Category: 2. World

LONDON: It began with an incident of the type that has become all too familiar in the West Bank, and yet has lately been overlooked by global media coverage distracted by the wars in Gaza and Iran.

On June 25, a force of about 100 of Israeli settlers, many of them masked, descended on the Palestinian West Bank town of Kafr Malik, 17 kilometers northeast of Ramallah.

It wasn’t the first time the town had been attacked, but this time was different.

Emboldened by right-wing ministers in Israel’s coalition government, settlers across the West Bank have become increasingly aggressive toward their Arab neighbors.

Kafr Malik, which sits close to an illegal settlement established in 2019, has been attacked again and again. But this time, the consequences went beyond harassment, beatings, and the destruction of property.

Accounts of what happened vary, but the basic facts are clear. In what The Times of Israel described as “a settler rampage,” the attackers threw stones at residents and set fire to homes and cars.

Men from the town formed a cordon to protect their families. In the words of a statement issued by the Israeli army, which until this point had not intervened, “at the scene, friction erupted between Israeli civilians and Palestinians, including mutual stone-throwing.”

The Israel Defense Forces then opened fire on the Palestinians, killing three men and wounding seven more, adding to a toll of more than 900 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since Oct. 7, 2023.

Five of the settlers were detained and handed over to the police. No charges have been forthcoming.

Daylight attacks like these have become increasingly commonplace in the West Bank, and routinely go unnoticed by the international community.

Attention was drawn to this one in part thanks to Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry, which issued a statement denouncing “the continued violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers, under the protection of the occupation forces, against Palestinian civilians, including the attacks in the village of Kafr Malik.”

A statement released by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, which monitors settler violence in the West Bank, also condemned the latest violence.

“Under the auspices of (the) government and (with) military backing, settler violence in the West Bank continues and becomes more deadly by the day,” it said.

“This is what ethnic cleansing looks like.”

In the wake of the attack on Kafr Malik, Hussein Al-Sheikh, deputy to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, also laid the blame for settler violence on the Israeli government.

“The government of Israel, with its behavior and decisions, is pushing the region to explode,” he posted on X. “We call on the international community to intervene urgently to protect our Palestinian people.”

The “sad truth,” said Ameneh Mehvar, senior Middle East analyst at the independent conflict data organization ACLED, “is that this feels like deja vu, the same story repeating again and again.

“Although it’s not a new story, what is new is that settler violence is now increasing, with settlers becoming increasingly emboldened by the support that they’re receiving from the government.

“There is a culture of impunity. They don’t fear arrest, they don’t fear prosecution, and they don’t fear convictions. In the few cases when settlers are charged with an offense, less than three percent end in conviction.”

In November, Israel’s new defense minister, Israel Katz, announced that settlers would no longer be subject to military “administrative detention orders,” under which suspects can be held indefinitely without trial.

The orders remain in force for Palestinians, of whom, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, more than 1,000 remain detained, without charge or trial.

On July 3, figures released by the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, revealed that between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 30 this year, at least 915 Palestinians, including 213 children, have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

More than 9,500, including 1,631 children, have been injured.

Reflecting the recent Israeli military activity in the area, 77 percent of child killings in 2025 have been in the northern governorates of the West Bank, with the highest number of fatalities — 35 percent of the total — in Jenin.

According to figures compiled by ACLED, among the dead are 26 Palestinians killed in West Bank incidents involving settlers or soldiers escorting or protecting settlers.

Settlers have killed around a dozen people, while five more have died at the hands of “settlement emergency squads” — civilians armed by the Israeli government in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

Seven were killed by the IDF, which intervened after arriving at scenes of violence initiated by settlers — exactly what happened at Kafr Malik.

In addition, ACLED recorded more than 820 violent incidents involving settlers in the first six months of 2025 alone — a more than 20 percent increase compared to the same period last year.

“This means that this year is on track to become one of the most violent years for settler violence since ACLED began its coverage in Palestine in 2016,” said Mehvar.

Demonstrating just how emboldened settlers have become, many have clashed with units of the IDF in a series of incidents that began with the attack on Kafr Malik.

The settlers, who had been trying to establish an illegal outpost on Palestinian land near the village, turned on the soldiers, accusing the commander of being “a traitor.”

According to the IDF, they beat, choked, and hurled rocks at the troops, and slashed the tyres of a police vehicle.

Later that same evening, an army patrol vehicle in the vicinity was ambushed and stoned. The soldiers, who at first didn’t realize that their attackers were fellow Israelis, fired warning shots, one of which wounded a teenager, prompting further settler violence.

According to IDF reports, gangs of settlers tried to break into a military base in the central West Bank, throwing rocks and spraying pepper spray at troops, while in the Ramallah area an IDF security installation was torched.

These events have come as a shock to Israeli public opinion. In an editorial published on July 1, The Jerusalem Post condemned “the growing cancer of lawbreakers in (the) West Bank,” which “must be cut out, before it’s too late.”

It added that the “aggression by certain Jewish residents of Samaria (the Jewish name for the central region of the West Bank) against Palestinians” had been “overlooked during the past 20 months amid the hyperfocus on the Israel-Hamas war and the plight of hostages and then the lightning war with Iran,” but “it can’t be ignored — or swept under the rug — any longer.

“These fringe elements within the Jewish population … are not just terrorizing Palestinians — itself an affront — but they have no qualms about directing their violence against their fellow Israelis serving in the IDF.”

But singling out the extremist settlers for condemnation overlooks the reality that they have been encouraged and emboldened by the actions of ministers within the Israeli government, said Mehvar.

On May 29, defense minister Katz and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich authorized the construction of 22 new settlements and “outposts” in the West Bank.

They made no secret of the motive. The new settlements “are all placed within a long-term strategic vision,” they said in a statement.

The goal was “to strengthen the Israeli hold on the territory, to avoid the establishment of a Palestinian state, and to create the basis for future development of settlement in the coming decades.”

It was telling that the new settlements will include Homesh and Sa-Nur, two former settlements that were evacuated in 2005 along with all Israeli settlements in Gaza. Last year, the Knesset repealed a law that prevented settlers returning to the areas.

“The reality is that there have been so many incidents of violence, either by the army or by settlers, for a long time,” said Yair Dvir, spokesperson for Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

“There is a state of permanent violence in the West Bank, which is happening all the time, and it’s part of the strategy of the apartheid regime of Israel, which seeks to take more and more land in the West Bank,” he told Arab News.

He accused the government of pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing against the whole of Palestine. “And of course, it has used the war in Gaza to do the same also in the West Bank,” he added.

Keeping up with the unchecked proliferation of illegal outposts and settlements in the West Bank is extremely difficult because of the sheer pace and number of developments.

In November 2021, B’Tselem published a report revealing there were 280 settlements, of which 138 had been officially established by the state. In addition there were 150 outposts, often referred to as “farms,” not officially recognized by the state but allowed to operate freely.

Settlers had taken over vast areas in the West Bank, to which Palestinians had little or no access, B’Tselem reported in “State Business: Israel’s misappropriation of land in the West Bank through settler violence.”

Some land had been “officially” seized by the state through military orders declaring an area “state land,” a “firing zone,” or a “nature reserve.” Other areas had been taken over by settlers “through daily acts of violence, including attacks on Palestinians and their property.”

The two methods of land seizure are often directly linked. “Settler violence against Palestinians serves as a major informal tool at the hands of the state to take over more and more West Bank land,” said the report.

“The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly. As such, settler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation.”

The report concluded that, in 2021, settlements in the West Bank were home to more than 44,000 settlers. But today, said Dvir, the figure is closer to 700,000.

“There has been a huge increase in the establishment of new outposts all over the West Bank in the past couple of years, even though all the settlements and outposts are illegal under international law,” he said.

“According to Israeli law, only the outposts are illegal, but they still get funding and infrastructure and, of course, are defended by the Israeli authorities.”

Mehvar fears the growth in officially sanctioned settlements is bound to see settler violence increase.

“There have always been attacks, but they were usually carried out at night, by a few individual criminals,” she said.

“But more and more we are seeing attacks in broad daylight, often in the presence of Israeli security forces, coordinated by settlers said to be communicating and organizing on WhatsApp groups.

“If more settlements are built, deep inside Palestine, not only will it make any hope of a Palestinian state almost impossible, but with so many settlers living in close proximity to Palestinian communities it will also make violence a lot more likely.”

Iran is still open to diplomacy, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Tuesday, noting that he and US President Donald Trump’s special envoy were “on the verge of a historic breakthrough” before the Israel-Iran war erupted.

The comments, contained in an article written by Araqchi and published in the Financial Times newspaper, offered praise for Trump’s earlier negotiating efforts in a further indication that talks over Iran’s nuclear programme may soon restart.

“In only five meetings over nine weeks, US special envoy Steve Witkoff and I achieved more than I did in four years of nuclear negotiations with the failed Biden administration. We were on the cusp of a historic breakthrough,” he wrote.

Araqchi said they were 48 hours from a pivotal sixth meeting when Israel launched airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities and ballistic missiles on June 13.

The air war between Iran and Israel lasted 12 days, during which Trump ordered US bombers to pound Iranian underground nuclear facilities.

Araqchi acknowledged having received messages indicating Washington may be ready to return to negotiations. He noted the US was one of six countries to sign a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, only to withdraw in 2018 under the first Trump presidency.

“Iran remains interested in diplomacy but we have good reason to have doubts about further dialogue. If there is a desire to resolve this amicably, the US should show genuine readiness for an equitable accord,” Araqchi wrote.

During a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night, Trump told reporters: “We have scheduled Iran talks, and they … want to talk.”

Witkoff then said the meeting would take place in the next week or so.

Trump told the reporters he would like to lift sanctions on Iran at some point. “I would love to be able to, at the right time, take those sanctions off,” he said.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview released on Monday that he believed Iran could resolve its differences with the United States through dialogue.

On Tuesday, a French diplomatic source said European powers would have to restore UN sanctions on Iran if there were no nuclear deal that guaranteed European security interests.

The source spoke after a call between French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot and his British counterpart David Lammy ahead of a Franco-British summit.

The international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders, accusing them of crimes against humanity for the persecution of women and girls.

In a statement, the ICC said on Tuesday there were “reasonable grounds to believe” the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, and Afghanistan’s chief justice, Abdul Hakim Haqqani, had ordered policies that deprived women and girls of “education, privacy and family life and the freedoms of movement, expression, thought, conscience and religion”.

Afghan human rights activists have called for the Taliban’s system of depriving women and girls of rights and freedoms and enforcing segregation to be recognised as gender apartheid.

Tahera Nasiri, an Afghan women’s rights activist now living in Canada, said the arrest warrant was an acknowledgment of the abuses Afghan women faced. “For four years, the Taliban have told us to stay silent, stay at home, cover our faces, give up our education, our voices and our dreams. Now, an international court is saying: ‘Enough. This is a crime.’

“Even if Akhundzada and Haqqani never sit in court, they now carry the mark of international criminals,” she said. “They are no longer just leaders of Afghanistan, they are wanted men.”

The court said the alleged crimes had taken place since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021 until January 2025, when the ICC’s chief prosecutor first sought the warrant.

Since returning to power, the militant Islamists have banned women from paid work and girls from secondary education, as well as issuing a series of edicts that ban women from many areas of public life, including walking in parks and even speaking in public.

Human rights groups have called on the international community to support the ICC in enforcing the arrest warrants. Liz Evenson, Human Rights Watch’s international justice director, said: “Senior Taliban leaders are now wanted men for their alleged persecution of women, girls, and gender non-conforming people.”

In June, the UN accused the Taliban of removing legal protections for women and turning the justice system into a tool for entrenching an “institutionalised system of gender oppression, persecution and domination”. The UN report also highlighted the suspension of a law on violence against women that included protections against rape and forced marriage.

When announcing that he was seeking a warrant in January, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, said the two leaders were “criminally responsible” for gender-based persecution in Afghanistan and that he would also be seeking warrants for the arrest of other Taliban leaders.

“Our commitment to pursue accountability for gender-based crimes, including gender persecution, remains an absolute priority,” he said.

Amnesty International has also called on the international community to recognise gender apartheid as a crime under international law.

Parwana Ibrahimkhail Nijrabi, a former Taliban prisoner now living in Germany, said: “Arresting these men won’t be easy, especially with some countries still engaging with the Taliban. But I hope member states of the ICC take this seriously and act to arrest them.”

Elon Musk’s new US political party faces steep challenges

Published On: Tue, 08 Jul 2025

23:54:16 PKT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Building a new US political party from scratch is a daunting task, even for the world’s richest man.

But that is what Elon Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, said he plans to do in the wake of his falling out with President Donald Trump. Musk this weekend announced the birth of the “America Party” – dedicated, he said, to defeating Republicans who backed Trump’s massive tax-cut and spending bill.

Musk described his new party on his platform X as tech-centric, budget-conscious, pro-energy and centrist, with the goal of drawing both disaffected Democrats and Republicans. Musk has criticized the tax-cut bill, which is forecast to add about $3.4 trillion to the United States’ debt.

Breaking the two-party system’s grip on US federal elections would take tremendous resources and a long-term commitment, political experts say. Similar attempts have failed, underscoring how difficult it is to gain a foothold in a country where elections are organized on a state-by-state level.

“There are just very, very significant barriers to the creation of a viable third party,” said David A. Hopkins, a Boston College political science professor. He said challenges include building party infrastructure, organizing volunteers and qualifying for the ballot.

David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who left the party over Trump, said Musk can provide what has long been required for such a push: money.

“What the independent space has been lacking has been resources,” Jolly said. “It’s more than filing with the Federal Election Commission. It’s really starting 50 state parties. You’re talking about $100 million just to enter the space with real serious intent.”

Jolly considered returning to politics as an independent, but he concluded that staying within the two-party system would be a more effective way to reach unhappy voters. He is now running for governor of Florida as a Democrat.

In 2016, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another billionaire, made a similar conclusion, rejecting the idea of running for president as an independent, saying that such a candidate would have “no chance of winning.”

Jolly estimated it would take Musk 10 years and perhaps $1 billion to build a viable national party – and said Musk’s recent history with his Department of Government Efficiency suggests the billionaire may not be in it for the long haul.

Musk left DOGE after just a few months in Trump’s administration, having delivered little of the savings he promised.

“What we have seen is an Elon Musk who is not disciplined … enough to change American politics,” Jolly said.

Musk’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Tesla shares closed nearly 7% lower on Monday as Musk reignited investors’ worries about his focus on the company.

PLAYING SPOILER

Musk could have chosen a more traditional path, using his political action committee to back Republican challengers to incumbents in the party primaries ahead of next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress.

He was the largest donor in the 2024 US campaign cycle, making nearly $300 million in contributions, mostly focused on helping Trump return to the White House.

Not all his political efforts have paid off. He poured millions of dollars into a Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, only to see his preferred candidate fail.

His efforts to convince Republicans in the US Congress not to pass Trump’s tax bill also fell flat.

It is unclear how effective he would be in backing independents in a handful of competitive US House of Representatives races.