Israeli settlers are “the most law-abiding people on earth” and face punishment if they violate the law, according to Israel’s foreign minister. However, settlers are rarely held accountable for their frequent support for the Israeli army and continue to assault Palestinians daily.
Published On 22 Oct 2025
In response to the increase in Israeli army and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank, Israel has ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists who support Palestinian farmers who grow olives.
The activists were detained last week in the Nablus Governorate’s Burin because they were protesting an Israeli general order that only allowed those who work on the land during the harvesting period.
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Since the start of the current season, the Israeli army and settlers have attacked olive pickers with 158 attacks., according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.
A number of violations were committed during the assaults, including mass shootings, arrests, and beatings. At least 74 attacks targeted olive-growing regions, with 29 instances involving the destruction of farmland and trees. 765 olive trees were completely destroyed.
Palestinian farmers are putting themselves at risk when picking olives, according to the UN and human rights organizations.
The UN Human Rights Office’s head, Ajith Sunghay, stated in a statement on Tuesday that “settler violence has skyrocketed in scale and frequency.”
We have already experienced severe attacks by armed settlers against Palestinians, women, children, and international solidarity activists two weeks after the 2025 harvest began.
According to Sunghay, the UN estimates that 80 to 100 000 Palestinian families depend on their livelihoods from the olive harvest.
The activists would be deported over their alleged affiliation with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), according to a statement released by Interior Minister Yariv Levin and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Wednesday.
The activists were denied entry to the country for a 99-year period, according to the statement, without providing their nationalities or where they would be deported.
Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, settler violence against Palestinians has increased.
According to the United Nations, more than 1, 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023, and thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee as a result of Israeli-imposed movement restrictions, home demolitions, and Israeli-imposed restrictions on movement.
According to the UN, there were 757 settler attacks that left a 13 percent increase in casualties or property damage in the first half of 2025, up from the same period last year.
Israeli settlers allegedly attacked Palestinian olive harvesters and activists with clubs during a settler attack in Turmus Aya on Sunday, according to a video released from the town of Turmus Aya. One woman suffered serious injuries when she was taken to the hospital.
In Beita’s Jabal Qamas area, settlers beat and set on fire three vehicles earlier this month, injuring at least 36 people, including journalists.
The West Bank and East Jerusalem are home to more than 700,000 settlers, who reside in 150 settlements and 128 outposts, both of which are prohibited by international law. Israeli soldiers frequently accompany or protect settlers, and they are frequently armed.
Although the project hasn’t yet received formal approval, the White House has begun razing the East Wing to make room for President Trump’s new ballroom. explains Soraya Lennie.
Published On 22 Oct 2025
You frequently hear the phrase “Mamdani, Mamdani, Mamdani” in the Morrisania neighborhood of New York City.
Morrisania, one of many areas where race and the needs of the working class converge in anticipation of New York’s November 4 mayoral election, is home to a rapidly expanding West African community with many new-immigrant Muslims.
Many people in this area rely on Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old candidate, to win.
After all, Mamdani’s victory over former governor Andrew Cuomo would set off a string of landmark victories for New York City: it had the first Muslim mayor, had the first African-born mayor, and had the first South Asian mayor to lead the largest city in the country.
The diversity of Muslim communities interwoven into the fabric of the city has sparked hope and grim reminders of ingrained Islamophobia and xenophobia.
But Aicha Donza, a shop owner in Morrisania, the Bronx, where annual incomes are half the city’s average, is supported by the avowed Democratic Socialist’s message of affordability: ambitious pledges for free buses, rent freezes on some buildings, and universal childcare, all of which are funded in part by raising taxes on the wealthy.
In addition to the items in her store, Donza compared the items to be imported from Ghana, Liberian palm oil from where she was born, and traditional Islamic clothing from Turkiye, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
People visit the store every day because the rent is so high, she said, and they complain that the prices are too high. If he can manage free buses, that would make a big difference.
Essa Tunkala, 60, a resident of the nearby Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx, speculated about what the election might mean for the neighborhood, a melting pot of both West African diaspora workers and parking attendants.
Residents of Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Togo, and Mali were listed among the many, with “It almost seems like you’re in West Africa,” Tunkala grinned.
How will Mamdani’s vision be realized, he asked, posing a number of serious questions that still hang over his run. Will he be able to form the kind of coalition with state officials and lawmakers that the mayoral position has the resources to fulfill his marquee pledges?
Tunkala, who sells sporting goods from a table on the street, said, “But we need fresh ideas to create opportunities.” I support him because we are a new generation with fresh ideas for development.
The 55-year-old Sierra Leonean cab driver, Ahmed Jejote, echoed the sentiment.
He made reference to the current city mayor, who was plagued by corruption and who announced his exit from the race in September. “We’ve experienced Eric Adams,” he said. “We’ve seen Cuomo”.
He stated, “Mamdani is just beginning to move forward.” For me, religion is not really what matters.
Mariam Saleh, 46, sat over steaming trays of food at Kumasi Restaurant: banku, a fermented blend of maize and cassava, suya, a spiced meat skewer, and kwenkwen, a type of jollof rice.
Concerning Mamdani’s run’s historical significance, she was less circumspect.
The 46-year-old, who is a native of Ghana, told Al Jazeera, “It is a huge step forward for us that he is Muslim.”
According to Joe Stepansky of Al Jazeera, 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor of New York City. If elected, he will set off a number of firsts.
Published On 22 Oct 2025
Following the September assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, United States President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have shaped their political agenda by blaming the left for political violence.
“Political violence, it’s just a statistical fact that it’s a bigger problem on the left,” Vance said while guest-hosting The Charlie Kirk Show podcast on October 15 in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing. About a minute later, he added, “Right now that violent impulse is a bigger problem on the left than the right.”
A Vance spokesperson did not answer our questions. When referring to left-wing violence, a White House spokesperson recently pointed to a September 28 Axios article about a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonprofit policy research organisation.
Democrats, calling your political opponents Nazis has consequences.
Study: Left-wing terrorism climbs to 30-year highhttps://t.co/30NvIj9nzC
The study found that “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right”. The study also showed that for the 30 years before 2025, right-wing attacks had outpaced left-wing violence.
“The rise in left-wing attacks merits increased attention, but the fall in right-wing attacks is probably temporary, and it too requires a government response,” the authors wrote in the study.
Vance’s statement oversimplified political violence and drew from part of one study of a six-month period. The federal government has no single, official definition of “political violence”, and ascribing ideologies such as the left wing and the right wing is sometimes complicated. There is no agreed upon number of left- or right-wing politically violent attacks.
Research before 2025 largely points to higher levels of right-wing violence over longer periods of time.
Trump has used the administration’s statements about rising left-wing violence to label antifa as a domestic “terrorist threat”, and administration officials also said they will investigate what they call left-wing groups that fund violence.
Although political violence is a small subset of violent crime in the US, it “has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy and deepen societal polarisation”, sociology professors at the University of Dayton, Arthur Jipson and Paul J Becker, wrote in September after Kirk’s assassination.
In an email interview with PolitiFact, Becker said the report in question “indicates there MAY be a shift occurring from the Right being more violent but 5 vs 1 incidents in 6 months isn’t enough to completely erase years of data and reports from multiple sources showing the opposite or to dictate new policies”.
The CSIS, a national security and defence think tank, published a September report examining 750 “terrorist” attacks and plots in the US between 1994 and July 4, 2025.
The report defined “terrorism” as the use or threat of violence “with the intent to achieve political goals by creating a broad psychological impact”.
The authors wrote that it is difficult to pinpoint some perpetrators’ ideologies, which in some cases are more of what former FBI Director Christopher Wray called a “salad bar of ideologies”. For example, Thomas Crooks, who allegedly attempted to assassinate Trump in 2024, searched the internet more than 60 times for Trump and then-President Joe Biden in the month before the attack.
The full CSIS report gave a more complete picture of politically motivated violence:
Studies have not uniformly agreed on some attackers’ ideological classifications. The libertarian Cato Institute categorised the person charged in the shooting deaths of two Israeli embassy staffers in May 2025 as “left-wing”, while the CSIS study described the motivation as “ethnonationalist”. Ethnonationalism is a political ideology based on heritage, such as ethnic identity, which can create clashes with other groups. The Cato study counted only deaths, while the CSIS analysis was not limited to deaths.
“While Vance’s statement has a factual anchor for that limited timespan, it selectively emphasises one short-term slice rather than the broader trend,” Jipson, of the University of Dayton, told PolitiFact. “In that sense, it can be misleading: It may give the impression that left-wing violence is generally now more dangerous or prevalent, which is not borne out by the longer view of the data.”
The Cato analysis, published after Kirk’s death, said 3,597 people were killed in politically motivated US “terrorist” attacks from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025.
Cato found right-wing attacks were more common than left-wing violence. This research has been highlighted by some House Democrats.
Wrong again, JD. The data is clear: for decades, right-wing extremism has been the greater threat.https://t.co/TkxBZ08Xjg https://t.co/PCWv4EuP4H
Cato wrote that during that period, “terrorists” inspired by what it called “Islamist ideology” were responsible for 87 percent of people killed in attacks on US soil, while right-wing attackers accounted for 11 percent and left-wing “terrorists” accounted for about 2 percent. Excluding the September 11, 2001 attacks showed right-wing attackers were responsible for a majority of deaths. Measuring homicides since 2020 also showed a larger number by the right than the left.
Vance said, “Political violence, it’s just a statistical fact that it’s a bigger problem on the left.”
He did not point to a source, but a White House spokesperson separately cited an article about a study that examined political violence from 1994 to July 4, 2025. It found that, in the first six months of 2025, left-wing attacks outnumbered those by the right. It is based on a small number of incidents: four attacks and one disrupted plot.
The study also showed that for 30 years before 2025, right-wing attacks had outpaced left-wing attacks.
The study detailed that the left wing “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers”. Research before 2025 largely points to higher levels of right-wing violence over longer periods of time.
The statement contains an element of truth because left-wing violence rose in the first six months of 2025. However, it ignores that right-wing violence was higher for a much longer period of time.
We rate this statement Mostly False.