Israeli army kills two in West Bank, including one teen
Israeli army kills two in West Bank, including one teen/node/2606530/middle-east
Israeli army kills two in West Bank, including one teen
Mourners carry the body of the Palestinian teenager Amjad Nassar Awad, 15, who was killed in an Israeli raid in the West Bank. (AP)
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Updated 01 July 2025
AFP
Israeli army kills two in West Bank, including one teen
Palestinian health ministry says 15-year-old Amjad Nassar Abu Awad was killed by Israeli military gunfire in Ramallah
Updated 01 July 2025
AFP
RAMALLAH: The Palestinian health ministry said Tuesday that the Israeli army killed two people including a 15-year-old boy in separate incidents in the occupied West Bank.
“At dawn today, Tuesday, 15-year-old child Amjad Nassar Abu Awad was martyred by Israeli gunfire in the city of Ramallah,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Also at dawn today, 24-year-old young man Samer Bassam Zagharneh was martyred by Israeli gunfire near the town of Dhahiriya” in the southern West Bank, the ministry added.
The Israeli military told AFP it was “looking into” the two reported incidents.
Around 20 people, mostly young boys and teenagers, had gathered at a Ramallah hospital to mourn Abu Awad, an AFP journalist at the scene reported.
In tears, the boys touched Abu Awad’s face in the white light of the hospital morgue.
Two Palestinian teenagers, aged 13 and 15, were killed last week in the West Bank towns of Al-Yamoun and Kafr Malik respectively.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
Violence has soared in the West Bank since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 that triggered the Gaza war.
Since then, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 946 Palestinians, including many militants, according to the health ministry.
Over the same period, at least 35 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military operations, according to Israeli figures.
Morocco king calls for social reforms amid youth-led protests
Royal speech much anticipated by the protesters, who have taken to the streets almost every night since September 27
Demonstrators have been calling for a change in government and for Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch to resign
Updated 51 min 58 sec ago
AFP
RABAT: Morocco’s King Mohammed VI on Friday said improving public education and health care was a priority, but made no reference to the youth movement that has been staging nationwide protests for sweeping social reforms.
“We have set as priorities... the creation of jobs for young people, and the concrete improvement of the education and health sectors,” the monarch said in his annual address to the opening session of parliament.
The royal speech had been much anticipated by the protesters, who have taken to the streets almost every night since September 27.
The unrest that has rocked the usually stable north African country has been fueled by recent reports of the deaths of eight pregnant women at a public hospital in the city of Agadir, which critics condemn as a symptom of a failing system.
Demonstrators have been calling for a change in government and for Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch to resign.
Many Moroccans have also expressed frustration at public spending as Morocco pushes ahead with major infrastructure projects in preparation for the 2030 World Cup, which it will co-host with Portugal and Spain.
The king pleaded that “there should be no contradiction or competition between major national projects and social programs.” ‘DǾԳٱ’
GenZ 212, the online-based collective calling the protests – whose founders remain unknown – made no immediate reaction to the speech.
Raghd, a 23-year-old sound engineer who had joined several demonstrations in Rabat, said she was “disappointed” that there was no explicit reference to the protests in the royal speech.
“I thought he would say something stronger,” she said without giving her last name.
The collective had urged its followers to refrain from protesting on Friday night “out of respect” for the king.
Yet Driss El Yazami, the former head of the National Human Rights Council, said the king’s speech might actually amount to “a national mobilization.”
He said the monarch “heard the call of the youth.”
In his speech, the king said Morocco was “charting a steady path toward greater social and territorial justice.”
He added that efforts must also ensure “that the fruits of growth benefit everyone.”
In July, he had declared that “there is no place, today or tomorrow, for a Morocco moving at two speeds.”
On Thursday, GenZ 212 demanded a “crackdown on corruption” and a “radical modernization of school textbooks.”
They also called for a national plan to renovate hospitals, recruit more doctors and health care workers, particularly in remote areas, and raise public health insurance reimbursement rates from 50 percent to 75 percent.
Official figures show a lack of education in Morocco is a key driver of the country’s poverty, which has, nevertheless, fallen from nearly 12 percent of the population in 2014 to 6.8 percent in 2024. ‘Sǰٴڲ’
GenZ 212 has insisted it had no political affiliation and no formal leadership.
Members on the online messaging platform Discord where it was founded discuss issues openly and put every major decision up to a vote.
Sociologist Mehdi Alioua said it comes as “part of a long history of youth-led social mobilization in Morocco.”
The north African country had seen mass protests in February 2011 and in 2016 with the Hirak uprising in the Rif region.
Yet GenZ 212 has brought together “young, connected urbanites, from the middle or upper classes,” as well as “young rural and small-town workers, often exploited agricultural low-wage laborers with few rights.”
The government made a fresh call on Thursday for dialogue with the protesters, saying their “message has been received” and vowing to “work quickly to mobilize resources and address shortfalls.”
Rallies have been largely peaceful, though some nights have seen spates of violence and acts of vandalism.
Three people were killed in clashes with security forces last week, while police have made dozens of arrests.
US announces deal for Qatar air force facility in Idaho
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that Qatar will be allowed to build an air force facility at Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho that will house F-15 fighter jets and pilots
Updated 59 min 38 sec ago
AFP
WASHINGTON: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday that Qatar will be allowed to build an air force facility at Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho that will house F-15 fighter jets and pilots.
The announcement comes soon after President Donald Trump signed an executive order vowing to defend the Gulf Arab state against attacks, following Israeli air strikes targeting Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital Doha.
“We’re signing a letter of acceptance to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at the Mountain Home Air Base in Idaho,” Hegseth said at the Pentagon, with Qatari Defense Minister Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani at his side.
“The location will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training” as well as “increase lethality, interoperability,” he said.
“It’s just another example of our partnership. And I hope you know, your excellency, that you can count on us.”
The Idaho base currently also hosts a fighter jet squadron from Singapore, according to its website.
Hegseth also thanked Qatar for its “substantial role” as a mediator in the talks that led to a truce and hostage-prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hamas, and its assistance in securing the release of a US citizen from Afghanistan.
The Qatari minister hailed the “strong, enduring partnership” and “deep defense relationship” shared by the two countries.
The Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is Washington’s largest military facility in the Middle East.
Trump’s close relationship with the leaders of Qatar has raised eyebrows, especially over its gift to the US president of a Boeing 747 to be used as Air Force One.
Though the Idaho facility for Qatar had apparently been in the works since the last administration of Democrat Joe Biden, the deal prompted some hand-wringing on social media, including from far-right activist Laura Loomer, usually a Trump ally.
“Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans,” Loomer wrote on X.
Hegseth, who never said it was a base, later wrote on the platform: “Qatar will not have their own base in the United States — nor anything like a base. We control the existing base, like we do with all partners.”
Israeli landgrabbers close in on West Bank herding community
Naef Jahaleen, a Bedouin herder, said the settlers provoke people at night, walking around the houses and disturbing residents
Most Palestinian Bedouins are herders, which leaves them exposed to violence when Israeli land-grabbers bring herds that compete for grazing land
Updated 11 October 2025
AFP
RAS EIN AL-AUJA, Palestinian Territories: In the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley, Naef Jahaleen fears for the future as Israeli settlers come for the land home to one of the area’s last Bedouin herding communities.
Life was good before in Ras Ein Al-Auja, the Bedouin herder says, but settlement outposts have grown one after the other over the past two years.
Settlers’ trailers have gradually given way to houses with foundations, some built just 100 meters from Bedouin homes.
In May, settlers diverted the village’s most precious resource — the spring after which it is named.
But for the community of 130 families, the worst issue is the constant need to stand guard to avoid settlers cutting power and irrigation pipes, or bringing their own herds to graze near people’s houses.
“The settlers provoke people at night, walking around the houses, disturbing the residents, making people anxious, scaring the children and the elderly,” 49-year-old Jahaleen said, adding that calling the Israeli police in the area rarely yielded results.
“There’s no real protection,” he said.
“A settler could come to your house — you call the police, and they don’t come. The army doesn’t come. No one helps,” Jahaleen told AFP after a meeting with other villagers trying to coordinate their response.
Palestinian Bedouin Naef Jahalin sits at a water tank as he shines a torchlight in search of any Israeli settlers incursions in Ras Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley in the Israeli occupied West Bank, on September 30, 2025. (AFP)
Land grabs
Most Palestinian Bedouins are herders, which leaves them particularly exposed to violence when Israeli settlers bring herds that compete for grazing land.
It is a strategy that settlement watchdog organizations call “pastoral colonialism.”
“They have started to bring in Jewish colonizers and give them some small herd or a few sheep or cows and take over a specific area. From there, this armed colonizer starts to herd,” Younes Ara, of the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, told AFP.
Settlements have expanded since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, with more than 500,000 settlers living in the Palestinian territory, excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Some three million Palestinians live in the territory.
Jahaleen said Israeli herding, combined with repeated harassment, aimed to make Palestinians leave an area.
“You never know when or how they’ll harass you. The goal is to make you leave,” Jahaleen said as he stood guard near his home one night, occasionally flashing a powerful torch up a gully near where young settlers had been bringing supplies.
That night, Jahaleen was joined on his watch by Doron Meinrath, a former army officer who sometimes leads volunteers for an Israeli organization called Looking the Occupation in the Eye.
Several foreign and Israeli activists help Jahaleen by standing watch, documenting settlers’ moves, calling the Israeli police or army, and trying to deter violence with their presence, taking turns for eight-hour shifts day and night.
“Let’s go after them,” Meinrath said as he saw a car drive down a hill on an illegal road finished last winter that connects the nascent Israeli outpost to a formal settlement.
All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are deemed illegal by the United Nations under international law.
Once caught up with the young man’s Toyota — which was missing a headlight and had a cracked windscreen — Meinrath marked down the number plate and reported it to the police as a vehicle unsafe for the road.
His aim was to get the vehicle impounded, in a bid to slow further land grabs.
Changing times
Even with the inexorable growth of settler outposts, Meinrath said he felt organizations such as his posed “a problem” for the settler movement.
Although he had always been left-wing, Meinrath said his opinions fortified as he saw Israel change and the settlement movement become stronger politically.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet openly call for the West Bank’s annexation, and more specifically that of the Jordan Valley.
Abu Taleb, a 75-year-old herder from Ras Ein Al-Auja, said he saw the land he was born on change, too.
Nestled between rocky hills to the west and the flat Jordan Valley that climbs up the Jordanian plateau to the east, his community used to be self-sufficient.
A young Palestinian Bedouin boy gives water to a flock of sheep by his family's water tank in Ras Ein al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley in the Israeli occupied West Bank, on September 30, 2025. (AFP)
But since settlers cut off access to the spring, he and his sons must pay to refill the water tank they need to quench their sheep’s thirst every three days.
After another settlement outpost sprang up a stone’s throw from his home, Taleb must now also bring his sheep into their pen when settlers arrive with their own herd, for fear of violence.
“My life as a child was good. But now, their lives are not good,” he said, pointing to three of his grandchildren milling around under the shade of a lonely acacia tree.
“They grew up in a bad life. These kids are afraid of the settlers everywhere.”
Major win for Trump on Gaza, but will it stand test of time?
Given that every US president over the past 20 years has been unsuccessful in resolving crises between Israel and the Palestinians, Trump’s accomplishment is already remarkable
Updated 11 October 2025
AFP
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has undeniably scored a diplomatic victory by helping to broker a truce for Gaza, but the path to the lasting peace he says he wants for the Middle East is littered with obstacles.
And it remains to be seen whether the 79-year-old Trump — who is not exactly known for his attention to the fine print — will devote the same level of energy to the conflict over the long term, once his victory lap in the region is over next week.
“Any agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but especially one indirectly brokered between Israel and Hamas is an extraordinary achievement,” Aaron David Miller, who worked for multiple US administrations of both parties, told AFP.
“Trump decided to do something that no American president... of either party has ever done, which is to pressure and squeeze an Israeli prime minister on an issue that that prime minister considered vital to his politics,” said Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But Miller, who has participated in Middle East peace talks over the years, warned of the “universe of complexity and detail” that remains to be hashed out with respect to the implementation of phase two of the deal.
The Israeli army said its troops had ceased fire at 0900 GMT Friday in the Gaza Strip, in anticipation of the release of all Israeli hostages, dead and alive, in the subsequent 72 hours, in compliance with the deal it reached with Palestinian armed group Hamas.
Trump has said he expects to head to the Middle East on Sunday, with stops in Egypt, where the talks took place, and Israel.
Art of the deal?
Given that every US president over the past 20 years has been unsuccessful in resolving crises between Israel and the Palestinians, Trump’s accomplishment is already remarkable.
But the Republican billionaire president has broader aspirations — to revive the Abraham Accords reached during his first White House term, under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco offered Israel diplomatic recognition.
Trump has brought his son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of the architects of those accords, back into the administration to work with special envoy Steve Witkoff on the Gaza negotiations.
Officials and foreign policy observers agree that Trump deftly used a mix of carrot and stick — publicly and privately, and especially with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — to get the deal done.
He also leveraged his strong ties with Arab and Muslim leaders including Turkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
For Miller, Trump clearly played a “decisive” role.
But while the agreement’s first phase appears to be on track, much remains undefined, including how — and if — Hamas will agree to disarm after two years of devastating conflict in the Palestinian territory, following its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
“A ceasefire is not yet a lasting peace,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said Thursday, after meeting with European and Arab ministers on how to help the Palestinians in the post-conflict period.
Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote: “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question.”
Huge challenges
Cook says the challenge now is to fully implement Trump’s 20-point plan, which calls for Hamas to surrender its weapons, the creation of an international stabilization force and new governing structures for Gaza that will not include the Palestinian militant group.
Trump insisted Thursday that “there will be disarming” by Hamas and “pullbacks” by Israeli forces.
Then on Friday, he added: “I think there is consensus on most of it, and some of the details, like anything else, will be worked out.”
But his administration will need to work hard to finalize the deal, and ensure that Arab countries in the region are invested in helping rebuild a devastated Gaza.
A team of 200 US military personnel will “oversee” the Gaza truce, senior US officials said Thursday.
Miller said there are “operational” holes in the plan as it stands, including “no detailed planning for either how to decommission and/or demilitarize Gaza, even if you had Hamas’s assent, which you don’t.”
The plan also calls for the creation of a so-called “Board of Peace,” a transitional body to be chaired by Trump himself — a proposal Hamas rejected on Thursday.
“Despite coming to office eager to shed America’s Middle East commitments, Trump just took on a huge one: responsibility for a peace plan that will forever bear his name,” wrote Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Libyan security forces stand guard outside a police building in Tripoli. (AFP)
Updated 11 October 2025
AFP
Libya arrests two over rocket attack on UN mission
In August, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) said its Tripoli headquarters had come under rocket attack, without victims or damage
Updated 11 October 2025
AFP
TRIPOLI: Libyan authorities have arrested two people suspected of carrying out an attempted rocket attack on the United Nations mission in Libya in August, the attorney general’s office said Friday.
The two suspects in the attack — which did not cause casualties or damage — were questioned by investigators and prosecutors in the capital Tripoli before being placed in pre-trial detention, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Their identities and motives were not disclosed, but the two were “confronted with incriminating evidence” by prosecutors, the statement added.
The prosecutor’s office did not provide further details.
In August, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) said its Tripoli headquarters had come under rocket attack, without victims or damage.
Authorities said they had foiled “an attempted attack” with an anti-tank missile on the compound housing UNSMIL headquarters.
The incident came as UNSMIL chief Hanna Tetteh was briefing the Security Council in New York, the mission said.
The Tripoli-based government then condemned what it called a “failed attempt” and a “serious act aimed at undermining security and stability, and damaging Libya’s relations with the international community.”
The government also said it was committed to building “professional and unified security forces” and ending the proliferation of “illegal armed groups” in the country.
Libya is split between the UN-recognized government in Tripoli, led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and a rival administration in the east.
The north African country has remained divided since a NATO-backed revolt toppled and killed longtime leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
