TUNIS: Tunisian authorities arrested another 150 people including local opposition leaders over unrest against price and tax rises that prompted troop deployments to restive towns, and activists called for renewed rallies at the weekend.
Protests, some violent, flared across Tunisia on Monday, when one protester was killed, before ebbing on Thursday. Protesters have burned dozens of state buildings, prompting the government to send the army into several cities and towns.
Activists and opposition politicians appealed for fresh demonstrations in the capital, Tunis, on Friday and on Sunday, the seventh anniversary of the toppling of authoritarian president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.
On Thursday, unrest was limited to sporadic clashes in the northern city of Siliana, in Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia and Douz in the south of the North African country.
“The protests have declined and there was no damage, but last night the police arrested 150 people involved in rioting in the past few days, bringing the total number of detainees to 778,” Interior Ministry spokesman Khelifa Chibani said. Sixteen extremists were among those detained, he said.
Three local leaders of the Popular Front, the main opposition bloc, were detained in Gafsa for allegedly setting fire to a government building, a judicial source said.
The Popular Front said its leaders had been targeted in a political campaign that was “reproducing the methods of the oppressive Ben Ali regime.” Party members had also been arrested in Mahdia and Karbariya, it said.
The protests draw on anger over price and tax increases included in this year’s budget that took effect on Jan. 1. The government has blamed the opposition and “troublemakers” for stoking unrest, a charge the opposition has denied. The government has vowed not to back down on the austerity measures, taken to satisfy foreign lenders.
Prices have increased for fuel and some consumer goods, while taxes on cars, phone calls, the Internet, hotel accommodation and other items have also gone up.
Tunisia appears to have little scope to back away austerity. The International Monetary Funds says Tunisia is committed to “decisive action” to reform its economy before the IMF reviews the payment of its next loan tranche.
Last year, the Washington-based IMF agreed a four-year loan program worth about $2.8 billion with Tunisia, but tied to economic reforms.
The 2018 budget also raises customs taxes on some imports, and the Tunis government is trying to cut the public sector wage bill through voluntary redundancies.
While Tunisia is held up by some as the only democratic success story among countries swept up in the Arab Spring, it has had nine governments since Ben Ali’s overthrow, none of which have been able to resolve deep-rooted economic problems.
Opposition leaders among 150 detained in Tunisia
Opposition leaders among 150 detained in Tunisia
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
