.

Corrections are open until 1 September, with over 165,000 applications received. A similar review will be conducted nationwide to verify nearly a billion voters.

But opposition parties have accused the commission of dropping many voters - especially Muslims who make up a sizeable chunk of the population in four border districts - to aid Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming state election.

The poll body and BJP have denied the allegations. In response to the BBC's questions, the Election Commission shared its 24 June order on conducting the SIR and a 27 July press note outlining efforts to ensure no eligible voter was "left behind".

"Further, [the commission] does not take any responsibility of any other misinformation or unsubstantiated allegations being floated around by some vested interests," it added in the response.

The commission has not released the list of deleted names or given any break-up according to religion, so it's not possible to verify the opposition's concerns.

A review by Hindustan Times newspaper found high voter deletions in Kishanganj, a district with the largest share of Muslims in Bihar, but not in other Muslim-dominated constituencies.

Parliament has faced repeated adjournments as opposition MPs demand a debate on what they call a threat to democracy. Outside, they chanted "Down down Modi", "Take SIR back" and "Stop stealing votes". The Supreme Court is also reviewing the move after watchdog ADR questioned its timing.

"It comes just three months before the assembly elections and there has not been enough time given to the exercise," Jagdeep Chhokar of ADR, told the BBC.

"As reports from the ground showed, there were irregularities when the exercise was being conducted and the process of data collection was massively faulty," he added.

The ADR has argued in court that the exercise "will disenfranchise millions of genuine voters" in a state that's one of India's poorest and is home to "a large number of marginalised communities".

It says the SIR shifts the burden onto people to prove their citizenship, often requiring their own and their parents' documents within a short deadline - an impossible task for millions of poor migrant workers.

While the draft roll was being published, we travelled to Patna and nearby villages to hear what voters think of SIR.

In Danara village, home to the poorest of the poor known as Mahadalits, most residents work on farms of upper-castes or are unemployed.

Homes are crumbling, open drains line the narrow lanes and a stagnant puddle near the local temple has turned brackish.

Most residents had little to no idea about SIR or its impact, and many weren't sure if officials had even visited their homes.

But they deeply value their vote. "Losing it would be devastating," says Rekha Devi. "It will push us further into poverty."

In Kharika village, many men said they'd heard of SIR and submitted forms, spending 300 rupees (£3.42; £2.55) on getting new photos taken. But after the draft rolls came out, farmer and retired teacher Tarkeshwar Singh called it "a mess". He shared pages showing his family's details - pointing out errors, including the wrong photo next to his name.

"I have no idea whose photo it is," he says, adding that his wife Suryakala Devi and son Rajeev also have wrong pictures. "But the worst is my other son Ajeev's case - it has an unknown woman's photo."

Mr Singh goes on to list other anomalies - in his daughter-in-law Juhi Kumari's document, he's named as husband in place of his son. Another daughter-in-law, Sangeeta Singh, is listed twice from the same address - only one has her correct photo and date of birth.

Many of his relatives and neighbours, he says, have similar complaints. He points out the name of a cousin who died more than five years back but still figures on the list - and at least two names that appear twice.

"There's obviously been no checking. The list has dead people and duplicates and many who did not even fill the form. This is a misuse of government machinery and billions of rupees that have been spent on this exercise."

Mr Chhokar of ADR says they will raise these issues in the Supreme Court this week. In July, the court said it would stay the exercise if petitioners produce 15 genuine voters missing from the draft rolls.

"But how do we do that since the commission has not provided a list of the 6.5 million names that have been removed?" he asks.

Mr Chhokar says a justice on the two-judge bench suggested delinking the exercise from upcoming elections to allow more time for a proper review.

"I'll be happy with that takeaway," he says.

The SIR and draft rolls have split Bihar's parties: the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) questions them, while the ruling Janata Dal (United) - BJP alliance backs them.

"The complexity of this revision has left many people confused," says Shivanand Tiwari, general secretary of the RJD.

Tiwari questions the Election Commission's "claims that 98.3% electors have filled their forms" and says "in most villages, our voters and workers say the Block Level Officer (BLO) - generally a local schoolteacher appointed by the commission to go door-to-door - did not visit them. Many BLOs are not trained and don't know how to upload forms". (The commission has said the BLOs have worked "very responsibly".)

Tiwari alleges that the "commission is partisan and this is manipulation of elections".

"We believe the target are border areas where a lot of Muslims live who never vote for the BJP," he says.

The BJP and the JD(U) have rejected the criticism, saying "it's entirely political".

"Only Indian citizens have the right to vote and we believe that a lot of Rohingya and Bangladeshis have settled in the border areas in recent years. And they have to be weeded out from the list," said Bhim Singh, a BJP MP from Bihar.

"The SIR has nothing to do with anyone's religion and the opposition is raising it because they know they will lose the upcoming election and need a scapegoat to blame for their loss," he added.

JD(U)'s chief spokesperson and state legislator Neeraj Kumar Singh said "the Election Commission is only doing its job".

"There are lots of voters on the list who figure twice or even three times. So shouldn't that be corrected?" he asks.

US President Donald Trump has said homeless people must "move out" of Washington DC as he vowed to tackle crime in the city, while the mayor pushed back against the White House likening of the capital to Baghdad.

"We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital," he posted on Sunday. The Republican president also trailed a news conference for Monday about his plan to make the city "safer and more beautiful than it ever was before".

Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said: "We are not experiencing a crime spike."

Trump signed an order last month making it easier to arrest homeless people, and he last week ordered federal law enforcement into the streets of Washington DC.

"The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY," Trump wrote on his social media site Truth Social on Sunday.

"We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don't have to move out. We're going to put you in jail where you belong."

Alongside photos of tents and rubbish, he added: "There will be no 'MR. NICE GUY.' We want our Capital BACK. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

The specifics of the president's plan are not yet clear, but in a 2022 speech he proposed moving homeless people to "high quality" tents on inexpensive land outside cities, while providing access to bathrooms and medical professionals.

On Friday, Trump ordered federal agents - including from US Park Police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the US Marshals Service - into Washington DC to curb what he called "totally out of control" levels of crime.

A White House official told National Public Radio that up to 450 federal officers were deployed on Saturday night.

The move comes after a 19-year-old former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was assaulted in an alleged attempted carjacking in Washington DC.

Trump vented about that incident on social media, posting a photo of the bloodied victim.

Mayor Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday: "It is true that we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023.

"We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low."

She criticised White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller for dubbing the US capital "more violent than Baghdad".

"Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false," Bowser said.

Washington DC's homicide rate remains relatively high per capita compared to other US cities, with a total of 98 such killings recorded so far this year. Homicides have been trending higher in the US capital from a decade ago.

But federal data from January suggests that Washington DC last year recorded its lowest overall violent crime figures - once carjacking, assault and robberies are incorporated - in 30 years.

On Saturday, Trump announced plans on Truth Social to host a news conference at the White House on Monday, "which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, DC".

In another post on Sunday he said the event at 10:00 EDT (14:00 GMT) would address ending "crime, murder and death" in the city, as well as its "physical renovation".

He described Bowser as "a good person who has tried", adding that despite her efforts crime continues to get "worse" and the city becomes "dirtier and less attractive".

Community Partnership, an organisation that works to reduce homelessness in Washington DC, told Reuters news agency that the city of 700,000 residents had about 3,782 people homeless on any given night.

Most were in public housing or emergency shelters, but about 800 were considered "on the street".

As a district, rather than a state, Washington DC is overseen by the federal government, which has the power to override some local laws.

The president controls federal land and buildings in the city, although he would need Congress to assume federal control of the district.

In recent days, he has threatened to take over the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department, which Bowser argued was not possible.

"There are very specific things in our law that would allow the president to have more control over our police department," Bowser said. "None of those conditions exist in our city right now."

Meir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water.

From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.

"Don't worry, there's no extra sugar," he said as he poured it into plastic cups.

Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.

It has been shaped by significant turning points.

The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel's devastating response.

The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.

The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.

Since October 2023, Israel's pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens - not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.

Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.

Ocha, the UN's humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.

The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.

Israel's rejects the ICJ's view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply - a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.

In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.

He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel's response ever since, as a turning point.

"I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He's beginning to understand that he's on his way out; that's what has changed in the last year or year and a half.

"Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here.

"The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It's just another small nation.

"The Palestinians don't interest me. I care about my people."

Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.

On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: "We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.

"The alleged acts of violence, destruction of property, and denial of access to land and resources appear to constitute a systemic pattern of human rights violations."

Simcha has a plan to dig a swimming pool at the base of the spring where we sat to talk. Like many others who are leading the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he is full of plans. When I met him first, not long after Hamas burst through Israel's border defences on 7 October 2023, he lived in a small group of isolated caravans on a hilltop overlooking the Judean desert as it sweeps down to the Dead Sea.

Since then, Simcha says his community has expanded into around 200 people on three hilltops. He was part of the faction of the settler movement known as hilltop youth, a radical fringe that became notorious for the violent harassment of Palestinians. Most Israelis who have settled in the occupied territories are not like Simcha. They went there not for ideological and religious reasons, but because property was cheaper.

But now men like Simcha are at the centre of events, with their leaders in the cabinet, leading the charge, married, older, thinking not just about swimming pools for their children but of victory over the Palestinians, once and for all, and everlasting Jewish possession of the land.

Simcha comes across as a happy man. He believes his mission - to implement the will of God by turning the West Bank into a land for Jews, and not for Palestinians - is progressing nicely.

Israel's decades-old project

Israel's project to settle Jewish citizens in the newly occupied territories started within days of its victory in 1967. Over the last almost 60 years, successive Israeli governments and some wealthy sympathisers have invested vast amounts of money and energy to get to the point where around 700,000 Israeli Jews live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I have been watching the settlements grow for about half of the lifetime of the project, since I first reported from the occupied Palestinian territories in 1991. In that time, the terrain of much of the West Bank has been transformed. The bigger settlements look like small towns, and the West Bank is carved into sections by a network of roads and tunnels built by Israel that are as much about staking an immovable claim to the land as they are about traffic management.

On remote hilltops at night, you can see the lights coming from the caravans of settlers who see themselves as Jewish pioneers. Olive groves, orchards and vineyards owned by Palestinian farmers along the road network are often overgrown, sometimes dotted with piles of rubble left from buildings Israel has demolished.

Controlling the land around the roads is necessary, Israel says, to stop attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

Farmers in areas under settler pressure often need military permission to visit their land, sometimes just once a year.

Palestinian farmers going about their business in vans or on donkeys used to be a common sight. In many parts of the West Bank, you just do not see them anymore, especially in places like the settlements east of Shiloh on the road to Nablus, where small groups of shacks and caravans on hilltops have connected up into sprawling residential hubs linked by sinuous road networks.

When first I reported on settlements, Israeli leaders would often say that national security depended on them. Enemies lurked across the Jordan valley, and pushing out the frontier, building the land, was a Zionist imperative.

Just like the kibbutz movement of collective farms in the 1920s and 1930s inside present-day Israel, settlements in the occupied territories after 1967 were strategically placed as a first line of defence.

In this conflict, land is a vital commodity.

Trading land taken by Israel in 1967 for peace with Palestinians who wanted it for a state was at the heart of the Oslo peace process that ended in violence but provided a false dawn of hope in the 1990s.

There were headlines around the world when, after months of secret negotiations in Norway in 1993, there was a handshake on the White House lawn between Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. They had signed a declaration of principles that was hoped would lead to the end of the conflict. Israel would relinquish occupied land to Palestinians. In return, they would drop their claim to territory they had lost when Israel declared independence in 1948.

The argument at the heart of their conflict across the 20th Century, about who controlled land they both wanted, would be solved by splitting it.

After a final disastrous summit at Camp David in 2000, the hopes of 1993 were replaced by the deadly violence of a Palestinian uprising and a massive military response from Israel.

Part of the reason why the peace process failed was that other forces, outside the talks, were at work.

Hamas never dropped its belief that the entire land of Palestine was an Islamic possession and used suicide attacks to discredit the notion that peace was possible.

Among religious Zionists in Israel, the victory in 1967 had supercharged a wave of messianism - the belief that a divine being was coming who would redeem the Jewish people.

It electrified the settler movement.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist brought up in Herzliya on the Mediterranean coast who spent weekends at settlements in the West Bank. During his first interrogation by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, he asked for a drink so he could toast the fact that he had saved the Jewish people from a disastrous path that denied the will of God.

Warning: This section contains an image some people might find upsetting

Today, the messianic idea grips settlers like Simcha more powerfully than ever.

They believe the victory in 1967 was a miracle granted by God, that restored to the Jewish people the ancestral lands that he had given them in the mountain heartland of Judea and Samaria - the area that much of the rest of the world calls the West Bank. Some believe events since 7 October have extended the miracle.

Last summer, the Minister for Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strock, put it like this to a sympathetic audience at an outpost in the Hebron hills, the area where Simcha operates.

"From my point of view, this is like a miracle period," she said. "I feel like someone standing at a traffic light, and then it turns green."

Minisyer Strock was speaking a few days before the ICJ issued its opinion.

She made her remarks at a settlement in the Hebron hills that the government had just "legalised".

Israeli law distinguishes between "legal" settlements and "illegal" outposts - a distinction that is in practice being blurred by the government's actions.

Outposts rebranded as "young settlements" are being retrospectively legalised as the government directs funds towards them.

At a ceremony in one of them in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for "grabbing massive territories".

A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.

Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman - a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.

On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.

When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen's dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.

His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed.

The settlement movement in the West Bank has powered ahead since 7 October, under the direction of hardline Jewish nationalists in the cabinet, men like Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Strock's leader in the Religious Zionist Party.

Ben Gvir was not drafted by the IDF when he turned 18, because of his extreme beliefs. He claims he campaigned to serve.

The two ministers are very different people to the secular politicians - retired generals like Yigal Allon from the Israeli left and Ariel Sharon from the right - two men who drove the settlement movement forward in its first two decades after 1967.

Just like Allon and Sharon, they believe that security requires power.

But for Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their followers, that is underpinned by the certainty of religious belief.

The influence they have acquired in return for supporting Netanyahu and keeping him in power continues to frustrate and enrage secular Israel.

Smotrich's Israeli opponents use the word "messianic" as term of abuse when they talk about him.

Allon and Sharon could be ruthless. After the 1967 war, Allon advocated the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Neither man believed they were doing the will of God.

Hamas uses religion to justify its violent opposition to the existence of Israel. Religious Zionists in the settler movement believe they are doing God's will.

Belief in a direct connection with God does not guarantee war. But it makes the compromises necessary for peace hard to achieve.

'Now the settlers are the military'

We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel's most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years.

Fellow Israelis have branded supporters of Breaking the Silence, which he no longer leads, as traitors many times.

Israeli military crackdowns since the October attacks have reduced Palestinian violence against settlers, while settler attacks on Palestinians have grown sharply.

Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

The war in Gaza has required the longest mobilisation of military reservists - the backbone of the IDF - in Israel's history. To get more Israelis into uniform, brigades in the West Bank have formed regional defence units made up of settlers.

"Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

"So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, 'you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I'm going to shoot you,' the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him."

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is "the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer".

"Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support."

He uses language about Netanyahu's conduct of the Gaza war since 7 October that is rare in Israel but common among Palestinians and increasingly heard among Israel's critics in Europe.

This is part of our conversation, in the shadow of the steel and razor wire between the village of Sinjel and Road 60 - the West Bank's main highway.

He says: "I think while we see a war of extermination in Gaza... we see a massive campaign by the state and the settlers... to basically ethnically cleanse as much land of the West Bank from Palestinians."

I reply: "Of course, if Netanyahu was here, any of his supporters, they'd say, 'what a load of rubbish. This is about Israeli security against terrorism and attacks on Jews.' What do you make of that?"

He responds: "I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

"Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians."

Meir Simcha agreed to talk, but he wanted to do it somewhere special, because for him, this is a special time. In a place where nation, religion and war are linked inextricably with politics and the possession of land, Simcha chose a patch of shade under a fig tree next to a spring of fresh water.

From his dusty car, a small Toyota fitted with off road tyres, he produced a bottle of juice made from fruit and vegetables.

"Don't worry, there's no extra sugar," he said as he poured it into plastic cups.

Simcha is the leader of a group of Jewish settlers steadily transforming a big stretch of the rolling terrain south of Hebron in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since it was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

He moved two large flat stones into the shade as seats, and we sat down in a patch of lush grass, kept alive in the harsh summer heat by water dripping from a pipe coming out of the spring. It was a small oasis at the foot of a steep, arid, rocky slope and the location, if not our conversation, felt peaceful in a way that the West Bank rarely does these days.

The conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea started well over a century ago when Zionists from Europe began to buy land to set up communities in Palestine.

It has been shaped by significant turning points.

The latest has come from the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas and Israel's devastating response.

The consequences of the last 22 months of war, and however more months are left before a ceasefire, threaten to spread across years and generations, just like the Middle East war in 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan.

The scale of destruction and killing in the Gaza war obscures what is happening in the West Bank, which smoulders with tension and violence.

Since October 2023, Israel's pressure on West Bank Palestinians has increased sharply, justified as legitimate security measures.

Evidence based on statements by ministers, influential local leaders like Simcha and accounts by witnesses on the ground reveal that the pressure is part of a wider agenda, to accelerate the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and to extinguish any lingering hopes of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Palestinians and human rights groups also accuse the Israeli security forces of failing in their legal duty as occupiers to protect Palestinians as well as their own citizens - not just turning a blind eye to settler attacks, but even joining in.

Violence by ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the West Bank has risen sharply since 7 October 2023.

Ocha, the UN's humanitarian office, estimates an average of four settler attacks every day.

The International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the entire occupation of Palestinian territory captured in 1967 is illegal.

Israel's rejects the ICJ's view and claims that the Geneva Conventions forbidding settlement in occupied territories do not apply - a view disputed by many of its own allies as well as international lawyers.

In the shade of the fig tree, Simcha denied all suggestions he had attacked Palestinians, as he celebrated the fact that most of the Arab farmers who used to graze their animals on the hills he has seized and tend their olives in the valleys had gone.

He looks back to the Hamas October attacks, and Israel's response ever since, as a turning point.

"I think that a lot has changed, that the enemy in our land lost hope. He's beginning to understand that he's on his way out; that's what has changed in the last year or year and a half.

"Today you can walk around here in the land in the desert, and nobody will jump on you and try to kill you. There are still attempts to oppose our presence here in this land, but the enemy is starting to understand this slowly. They have no future here.

"The reality has changed. I ask you and the people of the world, why are you so interested in those Palestinians so much? Why do you care about them? It's just another small nation.

"The Palestinians don't interest me. I care about my people."

Simcha says the Palestinians who left villages and farms near the hilltops he has claimed simply realised that God intended the land for Jews, not for them.

On 24 July this year, a panel of UN experts came to a different conclusion. A statement issued by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said: "We are deeply troubled by alleged widespread intimidation, violence, land dispossession, destruction of livelihoods and the resulting forcible displacement of communities, and we fear this is severing Palestinians from their land and undermining their food security.

"The alleged acts of violence, destruction of property, and denial of access to land and resources appear to constitute a systemic pattern of human rights violations."

Simcha has a plan to dig a swimming pool at the base of the spring where we sat to talk. Like many others who are leading the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he is full of plans. When I met him first, not long after Hamas burst through Israel's border defences on 7 October 2023, he lived in a small group of isolated caravans on a hilltop overlooking the Judean desert as it sweeps down to the Dead Sea.

Since then, Simcha says his community has expanded into around 200 people on three hilltops. He was part of the faction of the settler movement known as hilltop youth, a radical fringe that became notorious for the violent harassment of Palestinians. Most Israelis who have settled in the occupied territories are not like Simcha. They went there not for ideological and religious reasons, but because property was cheaper.

But now men like Simcha are at the centre of events, with their leaders in the cabinet, leading the charge, married, older, thinking not just about swimming pools for their children but of victory over the Palestinians, once and for all, and everlasting Jewish possession of the land.

Simcha comes across as a happy man. He believes his mission - to implement the will of God by turning the West Bank into a land for Jews, and not for Palestinians - is progressing nicely.

Israel's decades-old project

Israel's project to settle Jewish citizens in the newly occupied territories started within days of its victory in 1967. Over the last almost 60 years, successive Israeli governments and some wealthy sympathisers have invested vast amounts of money and energy to get to the point where around 700,000 Israeli Jews live in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I have been watching the settlements grow for about half of the lifetime of the project, since I first reported from the occupied Palestinian territories in 1991. In that time, the terrain of much of the West Bank has been transformed. The bigger settlements look like small towns, and the West Bank is carved into sections by a network of roads and tunnels built by Israel that are as much about staking an immovable claim to the land as they are about traffic management.

On remote hilltops at night, you can see the lights coming from the caravans of settlers who see themselves as Jewish pioneers. Olive groves, orchards and vineyards owned by Palestinian farmers along the road network are often overgrown, sometimes dotted with piles of rubble left from buildings Israel has demolished.

Controlling the land around the roads is necessary, Israel says, to stop attacks on Jews in the West Bank.

Farmers in areas under settler pressure often need military permission to visit their land, sometimes just once a year.

Palestinian farmers going about their business in vans or on donkeys used to be a common sight. In many parts of the West Bank, you just do not see them anymore, especially in places like the settlements east of Shiloh on the road to Nablus, where small groups of shacks and caravans on hilltops have connected up into sprawling residential hubs linked by sinuous road networks.

When first I reported on settlements, Israeli leaders would often say that national security depended on them. Enemies lurked across the Jordan valley, and pushing out the frontier, building the land, was a Zionist imperative.

Just like the kibbutz movement of collective farms in the 1920s and 1930s inside present-day Israel, settlements in the occupied territories after 1967 were strategically placed as a first line of defence.

In this conflict, land is a vital commodity.

Trading land taken by Israel in 1967 for peace with Palestinians who wanted it for a state was at the heart of the Oslo peace process that ended in violence but provided a false dawn of hope in the 1990s.

There were headlines around the world when, after months of secret negotiations in Norway in 1993, there was a handshake on the White House lawn between Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. They had signed a declaration of principles that was hoped would lead to the end of the conflict. Israel would relinquish occupied land to Palestinians. In return, they would drop their claim to territory they had lost when Israel declared independence in 1948.

The argument at the heart of their conflict across the 20th Century, about who controlled land they both wanted, would be solved by splitting it.

After a final disastrous summit at Camp David in 2000, the hopes of 1993 were replaced by the deadly violence of a Palestinian uprising and a massive military response from Israel.

Part of the reason why the peace process failed was that other forces, outside the talks, were at work.

Hamas never dropped its belief that the entire land of Palestine was an Islamic possession and used suicide attacks to discredit the notion that peace was possible.

Among religious Zionists in Israel, the victory in 1967 had supercharged a wave of messianism - the belief that a divine being was coming who would redeem the Jewish people.

It electrified the settler movement.

Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 by a Jewish extremist brought up in Herzliya on the Mediterranean coast who spent weekends at settlements in the West Bank. During his first interrogation by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, he asked for a drink so he could toast the fact that he had saved the Jewish people from a disastrous path that denied the will of God.

Warning: This section contains an image some people might find upsetting

Today, the messianic idea grips settlers like Simcha more powerfully than ever.

They believe the victory in 1967 was a miracle granted by God, that restored to the Jewish people the ancestral lands that he had given them in the mountain heartland of Judea and Samaria - the area that much of the rest of the world calls the West Bank. Some believe events since 7 October have extended the miracle.

Last summer, the Minister for Settlements and National Missions, Orit Strock, put it like this to a sympathetic audience at an outpost in the Hebron hills, the area where Simcha operates.

"From my point of view, this is like a miracle period," she said. "I feel like someone standing at a traffic light, and then it turns green."

Minisyer Strock was speaking a few days before the ICJ issued its opinion.

She made her remarks at a settlement in the Hebron hills that the government had just "legalised".

Israeli law distinguishes between "legal" settlements and "illegal" outposts - a distinction that is in practice being blurred by the government's actions.

Outposts rebranded as "young settlements" are being retrospectively legalised as the government directs funds towards them.

At a ceremony in one of them in the south Hebron Hills in April this year, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose powers over the running of the occupation also make him something like the governor of the West Bank, donated 19 all-terrain vehicles to the settlers. He praised them for "grabbing massive territories".

A sharp-eyed reporter at the Times of Israel pointed out that one of the settlers at the ceremony, Yinon Levi, had been filmed harassing Palestinians from an all-terrain vehicle. Levi is sanctioned by the UK and the European Union for using violence to drive Palestinians off their land, though President Trump lifted similar sanctions imposed by Joe Biden.

Levi is radical settler royalty, married to the daughter of Noam Federman - a notorious extremist. Federman is a former leader of the Kach party, which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the European Union and others.

On 28 July this year, Yinon Levi fired a bullet that killed Odeh Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist, during a disturbance in the West Bank village of Umm al-Khair. Levi pleaded self-defence and was released after three days of house arrest.

When we went to Umm al-Khair, Hathaleen's dried blood was still at the place where he was killed.

His brother, Khalil, told me the dead man was holding his five-year-old son, Watan, and filming the violent scenes on his phone when he was killed.

The settlement movement in the West Bank has powered ahead since 7 October, under the direction of hardline Jewish nationalists in the cabinet, men like Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, who is Strock's leader in the Religious Zionist Party.

Ben Gvir was not drafted by the IDF when he turned 18, because of his extreme beliefs. He claims he campaigned to serve.

The two ministers are very different people to the secular politicians - retired generals like Yigal Allon from the Israeli left and Ariel Sharon from the right - two men who drove the settlement movement forward in its first two decades after 1967.

Just like Allon and Sharon, they believe that security requires power.

But for Smotrich, Ben Gvir and their followers, that is underpinned by the certainty of religious belief.

The influence they have acquired in return for supporting Netanyahu and keeping him in power continues to frustrate and enrage secular Israel.

Smotrich's Israeli opponents use the word "messianic" as term of abuse when they talk about him.

Allon and Sharon could be ruthless. After the 1967 war, Allon advocated the annexation of large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley. Neither man believed they were doing the will of God.

Hamas uses religion to justify its violent opposition to the existence of Israel. Religious Zionists in the settler movement believe they are doing God's will.

Belief in a direct connection with God does not guarantee war. But it makes the compromises necessary for peace hard to achieve.

'Now the settlers are the military'

We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel's most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years.

Fellow Israelis have branded supporters of Breaking the Silence, which he no longer leads, as traitors many times.

Israeli military crackdowns since the October attacks have reduced Palestinian violence against settlers, while settler attacks on Palestinians have grown sharply.

Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

The war in Gaza has required the longest mobilisation of military reservists - the backbone of the IDF - in Israel's history. To get more Israelis into uniform, brigades in the West Bank have formed regional defence units made up of settlers.

"Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

"So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, 'you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I'm going to shoot you,' the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him."

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is "the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer".

"Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support."

He uses language about Netanyahu's conduct of the Gaza war since 7 October that is rare in Israel but common among Palestinians and increasingly heard among Israel's critics in Europe.

This is part of our conversation, in the shadow of the steel and razor wire between the village of Sinjel and Road 60 - the West Bank's main highway.

He says: "I think while we see a war of extermination in Gaza... we see a massive campaign by the state and the settlers... to basically ethnically cleanse as much land of the West Bank from Palestinians."

I reply: "Of course, if Netanyahu was here, any of his supporters, they'd say, 'what a load of rubbish. This is about Israeli security against terrorism and attacks on Jews.' What do you make of that?"

He responds: "I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

"Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians."