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Year: 2025

Israel’s settler outposts choke Palestinian life in West Bank’s villages

Israel’s settler outposts choke Palestinian life in West Bank’s villages

On a sweltering summer day, the insides of villagers’ homes in Ras Ein al-Auja smelled of rot. The villagers said that the day before, settlers had – not for the first time – severed the power lines between their homes and the off-grid electricity networks the community had built up with help from humanitarian organisations, causing the food in their refrigerators to spoil. Israeli authorities have long denied access to basic services such as water, electricity and sanitation to this Palestinian community and others in Area C, and almost all of these communities face demolition orders. Israel typically accuses Palestinians of building without permits to justify the orders, but it makes it near impossible to acquire the permits. The Israeli military did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment for this article. According to Ghawanmeh, Israeli settlers from the three surrounding outposts – all established in the past two years – cut the off-grid electricity systems “five or six times a week”. Last year, settlers prohibited the Bedouins from accessing the al-Auja spring, which locals depend on for both their herds’ and their own water needs. The Palestinian villagers and local reports indicate that Israeli military forces allowed the settlers to block access to the spring. Now, all of the land where the Palestinian locals had grazed their herds is off-limits, forcing them to keep their livestock penned up. Ibrahim Kaabneh, 35, has only 40 sheep and goats left. He once had 250, but he said he sold most of his herd after he and a relative were attacked by settlers last year and the settlers stole his relatives’ herd. “I needed to get money to feed the rest of the herd before they would die or be stolen by the settlers,” he said inside his sparse family home with his children looking on quietly in the summer heat. With settlers attacking them if they bring out their herds to graze and no longer able to access the water spring as well as being denied access to the nearby water pipes connected to Israeli settlements, Kaabneh now must spend about 200 shekels ($60) a day on fodder for his animals while paying for water tanks every two days. “Even the livestock that we still have, we feel like they’re not ours,” Kaabneh said. “Any moment, they can be stolen. Any moment, they can be attacked.” Kaabneh lives about 200 metres (220 yards) away from a second Israeli outpost that was established a year ago. The outpost, containing a corrugated iron pen allegedly stolen from an already-expelled Bedouin community nearby, is a preview of what the newest outpost will look like as it expands, according to locals. The outpost established in August is even closer to the Bedouins living here. This has added to the fears among community members who feel “suffocated” by encroaching settlers. Since the war in Gaza started, settlers have burned homes in the community and are alleged to have assaulted community members, including Kaabneh’s uncle, who was struck by a bulldozer. Settlers also come to the village inappropriately dressed or drunk, the Palestinians say. Kaabneh says he has trouble sleeping, and he is wary of leaving his home even to get groceries because he fears for his family. Women and children avoid leaving their homes for more than an hour or two at a time. An access road to the community – built with funding from the United States Agency for International Development, as a billboard attests – now has at its entrance a series of concrete blocks painted with Israeli flags, and community members face constant harassment to run the most basic of errands. “Once we step outside of the house, it seems like we’re doing something wrong or we’re doing something illegal,” Ghawanmeh explained. “Children, the women and everyone here is in constant fear and in constant danger whenever they leave the house for whatever necessary reason.” “What we are living at the moment is a disaster,” he continued. “To move from accessing 20,000 dunums of land to accessing nothing and from having a free water source to now not having it at all is crippling.” Adblock test (Why?)

Trump asks Supreme Court to let it cut billions in foreign aid

Trump asks Supreme Court to let it cut billions in foreign aid

Published On 8 Sep 20258 Sep 2025 Days after a federal judge ruled that United States President Donald Trump’s administration cannot unilaterally slash billions in foreign aid funding, the Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In a court filing on Monday, lawyers for the administration asked for an emergency stay to halt the order issued by the lower court and allow the administration to continue to withhold about $4bn in congressionally approved funds. Last month, Trump said he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a US president roughly 50 years ago. Last week, US District Judge Amir Ali ruled that the Republican administration’s decision to withhold the funding was likely illegal. The money at issue in the case was approved by Congress for foreign aid, United Nations peacekeeping operations and democracy-promotion efforts overseas. The Justice Department said in its filing on Monday that the administration views the $4bn of disputed foreign aid funding as “contrary to US foreign policy”. Congress budgeted billions in foreign aid last year, about $11bn of which must be spent or obligated before a deadline of September 30 – the last day of the US government’s current fiscal year – lest it expire. After being sued by aid groups that expected to compete for the funding, the administration said last month that it intended to spend $6.5bn of the disputed funds. Trump also sought to block $4bn of the funding through an unusual step called a “pocket rescission”, which bypasses Congress. Advertisement Ali ruled on Wednesday that the administration cannot simply choose to withhold the money and it must comply with appropriations laws unless Congress changes them. The judge’s injunction “raises a grave and urgent threat to the separation of powers”, Justice Department lawyers wrote in Monday’s filing, adding that it would be “self-defeating and senseless for the executive branch to obligate the very funds that it is asking Congress to rescind”. Under the US Constitution, the government’s executive, legislative and judicial branches are assigned different powers. Trump budget director Russell Vought has argued that the president can withhold funds for 45 days after requesting a rescission, which would run out the clock until the end of the fiscal year. The White House said the tactic was last used in 1977. Lauren Bateman, a lawyer for a group of plaintiffs, said on Monday that the administration is asking the Supreme Court “to defend the illegal tactic of a pocket rescission.” “The administration is effectively asking the Supreme Court to bless its attempt to unlawfully accumulate power,” Bateman said. In recent months, the Supreme Court has issued a number of decisions in Trump’s favour through the use of emergency rulings – rarely requested by previous administrations but which Trump has sought and received in record number. From the beginning of his second term in January to early August, Trump had sought 22 emergency rulings, surpassing the 19 requested in all four years of President Joe Biden’s administration and nearly three times as many as the eight requested during each of the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W Bush, both of whom served two terms, or eight years. The rulings differ from typical cases in that they are often issued in extremely short, unsigned orders that give little in the way of legal reasoning despite the high stakes involved. That lack of transparency has led to criticism from legal scholars as well as rare pushback from federal judges. As of August, the court had sided with Trump in 16 out of the 22 emergency ruling cases. Adblock test (Why?)