Trump-era settlement growth proceeds in his absence
Trump-era settlement growth proceeds in his absence/node/2040281/middle-east
Trump-era settlement growth proceeds in his absence
A Palestinian woman holds up a national flag in front of burning tires during a protest against settlements in occupied territories in Burqa, West Bank. (AFP/File)
Trump-era settlement growth proceeds in his absence
Updated 10 March 2022
AP
JERUSALEM: The growth of Israel’s West Bank settler population accelerated last year, according to figures released by a pro-settler group on Thursday, despite renewed American pressure to rein in construction on occupied territory that the Palestinians want for a future state.
The figures show that a settlement surge initiated when President Donald Trump was in office shows no sign of slowing down.
Trump provided unprecedented support for Israel’s claims to land seized in war, reversing decades of US policy.
President Joe Biden’s administration has returned to the previous approach, criticizing settlement expansion as an obstacle to resolving the conflict. But Israel has continued to build and expand settlements, and major road projects are expected to bring even more settlers into the territory.
The statistics, compiled by WestBankJewishPopulationStats.com and based on official figures, show the settler population grew to 490,493 as of Jan. 30, a nearly 3.2 percent rise over 13 months. The population has risen by 16.5 percent since the group began compiling statistics in 2017, it says.
Israel’s overall annual growth rate, by comparison, is around 1.7 percent. In 2020, the last year of the Trump administration, which also saw repeated coronavirus lockdowns, the settler population in the West Bank grew by 2.6 percent, according to the group.
“There’s a tremendous amount of construction going on,” said its CEO, Baruch Gordon, including in his community of Beit El, just outside the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is headquartered.
“Right now there’s 350 units going up that will probably be finished within a year, year and a half. So when that hits, that’s going to increase the size of our town by about 25 percent,” he said.
The settler population tends to be younger and more religious, with a higher average birth rate. Many Israelis are drawn to the state-subsidized settlements for the quality of life.
They resemble suburbs or small towns and offer lower housing prices than Israel’s crowded and increasingly unaffordable cities. The pandemic might have made the settlements even more attractive.
“Just like in America, people moved out of Manhattan and went to suburbs and found that they could live in more open spaces, and the same is happening in Israel,” Gordon said.
His figures do not include East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed in a move not recognized internationally, and which is now home to more than 200,000 Jewish settlers. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are together home to some 3 million Palestinians.
Israel captured both territories, along with Gaza, in the 1967 Mideast war.
The Palestinians view the growth of settlements as the main obstacle to peace because they cut off Palestinian communities from their land and from one another, and make it nearly impossible to create a viable state. Settlements have expanded under every Israeli government, even at the height of the peace process in the 1990s.
There have been no serious peace negotiations in over a decade, and Israel’s current prime minister, Naftali Bennett, is a former settler leader opposed to Palestinian statehood.
Israel’s political system is dominated by pro-settler parties that view the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people.
The international community still considers a two-state solution to be the only realistic way of resolving the century-old conflict, but it has provided no incentive for Israel to end the occupation — now well into its sixth decade.
What the lifting of the RSF’s Kadugli siege means for Sudanese civilians
Sudanese Armed Forces advance raises hopes for aid access as famine and displacement grip South Kordofan
Analysts warn humanitarian relief remains fragile amid continued fighting, stalled talks, and volatile front lines
Updated 7 sec ago
Arab News
RIYADH: As Sudan’s devastating conflict approaches its third anniversary, the army announced on Tuesday that it has broken the years-long siege on Kadugli, the famine-stricken capital of South Kordofan, in what analysts say could signal a shift in the war’s momentum.
The army’s breakthrough, announced days after a similar advance in nearby Dilling, offered South Kordofan residents a reprieve from a deepening humanitarian crisis that had triggered mass displacement and widespread hunger, sparking hopes that aid could finally resume.
The oil-rich Kordofan region has become the latest front line in Sudan’s conflict, toward which the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shifted their focus after seizing El-Fasher, one of the army’s last strongholds in Darfur, last October.
Tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees are living in makeshift shelters at spontaneous refugee resettlements near the border town of Adré, Chad, with limited access to basic services. (UNHCR photo)
Joining forces with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, which controls stretches of territory in Kordofan and beyond, the Abu Dhabi-backed RSF tightened a blockade that had intermittently isolated Kadugli and Dilling since the war began.
The siege deepened the already dire famine conditions, later confirmed by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification in November, in the city and in El-Fasher.
Although the army’s recent operation has reopened the road between Kadugli and Dilling, aid organizations say sustained humanitarian access is still vulnerable to renewed fighting and insecurity in surrounding areas.
Mathilde Vu, the advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Sudan, said aid trucks have started arriving in Dilling, which is a “good sign.”
Infographic showing the location of Kadugli and Sudan's provinces affected by the ongoing civil war. (AFP/File)
“We hope this means more supplies into Kadugli soon,” she told Arab News, but warning that famine in the city will not be reversed overnight.
“Humanitarian access needs to be guaranteed immediately and permanently,” she said, calling for global pressure to ensure the warring parties abide by international law and not attack nor block entry of aid.
On Thursday, Mohanad El-Balal, co-founder of Khartoum Aid Kitchen, posted photos on X showing trucks of aid from Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commission heading to Kadugli.
However, humanitarian organizations and global hunger monitors warned that without a sustainable peace, the lifting of the siege on Kadugli and Dilling will offer only a temporary relief for civilians.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network says famine conditions will probably persist until May even though some commercial supplies have started reaching South Kordofan.
“Access is likely to be volatile as the area remains heavily contested, and joint RSF-SPLM-N forces are expected to seek to regain control,” the monitor said.
It noted that the arrival of large numbers of displaced people in rural areas around the Western Nuba Mountains near Dilling, combined with a troop buildup, insecurity, depleted harvests and restricted trade, could push conditions beyond famine thresholds by May.
Continued fighting in the area, even after the lifting of the siege, is expected to further impede aid efforts, warned humanitarian organizations.
Hours after the army entered Kadugli, the RSF launched a drone attack that hit a medical center in Kadugli, killing 15 people including seven children, according to Sudan Doctors Network, which tracks the war.
The next day, local media reported that a similar drone strike on a military hospital, attributed to the RSF-SPLM-N alliance, killed one and injured eight.
The fighting had already pushed more than 88,000 people to flee the Kordofan region since October, according to UN figures.
Aid agencies expect that figure to grow to 100,000 based on new reports of large-scale displacements in Al-Quoz, Habila, and Ar-Reif Ash Shargi in South Kordofan, as well as continued near-daily displacement out of Kadugli and Dilling.
On Thursday, the IPC issued an alert, confirming that famine has now spread to two cities in North Darfur — Um Baru and Kernoi. It projects that acute malnutrition will continue to spread in 2026, with nearly 4.2 million estimated cases compared with 3.7 million in 2025.
“Prolonged displacement, conflict, and erosion of health, water and food systems are expected to increase acute malnutrition and food insecurity,” the IPC said.
Although supply lines and access to the people of Kadugli and Dilling are expected to improve, it said the “conflict continues to drive displacement, looting, and severe disruptions to livelihoods, trade, access to services, and mutual and humanitarian aid.”
Regular shelling and drone strikes on civilian sites and infrastructure have caused conditions to deteriorate in both towns, the monitor added.
Against this backdrop, the US and UN co-hosted a fundraising event in Washington on Wednesday to appeal for aid for Sudan, launching a new Sudan Humanitarian Fund with $700 million.
However, this figure is a long way from meeting the $2.9 billion requested by the UN’s 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, which was only 5.5 percent funded as of Feb. 3. The 2025 plan received just 38.7 percent of what was needed.
While the military breakthrough in Kordofan is a significant development, observers cautioned that peace remains a distant prospect as mediation efforts stall and the warring parties continue to vie for control over different parts of the country.
The UN estimates more than 40,000 people have been killed since the war began and 14 million displaced, triggering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Both sides are accused of war crimes. In Darfur, the RSF has even been accused of genocide — and Abu Dhabi has been accused of backing the RSF.
Last year, a detailed report produced by Amnesty International provides evidence for the presence of UAE armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles in Sudan being used by the RSF in particular. Amnesty also accuses the RSF of war crimes.
The army now controls the capital Khartoum along with the northern, central and eastern regions, and the strategic Red Sea city Port Sudan. The army’s next objective is Darfur — the last region under RSF control.
Speaking to Reuters on Tuesday, Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said that advances on the battlefield had not alleviated civilian suffering.
“Every day we see new overloaded trucks with women and children fleeing fighting and starvation in South Kordofan to South Sudan, which is also in a deep economic crisis,” Egeland posted on X. “It is the worst crisis in the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world.”
Last month, the US and Saudi Arabia presented the Sudanese Armed Forces with the latest truce proposal. Speaking to reporters after the breakthrough on Tuesday, Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan said there would be no truce as long as the RSF occupies cities.
“We respond to all calls for peace and we respond to any call to end the war, but ending the war will not be at the expense of Sudanese blood,” he said. “There must be no truce that strengthens the enemy, no ceasefire should allow this militia to regain its strength.”
Analysts believe the army’s latest breakthroughs in Kadugli and Dilling are a sign that momentum is beginning to shift against the RSF.
Mariam Wahba, research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote on Thursday that the army’s victory has “weakened the RSF’s control over strategic population centers in South Kordofan by disrupting the rebel group’s supply lines.”
Another political analyst told Arab News that Kadugli’s liberation was “a strategic surprise by all measures,” overturning the balance of power and redrawing the map of control in western Sudan.
During Wednesday’s fundraiser in Washington, Massad Boulos, US senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, confirmed that the US has put forward a “comprehensive proposal” for a humanitarian truce that could be agreed on in the next few weeks.
He said that the plan had already gained the support of members of the Quad — comprising the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — which has been coordinating diplomatic efforts to end the war in Sudan.
However, for peace to succeed, Wahba said Washington must go beyond its current focus on humanitarian aid and ceasefire diplomacy by adopting a dual strategy of pressure and alignment.
She said the US should act to disrupt the RSF’s financial networks and arms supply chains to weaken its capacity to wage war, while applying pressure on the army, through sanctions or diplomatic isolation, to exclude hardline Islamists from its ranks.
Washington, she said, should leverage its ties in aligning efforts with regional powers — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and the UAE — around shared objectives such as preventing Sudan from becoming a safe haven for militias and transnational criminal networks.
“Coordinated pressure would provide Washington with greater leverage to shape ceasefire terms, marginalize spoilers, and influence Sudan’s postwar trajectory without direct US military involvement,” she said.
On Tuesday, Burhan vowed that he would liberate all Sudanese territory.
“I want to assure our people everywhere — in Al-Geneina, in Al-Tina, and in all other places — the army will reach them. The armed forces will reach them.”
To the people of Al-Fasher he said: “We are coming.”
