The ‘tear-gassed’ Palestinians trying to stop Israeli settlers occupying their land

Published

3 years ago

January 31, 2023

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It’s night-time, and the lights of our 4×4 guide the way up a mountain road in the West Bank.

We’re above the village of Battir, south of Jerusalem, on rocky land that has been farmed by generations of the same Palestinian families over decades.

They didn’t create this road. It was bulldozed one evening by an Israeli settler living nearby. In the weeks that followed, he moved sheep on to the land, built a pen for them, and then dug a hole out the side of the hill.

We’re with Hasan, one of the villagers who has fought to reclaim this land through Israeli courts.

“He (the settler) was just over there, and he started expanding all over this hilltop.

“He brought some kind of big containers on wheels and he created like a big camp, with electricity generators and so on, and bringing all the facilities of water tanks and stuff like that.”

Every evening, men from Battir come up here to keep watch on a rota. Within minutes of us arriving, a spotter saw the car lights and raised the alarm.

Hasan said: “His (the settler’s) claim was a grazing permit to come just to graze his sheep in the area. Then he starts saying this is the promised land of Israel and this is the land of the state of Israel, and I have the right to be here.

“But he never showed any evidence of land ownership or a contract that he got through any legal body.”

Hasan and his fellow villagers have been threatened and on one occasion had tear gas fired at them by Israeli security when they tried to stand their ground.

“There were over a hundred settlers coming all together. We were really worried that it will become like a violent reaction. The third time he came in March or in February 2022, it was the most dangerous one when he came with some support of soldiers with him.

“They start shooting tear gas on us to prevent us from even getting closer from the hilltop over there. So we learn that this is getting violent. We are not looking to lose somebody from our village or our brothers or our cousins.”

It is a story you hear regularly in the West Bank. Israeli settlement expansion is illegal under international law and opposed by the US, UK, EU and the UN. It is the source of extreme anger for many Palestinians.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has flown in at a “pivotal moment” as the security situation here grows ever more volatile by the day.

He met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday and will sit down with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah on Tuesday.

Although the US still talks of a two-state solution, as do other international governments, it is a non-starter right now.

Mr Netanyahu is facing international pressure to calm the tensions, whilst at the same time beholden to extreme right-wing voices in his new cabinet.

In response to recent terror attacks in Jerusalem, the government has said it wants to arm more Israeli civilians and there has already been talk of introducing the death penalty.

The future for Hasan, and other Palestinians, is concerning.

Hasan said: “Unfortunately, this is a very dangerous situation. We are really worried about all the support that the settlers are gaining through the new government.

“We are really worried they will come and they will attack us with their weapons, and we will not be allowed to be here anymore.”

What do you want? I ask him.

“I want to live in peace. I want to live in freedom. I want freedom because freedom will get us peace and justice. Without the freedom, we will never get peace and justice in this country.

“And there should be a solution if they want to have a one-state, two-state, 10-state solution, I don’t mind, I just want a free state that we could live in as Palestinians.”

World

What’s it like with the National Guard on the streets of DC?

Published

4 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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What's it like with the National Guard on the streets of DC?

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What’s it like on the streets of DC right now, as thousands of federal police patrol the streets?

Who is Steve Witkoff, the US envoy regularly meeting Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to broker peace in Ukraine and Gaza?

And why is Californian Governor Gavin Newsom now tweeting like Donald Trump?

Martha Kelner and Mark Stone answer your questions.

If you’ve also got a question you’d like the Trump100 team to answer, you can email it to trump100@sky.uk.

You can also watch all episodes on our YouTube channel.

World

It’s been a confusing week – and Trump’s been made to look weak

Published

4 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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It’s been a confusing week.

The Monday gathering of European leaders and Ukraine’s president with Donald Trump at the White House was highly significant.

Ukraine latest: Trump changes tack

The leaders went home buoyed by the knowledge that they’d finally convinced the American president not to abandon Europe. He had committed to provide American “security guarantees” to Ukraine.

The details were sketchy, and sketched out only a little more through the week (we got some noise about American air cover), but regardless, the presidential commitment represented a clear shift from months of isolationist rhetoric on Ukraine – “it’s Europe’s problem” and all the rest of it.

Yet it was always the case that, beyond that clear achievement for the Europeans, Russia would have a problem with it.

Trump’s envoy’s language last weekend – claiming that Putin had agreed to Europe providing “Article 5-like” guarantees for Ukraine, essentially providing it with a NATO-like collective security blanket – was baffling.

Russia gives two fingers to the president

And throughout this week, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has repeatedly and predictably undermined the whole thing, pointing out that Russia would never accept any peace plan that involved any European or NATO troops in Ukraine.

“The presence of foreign troops in Ukraine is completely unacceptable for Russia,” he said yesterday, echoing similar statements stretching back years.

Remember that NATO’s “eastern encroachment” was the justification for Russia’s “special military operation” – the invasion of Ukraine – in the first place. All this makes Trump look rather weak.

It’s two fingers to the president, though interestingly, the Russian language has been carefully calibrated not to poke Trump but to mock European leaders instead. That’s telling.

The bilateral meeting (between Putin and Zelenskyy) hailed by Trump on Monday as agreed and close – “within two weeks” – looks decidedly doubtful.

Maybe that’s why he went along with Putin’s suggestion that there be a bilateral, not including Trump, first.

It’s easier for the American president to blame someone else if it’s not his meeting, and it doesn’t happen.

NATO defence chiefs met on Wednesday to discuss the details of how the security guarantees – the ones Russia won’t accept – will work.

European sources at the meeting have told me it was all a great success. And to the comments by Lavrov, a source said: “It’s not up to Lavrov to decide on security guarantees. Not up to the one doing the threatening to decide how to deter that threat!”

The argument goes that it’s not realistic for Russia to say from which countries Ukraine can and cannot host troops.

Would Trump threaten force?

The problem is that if Europe and the White House want Russia to sign up to some sort of peace deal, then it would require agreement from all sides on the security arrangements.

The other way to get Russia to heel would be with an overwhelming threat of force. Something from Trump, like: “Vladimir – look what I did to Iran…”. But, of course, Iran isn’t a nuclear power.

Something else bothers me about all this. The core concept of a “security guarantee” is an ironclad obligation to defend Ukraine into the future.

Future guarantees would require treaties, not just a loose promise. I don’t see Trump’s America truly signing up to anything that obliges them to do anything.

A layered security guarantee which builds over time is an option, but from a Kremlin perspective, would probably only end up being a repeat of history and allow them another “justification” to push back.

Image and reality don’t seem to match

Among Trump’s stream of social media posts this week was an image of him waving his finger at Putin in Alaska. It was one of the few non-effusive images from the summit.

He posted it next to an image of former president Richard Nixon confronting Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – an image that came to reflect American dominance over the Soviet Union.

That may be the image Trump wants to portray. But the events of the past week suggest image and reality just don’t match.

The past 24 hours in Ukraine have been among the most violent to date.

World

At least 17 dead in Colombia after car bombing and helicopter attack

Published

4 hours ago

August 22, 2025

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At least 17 dead in Colombia after car bombing and helicopter attack

At least 17 people were killed after a car bombing and an attack on a police helicopter in Colombia, officials have said.

Authorities in the southwest city of Cali said a vehicle loaded with explosives detonated near a military aviation school, killing five people and injuring more than 30.

Authorities said at least 12 died in the attack on a helicopter transporting personnel to an area in Antioquia in northern Colombia, where they were to destroy coca leaf crops – the raw material used in the production of cocaine.

Antioquia governor Andres Julian said a drone attacked the helicopter as it flew over coca leaf crops.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro attributed both incidents to dissidents of the defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

He said the aircraft was targeted in retaliation for a cocaine seizure that allegedly belonged to the Gulf Clan.

Who are FARC, and are they still active?

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist guerrilla organisation, was the largest of the country’s rebel groups, and grew out of peasant self-defence forces.

It was formed in 1964 as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party, carrying out a series of attacks against political and economic targets.

In 2016, after more than 50 years of civil war, FARC rebels and the Colombian government signed a peace deal.

It officially ceased to be an armed group the following year – but some small dissident groups rejected the agreement and refused to disarm.

According to a report by Colombia’s Truth Commission in 2022, fighting between government forces, FARC, and the militant group National Liberation Army had killed around 450,000 people between 1985 and 2018.

Both FARC dissidents and members of the Gulf Clan operate in Antioquia.

It comes as a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that coca leaf cultivation is on the rise in Colombia.

The area under cultivation reached a record 253,000 hectares in 2023, according to the UN’s latest available report.