Palestinians across the West Bank are facing at least six settler attacks per day – the highest rate ever documented – with nearly two dozen people killed, more than 1,000 injured, and more families displaced in the first months of 2026 than in all of last year. This is Israel’s apartheid carceral system working exactly as designed, Basil Farraj tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek.

Farraj, an assistant professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, joins from the occupied West Bank to break down the surge in Israeli settler violence in cities like Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, and increasingly Birzeit, connecting it to a decades-long Israeli displacement policy he says is finally becoming impossible for the world to ignore. This week, the UK, France, Canada, and nine other countries announced a coordinated trade ban on Israeli settlement goods, with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy accusing settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”

Farraj explains why he sees sanctions against Tel Aviv’s settlement enterprise – even as the US under Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to join them and Ambassador Mike Huckabee accused Britain of “Jew hate” – as a meaningful but insufficient first step, making the case for a full boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli state. He connects the West Bank escalation to Israel’s plans to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza, and to his own research on Israel’s prison system – arguing that the abuse, starvation, and isolation faced by Palestinian detainees, intensified under Benjamin Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, mirrors the same architecture of control now expanding across the occupied territories, increasingly reaching Palestinian citizens of Israel as well.

Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!

AI could kill every human on Earth by the end of the decade. If it sounds like a sci-fi headline, that’s the point, says Dr. Thejas Wesley, postdoctoral associate at MIT. He joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to unpack why Anthropic researchers Evan Hubinger, Samuel Marks, and Jacob Coxon – who resigned this week to go public – are sounding the alarm now, as competition from Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 heats up and Anthropic heads into its IPO.

Wesley argues the “rogue AI agents” framing coming out of both Anthropic and OpenAI (last week from CEO Sam Altman himself) is less a scientific warning than a coordinated business strategy, recasting corporate recklessness and unregulated competition as an alien invasion, rather than what it actually is: a series of choices made by executives chasing profits. He points to OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident earlier this summer: rather than nascent digital consciousness breaking free, this was OpenAI shipping software without basic safety guardrails, following the same corporate cost-cutting logic behind disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment or the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. As polling shows 71% of Americans oppose new data centers, and 68% support stricter AI regulation, Wesley outlines Bernie Sanders’s proposed sovereign wealth fund plan and ban on AI superintelligence, versus Elon Musk’s counter: letting a small “cabal of technofascists” govern AI development themselves. Wesley says the real fix isn’t billionaires regulating themselves; it’s public, democratic control over a technology with very real life or death consequences for humanity.

Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!