International Glance
The fear is palpable in this Palestinian village. It’s clear in how farmers gather their harvests quickly, how they scan the valley for movement, how they dare not stray past certain roads. At any time, they say, armed Israeli settlers could descend.
“In a matter of minutes, they get on their phones. They gather themselves, and they surprise you,” said Yasser Alkam, a Palestinian-American lawyer and farmer from the village of Turmus Ayya. “They hide between the trees. They ambush people and beat them up severely.”
In recent months, Alkam says Turmus Ayya has weathered near-daily attacks by settlers, especially after they set up an outpost that the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now says is on his village’s land.
Alkam says he can’t reach hMore...is own fields for fear of being assaulted. In a particularly gruesome attack, he watched a settler beat a Palestinian woman unconscious with a spiky club.
The fear is shared throughout the West Bank. During October’s olive harvest, settlers across the territory launched an average of eight attacks daily, according to the United Nations humanitarian office, the most since it began collecting data in 2006. The attacks continued in November, with the U.N. recording at least 136 more by Nov. 24.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday called for a complete end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – not just a pause in the fighting that has raged since February 2022 – ahead of US-Russia talks in Moscow centering on a peace plan aimed at ending Europe’s deadliest war since World War II.
The killing of two unarmed Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the northern West Bank city of Jenin has provoked international outrage after video footage of the incident went viral on Friday.
The Israeli army on Monday again targeted several locations in southern Gaza that fell under the military-controlled yellow zone, according to local witnesses.
Ninety-one years ago this week, millions of Ukrainians starved to death while grain rotted in Soviet warehouses. Stalin’s regime seized their harvests, blocked aid, and watched them die. The Holodomor – “death by hunger” – was genocide: deliberate, calculated, and monstrous.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) called Sunday on the Trump administration to refocus its energy on defending Ukraine’s sovereignty in peace talks with Russia.
Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 70,000 people in over two years of war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as the death toll continues to climb despite the ongoing ceasefire.
