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Attacks on Palestinian communities by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, which are often supported by Israeli forces, have gathered pace over the past month since settlers from the Havat Gilad settlement attacked Palestinian homes on the eastern edge of Tal, southwest of Nablus.

On Sunday and Monday, the Israeli military raided multiple towns, villages and refugee camps across the occupied territory, and reports of arrests, home searches and settler attacks have continued to mount.

A 15-day siege on three families comprising 15 people, including two children, in the village of Qusra, which is ongoing, drew a rare public condemnation this month from the United States ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a staunch supporter of Israel and its West Bank settlements.

Israel is also pushing ahead with plans for the so-called E1 settlement expansion close to Jerusalem, which human rights organisations warn would essentially sever the West Bank in two, further hampering the freedom of movement of Palestinians on either side of it and endangering the possibility of a Palestinian state.

The West Bank attacks increasingly fit the definition of a pogrom, experts said. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese described these Israeli attacks against Palestinians as “pogroms against defenceless civilians”.

So why are experts calling settler attacks pogroms, and do they fit the formal definition of one?

What’s happening in the West Bank?

Settlers, frequently supported by the Israeli military, have been attacking Palestinian homes, businesses, and agricultural fields across the occupied West Bank. Such attacks have been commonplace for decades as settlements have expanded across the territory, but they gathered pace after October 7, 2023 when Israel launched it genocidal war on Gaza, and have become particularly violent and frequent over the past month.

Israeli settlements across the West Bank are illegal under international law.

According to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, however, Israeli settlers now number roughly 780,000 across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, living among 192 settlements and 400 outposts, rising to 71 percent of Area C, which is under full Israeli civil and military control, and 91 percent of the Jordan Valley.

Settlers often set up outposts without formal approval around Palestinian villages from which they launch a campaign of harassment, including killing livestock, cutting supply lines and damaging property, in order to drive local residents out. Once they establish a more formal settlement, they often receive retrospective approval from the Israeli government for the settlement.

In some places more recently, illegal settlers have laid siege to individual family homes – such as in the Ras al-Ein area of Qusra – cutting off water and other supplies and damaging orchards or harming livestock.

This has set a new pattern: settlers establish a tent adjacent to individual homes; Palestinians’ homes are besieged, with essentials cut off; and Israeli soldiers arrive not to remove the settlers, but rather to remove the family – through arrest or ostensibly for their “protection”.

In Qusra, the three besieged families were forced together into one of the family houses. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have occupied one of the other homes for use as a military post and thrown furniture and belongings from its windows, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

The UN humanitarian affairs office recorded more than 1,330 settler-related attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank between January and late July this year, averaging six a day and marking the fastest pace since the agency began systematic tracking two decades ago.

Separately, a UN-appointed commission of inquiry has found that the Israeli authorities have repeatedly failed to prevent foreseeable settler attacks and, in some cases, have directly enabled them through army protection and the provision of weapons and funding.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has found that settler attacks, demolitions and evictions forcibly displaced more Palestinians in the first four months of this year than in the whole of 2025.

OCHA reported that 107 communities, comprising 5,900 Palestinians, had been completely or partially displaced as a result of settler violence since January 2023. It also found that the Israeli military have expelled another 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank since January 2025, essentially emptying the Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams camps.

What is the definition of a pogrom?

Major US and UK dictionaries vary to some degree on the definition of a “pogrom”.

The British Collins Dictionary identifies a pogrom as “organised, official violence against a group of people for racial or religious reasons”, with a notable inclusion of official, or state-backed violence.

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary calls it “the organised killing of large numbers of people, because of their race or religion”, without mention of state-sanctioned violence.

Merriam-Webster says it is “an organised massacre of helpless people” – “specifically: such as a massacre of Jews”.

Cambridge Dictionary says it is “an act of organised cruel behaviour or killing that is done to a large group of people because of their race or religion”.

The word is understood to have been introduced via Yiddish and was at first used to describe the wave of violent, organised mob attacks on Jewish communities in the Russian Empire following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

It is important to note that unlike legal terms including “crimes against humanity” or “genocide,” “pogrom” has no established legal definition under international law.

Can attacks in the West Bank be referred to as pogroms?

Besides Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who has described Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as “pogroms against defenceless civilians”, Israeli officials themselves have described such attacks as “pogroms”.

On February 26, 2023, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked Huwara and surrounding Palestinian communities after two Israeli settlers were killed. A Palestinian was killed, hundreds were injured, and homes, businesses and cars were burned.

The Israeli military’s then-commander in the occupied West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs, called the settlers’ attack a “pogrom”, and it was also recorded as such by the US State Department.

Israeli-Palestinian human rights group B’Tselem has also previously described Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank as “pogroms”, especially after the February 2023 attacks. Later, it followed up with a report titled, “The pogroms are working – the transfer is already happening”, which argued that settler attacks were contributing to the displacement of Palestinian communities.

“Settler violence is not a new phenomenon. But over the past three years, it has become more violent, more systematic and, most importantly, part of a state mechanism intended to ethnically cleanse large parts of the West Bank,” said Yair Dvir, the spokesperson for B’Tselem.

“The government funds and arms the settlers, while the Israeli military stands by and, in many cases, actively participates in the attacks,” he told Al Jazeera. “So far, these militias have expelled 64 Palestinian communities and taken control of around one million dunams of land.”

Dvir also told Al Jazeera that the Israeli settlers are “now carrying out organised attacks on established Palestinian villages and towns in order to drive out their residents”.

“These are armed militias operating as an unofficial arm of the state, with a shared goal: to ethnically cleanse as much of the West Bank as possible,” he added.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which is named after Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who is credited with coining the term genocide after the Holocaust, referred to settler attacks on Al-Mughayyir, a Palestinian village in Ramallah, as “pogroms”, reporting that hundreds of armed settlers attacked residents and burned buildings and cars while soldiers stood by earlier this year. In 2025, the Israeli military uprooted thousands of Palestinian olive trees at Al-Mughayyir.

Raheel Dhattiwala, an Indian scholar who focuses on collective violence, told Al Jazeera: “West Bank attacks fit the characteristics of a pogrom – systematic targeting of one civilian group by another with state approval. A few senior Israeli army officers have called it ‘pogroms’ in the past too, for example after attacks in Huwara.

“One might want to debate the use of the term, ‘pogrom’, but it is accurate to call settler violence systematic attacks of occupiers, with government approval, on groups of occupied people.”

Ahmed Krim spent 30 years teaching English in Algeria’s middle schools. Now retired, the 60-year-old watched the language he loved remain firmly behind French as the country’s second language.

English was less valued than French, which might have been the language of Algeria’s coloniser, but continues to be present in every dialogue, six decades after independence.

On July 25 , Algeria’s Education Minister, Mohamed Seghir Saadaoui, announced that English will become the sole foreign language taught in the third year of primary school in the new academic year for 2026-2027.

French would be pushed back to the fourth year, ending its domination of foreign language classes in Algerian schools.

From next month, eight-year-olds across Algeria will become the first to learn English before French.

“It is a very good decision. But it requires thinking, planning and resources,” Krim told Al Jazeera.

It is among the first steps in President Abdelmadjid Tebboune’s linguistic overhaul for Algeria, which he first outlined in 2022 with English being introduced to primary schools.

Since then, medicine and science faculties have begun switching from French to English.

The French language has been erased from some utility bills and Air Algerie tickets. Road signs are beginning to feature English alongside Arabic, while government ministers’ websites will also have English as an option.

The shift from French to English as Algeria’s secondary language is both sweeping and structural.

It comes amid the most serious diplomatic crisis between the two countries since Algeria’s independence from France in 1962.

In July 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron publicly backed Morocco’s sovereignty claim over Western Sahara.

Algeria, which supports the Sahrawi Polisario Front and hosts over 170,000 Sahrawi refugees, viewed that as highly provocative.

That, and other issues, saw Algeria expel French diplomats, and vice versa.

Algeria’s replacement of French as the country’s second language accelerated after the diplomatic crisis grew.

A classroom without enough teachers

A rethink of the whole education system in Algeria may be needed.

“First and foremost, specialised training centres must be restored and candidates must not be forced into the teaching profession without wanting it – we need people who genuinely want to do this work,” Krim said.

He refers to dedicated institutes established after independence, where primary and middle school teachers, like himself, trained via a model that combined classroom instruction with direct school placements to meet the gap in Arabic instructors.

The centres operated until the late 1990s, when an economic crunch replaced them with the fewer and more selective Ecoles Normales Superieures.

Most teachers today are university graduates, but lack the practical, classroom-first grounding that the older model provided.

Krim said that school curricula must be designed and entrusted to “a qualified body that includes both linguistic and pedagogical expertise, free from all ideology”.

But journalist and analyst Noureddine Bessadi said the ideological dimension matters in Algeria, which overthrew colonialism following a bloody and bitter struggle against the French.

“Since independence in 1962, every shift in language policy has been fought as much on political as pedagogical grounds,” Bessadi told Al Jazeera.

After independence, Algeria’s Arabisation drive, when French was displaced from government and education, was “part of state building and enforcing Algeria’s identity, centring Arabic and Islam”, Bessadi added.

Tamazight, a non-Semitic language spoken by around a quarter of Algeria’s population, was marginalised until 1995, Bessadi said, shaped by an “ideological perception of unity that prioritised linguistic and cultural harmony”.

Critics argue that the transition from French to English is happening faster than the system can keep up with. For one, it is believed that there are not enough qualified English teachers to make the language reforms work.

But one source familiar with the matter told Al Jazeera that there are enough teachers to roll out this programme in primary schools and that any shortage could be filled through contractors.

In February, Algeria’s education ministry reportedly recruited about 15,000 English language teachers for primary schools.

Rafik Laceb, a lecturer in English at Mouloud Mammeri University in Tizi Ouzou, is cautiously optimistic about the primary school reform. But he considers the parallel push to teach university subjects in English to be rushed and poorly executed.

“Frankly, and beyond any chauvinism, I believe this decision is positive… I believe there is, today, sufficient supervision and evaluation work from the first experience,” Laceb said, in reference to the previous introduction of English in later primary school years.

The university experiment that began in 2023-2024 produced insufficient contact hours, a lack of genuine assessment of students’ English levels and no tracking of their progress.

Around 50 percent of teaching at Tizi Ouzou University’s English department is by younger contract staff, which brings other challenges.

“A young contract teacher must first master the basic principles of medicine before attempting to teach medical terminology in English,” he said.

Levelling the playing field

Currently, children only begin learning a foreign language in the third year of state primary schools, whereas multiple languages are taught at private schools from kindergarten.

Djamel Merah, whose daughter attended private schools before transferring to public secondary school, studied Arabic, French and English simultaneously from kindergarten level.

Merah welcomes the government’s language reforms at state primary schools, which will provide more children with the opportunity to learn English.

“It addresses a question about the gap in opportunities between children who get multilingual education from the start and those in public schools who don’t get the same chance,” he said.

Shakespeare’s rising shelf space

There also appears to be a more organic response among the public that precedes the government’s promotion of the English language.

Krimo Taleb, a bookseller at the Libre Pensee bookshop in Tizi Ouzou, has seen a growth in English-language book sales, particularly among female readers.

“In my opinion, it has nothing to do with government decisions. The majority of young readers today speak three languages fluently,” he said.

His own daughter, a middle school student, reads fluently in Arabic, English and French.

Colleen Hoover, Ana Huang and J. K. Rowling are some of the best-selling authors at his shop.

“Previously, our bookshops provided for English literature students the works of Shakespeare,” Taleb says. “Today, there is a diverse range of English-language titles aimed at the general public.”

However, French remains Algeria’s most influential foreign language. According to the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF), Algeria has approximately 15 million French speakers, nearly a third of its population.

There is not a single newspaper published in English and written English by Algerians remains in its infancy.

But there are signs that former colonies are turning their backs on France’s linguistic legacy, particularly in Africa, where Paris’s military and political presence made a resurgence in recent decades.

In March 2025, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso withdrew from the OIF, accusing it of being a political instrument of Paris.

“Mali made its national languages official in 2023, demoting French to a working language. Burkina Faso followed the same year and Niger in 2025,” Bessadi added. “Even Senegal, which has not removed French as an official language, has begun encouraging local languages at its expense.”

For Krim, Algeria’s linguistic ambitions are not far-fetched, but for it to work, the country needs the “necessary resources… and transparency”.

New Delhi, India – An investigation by human rights group Amnesty International has confirmed that Indian government forces used lethal weapons, including pellet-firing shotguns, grenades, batons and electric shock devices against demonstrators in Gen Z protests that rocked the national capital last month.

On July 20, thousands of protesters had all but shut down New Delhi, blocking off Parliament Street, demanding the resignation of then-Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan following a string of examination scandals involving the leaking of national exam papers and other irregularities.

More than 100 students were injured in the crackdown by police and paramilitary forces that day. Indian newspapers obtained hospital records that showed that doctors had treated pellet wounds in several cases.

India’s opposition, led by Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, has since called on Home Minister Amit Shah, seen as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s confidant, to answer questions about the alleged police brutality and has joined protesters in calling for his resignation.

But despite mounting evidence and growing political criticism, the Modi government repeatedly insisted that security forces had been measured in their response to the protests and denied using excessive force.

Now, an Amnesty investigation has found the use of tactics that Indian law enforcement rulebooks themselves warn against using in all but exceptional circumstances.

What happened on July 20 in New Delhi?

In July, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical, youth-led movement which gathered momentum in response to the national examinations scandal, called on its supporters to march on the Indian Parliament after a monthlong sit-in failed to oust the education minister.

Two days before the march, the police forcibly removed renowned activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been taking part in a hunger strike. That move galvanised public anger, bringing out more protesters in New Delhi.

On the morning of the march day, the police used tear gas as protesters swelled, then attacked them with electric shock batons, as well as shooting at them with pellet guns, Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab has verified from video and photographic evidence alongside witness testimony.

Amnesty also found that government forces had put up barricades and enforced a communications blackout.

“The weapons were deployed in a manner that breached international law and standards and domestic policing guidelines,” Amnesty said in a statement on Monday.

The rights group’s report also noted that the Delhi Police had publicly denied any disproportionate use of force, specifically pellet guns. The police also repeated this before India’s top court during a hearing about the alleged use of excessive force.

Amnesty says the evidence it has gathered “directly contradicts [the police’s] account”.

Four days after the July 20 march, as protests spread across the country, police in Bihar state’s Siwan town opened fire on protesters, injuring at least three youths.

Did government forces fire pellets at protesters?

Following the July 20 protest, several videos and photos emerged of protesters with injuries consistent with pellet wounds, which were reflected in their medical records as well.

The Evidence Lab verified two videos showing a paramilitary Rapid Action Force officer firing a shotgun into the crowd at the intersection of Connaught Place and Parliament Street in New Delhi, where protesters had gathered.

At least two protesters had wounds consistent with those caused by birdshot, a hunting round that fires a large number of small metal pellets, the group noted.

“The doctors confirmed that they were pellet injuries. Thankfully, my bones have been saved, but my body has been scarred badly,” one protester told Amnesty.

Amnesty said birdshot ammunition has not been developed for law enforcement purposes due to the widespread dispersion of the metal pellets, which “is inherently inaccurate and presents a high risk of serious injuries to the targeted person and even bystanders”.

Amnesty also said the police did not issue a public warning before firing pellet guns, as recommended by the Indian government’s Bureau for Police Research and Development.

Police and security forces have used metal pellets for more than a decade in Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to the first mass blinding during a 2016 civilian uprising.

Posting on X, Delhi Police called the reports of pellet injuries during the latest protests “fake news”, “completely false and misleading” and warned that “appropriate legal action” would be taken against anyone “spreading rumours”.

A subsequent internal inquiry by India’s paramilitary forces, however, reportedly found that personnel had fired at least seven rounds of ammunition containing metal pellets.

“Instead of facilitating the right to protest, Indian authorities suppressed it first with a communication blackout, barricades and transport disruption. They then attempted to crush it with unnecessary or excessive use of force against peaceful protesters, including children,” said Aakar Patel, chair of the board, Amnesty International India.

“This heavy-handed response was state-sanctioned violence masked as crowd control. The continued impunity after a month is a testament to that,” Patel said.

Did police use tear gas grenades and batons?

Government forces did use tear gas grenades to disperse the crowd at several places in New Delhi, as seen by Al Jazeera and verified by Amnesty, not just on July 20 to prevent CHP supporters’ march to Parliament.

“Tear gas grenades releasing an excessive amount of explosive energy are extremely dangerous and should be prohibited for use in public assemblies,” Amnesty said, referring to videos of tear gas shells exploding near students.

The group also noted that witnesses observed that “tear gas grenades were launched directly at protesters instead of at an angled trajectory above the head of protesters, at odds with UN Guidance on the use of Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement”.

Amnesty has also verified claims that the police used lathis, the Indian version of batons, to beat protesters.

The UN special rapporteur on torture considers lathis to be inherently cruel, inhuman or degrading as “they deliver a greater level [of] kinetic force than conventional batons, causing excessive pain and increasing the risk of serious injury” and has called for them to be prohibited, a position that Amnesty supports.

The group also found men in civilian clothing beating protesters “while uniformed officers, who escorted them toward the crowd, stand beside them and make no attempt to intervene”, as visible in videos seen by Al Jazeera. Several officials were not wearing their name tags or badge numbers, as required.

What has been the reaction to the use of excessive force?

A day after the crackdown in New Delhi, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke told the crowd, “Every police person who attacked you would be identified and dragged to the courts”.

The group also launched a platform for protesters to upload videos and photos from the crackdown.

The opposition, led by the Congress’s Gandhi, pushed the home minister for a discussion on the issue in Parliament, an issue that plagued the monsoon session with Shah missing.

Gandhi argued that either Shah ordered the usage of lethal weapons, in which case “he is guilty”, or he was unaware of the situation, which makes him “incompetent” for the job.

Sahil Lochab, a 19-year-old who lost vision in one eye due to pellet injuries, said the police had been refusing to register his complaint. In response, Gandhi staged a seven-hour sit-in outside the office of the Delhi Police chief, insisting that a case be registered over the use of pellet guns on protesters, alongside Lochab.

After Gandhi’s pressure, the police relented. A student at the University of Delhi, Lochab received multiple pellet injuries on his chest, back, arms and face. Several pellets could not be taken out, he said in his complaint.

“My medical documents show that there are over 200 pellets in my body. Doctors have told me that the possibility of my eyesight coming back is less than 1 percent,” Lochab wrote in his complaint.

Naivasha, Kenya – For communities living around Naivasha, water is not an abstract resource. It sustains families, livestock, farms and schools.

That reality has taken on new significance after plans for a major Microsoft-G42 data centre in Olkaria, near Lake Naivasha, stalled in May 2026 over concerns about available power capacity.

Microsoft and United Arab Emirates-based artificial intelligence company G42 announced the project in 2024 as part of a $1bn digital investment package for Kenya. The proposed facility was to run on geothermal energy and eventually scale to as much as 1 gigawatt of capacity.

The uncertainty has also prompted questions about what another major industrial user could mean for water in a region where residents already report shortages.

Microsoft and G42 said the proposed data centre campus would run entirely on renewable geothermal energy and incorporate water conservation technology. The companies did not disclose a project-specific water consumption figure in their 2024 announcement.

Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) communications director Frank David Ochieng told Al Jazeera that the data centre remains at the design stage and that he could not comment further until the project is ready to proceed.

For residents like Musa Olorkedienye, who spoke to Al Jazeera, water scarcity is already a daily concern. He says communities around Olkaria have seen changes in access to water, including the loss of reliable piped supplies that residents previously received from KenGen.

“Currently, we are relying on water vendors to get water, our animals are walking for kilometres, and we fear things could get worse as demand for water rises,” Olorkedienye says.

Pastoralist Isaac Leshishi, who also spoke to Al Jazeera, says increasingly harsh weather is adding to the pressure.

Why Olkaria?

The choice of Olkaria was closely tied to energy. The area is home to Kenya’s major geothermal operations, making it an attractive location for a power-intensive facility.

KenGen operates the Olkaria geothermal complex, while Microsoft and G42 planned to power the proposed data centre entirely with geothermal energy.

A lake under pressure

Naivasha is a freshwater lake in Kenya’s Rift Valley whose catchment supports agriculture, tourism, livestock and domestic water use. Its basin also hosts geothermal development and other economic activity.

Grace Kimani, a patrol leader with Lake Naivasha and Oloiden, told Al Jazeera that the reservoir is under growing pressure from population growth, agriculture, water abstraction, climate variability, pollution and ecosystem degradation.

“The planned Microsoft-G42 data centre in Olkaria could bring jobs and investment, but its water demand raises concerns about adding pressure to already competing needs, particularly during dry periods,” she said.

Kimani said there is limited public information about the project’s expected water demand, source and cooling technology. She said transparency and an assessment of its cumulative impact on water resources would be important.

She also called for water-efficient or water-free cooling, water recycling and the use of treated wastewater, as well as sustainable abstraction limits and community involvement in monitoring.

Silas Wanjala of the Lake Naivasha Riparian Association, who spoke to Al Jazeera, said the region is heavily dependent on groundwater and that declining water flows are adding to the pressure.

“These industries, especially EcoCloud, which deal with data, will consume a lot of water at a time when rivers are drying, and demand for water is on the rise,” Wanjala said.

Olkaria EcoCloud Data Centre is a local partner in the G42-led development. In 2024, the Kenya News Agency reported that G42, Microsoft and EcoCloud signed a letter of intent for the wider data-centre initiative, with EcoCloud described as a local partner that had previously signed a memorandum of understanding with G42.

Wanjala points to past fluctuations in Lake Naivasha as a warning.

“This lake in 2010 nearly dried up due to over-abstraction, and this could be repeated due to high demand for water by these investors in Olkaria,” he says.

His concern comes against a wider backdrop of water scarcity in Kenya. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations says Kenya has about 527 cubic metres (527,000 litres) of freshwater available per person, below the 1,000-cubic-metre threshold for water scarcity, and estimates availability could fall to about 475 cubic metres per person by 2030.

The figures do not show what effect the proposed data centre would have on Lake Naivasha. They provide context, however, for why the prospect of another major water user is drawing scrutiny in a region where demand is already high.

How much water would it use?

The amount of water the proposed Microsoft-G42 facility itself would require remains unclear.

The project announcement provides no projected consumption figure.

Existing industrial use offers some context.

A KenGen environmental and social impact assessment records that 195,165 cubic metres of water were abstracted from Lake Naivasha in July 2023 for domestic and commercial uses at Olkaria and for operations and domestic use at Eburru.

Of that total, 153,918 cubic metres were used for commercial operations at Olkaria. The assessment records the abstraction as within Water Resources Authority (WRA) permitted levels.

Those figures relate to existing KenGen operations, not the proposed data centre.

For farmer Eskimos Kobia, who spoke to Al Jazeera, the potential competition extends beyond households and livestock. He says farmers, pastoralists, schools and investors will all face greater pressure as demand increases.

Kimani said climate variability has also led to fluctuations in lake levels, with periods of flooding followed by prolonged dry conditions.

“Water quality is affected by agricultural run-off, untreated wastewater in some areas and invasive species,” she says.

Investment versus local concerns

Not everyone in Naivasha opposes the investment.

Absolom Mukhuusi of the Naivasha Professional Association, who spoke to Al Jazeera, says the technology sector could bring jobs, infrastructure and new businesses to the area. But he says economic benefits should not come at the expense of local communities.

“Even as we welcome the investors, our biggest fear is what happens to our water bodies and communities as water is diverted to Olkaria for the heavy users,” he says.

Could technology help?

Geologist Kenyatta Otieno, who spoke to Al Jazeera, sees another potential benefit.

He recalls the pressure large flower farms once placed on the lake’s ecosystem, saying many have since left or scaled back their operations.

Otieno says the proposed centre would have included a resource centre to monitor lake levels and weather patterns. Such monitoring, he says, could help identify the highest water level over time and guide riparian land zoning.

“The centre being built with water conservation in mind would be futuristic as Naivasha is generally a water-scarce area. It would be a model for future development,” Otieno said.

Kenya already has regulators responsible for managing competing demands. The WRA regulates water abstraction and issues water-use permits, while the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) oversees environmental impact assessments under the country’s environmental regulatory framework.

Attempts by Al Jazeera to obtain comments from WRA and NEMA officials were unsuccessful. Efforts to reach Microsoft-G42 officials and Kenyan government officials for comment on the project’s status and water requirements were also unsuccessful.

For now, the project’s eventual scale, design and water requirements remain unclear, according to KenGen.

“We are now competing with the multibillion [-dollar] companies for water, and we fear that we shall be the losers in the long run,” Leshishi said.

Germany splits

At least two generations on both Guetinger’s maternal and paternal sides were from Babenhausen, a small Bavarian market town of about 4,000 people in the 1960s. Surrounded by a castle, it was once home to a merchant family said to have been prominent during the Middle Ages.

Guetinger’s father, Ernst, was among five siblings and the youngest of the three boys. Hans was the eldest, followed by another brother, Erich, and there was a four-year age gap between Ernst and Hans. Guetinger said this age difference played a role in his father’s and uncle’s relationship.

“My dad and uncle Hans didn’t have a very close relationship because they had grown up during wartime,” he said. “When war broke out in 1939, Uncle Hans was obliged to serve as a soldier.”

Soldiers were in short supply, so German boys aged 16 and 17 were drafted as “Flakhelfer” to work with anti-aircraft guns or man the huge lights that tracked enemy aircraft.

“My Uncle Erich was in this age range so served in this role, but my dad, being the youngest, did not have to serve,” he added.

After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, the country was divided into occupation zones and then formally split into two separate countries in 1949.

Hans returned to Babenhausen, Bavaria, after the war and looked for work as a shoemaker. But jobs were scarce, and he had trouble finding work.

Amid their struggles, Hans’s homesick wife encouraged him to try finding work in the GDR, where she was from. They knew they would be welcomed, because the GDR was keen on people willing to buck the trend of those going west – roughly 2.7 million people moved to West Germany between 1949 and 1961 – for better economic and employment opportunities.

In 1958, Hans’s family moved east to Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near the Polish border, where Hans started working at a power station that also provided their accommodation. He was also able to indulge in his love of hunting as much as he liked.

“He was very happy hunting,” Guetinger remembered fondly. “In West Germany, you could only hunt if you owned land, but since the government owned all the land in the GDR, my uncle was told he could hunt wherever he wanted.”

Hans became so well known for his hunting abilities that when the big cadres wanted to celebrate something and eat some tasty meat like boar or wild swine, they would ask Hans to go hunting.

“The party had its own hunters, but they considered my uncle one of the best,” Guetinger said.

Meanwhile, Hans’s younger brother Ernst, back in Bavaria, became a father to Erich Guetinger in 1951.

In the 1950s, freedom of movement between the two countries remained largely unrestricted, but from the 1960s onwards, tougher measures were instituted. After that, East Germans were generally only allowed to travel to the West for urgent family matters, such as funerals or weddings.

In August 1961 – 65 years ago – the East German government began building the Berlin Wall, a 155km (96 miles) concrete structure surrounding West Berlin that effectively isolated it within GDR territory and severed the capital.

Outside Berlin, efforts to fortify the division led to the installation of new barbed wire fences, detectors, watchtowers, as well as booby-traps and extended powers for border guards to shoot and arrest escapees. Between then and 1989, when the wall came down, an estimated 75,000 people were imprisoned for trying to escape.

Guetinger says that in the early years of the division, there was barely any contact with his uncle and family.

“Eventually, we were able to start sending letters, but we shared very little in these because everybody knew the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, would carefully check the post between families, often reading our letters,” he said.

Like many families in West Germany, the Guetingers would often send Western products to their relatives in the East.

“For Christmas, we made parcels containing things we knew they would like, and which we knew it would be difficult for them to get, such as coffee and blue jeans,” Guetinger said.

“Blue jeans were particularly hot property, and my cousins liked this kind of clothing. And even though we would send parcels, there was always a chance that they wouldn’t reach them,” he explained, noting that shipments were closely monitored.

Guetinger says it is still hard to fully assess how the day-to-day disruption caused by the division impacted their family’s sense of safety and unity.

“Even if my parents had a heavy heart back then, they would rarely talk about it, so today, I have to rely on other indicators to try and understand. And one of the indicators is that my dad and his elder brother tried to visit each other as soon as it was possible for both of them.”

A day after a suspected Israeli attack on the Abu al-Duhur airbase near Idlib, northwest Syria, US Ambassador to Turkiye Tom Barrack has suggested creating a “deconfliction mechanism” between Turkiye, Syria and Israel. Barrack called the original attack – which he, along with the Syrian government, blamed on Israel – an “unnecessary escalation”.

But despite the intervention from the US official, analysts believe the proposal may not be able to stop Israel, which has conducted regular attacks on Syria for years, and continues to occupy Syrian territory.

“It is difficult to have a deconfliction mechanism [when] only one party [is] causing conflict in the first place,” Samy Akil, a senior adviser with The Syria Report, told Al Jazeera.

Analysts and diplomatic sources say that Israel is the party holding back progress on talks and the easing of tensions with Syria, which is under a new government since the overthrow of former President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. At the end of a more than decade-long war, Syria is now seeking better relations with the West.

“Israeli-Syrian talks are stagnating because the ball is in Israel’s court and they don’t see a need to prioritise talks with Damascus currently,” Akil said.

Turkiye and Israel trade verbal shots

Under the former al-Assad regime, Israel often attacked Iranian-aligned targets or interests in Syria – including the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April 2024 – but avoided directly attacking Syrian state targets.

That changed when al-Assad fled in the early hours of December 8, 2024. Israel attacked Syria’s military infrastructure around the country, aiming to cripple the new government’s military forces. It also threatened the post-Assad military with deploying forces south of Damascus.

And since the fall of al-Assad, Israel has also shifted focus from Iranian influence in Syria to Turkish influence in the country. The Turks backed a number of anti-Assad rebel groups, many Syrians in exile spent considerable time in Turkiye, and Ankara has sought to build strong ties with Damascus and Syria’s new President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Analysts told Al Jazeera that Tuesday’s attack was in fact a message from Tel Aviv directed at the halls of power in Ankara.

On Tuesday evening, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement that seemed to confirm that suspicion, while it stopped short of claiming responsibility for the actual attack.

“Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo,” the statement said.

“Israel repeatedly warned Syria that such a deployment would pose a threat to Israel’s security. Syria chose to ignore these warnings.”

Turkiye has slammed the Israeli account of events.

“The untenable allegations put forward by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office are intended to legitimise Israel’s unlawful airstrikes targeting Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the Republic of Turkiye’s Directorate of Communications said.

It also accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of pursuing “expansionist and destabilising policies in the region ahead of the elections in Israel”.

Israeli provocations in Syria

Enter US Ambassador Barrack and the idea of a deconfliction mechanism. This would act as a channel of communication between the concerned actors – Syria, Turkiye and Israel. It would be facilitated by the US, and would aim to prevent military escalations.

The strategy appears to be similar to what the US is trying to build in Lebanon between Beirut and Tel Aviv. That deal is aimed at stopping Israeli attacks on Lebanon, disarming Hezbollah, and convincing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon. However, experts say these processes have yet to show results, largely because of Israel’s military superiority and the Netanyahu government’s willingness to undermine negotiations through unilateral military actions.

For its part, the Syrian government has shown a strong willingness to find a solution with Israel, even if it has emphasised that it is not willing to agree to full normalisation.

That is despite the Israeli landgrab of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and Jabal al-Sheikh in December 2024, and the continued deployment of checkpoints that harass and at times kidnap Syrian citizens.

Early on Wednesday morning, Israeli troops reportedly conducted a raid on Quneitra in southwestern Syria and abducted two people.

Analysts say that for any deconfliction mechanism to work, all parties must be committed to working towards the goal.

“In other words, at what point does a deconfliction mechanism provide added value when any sort of Syrian military buildup 300 kilometres [186 miles] away from Israeli borders is perceived as a threat?” Akil said, adding that Syria’s small Soviet-era air force would not “seriously pose a threat to Israel”.

Netanyahu’s re-election escalation

Galip Dalay, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, told Al Jazeera that for any mechanism to work, the US would need to apply pressure on Netanyahu’s government.

Dalay said Netanyahu, who is running for re-election in October, is likely looking for an escalation with either Lebanon or Syria – or in Palestine – after US President Donald Trump pressured Israel to back down in the war on Iran.

But earlier in August, Netanyahu explicitly rejected the Gaza disarmament plan announced by Trump, forcing it to be altered – and did not receive any public pushback from the US.

“If the US puts proper pressure on Israel, they would listen,” Dalay said. “We saw this with Iran. It was the US who made the decision, and even though Netanyahu didn’t like it, they had to go along with the decision.”

Dalay added: “The question is not only about if there is a need for a deconfliction mechanism in Syria; it is to what extent the US is willing to make it credible and functional, and if the US is willing to put pressure on Israel.”

New Delhi, India – In a crowded ward of New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), India’s premier public hospital, a mother sits quietly beside her 29-year-old son, Piyush Singh*.

Diagnosed with stomach cancer a year ago, Singh has already undergone five rounds of chemotherapy. He now lies in the hospital’s palliative care unit, where the goal is no longer to cure the disease but to relieve pain and preserve his dignity.

“The world comes to AIIMS when they are not well. But where shall we go?” asks his mother. “My son has already received five doses of chemotherapy, but his condition has not improved. The doctors are not telling us anything. I don’t know what to do next.”

Piyush’s family is not asking for his life to end. They simply don’t know what comes when treatment fails.

A few floors away, Aryan* has come to AIIMS from Auraiya, a small town in Uttar Pradesh state, to accompany his 40-year-old brother Amit (name changed), who has been battling mouth cancer for four years. Two surgeries, radiation and two rounds of chemotherapy later, doctors say there is little hope of him surviving. The final checkup has been done. There is nothing more left to try.

“There is no duvidha [dilemma in Hindi],” says Aryan. “The doctors have said no. So it is clear now.”

He plans to take Amit to his rented flat in Gurgaon and give him whatever painkillers he has been prescribed. Beyond that, he has no plan, because no one has given him one.

“I don’t know about palliative care. I don’t know how to ease his pain. I have nothing apart from the medicines I got today,” he said.

Piyush and Amit are no exceptions. They represent a reality that many Indians are coming to terms with – with little institutional help.

India recorded an estimated 1.56 million new cancer cases in 2024, according to an Indian Council of Medical Research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But cancer patients are not alone. Families of patients with traumatic brain injuries and degenerative neurological conditions also hit the same wall.

According to a 2025 analysis by ecancermedicalscience, an open-access medical journal, an estimated seven to 10 million people require palliative care in India, but only about 4 percent receive it.

Such families find themselves with little or no awareness or preparedness for what comes next. Many have never heard of palliative care, or that the law gives them the right to document their treatment preferences before a crisis arrives.

The problem is also rooted in how many Indians confront death – a phenomenon that is one of the least-discussed subjects within families or societies. In many households, conversations about dying are considered inauspicious.

In such a worldview, to think of interventions in how or when someone dies carries a moral weight that goes beyond medicine or law. Families often avoid discussing medical wishes until a loved one is critically ill, leaving relatives to make deeply personal decisions during moments of grief and uncertainty.

From caregiving to court

The answers are increasingly being shaped not just by medicine, but also by the law.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court recognised that the “right to die with dignity” was part of the fundamental right to life, enshrined in Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.

The court also allowed such patients to record their wishes about life-sustaining treatment if they lose the capacity to decide in an advanced stage of their ailment.

The top court’s ruling was in response to a petition filed by Common Cause, an NGO, which called for legal procedures allowing terminally ill individuals to execute Advance Medical Directives, commonly known as “living wills”, to refuse life-prolonging medical treatment.

A living will is a legal document that highlights an individual’s preferences for medical treatment when they cannot voice their choices. The provision allows them to nominate a loved one to decide for them.

“It [judgement] broadens the scope of Article 21. It now affirms, kind of completely, that the right to life includes the right to die with dignity. That is the bottom line for us,” Vipul Mudgal, director of Common Cause, the organisation behind the 2005 petition, told Al Jazeera.

Yet, for most Indians, that right largely existed on paper – until six years later.

In 2024, a family in Ghaziabad, an industrial district on the outskirts of New Delhi, filed a petition in the Delhi High Court and later in the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the fate of a 32-year-old patient who was in a vegetative state for nearly 13 years.

Harish Rana’s case was a first in India where passive euthanasia, or withdrawal of life support, was permitted by the top court. On March 11, the Supreme Court directed the withdrawal of his life support at AIIMS, New Delhi. He passed away two weeks later.

But the journey from caregiving to courtroom was not easy.

Rana’s family managed his feeding tube, tracheostomy and urine bag every day for 13 years, and it had drained them.

“A family reaches such a decision when it sees no scope for improvement. Harish Rana could not speak, we were his voice,” Rana’s father Ashok told Al Jazeera. “He was not in that state for 13 days or 13 months, but for 13 years.”

All those years, said Ashok, he watched his son breathe but not recover, with only one question on his mind: “I am around 63 years old, and my wife is 58 years old. If something happens to either of us, who would take care of him?”

That is when they decided to approach the court.

While the Rana case is a landmark, experts say it is unlikely to set an immediate precedent in a country where death is an uncomfortable topic. That is why, despite being legalised in 2018, living wills remain uncommon and largely unheard of.

As a result, terminally ill patients do not discuss their wishes while they still can, and families end up making decisions for them without preparation or guidance.

A 2019 survey across seven cities, including New Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, by Healthcare at Home (HCAH), a health advocacy group, found that 73 percent of urban Indians were unaware of their right to a living will. Even among people aware of their right, only 6 percent had actually drafted such a will.

“The Harish Rana case was made more complex because there was no living will,” said Manish Jain, the lawyer who represented the family in court. “Living will clinics are absent across India.”

There are only two such clinics in India. The first opened in Mumbai last year, followed by one in New Delhi – both operated by private hospitals, which are beyond the reach of most Indians.

Fears of misuse of living wills

Concerned over a likely misuse of living wills, the Supreme Court made its guidelines complex. However, in the process, the court ended up making it difficult to navigate for most people.

To make a living will legally valid, an individual would sign it before two witnesses and get it countersigned by a magistrate. If the patient later became terminally ill, the treating doctor would be required to form a board of specialists with at least 20 years of experience each, whose findings then had to go to a district magistrate, who would form a second medical board. Only after both boards agreed could the process move forward, and any disagreement meant the matter went to the regional High Court.

In 2019, the Indian Society for Critical Care Medicine, a nonprofit group of physicians, approached the Supreme Court, arguing its guidelines were unworkable. In 2023, a five-judge top court bench simplified the process, removing the requirement of a magistrate’s countersignature, reducing the minimum medical experience requirement for review boards from 20 years to five, and allowing multiple nominees instead of one.

“Decisions are being made every day, sometimes by the family members, sometimes by the doctors, sometimes because of paucity of money,” said Mudgal.

He said if the families, doctors and courts can make end-of-life decisions for an individual, why cannot the individuals make those decisions for themselves? This recognition, while respecting individual autonomy, also relieves family members from the guilt of deciding for their loved one, he added.

“If there is no meaning left in life, somebody is kept alive artificially, just beating the heart with some mechanical device, that life has no meaning,” he said.

Yet, such questions remain unanswered by law. Living wills and the right to die exist entirely through judicial interpretation. There is no parliamentary law governing the same.

“There is no framework [of parliamentary law] passed by the parliament,” Jain said. “The Supreme Court of India itself requested the government to pass legislation regarding this issue,” he added, first in 2018 and again in 2023.

But lack of a law is only one part of the challenge.

For families, the absence of palliative care means little or no guidance on what comes after treatment options run out. Even families like Piyush’s, who have access to palliative care, don’t know what comes next.

“There are many patients like this who don’t have legal awareness of passive euthanasia. Not only patients, but their doctors also do not have full awareness about palliative care,” Dr Saipriya Tewari, principal consultant and unit head of pain management and palliative care at Max Super Speciality Hospital in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera.

She said families often look confused when told there is no treatment left, and that they should take the patient home.

“What will they do after taking the patient home? Nobody tells them. It is only discussed if the palliative care doctor is involved in the treatment,” Tewari said. “And even if the end is coming, then how do we maintain dignity in time? That is the question.”

Piyush’s mother has a different question.

“If he is sick, then we have to get treatment. We have to do something to keep him alive. What should we do? We are not able to think of a way out of this. Nobody is giving us any suggestions about where to go.”

*Names changed to protect the identity of the patients and their families.

Beirut, Lebanon – Not long after the fall of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the new government was keen to hunt down members of the former regime.

Al-Assad and his brother fled the country hours before the capital Damascus fell to the advancing armed opposition, leaving many top officials and military commanders to fend for themselves.

Many of them reportedly fled and crossed to neighbouring Lebanon where some top officials were spotted openly in capital, Beirut.

Now the Syrian government is trying to get them extradited for war crimes committed during the uprising, which began in 2011.

“We are seeking to boost the international judicial cooperation to pursue members of the former regime and extradited to Syria to complete judicial procedures and process,” judge Mustafa al-Qassem, an aide to the Syrian justice minister, said in an interview with state television.

Former officials felt they were safe in Lebanon due to their close connections with Hezbollah or their network with figures in Lebanon’s military. Some had built connections in Lebanon over the years, including during Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2005.

But that’s no longer the case.

Adel Issa, a former major general in al-Assad’s Syrian Army, was arrested recently in Lebanon after staff at the Syrian embassy reportedly tipped off authorities after he came in to do paperwork. A top Lebanese prosecutor announced on Tuesday that Issa would be extradited to Syria to face trial due to alleged crimes he committed during his military service.

But there are other former al-Assad regime officials who are in Lebanon and whom Syrian authorities also want returned to face justice.

Last week, al-Assad, his brother Maher and his cousin Atef Najib were all sentenced to death by a Damascus court. Bashar and Maher al-Assad were sentenced in absentia because they are in exile in Moscow, where they fled after the regime fell.

Their presence in Russia likely protects them from extradition. But the case brings to attention important issues about remaining regime figures in Lebanon and their potential extradition to Syria.

Regime officials in Lebanon

On December 8, 2024, the five-decade reign of the al-Assad regime ended when Bashar left Damascus for Moscow. As rebels entered Damascus, al-Assad fled without telling many of his top officials who then had to sort out their own escapes.

Sources with knowledge of the whereabouts of former regime members said the top figures – such as the al-Assads or the former head of the National Security Bureau Ali Mamlouk – are in Moscow or the United Arab Emirates.

However, Jamil al-Hassan, the former head of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, is thought to be in Lebanon. Last year, media reports suggested that Syria and France have called on Lebanon to arrest and extradite al-Hassan.

Aside from him, Bassam al-Hassan, a former Republican Guard commander who was in al-Assad’s inner circle, was tracked down to a Beirut apartment by a US broadcaster last year. He had been responsible for procuring weapons and liaising with Syria’s chemical weapons programme, which the regime used against its own people.

Hezbollah’s role

Syrian and European sources intimately familiar with the details said most former regime officials still in Lebanon are now in Tripoli’s Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood or in parts of the northern region of Akkar, which borders Syria. Estimates on the number of former regime officials in Lebanon are imprecise, experts said, because many have either moved to third countries, sometimes with false passports, or have been smuggled back into Syria.

One source familiar with the issue, speaking on background because he wasn’t authorised to share information publicly, said that in the early days after the fall of the regime, former government figures set up training camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. However, the source said, the camps have since been shut down by Hezbollah and the Lebanese army.

On August 4, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said his party was open to a meeting with Syria’s leadership. The group fought side by side with the al-Assad regime in Syria’s war and is, therefore, viewed negatively by many Syrians. But Hezbollah has said it has no desire for bad relations with Syria’s new government.

“Russia shelters the family and its fortunes while so far declining to fund a restoration [of the al-Assad regime], and Hezbollah, under disarmament pressure, needs calm with Damascus more than it needs a [battle on the] Syrian front,” Nanar Hawach, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst on Syria, told Al Jazeera.

Syria has been under pressure from the United States to intervene in Lebanon against Hezbollah although experts believe Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and his government are aware that such a move could lead to widespread regional unrest and undermine the domestic authority they are working to establish, including from figures still in Lebanon.

For years, Syria had a paternal relationship and view towards neighbouring Lebanon. The Syrian military entered Lebanon in 1976 when Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, was in power and occupied large swaths of the country until 2005 when a popular uprising pushed Bashar al-Assad to withdraw his troops.

The younger al-Assad and Syria still exerted their influence in Lebanon via local allies, including Hezbollah, until the regime’s demise in 2024. Since then, Syria’s new government under al-Sharaa has indicated a willingness to have a more balanced and egalitarian relationship with Beirut.

To date, no Syrian regime figures accused of committing atrocities have been returned from Lebanon. That’s why, with extradition approved, Issa’s case could be so groundbreaking. While they have not yet faced trial, many former regime officials are either under foreign sanctions and/or worked in key regime roles that contributed to severe crimes against the Syrian people.

Earlier this year, Syrian authorities asked Lebanese security forces to hand over more than 200 senior officers who fled to Lebanon after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, according to a Reuters agency investigation that showed how the neighbouring country was a hub for insurgent plotting.

Lebanon’s parliament has passed a law to abolish capital punishment, making it the first country in the Middle East to do so. That has contributed to the controversy over the extradition process with Syria, which does apply the death penalty.

Wadih al-Asmar, cofounder and president of the Lebanese Centre for Human Rights, said a number of the Syrian officials in Lebanon would have committed crimes during the occupation period and, therefore, the Lebanese judiciary “has a duty and obligation” to prosecute some of these figures.

Al-Asmar said his organisation has received asylum requests from Syrians afraid to return to their country but none had been military figures connected to the former regime.

But other ex-regime officials, particularly those in Europe, could have those connections. And the landmark trial in Damascus last week that sentenced the al-Assad brothers and their cousin to death could be a concern for European and other states when extraditing wanted figures to Syria.

Experts said Beirut’s desire to have a positive relationship with Damascus will likely supersede human rights concerns related to the death penalty for former regime figures. Still, al-Asmar said: “Lebanon cannot, without violating international law and its own law, send back any person to a country where he can face the death penalty.”

He added: “It’s a very complicated situation, and I believe the only way out for the Lebanese government and the Syrian government with respect to the state of law is for Syria to abolish the death penalty.”

New Delhi, India — On August 13, Abdul Hafeez returned to the primary school he once went to, in Karisunda, a village in Bankura district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The 26-year-old was visiting his alma mater as part of a campaign by the Cockroach Janata Party, a popular Indian pressure group, to audit conditions of the country’s under-funded, often dilapidated government-run schools.

The CJP had just succeeded in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, in July, after a 37-day sit-in in the national capital that prompted antigovernment Gen Z protests across the country.

But in Bankura, things would turn deadly. Hours after Hafeez’s visit to his school, he alleged that local workers of Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) arrived at his home and assaulted him and his father, Mohammad Mafik. Two days later, Hafeez’s 51-year-old father died from his injuries.

On Sunday, Suvendu Adhikari, the chief minister of BJP-ruled West Bengal, said the attackers were “criminals with no BJP connection” and assured action.

But a day after burying his father, Hafeez told Al Jazeera that he stands firm in calling for accountability and reforms in government-run schools. “We will fight for justice for my father, but these attacks will not stop us from demanding better education,” he said.

That demand marks a new line in the sand for the CJP. Fresh from successfully forcing Modi and his government onto the defensive — the Indian PM has only rarely sacked ministers even in the face of credible accusations of wrongdoing or public pressure — the group has now announced its next battleground: India’s public-funded schools.

CJP leaders have asked their supporters, who thronged the protests in New Delhi from different parts of the country, to visit their nearby schools and audit their conditions.

They are working around a basic four-point checklist for what the CJP is calling its Fix the Schools campaign: drinking water and functional toilets; electricity and usable classrooms; boundary walls and campus safety; and midday meals and teacher attendance.

And the murder of Hafeez’s father has raised the already high stakes in a battle between the well-oiled machinery of Modi’s BJP and the fledgling, thin-on-organisation CJP.

“Abdul went to inspect the [government] school in Bengal where he once studied,” said Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the CJP. “It makes my blood boil that people are being murdered simply for demanding better schools.”

‘A disruptive change’

Ashutosh Ranka, a co-convenor of the Cockroach group, appeared emotional after meeting Hafeez’s family on Monday. He told reporters that the group proposed to press the government for compensation; however, Hafeez requested that a school be named after his father.

In Rajasthan, Ranka’s home state in western India, the group has faced other challenges.

Ranka joined a sit-in with primary school students in Alwar district on August 14 to demand additional rooms, clean toilets and drinking water. Local publications reported that the officials accepted the demands.

On Sunday, the Rajasthan government, also led by Modi’s BJP, imposed restrictions on so-called outsiders entering government schools and on taking photos and videos, citing students’ privacy.

The government notice, which ordered the school management to pursue criminal action against such surveys, came after Ranka had announced visits by CJP volunteers across the state.

Samina Bano, an education-policy expert who has advised several Indian states on reforms, told Al Jazeera that “it is essentially the system itself that is not working anymore for the people”.

In the last 10 years, Bano said, she had found “drunk teachers on duty during spot checks”, fake appointments in rural areas that many teachers do not want to go to, and other systemic failures that she insisted are common in the Indian public school system.

“Education in government-run schools a sorry state of affairs.
 It requires a disruptive change,” Bano said.

“The real problem is the quality of teaching, learning outcomes and the food,” Bano added, crediting the Cockroach pressure group for bringing the demands for reform into mainstream politics.

“They are bringing it into the discourse, but once people start demanding, there needs to be actual institution building, and that’s different work altogether,” Bano said. “There has to be an appetite to reimagine public education in India.”

‘Playing to strength’

After Gen Z protesters returned from the streets in New Delhi, the internet was instead flooded with videos of school-going children asking for better facilities across several states. They were blocking roads, circling local administration offices and fighting with bureaucrats.

The Cockroach party tapped into the momentum and announced its next phase in a smart mobilisation strategy, said Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi.

“It plays to their strength of leveraging social media. Without many volunteers [like a traditional political party], they can outsource the grassroots work to followers on social media itself,” he said.

“By leveraging the power of social media, which is now felt in the remotest of corners in India, the Cockroach party has dramatically driven down organisational resource costs of a movement,” Ali added.

But Ali cautioned that this approach of relying on volunteers without political or organisational skills, protest experience or institutional support also exposes them to violence, as happened with the Hafeez family in West Bengal.

Yet the blood spilled in the eastern state hasn’t dimmed the drive from the CJP to demand accountability from authorities.

On Tuesday, Ranka announced on X that multiple venues in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata had cancelled or refused permission to the CJP to hold meet-ups with students.

“This only reinforces the fact that the BJP is scared from the cockroaches,” he wrote. “Cockroaches of Bengal will continue to visit govt schools and push the Bengal govt to get them fixed.

“The more you stop us, the bigger we become.”

New Delhi, India – On the night of August 4, in a counting hall in the eastern Indian city of Patna, some 1,000km (620 miles) from the national capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered one of its most stunning political setbacks in 12 years.

Bankipur, a constituency in the legislature of the state of Bihar, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign, winning a seat that the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, had held until just a few months earlier.

The defeat came less than two weeks after India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, bowing to seven weeks of student-led protests that had shaken New Delhi and spread to several cities. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical outfit born on Instagram in May after India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young Indians with “cockroaches” and “parasites”, had led those protests.

Nabin, the BJP chief, had spent the Bankipur campaign denouncing the country’s Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country”.

Instead, it was the BJP’s stranglehold over the constituency that was broken. That surprise electoral verdict has thrust upon India a broader question, say analysts: Will India’s most formidable political machine — the BJP — be forced to change?

A charm offensive, gone slightly wrong

The clearest sign that the BJP treats the Gen Z uprising as more than a passing nuisance is the sheer awkwardness of the party’s response. During the peak of the protests, Modi released a string of selfie-style videos on Instagram addressing the exam paper leaks that led to the protests. He reportedly told cabinet colleagues that young people were “just on Instagram”, urging ministers to court them on the platform with reels rather than media briefings.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party has launched a Gen Z outreach initiative directing civil administrative officers into schools for career counselling sessions.

The BJP has also released a gym-set video in which young people trade internet slang with an older trainer who steers the talk towards the government’s development record. The slang was laid on so thick that many Instagram users mocked the party, joking that it had seemingly paid young people to write propaganda aimed at their own generation.

After another video of Modi that briefly vanished from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

New Delhi-based analyst Asim Ali says this sudden scramble for social media relevance reveals a lot about the party itself.

The BJP once produced narratives that its own supporters would circulate unprompted. Today, he said, much of its messaging “feels more managed and paid for” – a mismatch for a decentralised space that rewards top-down discipline far less than Facebook and WhatsApp once did.

“The party’s communications machinery remains powerful, given its control over the mainstream media,” Ali told Al Jazeera. “But on social media, especially Instagram, it is unable to generate the kind of organic emotional identification that it could around 2011 to 2014.”

Gilles Verniers, a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, described the BJP’s outreach as “a battle for perception” rather than a policy shift.

“There haven’t been any proposals that fundamentally change anything,” he said. “There’s a new minister for education, but he comes from the same background, an old man from the RSS.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the far-right ideological parent of the BJP.

Verniers argued that what was genuinely broken is the BJP’s usual playbook against dissent: branding protesters antinational, foreign-funded or terrorists, as they did during demonstrations against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019-20. The changed citizenship law, for the first time, introduced a religious test for naturalised citizenship: non-Muslim asylum seekers from India’s neighbouring nations were given a faster track to citizenship.

That past approach towards protests failed this time partly because the movement mocked itself before the state could, and partly because it was pluralistic.

Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers’ protests, it could not be pinned to one religion or community, and also drew in young people from the BJP’s own so-called “upper-caste” Hindu base. It was a “truly caste-blind movement”, Verniers said.

The episode also punctured a notion pushed by the BJP, he said, that Modi held a natural command over the youth.

For the first time, the prime minister “appears his age”, Verniers said of 75-year-old Modi.

“What the movement has done is really turn him into a boomer in the public imagination, and that must really, really hurt,” he added.

Does any of this show up in the numbers?

The BJP lost two of the three by-elections held in the first week of August, in states it governs – Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, it comfortably retained the third, Manjalpur in Gujarat, Modi’s home state.

Opposition leaders drew a straight line from the losses to the student protests, but analysts were more cautious. Ali warned against reading too much into the Bankipur vote.

By-elections, Verniers added, are decided by a fraction of the electorate, “barely a third of the population vote”, and that the BJP’s system of power “has proved very resilient to absorbing setbacks”.

Verniers points to Haryana, where the BJP won a majority a few years after the northern state’s farmers joined a yearlong movement to oppose three controversial agricultural laws. It was an election fought “not on farmers, but on caste”, he said.

What had shifted was not the vote count but a surrounding story now building “into a broader narrative of challenges to the BJP”.

An MP on the ground

Few politicians visited Jantar Mantar, the epicentre of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi, as often as Pushpendra Saroj, 27, a Samajwadi Party member of parliament from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh. The Samajwadi Party is the main opposition to the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Saroj watched a gathering of a few hundred swell into thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalised following a 20-day hunger strike. He credited this to “the aggression from the government” – weeks of silence, alleged cuts to power and water and the July 20 baton charge against protesters in New Delhi. The crowd had grown beyond its student base to include army veterans and even serving police officers.

The politician pointed out that the education minister’s resignation came only after “fingers got pointed at the prime minister directly”.

A simpler sympathy helped, too. “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up,” Saroj said.

‘This is not a victory in any terms’

For many who marched in New Delhi, the story is bigger than a satirical “Cockroach” Instagram page or a single resignation. Anjali, a postgraduate student and secretary of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) at the University of Delhi, an older left-aligned group that mobilised alongside the CJP, reads the protests as the surfacing of a longer-term anger.

“We know for a fact that this did not originate from a particular remark or any particular leak,” she told Al Jazeera. “This is an accumulated anger of the youth of this country for the last 12 years. As long as communal, casteist, anti-women politics is not ended, this is not a victory in any terms,” she said.

Anjali was also critical of who paid the price once the protests ended. Muslim and Dalit students, she said, were “the first to be put behind bars”, the first to face intimidation and police complaints, echoing the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia, the New Delhi university at the heart of the anti-CAA protests.

In the western state of Goa, police detained two young men for allegedly backing jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Pradhan’s exit, an episode she reads as part of the same pattern.

What comes next for the CJP movement?

Ali, Verniers and Anjali all agree that a leap into electoral politics is unlikely for the CJP.

Verniers called that restraint from the group so far “tactically smart”, citing the example of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a protest movement that built a successful party but, a decade into power, is “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearance” in some former strongholds.

A national campaign demands money, volunteers and organisation that a young, often underemployed movement lacks. Its more durable influence, Verniers suggested, will be on other parties’ agendas, “as an interest group, rather than as a separate political force”, one the opposition has been unusually willing to embrace.

Anjali described AISA’s posture in similar terms: present at Jantar Mantar, but unwilling to let the fight narrow to one resignation. The group, she said, plans to keep building the argument against the government on campuses nationwide.

Al Jazeera reached out to 18 BJP national spokespeople for their responses to this article, but did not receive any replies.

The gap between power and legitimacy

Ali said he did not expect the BJP to trade its Hindu majoritarian politics — an ideology known as Hindutva — for one built on jobs and education, as demanded by CJP-led Gen Z protesters.

“I don’t think the BJP would dilute its Hindutva agenda; if anything, it would double down on it, so that the most salient issue in any election is religious identity.”

That may be, but what has changed, Verniers suggested, is not so much the BJP’s raw political power as its legitimacy.

“Electorally speaking, they are as dominant as they’ve ever been, perhaps more,” Verniers said. He cited the party’s ability to win elections, engineer defections, and outspend rivals, as proof of their continued success and of the BJP having pushed “the boundaries of what is democratically admissible”.

But the authority behind that dominance is what the protests have dented. And that gulf “between the actual power that the BJP has, and its ability to have citizens comply and obey” is harder to repair with a by-election win or a polished reel, he said.

That gap, Verniers said, “is the really important, interesting disconnect” the party now has to live with.

Gaza City — Rabab Deifallah sits inside her tent, clutching a small, battered lighter. She presses it once, then again, trying to produce a spark strong enough to ignite a pile of wood inside a stove.

The mother of five has carefully looked after the lighter. Her son has repaired it several times since it became difficult to buy a new one after Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Firewood has become essential for 46-year-old Rabab. She uses it to bake bread, heat water for her children, prepare food and make tea amid shortages of cooking gas and soaring fuel prices.

“Our whole daily life depends on fire,” Rabab told Al Jazeera. “But getting a fire started begins with a lighter and this small object has become one of the hardest things to find in Gaza.”

Before the war, lighters were so cheap and readily available that she remembers buying three for one shekel ($0.33). Today, a new lighter can cost between $27-33 and Rabab last spent $12 to repair her old lighter.

“Should I spend that amount on a lighter, or should I buy a bag of flour?” she asked.

Palestinians in Gaza would rather spend their limited money on food, so a single lighter is often passed around families in several tents.

Some days, Rabab cannot find a lighter at all, so her family has been forced to spend days eating cold food or waiting until a neighbour has a fire burning to borrow a spark.

She often sends a piece of cardboard to a neighbour to get a light off their fire and bring it home. Other times, if a neighbour is baking bread, she may ask to use their oven to prepare food for her family.

The lighter is now something she guards carefully, as it is, for her, the starting point for fire, food, bread and hot water.

A second struggle

Nearby, Hasnaa Mansour, 43, faces the same problem but from a different angle.

Displaced from Jabalia refugee camp, Hasnaa sits beside a clay oven she had treasured since her family’s financial situation deteriorated during the war.

Her husband previously worked as a tailor and the family lived relatively comfortably, but due to a lack of business, Hasnaa now bakes and sells food to help support their six children.

Hasnaa has repeatedly repaired her lighter because buying a new one is beyond her means.

But a shortage of cooking gas has made the problem even worse.

“With gas, all you need is a small spark to light it. But with the oven, I need a real fire,” she said.

“I’ve been sitting here since the morning and by 10 o’clock I still couldn’t light the oven. I sent my young daughter with a piece of cardboard to look for someone who had a fire burning, but she couldn’t find anyone.”

Restrictions and shortages

The lighter shortage comes amid Israel’s continued siege on Gaza.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says restrictions on the movement of goods and closures of crossings have contributed to shortages and rising prices of essential supplies. OCHA also says items classified by Israeli authorities as “dual-use” face additional difficulties in obtaining approval to enter Gaza.

The Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in June that restrictions on crossings and the mechanisms for bringing commercial shipments into Gaza continued to limit the flow of goods.

It said that more than 30,000 trucks entered Gaza during the first five months of 2026, an average of no more than 191 trucks a day – still far below the territory’s daily pre-war needs.

In an earlier publication, the chamber of commerce documented the emergence of lighter-repair work during the war, saying lighters were among items prevented from entering Gaza.

That is why lighters are now so valuable and families spend relatively large amounts to fix them rather than buy a new one.

Sharing a single lighter

For Shadi Abu Shamlah, a displaced father living with his family at Al-Karmel School west of Gaza City, the shortage means sharing a lighter among tents.

“The whole school here… you wouldn’t find more than four lighters,” he said.

The few available lighters move from one tent to another as families try to cook, heat water or prepare hot drinks.

“The lighter today is the backbone of life. If you have a lighter in your tent, you’re okay. If you don’t have one, you’re stuck,” he said.

“The simplest things need fire. You want a cup of tea, you want to cook, you want to make milk for a child… you need fire.”

Abu Shamlah says his family sometimes goes to bed without dinner because they cannot light a fire.

Repairing lighters has also become difficult. He says a lighter flint can cost 25 to 30 shekels ($8–$10), while people have resorted to using gas from larger cylinders to refill lighters, sometimes causing burns.

Tamer Al-Shawish, who worked as a driver before the war, turned to fixing lighters to help provide for his family.

On a small stall near Al Karmel school camp, the 24-year-old father of two says his new profession was previously unheard of.

“The war has forced us into jobs and work we never knew before. I started repairing lighters so I could provide for my family’s needs,” he told Al Jazeera.

A new profession

“Before the war, no one needed to repair a lighter. They were cheap and available. When the gas ran out, we would throw it away and buy another one.”

“People come to repair the lighter because it is cheaper than buying a new one, especially with the high prices and shortages of basic goods,” Tamer said.

He salvages parts from damaged lighters to repair others.

“Even an old lighter has value now. We take parts from damaged lighters and use them to repair other lighters, so they last longer.”

New Delhi, India — Authorities dispatched workers early to New Delhi on the morning of July 26 to paint over the graffitied walls near the Jantar Mantar observatory.

A day earlier, protests over an exam leak scandal, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), had led to the ousting of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The entry curve of the protest strip read: “#2026 Gen-Z REVOLUTION!!!”

A man in his early twenties climbed a tree carrying a powerful loudspeaker and blasted a song. “Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom!” The crowd followed the words, with their hands raised in the air.

Azadi, translated as “freedom” in English, a popular hip-hop song from the Bollywood film Gully Boy, became the anthem of the student protests in one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in years.

Fast-paced video footage of police personnel beating students at New Delhi’s Parliament Street gave a new lease of life to the nearly decade-old track.

It was not just in Delhi – the chants reverberated in other cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow and Mumbai.

Just a decade ago, Azadi was among the most radioactive words — and criminalised protest slogans — in Delhi, for which student leaders were jailed for treason.

After thousands of protesters returned home following the minister’s resignation last month, the lights at Jantar Mantar had gone out. But rows of bright-yellow metal police barricades still lined the street. Many of them were painted over by protesters. One of them read, in red: “Umar, Sharjeel, Gulfisha were here before you”.

The journey of the Azadi chant — from Pakistan’s feminist movement, the Kashmiri resistance, to the mainstream in India — charts the evolution of both a political slogan and student politics and activism in India under Modi’s rule over the last decade.

‘Criminalising university spaces’

December 9, 2016, was supposed to be a casual evening at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s premier public universities that for decades has also been a cauldron of political activism.

A group of students coming together to meet was just another banal event. This meeting was to discuss capital punishment in India, looking at the case of a Kashmiri, hanged for an armed attack on India’s parliament in 2001.

At least, that’s how Banojyotsna Lahiri, a close friend of Umar Khalid and one of the organisers of the event, who spoke to Al Jazeera, remembered that winter evening.

Indian TV media channels, seen as friendly to Modi’s government, made the event a national political flashpoint, repeatedly airing footage of students chanting Azadi slogans, led by then JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar.

Pro-Modi media labelled the students as “sympathisers of terrorists” and some channels even aired doctored clips about the event.

Students like Khalid and JNU became household names as the controversy “blew out of proportion,” Lahiri said.

“Intense media trial picked up. It was a targeted campaign: propagating that antinational students lived off taxpayers’ money,” Lahiri recalled. Within days, sedition charges and arrests followed, with Khalid and others released on bail a few weeks later.

The JNU has been a traditional bastion of left-liberal politics, which also puts it in the crosshairs with the country’s Hindu majoritarian right, especially under Modi. But it was not the only university with popular anti-establishment politics at the time.

After a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, died by suicide in Hyderabad, in southern India, alleging caste discrimination, the Central University there erupted in protests, followed by a government crackdown.

These events in early 2016 kicked off a government campaign that gradually eroded space for dissent and expression in India’s public universities. Students said this has worsened over the years.

Right-wing goons attacked student leaders. Khalid was shot at in New Delhi. Universities blocked permissions to hold discussions, film screenings or protests.

“It requires a lot of courage to be a student activist or leader in India, after coming from small towns,” Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said.

“It is the first time in independent India where the government has undertaken a coordinated, well-thought-out attack on student activism.”

Lahiri said that the media campaign led to serious repercussions for those involved in the protests.

“The tag of antinational was accepted in wider Indian imagination, outside universities and these students [like Khalid] could never shed it,” Lahiri said.

In 2019, protests erupted against proposed amendments to India’s citizenship laws, which were seen as discriminatory against Muslims and rendering them second-class citizens.

Several Muslim student leaders in Delhi shot to national prominence for their fiery speeches and organising protests against the proposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The government appeared to step back from a nationwide screening of who qualifies as an Indian citizen amid the protests.

Another crackdown followed, jailing dozens of prominent student activists and burying their cases under piles of charges, including terrorism.

After the citizenship protests in 2019, which ran into 2020, students say the spaces in universities for protest shrank even further.

Police presence and inquiries were beefed up; students allege that several politically biased appointments to university administrations were made, and funding for research and institutions was slashed.

Six years on, student leaders like Khalid, who was rearrested, and Sharjeel Imam continue to be imprisoned without trial.

The journey of ‘Azadi’

After the controversy in 2016, the visuals of JNU reverberating with Azadi slogans inspired a music producer, Dub Sharma, to layer electronic beats over the crowd chants, which flows as the central melody.

Those slogans called for freedom from caste-based hierarchy, capitalism, hunger, and to break free from the influence of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Three years later, the track was tapped by director Zoya Akhtar for her 2019 Bollywood flick, Gully Boy, inspired partly by the poverty of rappers in Mumbai’s slums. Sharma recreated the song for the movie — and recruited popular Mumbai artist Divine to rap to it.

But the revised version of the song only retained “freedom from hunger” from the crowd’s original chants, omitting other calls for social justice. The film’s team faced criticism for hollowing out the original track but they defended it, arguing that the track was altered to suit the film’s own arc.

Seven years ago, in the recreated version, Divine rapped about income inequality, politicians’ privileged children and called on people to take over a corrupt system — all of which have become the central theme of Gen Z protests across the world.

Under Modi, India has continued to slide in multiple democratic indices. This year, Sharma’s rehashed score became the anthem of the students’ resistance, calling for wider educational reforms.

The earliest modern political life of the Azadi chant can be traced to Pakistan’s feminist resistance to General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. The late Indian feminist activist Kamla Bhasin recalled being inspired by the chant’s fluidity and adopting it to the Indian subcontext, making the calls suitable to specific protests.

Kashmiri resistance to Indian occupation adopted the slogan in the late 1980s as well. The left liberal movement in New Delhi caught up, too. But their calls to freedom were specific to their unique contexts.

A year before Bhasin passed away in 2021, she referred to the Azadi chants in an interview as “a living, breathing slogan”.

“This slogan grows every day, it evolves every day. Its meaning is not set in stone.”

Beginners’ guide to protesting in Delhi

A month after India’s chief justice controversially equated India’s unemployed youth with cockroaches and parasites, the insult caught the national imagination last June.

A Boston University graduate, Abhijeet Dipke, casually wondered: “What if all cockroaches come together?” in a post on X. He then started a social media campaign, under the self-named Cockroach Janta Party, and went viral on the internet. It gained more than 22 million followers on Instagram, more than double Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014.

Dipke returned to India, pledging to launch an agitation, channelling support in calling for education reforms starting with the resignation of the former education minister, after a series of examination scandals that affected millions of Indian students.

On June 6, he landed in New Delhi and came straight to the Jantar Mantar protest site, where he stood with Neha Bora, the national president of All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

Bora, a slight 29-year-old, had been with AISA for eight years, since her college days in Delhi’s JNU.

“[The Cockroach movement] did not have any idea about what might happen, or what to expect here,” she told Al Jazeera, sitting cross-legged in a loose T-shirt. “They didn’t know what to do. They were excited but also scared.”

Bora said student unions, like hers, “helped the protest stand” and take shape.

After the protest occupied the Jantar Mantar strip, defying frequent police orders to vacate, Bora’s AISA, alongside the Student Federation of India (SFI), another prominent left-wing student organisation, organised a protest camp. Six students joined educator-turned-activist Sonam Wangchuk, 59, on a hunger strike.

For a month, student volunteers from these organisations took shifts at the protest site, making sure it was occupied at all times. They gave the protest slogans, placards, and a voice that helped bring it international prominence.

“Sit-in means a lot of repetition for those people who you’re appealing to join,” Bora said, describing challenges. “As a student organisation, we knew the science behind keeping protest alive: bring in different sections of society to support the movement, like lawyers, professors and farmers.”

The Jantar Mantar protest was particularly remarkable in ways that experienced protest organisers — whose politics for years has been criminalised or sidelined — quietly equipped a younger generation to organise what, from the outside, appeared to be a leaderless movement, political analysts say.

With this came the same playbook from opponents to delegitimise the students, said Bora. For weeks, they fought back against “baseless conspiracies and allegations of being antinationals or foreign-funded”. At one point, Education Minister Pradhan called the protesters the “B-team of terrorists”.

However, this time, criminalising the young protesters did not work, and the demonstration continued to grow in popularity. Rather, the movement, campaigning on education issues, gave the student organisation a shot at gaining a foothold in national politics, said Apoorvanand.

Rediscovering ‘Azadi’

This summer, the grammar of Indian politics appeared to flip in the Gen Z protest wave. A stroll through the protest strip, reverberating with Azadi chants, raised a question: what had changed in New Delhi since 2016?

Before peeling back the layers, Lahiri, Khalid’s friend, insists that one needs to settle on a baseline: “The earlier citizenship protests were for Muslims, led by Muslims. Their names were Muslims, therefore [they were] easier to criminalise.” Several political analysts agree.

By contrast, none of the most prominent names in this year’s student protests was Muslim — though the organisers repeatedly called out the “hate and divisive politics” of the ruling government, which has been criticised for alleged targeted attacks on minorities.

Mohammad Junaid, a volunteer at the site, became the most visible Muslim face at the Jantar Mantar strip. Even before everyone had returned home after the protest ended, Junaid and his family members were picked up and harassed by police, he said.

At one point, the Cockroach leaders asked the protesters to refrain from chanting “negative” Azadi slogans. That made no difference among the crowd, though.

N Sai Balaji, a student activist who served as AISA’s national president from 2019 to 2023, said there is a clear difference between the student leaders’ pre and post-citizenship protests, where they have moved on from being objects of representation to owning the narrative.

“It’s just not the same kind. They are tech-savvy 1786809159, know how to integrate their message, and they know the language of the internet so well because they grew up there,” he told Al Jazeera. He compared this with his own generation growing up watching TV.

“That is why the traditional media was useless for them. Rather, they became the media themselves,” Balaji said. “They owned their story. Something we could not do.”

Balaji stressed that social media influencers and alternative media spaces reported the protest and became the main medium of amplification. Many began boycotting traditional media outlets seen as friendly to the government. “And no one was calling them antinationals in this new space,” he said.

Instead, for instance, when videos of Bora on hunger strike were watched by millions, Balaji said, it made people question the status quo. “India’s aspirational class, who felt betrayed by the government’s broken promises, found hope in people who were sitting selflessly,” Balaji stressed.

“That’s where the whole propaganda vanishes. Suddenly, the so-called antinationals become humans too,” he added.

Lahiri said the current generation of student leaders broke through traditional moulds of activism. “With their language, imagery, and Instagram reels, people outside universities are now able to connect more,” she said.

And with spaces inside universities criminalised, the students’ politics are yet again spilling out onto the streets, added Lahiri. She went a step further to note that unlike her own generation, the new student protesters are “trying to do politics under even harsher circumstances”.

Call it shallow, Lahiri argued, breaking into a laugh, but just saying, “Fu** Modi,” is more of a slap in the face, instead of our sentiments coated in academic language.

Out of the flood of online memes and posters, one stayed with Lahiri. It read: “Umar Khalid walked, so Gen Z could run.” She is not sure if Khalid would agree with this, but she does.

For Bora’s part, she told Al Jazeera, the 2019 citizenship movement led by Muslims “inspired a revolution inside” her, which keeps her going even today.

Painting her predecessors as antinationals and traitors of India, Bora said, the Modi government criminalised the mere expression of the word Azadi by “creating so much noise around it.”

However, “when students faced police brutality — when the wounds of those batons were fresh on their bodies — one understands that the Azadi slogan is the most radical assertion of fundamental rights in India”, Bora said.

As the conflict in Yemen rages on and spills over into the Red Sea, developments in recent weeks reveal a new trend worth pondering. The Houthis group, which for years almost monopolised the advantage of drone warfare, has begun facing fire from the same weapon used by its opponents on multiple fronts.

This does not mean that the balance of power has shifted, or that the Houthis have lost their missile and drone superiority. However, the increasing use of this type of warfare by the forces loyal to the internationally recognised government may change the nature of the confrontation, especially if it shifts from scattered operations to an organised and sustained capability.

For years, the Houthis were able to use drones as one of the most important weapons of asymmetric warfare. They were able to monitor their opponents and strike their gatherings, command centres and facilities far from the lines of contact, while government forces were mostly in a position of defence and interception.

Today, the equation is no longer that simple.

Forces affiliated with the government have announced in recent days the use of drones against Houthi positions in Marib, al-Jawf, Taiz, Hajjah, al-Dhalea and other fronts – and have shown video of a number of those operations.

It is not yet possible to speak of parity in drone power. The Houthis have years of experience and a more advanced missile and drone infrastructure. However, the government does not necessarily need full parity in order to bring about change on the battlefield.

It is enough for Houthi gatherings, vehicles, artillery, reinforcements and command centres to become vulnerable to strikes for them to be forced to change their patterns of deployment, movement and supply. In war, forcing the enemy to change its behaviour is in itself a military achievement.

It would be wrong to say that the Houthis have moved onto the defensive. They are carrying out broad offensive operations: they have struck Marib and Hadramout, repeatedly targeted al-Makha (Mocha), escalated against Saudi Arabia and once again moved their operations to the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb.

But there is a difference between the group being on a strategic defensive and beginning to act on some fronts as though it must prepare for a possible attack.

Here, the geography of the recent strikes becomes more important than their number.

Marib, Taiz, al-Makha and the western coast are not random fronts; they represent key gateways for any potential ground war.

Marib is the gateway to the east and one of the government’s most important military and political centres of gravity. Striking camps and movements there not only causes losses, but can also expose deployments, defences, response speed and sources of reinforcement.

Taiz is the central and coastal junction. Activating its fronts can pin down large forces and prevent their easy redeployment towards the western coast or other fronts.

Al-Makha and the western coast carry a different significance. South of the city lies Bab al-Mandeb and to the north the road extends towards Hodeidah. Therefore, the repeated targeting of al-Makha with missiles and drones can also be seen as a test of a front that could become very important if a ground operation begins along the coast.

When we combine what is happening in Marib, Taiz, al-Makha, al-Dhalea, al-Jawf, Saada and Hodeidah, it becomes difficult to view each front as a separate incident.

This does not mean that the decision for a ground war has been made, but it does mean that the parties have begun to act as though this possibility must be taken seriously.

For this reason, the most important indicator in the coming period will not be the number of missiles or drones, but the movement of forces and reserves, and the transfer of ammunition.

When this movement begins to concentrate on a specific axis, we will have moved from testing the front to preparing the front.

It is precisely in this context that the recent statements of Presidential Leadership Council Chairman Rashad al-Alimi should be understood.

Al-Alimi offered the Houthis the option of laying down their arms and participating in the political life of the country, but he also said that from now on, no Houthi action would go without a response or comprehensive deterrence. He defined the strategic objective as restoring state institutions, stressing that sustainable peace is based on the state’s monopoly over arms and sovereignty.

If these statements hadn’t been accompanied by action, they could have been seen as escalating political rhetoric only.

But what gives Al-Alimi’s latest message its weight is what is happening on the ground: government drones have entered the confrontation openly, artillery is operating on more than one front, military readiness is increasing and the government is speaking more clearly about deterrence.

The real test for the government would be whether these moves turn into a sustained operational doctrine, whereby any Houthi attack incurs a direct cost, or the old pattern is maintained where government forces absorb strikes and issue limited responses.

All of this is happening within a larger regional context. The turmoil in the Strait of Hormuz and the US-Israeli war on Iran are raising the strategic value of the Red Sea. The less secure Hormuz becomes, the more important Saudi energy and trade routes to the west become.

Here, the value of Bab al-Mandeb automatically rises as a power card in the hands of the Houthis.

The geographic equation is highly complex: Iran can exert pressure on Hormuz, the Houthis have the ability to threaten Bab al-Mandeb and Saudi Arabia is strategically positioned between the two corridors.

In return, Riyadh is working on arrangements to protect the Red Sea, while Yemeni government forces are showing greater activity on the ground.

This may lead to a formula different from the previous war: Yemeni forces taking on the bulk of the ground confrontation, while Saudi Arabia and its partners provide support, deterrence and protection for maritime routes.

The danger is that everyone is now approaching the brink of war: the Houthis are testing how much pressure they can exert on Saudi Arabia, the Yemeni government, and international navigation. Meanwhile, government forces are testing new tools and their ability to regain the initiative and Saudi Arabia is trying to build a new deterrence, while the US-Iranian confrontation continues in the background. This widens the margin for strategic error that could lead to an open war.

IT is the dancefloor hit that was the late Queen’s favourite song.

But we can reveal Abba’s Dancing Queen — released 50 years ago this week — almost had a completely different name and made the Swedish foursome cry the first time they heard the final edit.

In an exclusive interview to mark half a century of the song, which has been streamed more than two billion times and was voted the UK’s favourite dancefloor filler, ­historian Carl Magnus Palm explains that Abba still have unheard songs.

But friend of the band Carl fears the world will never hear them.

And he insists that members Agnetha Faltskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad have no interest in reforming.

Carl, who has known the band for 25 years, told The Sun: “Dancing Queen was one the songs that Abba are most proud of as its sound was so unique at the time they wrote it.

“But the lyrics didn’t come until a long time after the melody was formed.

“They told me that for weeks they sung nonsense words over the chorus.

The working title was ‘Boogaloo’ as they were the words they sung instead of Dancing Queen for a long time.

“I’m not sure it would’ve been the hit it is today if they had stuck with that. When they eventually found the lyrics and the song was finished, some of the band were reduced to tears, they found it so beautiful.”

On the prospect of them reforming and releasing of new songs, he added: “They seem very firm that they are going to enjoy their retirement and that they’ll be no more new music.

“However, I know there are a few songs which have never been heard. They were written for their last album and didn’t make the cut.

“They won’t even tell people the names of the tracks. I guess while they remain unreleased there is always a chance of new music. It’s not impossible but unlikely.”

Carl revealed that the famously private Swedish group remain close but rarely socialise together.

And he said they shed tears of joy when they saw their younger selves in hologram form at London’s Abba Voyage show.

Carl also said that songwriter Bjorn is working on a new musical with the help of AI and an unnamed “British female artist”.

Abba formed in 1972 and went on to become one of the world’s biggest acts, selling more than 50million records.

Dancing Queen alone — which was released in August 1976 — has sold more than 4million globally and has two billion downloads on Spotify.

The song was not only voted the UK’s favourite Abba hit of all time by Radio 2 listeners in 2024 but was voted the nation’s favourite dancefloor song ever.

But Carl, who got close to the band having been a historian and author on their music for 25 years, told how the song could have been so different to the track we all love.

He said: “Abba had a big hit with Waterloo in 1974 but the reality was everything after that for a while had been a flop in the UK and they put great store by what was a success in ­Britain.

“They wondered whether part of it was down to getting distracted in the songwriting process. So in the summer of 1975 they went to a tiny cabin in the Swedish archipelago island of Viggso near Stockholm.

“Bjorn and Agnetha, who were married at the time, had a property there and they had this small two-bedroom guest cabin with an indoor porch.

“I was lucky enough to be allowed to go there. They set up Benny’s piano and two chairs and started to write a melody.

“No one could reach them there, so they could focus. For the first time Bjorn brought an electric guitar and amp instead of his acoustic guitar because he told me he’d been listening to lots of American dance music like Stevie Wonder and George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby.

“They then came up with this melody. It was the beginning of Dancing Queen. For ages the lyrics were ­gibberish — English words with no meaning or cohesion. I heard them. The chorus was simply ‘Boogaloo’.

“In the next few weeks they went back to the mainland and laid it all down.

“Benny and their manager wrote the lyrics about this 17-year-old ­clubbing girl.

“They gave no suggestion it was based on Agnetha and Frida — just a fictitious young clubber. They told me that they got rid of some extra verses, which the fans never heard.

“I’m glad they did as originally the first two lines to the song were going to be ‘Baby, baby, you’re out of sight. Hey, you’re looking all right tonight’.

“They knew people would have hated that so they cut it out.

“It was a good job because I doubt it would’ve been the hit it is today with those as your opening lyrics.”

Carl also told about how the band became emotional when the song was finally cut.

He said: “Bjorn and Benny told me there were absolutely ecstatic. They finished it late at night and Bjorn was desperate to play it to someone. Agnetha was asleep at home so he went to his sister’s place instead, and they played this tape over and over again.

“Bjorn went home to Frida, who he was married to then, and played it.

“She told me she put the tape in the tape machine, pressed the play button, and she thought it was so beautiful that she started to cry.

“Agnetha has since told me she had chills and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up when she heard it.”

The video for the song was recorded in a “matter of hours” on a low budget.

When released, Dancing Queen spent six weeks at No1 in the UK and topped the charts in 15 different countries.

According to Carl, Abba loved the song so much they always tried to play it as their final tune of every encore at live shows.

It gained fans from all over the world, including the King and Queen of Sweden and the late Queen ­Elizabeth, who regularly said was her favourite song.

Virgin Radio DJ Chris Evans once recalled performing a DJ set at a ­private royal party.

When Dancing Queen was played, the Queen reportedly remarked to her guests: “I always try to dance when this song comes on because I am the Queen and I like to dance”.

Carl added that the band were moved by having the late Queen as a fan, saying: “They were all very touched.”

However, Bjorn told him that he was “puzzled” by the fact Dancing Queen is seen as a dancefloor song as “he still thinks it’s too slow to dance to”.

In 1979, Bjorn and Agnetha split and two years later Frida and Benny did the same. It saw the band go on an indefinite hiatus.

But in 2021, they returned with new material and album Voyage.

A year later, interactive experience Abba ­Voyage opened in London — showing the band as holograms from their pomp.

Carl added: “They loved Abba ­Voyage and they went to the opening. Bjorn told me it was like watching a band he used to know from decades ago.

“He said it was like an out-of-body experience.

“There were tears of happiness when they saw it, definitely.”

Carl, who first got to know the band when they worked with him to release his 2001 book Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The Definitive Bio- graphy Of Abba, said that the likelihood of there being any reunion is very slim.

Carl added: “They are winding down now.

“They like their privacy. They have grandchildren. They are in their 70s and 80s.

“The chance of a reunion is very slim I think. But it’s not impossible. There are still the songs that didn’t make it on Voyage, but they are showing no signs of wanting anyone to know what they are.

“They are still close but they don’t really socialise. They are all living very low-key lives.

“It is only Bjorn who is working. He is working on a musical — using the help of AI — with a British female singer, whose name they have not told me.

“One thing I know for sure is that when they recorded Dancing Queen on that tiny porch they would never have dreamed it would still be as relevant and popular today — 50 years on.”

• Bright Lights Dark Shadows: The ­Definitive Biography Of Abba by Carl ­Magnus Palm is available now.

Taybeh, occupied West Bank – Underneath a painting of Jesus and his disciples, Sandra Basir brought out what she and her husband, Roland, now keep to protect their home: a couple of fire extinguishers.

They keep them because the last time Israeli settlers set fire to a neighbour’s car outside their house, no one else came. “Civil defence – when did they even show up? After everything was already over,” Roland says.

The couple’s nightly routine in their Palestinian Christian town is now similar to the majority-Muslim rural Palestinian communities besieged by settler attacks and nighttime military raids for years. Sandra checks the doors more than once before bed. They got a dog to stay outside to alert them of any trespassers. Sandra is, by her own description, always half-awake – listening for whoever might be coming for her four small children while they sleep.

Their seven-year-old son has stopped playing outside, Sandra says, and for months, the little boy told his father not to go to work – scared he might not return. “That’s what our life has become,” says Sandra, who was on the verge of tears throughout the conversation. “A child that age should just be playing.”

For more than 20 years, Roland built up a stone quarry and concrete-block factory on the edge of town, investing an estimated $5m in the business. After employing 40 local Palestinians, he has found his life’s work snatched by marauding settlers, both armed adults and some barely teenagers.

In the past three years – and with the situation deteriorating even more severely this past year – he and his workers were frequently chased off by settlers at gunpoint, with his quarry’s heavy-machinery equipment set on fire. The most brazen attack came in March, when Roland says some 30 to 40 settlers stormed the quarry site in a coordinated mass incursion. Videos and photos show them raising Israeli flags over the grounds and performing prayers on the land. Before leaving, they smashed his office, destroyed electrical panels, and pulled cameras from the walls.

Roland documented everything on video, filed complaints with the liaison office, the police, and every institution he could reach. All his efforts to mobilise help to protect his land, however, were for naught. The settlers were back the next day, with their attacks continuing ever since.

Meanwhile, Roland showed Al Jazeera donation pages online for the settlers that he says carried out the attacks. He also alleges that stone taken from his land was registered under a settler’s name and resold.

This past week, he finally stopped trying to continue operations, leaving his stone quarry business all but abandoned.

“They’ve taken the quarry, taken the factory, taken the land,” Roland says. “What’s left for them to take? My children? My house?”

A once-safe haven now in the crosshairs

A few years ago, nobody in Taybeh thought trouble like this was coming their way.

Madees Khoury, who runs the Taybeh Brewery her family founded in 1994, lived in Taybeh through the second Intifada, the Arab Spring, and every war on Gaza – but none of it ever really touched the quaint town filled with centuries-old churches, well-built homes, and street-corner statues of Mother Mary and Jesus. “Taybeh was always safe, untouched – never, never, never did I imagine it would come to this,” says Madees.

The town is traditionally identified with biblical Ephraim – the place Jesus is said to have withdrawn to before his final journey to Jerusalem – and is the last Palestinian town left in the West Bank whose population is entirely Christian, home now to roughly 1,200 people and to the ruins of the fifth-century Church of St George, one of the oldest Christian sites in the Holy Land.

Things began to change as Israeli settlers, after driving Bedouin and herding communities from areas to the east, increasingly turned their attention to the hills around Taybeh itself, commencing attacks within the town last year. Mayor Suleiman Khourieh estimates roughly seven settler outposts now surround the town – four or five, by his count, sitting directly on Taybeh’s municipal land.

The attacks that followed mirror those taking place across the rural West Bank, with Sandra – who says her mother’s arm was broken by a settler during last year’s olive harvest – and Roland showing Al Jazeera photographs and videos of the frequent settler incursions within the town’s central confines.

Repeatedly, settlers graze cattle, sheep and camels on private agricultural land. Last year, Christian leaders say fires were deliberately set near the church and its adjoining cemetery. A couple of months ago, armed settlers set large fires along the village’s farmlands and prevented firetrucks from reaching them, according to local residents who drove to the scene.

Residents of Taybeh now face routine restrictions on accessing their farmlands and resources, including the now depopulated Ein Samiya spring. The spring supplies all the water to Taybeh Brewery and other Palestinian communities in the area, but settlers have since taken control of it.

Madees Khoury remembers one morning, in February this year, when a group of settlers walked into the centre of town claiming to search for a horse that didn’t exist – while her cousin’s actual horse and its foal, kept in a small structure on her father and uncle’s land for years, stood a few metres away. When she and her family called Israel’s Civil Administration to have the settlers removed, she says the officials who arrived instead walked in alongside them, broke open the door, and helped carry the horses out. “Instead of removing them,” she says, “the officials who came walked alongside the settlers onto my father and uncle’s private property … took the horse and the foal, and walked out.”

The newest outpost, established just last week, sits on the western edge of town, in Area B of the West Bank – nominally under Palestinian civil administration, though security in these hills has long since fallen to whoever is willing to enforce it on the ground.

On his own land in Area B, Mayor Khourieh has watched a settler take over his vineyard and its well over the past month, following the establishment of a settler outpost nearby. Sitting in his office, Khourieh described the settlers cutting his locks, bringing sheep there to graze, at one point pitching a tent by the well and furnishing it with sofas, and even bathing in the water meant for his vines.

According to the mayor, the army eventually removed the settlers’ tent, but the settlers still come back daily to water their flock from Khourieh’s own well. “We still don’t know whether I’m even allowed to go to my own vineyard or not,” says the town mayor inside his office.

Israeli officials have, at least on paper, acknowledged the problem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this year that outposts established in Area B should be evacuated. But despite reported pressure from career military officials to remove the outposts over security concerns, enforcement has frequently been blocked amid opposition from officials in Netanyahu’s far-right government. By Peace Now’s latest count, of the approximately 390 illegal outposts and farms across the West Bank, at least 21 sit in Area B.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli authorities for comment on the attacks on Taybeh, and the accusations that their response has not been sufficient, but has yet to receive a response.

Hollow protections from the state

Following attacks in the area – including the invasion of a then-empty home of a Taybeh family on August 5 – on August 9, the Israeli army declared Taybeh, along with the neighbouring village of Rammun, a closed military zone.

The order itself has confused almost everyone tasked with living under it. It bars entry to Israelis and foreigners without a specific connection to the village, and the army has offered little clarity on the terms and enforcement. “It’s unclear,” Madees Khoury says. “The whole thing was strange.”

What almost no one in Taybeh believes is that the order will actually keep settlers out. Especially in the past year, such closed military zone orders have been issued in cases where settlers are attacking local Palestinians – only for those orders to be enforced selectively to remove activists attempting to offer protective presence to local Palestinians, while doing little to remove the violent settlers themselves.

Instead, the removal of visitors adds to the town’s growing isolation.

“The decision hasn’t amounted to anything practical,” the mayor says, “because the settler is still exactly where he was.” Father Bashar Fawadleh, priest of Taybeh’s Christ the Redeemer Church, put it more bluntly: “We don’t feel that they’re actually forbidding the settlers from coming to Taybeh.”

According to Roland, the day the military zone closure was announced, settlers broke into his office at the stone quarry and smashed cabinets, equipment, and anything they could reach inside. The following morning, he tried to go back to what remains of his quarry, but settlers confronted him again. He called the police; two and a half hours later, he says, they arrived, but the settlers had already left.

‘The cross we have to carry’

Emigration of Palestinian Christians has been an issue in Taybeh and elsewhere for years, as the Palestinian Christian population has shrunk to about 40,000 in the West Bank, or just more than 1 percent of the entire population. But under the pressures of severe restrictions on land access by Israeli authorities and settlers, movement restrictions, and the threat of unchecked settler attacks, in Taybeh, the quiet of emptiness is being replaced by a quiet borne of fear.

Madees Khoury says people avoid the roads now because no one wants to risk a checkpoint that might swallow four hours of their day, or a stretch of road where a settler’s car might slow down alongside theirs.

Tourism is gone; a well-known hiking trail that begins at the brewery sees almost no visitors any more. Among a wider economic depression and skyrocketing export costs imposed by Israeli authorities, Taybeh Brewery’s revenues are down 80 percent compared with before October 2023, according to Madees Khoury.

Fifteen families have already left Taybeh in the past two years, according to Father Bashar, along with dozens of individuals who left parents behind and moved on alone, mostly to the United States and Europe.

And yet almost no one who spoke to Al Jazeera described leaving as a real option for themselves. “Where is there to go?” asks Roland Basir, reiterating a common refrain heard across the West Bank these days.

“This land is ours,” says Father Bashar. “We cannot leave it easily … we want to resist by staying rooted in this land, to be part of this land, for dignity, for security, for peace, and for justice.”

Mayor Khourieh, whose own vineyard now sits behind a settler’s fence, put it in starker terms. “We are Palestinian Christians,” he says. “We have been in this town since the Lord Christ walked in it. This is our town. We will not leave it. Even if we die, we’ll be buried in it, because it’s holy ground.”

These days, Father Bashar frames the threats to this bastion of the wider Palestinian Christian community in the context of the suffering that Jesus endured. “For me, our cause, our problems, are the cross we have to carry on our shoulders,” he says.

He pauses before offering the line he says he carries into every house he visits after a new attack: “In the midst of this cross, in the hardest time, still we have hope. Inside our hearts, we have to put hope instead of the fear.”

Duvetyne, or in this case the alternative spelling Duvateen, is a twill fabric with a matt finish that makes it ideal for blocking out light.

In its black fire-retardant form, it has widespread use in the film industry to ensure the right controlling effect.

In the first season of the ­original Star Trek for instance, exterior shots of space, “the final frontier”, were created by gluing glitter to it.

As you’ll discover, it was also used by The Afghan Whigs’ frontman Greg Dulli — and now it’s the name of a pivotal song on the band’s tenth studio album, Soft Control.

It is 40 years since he formed the Whigs in Cincinnati, Ohio, later moving to Seattle to become Sub Pop label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

But Soft Control, their first LP in four years, has to be one of their most urgent, textured and captivating efforts yet.

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When he calls from America’s West Coast, it’s the first time I’ve spoken to Dulli since 2008.

He was in London then during an extended Whigs’ hiatus, promoting The Gutter Twins’ album Saturnalia, made with the late Mark Lanegan, one of the grunge movement’s defining singers both with the Screaming Trees and as a solo artist.

Lanegan died aged 57 in 2022, a year after battling a severe case of Covid at his adopted home of Killarney, Ireland. “Mark is someone I miss . . . every day,” Dulli tells me.

He returns to the subject in hand and provides a fulsome explanation of his song Duvateen.

“There was a time in my life when I put it on all my windows,” he admits. “I kept my house in permanent night, living the vampire life.

“I had a friend in the movie business so I went with her to get some. I saw what it could do for me.”

So, what DID it do for you? I venture with a degree of trepidation.

“It was decades ago and I just didn’t have any use for sunlight or for being outside,” replies Dulli, before adding with a knowing sigh, “It was clearly not a healthy time for me.”

By calling the piano-led song Duvateen, Dulli, who delivers the lyrics with white-knuckle intensity, is using it as a metaphor for the infinite void — or, if you like, ­mortality.

He admits: “The symbolic nature of it is not lost on me.”

With lyrics that span his childhood, “teacher gonna chase us down the hall”, to the grave, “dig somebody’s hole”, it encapsulates the circle of life and serves as the album’s heartbeat.

Its sound is in stark contrast to the more rock-heavy numbers, drawing this response from Dulli: “When I get a piano song like that, it’s an exciting moment in my life.

“It’s the sort of thing I could play to my mom.” As for the idea that Duvateen is the album’s centrepiece, he says: “You write songs and, as some emerge, they state their alpha-ness.

“Duvateen got my attention very quickly. It started out differently — a bit like Honky Tonk Women for a minute — but I completely changed it.

“It was one of those songs when you feel as if your hand is being guided from beyond.”

I suggest to Dulli that listening to Soft Control’s ten tracks “feels like an emotional rollercoaster”.

“Well, life in general is an emotional rollercoaster for me,” he replies. “It would stand to reason that any art I put forth would be a similar thing.”

Next the single-minded singer describes his path to the album: “We did a Covid record that came out in ’22, then we toured it for a year.

“Then I took some time off and travelled. I didn’t start working on a new record until ’25.

“But once I began writing songs again, they were happening fast and furious. I did 20, 22. Cut them down to ten. And here’s the ten.”

The result is a concise, dynamic punch of an album. “I like 40 minutes or less and I like ten as a round number,” says Dulli. “I’ve been landing on it for the past four or five records.

“They’re like a little family and sometimes they waiting for a little brother or sister to show up. I wrote the final song, Loose Talk, earlier this year.”

The album comes bursting out of the blocks with taut Jungle Roux and riff-heavy House Of I.

Elsewhere, My Lover leans into the band’s R&B credentials while stately The Deepest Part Of The Darkest Shadow serves as a companion piece to Duvateen.

There’s a song called Memphis, Texas, not as strange as you think because there is such place, along with the famous Memphis in ­Tennessee where Elvis made his name.

The album ends with A Simulation, 70 seconds of ambient beauty segueing into one of Dulli’s most tender vocals and a gorgeous string arrangement.

He calls it one of his “most existential songs”. “I get overwhelmed by injustice, sadness, and people and animals being hurt. I know I’m not the only one wondering, ‘What the f*** are we doing here?’”

But now, before we go any further, it’s time to tell Dulli’s story beginning with his teenage dream of fronting a band, inspired by a legendary psychedelic soul band.

He recalls: “I went to see The 5th Dimension. When (singer) Billy Davis Jr. took off at the end of Let the Sunshine In, it was the most electrifying thing I’d ever seen. I knew I wanted to be a lead singer.”

Having dropped out of studying film at the University Of Cincinnati and flirted with the idea of becoming an actor, Dulli formed his first band, The Black Republicans, in the mid-Eighties.

Did they find it hard to get noticed at first? I ask. “When you’re 20 years old, nothing’s hard, man,” he answers. “You’re literally immortal.

“We all had regular jobs. I drove a taxi. I cooked in a restaurant. I painted houses, put roofs on houses. I was a roadie-type guy at the big theatre in town.”

Crucial to Dulli’s trajectory was the recruitment to The Black Republicans of bassist John Curley, the only Whigs founder member still by his side today.

He says: “We would see this bearded dude at our shows. We all thought he was about 40.

“Then one night after the show, he walked up and introduced himself to me, saying, ‘I’m better than your bass player.’ John came by our rehearsal place and played his way into the band.”

Dulli describes what happened next: “I moved to Arizona for six months and wrote a bunch of songs.

“Then I came back to Cincinnati and started the Whigs with John, Rick McCollum (guitar) and Steve Earle (drums).”

He remembers the Midwestern city on the Ohio River being a “great jumping-off point” because so many towns “weren’t that far away from us”.

Dulli rattles off the places in the manner of Johnny Cash singing I’ve Been Everywhere — “Louisville, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Athens, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh.”

But most inspirational to Dulli was a venue in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, The Jockey Club.

“Back in the day, the jazz dudes Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. played there,” he says.

“Then it fell into disrepair before opening again as a punk rock club. When I got to college, my roommates were deep in that scene and that’s how I got into The Jockey Club.

“I saw The Damned, Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Violent Femmes, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Killing Joke, so many great people.

“And everybody in the area cut their teeth there. If you were in a band, you played The Jockey Club and you played it multiple times a month.”

In 1989, the Whigs self-released debut album Big Top Halloween caught the attention of Seattle-based Sub Pop’s boss, Jonathan Poneman, who offered them a contract.

Suddenly, they were label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana and Mudhoney — but they were a very different beast.

Dulli says: “We were outsiders in more ways than one. We were from Cincinnati and we weren’t from the Northwest.

“Our covers were R&B covers instead of Stooges’. I love The Stooges but we had bonded over The Temptations. At our first rehearsal, we played Psychedelic Shack.

“We formed in October, 1986, and played our first gig in January the following year — and I guarantee you we played Psychedelic Shack at that show.”

Dulli was also infatuated with a Midwestern powerhouse in the shape of genre-defying Minneapolis-based Prince.

“We weren’t trying to sound like Prince,” he says. “But you could grab elements of him and stick them in your quiver.”

So what was it like heading to Seattle and mixing with Kurt Cobain and Co?

“It was like seeing people our age doing cool things,” says Dulli. “When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off No.1 on Billboard, I thought, ‘Wow! One of our own is at the top’.

“It was an exciting time, certainly in Seattle, where we had a front-row seat to it all.

“We loved all those guys and we loved those bands, played with everybody, and got to know everybody.”

When it came to meeting his biggest buddy from the scene, Mark Lanegan, it was via a different route.

“I met Mark in Boston when the Screaming Trees, Primus and the Whigs were on the same bill but we didn’t start hanging out until around 2000.”

The Whigs enjoyed a stellar Nineties, navigating their way through the music industry “machine” on various labels but coming up with at least three first-rate albums, Congregation (1992), Gentlemen (1993) and 1965 (1998).

In 2001, frazzled Dulli decided to take a step back and the Whigs disbanded. Aside from a brief recording reunion in 2006, the ­hiatus lasted ten years.

He says: “I had absolutely no intention of being in the Whigs ever again. In my creative life, I’m so proud of the things I did during that time — The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins.

“But when the door opened to the Whigs again, I was a different person and ready to step through it.”

Dulli remembers the times he would pass through his home town of Cincinnati where bassist Curley and his wife were raising their two daughters. “We were all pretty cooked from the Whigs experience but John would come to the shows and would get up on stage and play with either one of my bands — and everybody loved it.”

In 2010, when Dulli was on a solo tour, Curley did his usual thing but was then persuaded to do the next night in Chicago, a five-hour drive away.

He says: “It was the first time in 11 years that anyone had seen John Curley and I on stage together outside of Cincinnati.

“When I introduced him, the ovation was so unexpectedly loud and long. That, effectively, was the catalyst for the Whigs reforming.”

Since getting back together, they have made four studio albums, Do To The Beast (2014), In Spades (2017), How Do You Burn? and the imminent Soft Control.

The current line-up is Dulli, Curley, multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, Christopher Thorn (guitars) and Bryan Lee Brown (drummer who recently replaced Patrick Keeler who tours with Jack White).

Forty years on since the Whigs formed, Dulli says: “I’m still smiling at my good fortune. Still putting out music, playing live, the whole works. I’m a lucky fella.”

He accepts that he used to be “an angry young man” but, at 61, he has found a degree of peace.

“I had an imaginary chip on my shoulder that I needed to get rid of,” he says.

“You can tame yourself but you can always go back to the wild side — just in case you need to explore.”

It’s fair to say that The Afghan Whigs’ latest album is one of his walks on the wild side.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS

Soft Control

★★★★☆

Ein el-Hilweh, occupied West Bank – Adel Daraghmeh lies on his side on a thin mattress laid straight onto the dusty ground, one arm flung out, a sandal hanging half off his foot. “We don’t sleep, we barely drink, we barely eat,” he says weakly.

Above him, a patchwork of dark tarpaulins and old blankets is tied together between a few bent wooden poles – the only thing standing between his family and a sun pushing past 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit) in the early afternoon.

They are homeless again – their home destroyed days before by an Israeli bulldozer despite a court injunction they believed protected them. Beside him, his wife, Kheirieh, sits on a chair, a small plastic cup of water cradled in both hands.

About 30 metres up a slope, a settler-built fence now cuts across the hillside, cutting Adel and his brothers off from land their flocks grazed for generations. Past the fence, on the crest of the hill, an Israeli flag flies – visible from where Adel lies. “Isn’t this a disgrace, what we are living in?” he asks, more than once, over the course of an hour.

Adel manages diabetes with daily medication, but it’s been a struggle to obtain it in recent days. “They bulldozed the medication [in the house],” says Adel. “Our things, our household goods – all gone. They destroyed us. Our phones, the solar panels – no electricity, no water.”

As the family has learned in recent weeks, as Israel gears up for fiercely contested elections in October, even an Israeli Supreme Court injunction may not stop the bulldozers from coming now.

‘Five minutes to clear the whole area’

The wreckage of the Daraghmehs’ house is still scattered: clothes, a pulverised medicine cabinet, a hollowed-out mini-fridge with its door hanging open, and split cinderblocks.

Even after their son Hilal’s home was demolished shortly before without warning, the July 28 demolition of Adel and Kheirieh’s home came as a shock. With Adel a short drive away in Tubas collecting medication, Kheirieh was home with their daughter, Hanaa, when Israeli soldiers, settlers and Civil Administration officials arrived with a bulldozer and about 10 other vehicles. “They came while I was asleep,” she says.

Kheirieh walked out to meet them with the family’s legal papers – proof, she believed, that the home was protected by an earlier Israeli Supreme Court order barring demolition until the family’s case was resolved.

The court had suspended a 2022 demolition order while a case brought forward by the family progressed.

Soldiers took the documents, read them, conferred among themselves, and handed them back.

Then the bulldozer started anyway.

“Five minutes to clear the whole area,” one of them told her, she says.

“I told him: I can’t. I can’t clear the area. I’m on my own, and I’m ill,” she says. Already sick, and now seeing the bulldozers bearing down on her home with nearly everything she owned inside, she blacked out, waking up three hours later in an ambulance.

“And before I knew it, the bulldozer had started,” she says. “The whole house – all of it. All our belongings. Gone.”

“No order, no law,” added Adel weakly from the ground. “No humanity.”

‘Discriminatory’ system

“The army and the settlers demolished … despite the existence of a court order prohibiting it,” says Tawfiq Jabareen, the lawyer representing the Daraghmeh family, referring to the initial July 2 demolition of Hilal’s home. “The prosecution claimed it was a mistake by the army, and that it would not happen again – but the demolition was repeated.”

“The law and court rulings mean nothing to the settlers,” adds Jabareen, “who try to circumvent them by every means, believing that imposing facts on the ground is stronger than any law or court ruling.”

The Daraghmehs are herders of livestock who have lived along the Ein el-Hilweh spring, in the northern Jordan Valley, for generations. Four brothers and their families live in the area. “I was born here,” Adel says. “My father was born here.”

Nearby are the illegal Israeli settlement of Maskiyot and several settler outposts established in recent years, subjecting the extended family to numerous attacks, thefts and raids.

Like herding communities across Area C of the West Bank – under complete Israeli military and administrative control – the family has spent years navigating demolition orders under a planning system that leaves Palestinians almost no legal path to build.

Adel has had his home demolished before and spent significant money to rebuild it, he explains. What’s different now, they say, is that even that limited process – a warning, a demolition order, followed by a chance to appeal – has stopped applying to them at all. No demolition order was presented for either Hilal’s home or Adel’s when they came to bulldoze them despite the court injunctions.

Soldiers, settlers and Civil Administration officials arrived together during the demolitions, according to the family and activists present.

Allegra Pacheco, chief of party of the West Bank Protection Consortium and a lawyer who has represented Palestinians before Israeli courts for decades, says the irregularity of such demolitions is no aberration in an otherwise functioning system.

“This is a continuation of the deterioration of any pretence of legal protection for Palestinians,” she says. Even the ordinary planning process was built to fail Palestinians, she argues. Under a zoning system inherited from Jordanian and British Mandate-era law, Israel changed some of the laws to the detriment of Palestinians, leaving most Palestinian areas in Area C without approved building plans, while Israeli settlements – illegal under international law – are zoned and built freely.

“The Israelis set up the system to be discriminatory and to fail Palestinians,” says Pacheco. “So people build anyway, get the stop-work order, then demolition [order] – which you can appeal. But you’re appealing to the one who made the rule to discriminate against Palestinian construction.

“There’s no way for Palestinians in general to win under the current Israeli legal framework.”

As lines blur between authorities and settlers, who exactly spearheaded the demolition – soldiers, settlers, the Civil Administration – was unclear even to the family. “They’re all the same when they come,” says Hilal. “They’re all together.”

According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), since January 2023, more than 6,200 Palestinians, including more than 3,000 children, have been forcibly displaced, including more than 2,300 people since the beginning of 2026 alone. More than 907 Palestinian structures in the occupied West Bank have already been demolished this year.

Al Jazeera reached out to Israeli authorities and the military for comment on the events described in this article, but no response has yet been received.

‘Nothing is holding them back’

A short walk from the rubble of his parents’ home – and his own – Hilal sits under the shade of a tree beside the spring that sustained his family for generations, one that he and his flocks can no longer use.

Minutes earlier, he’d watched two settlers cool off at the spring, dousing themselves with water as one of them changed into a military uniform on the bank.

Hilal’s own remaining cattle – most of the herd already stolen, confiscated or sold – scrounge instead for whatever run-off is left once the settlers are gone. “We used to drink from this spring, and carry water on the donkey,” he says. “But they stopped us. The settlers fenced it off.”

Later, he rides his donkey across the road to what remains of his home. What had been walls and a roof is now a field of scorched rubble and gnarled metal piping, bent and knotted where the bulldozer dragged it. On his donkey, Hilal points to where each room had stood. He estimates the losses at 170,000 shekels ($57,000).

“Not a single thing I got to take – all of it is gone,” he says.

Next door, at the home of Adel’s brother, Qadri – which was previously demolished in August last year – several relatives, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, describe an extended family bracing for its turn.

“Nothing is holding them back now,” one son says. “They don’t even need an order any more. Of course we are scared they will come for us next.”

Prevented from rebuilding by nearby settlers and soldiers, Adel and Kheirieh now rely on relatives for help getting basic supplies. “All of our family helps each other,” says one relative, “but it is so hard when we don’t have enough, and we might be next.”

Following earlier thefts by settlers and confiscations from authorities a year and a half ago, the family had another 50 head of cattle stolen by settlers, they say.

Amid deteriorating health, an exhausted, heat-stricken Adel sits up from lying on the ground only when the topic of past weddings comes up. His hoarse voice strengthens, and he breaks into a wide smile. Softly, he begins clapping out the rhythm of a dahiyyeh – the sung, chanted line-dance of Bedouin celebrations – his wavering voice rising over the sound of his own hands.

“What beautiful times together,” he says. “Beautiful.”

Then, as if that singing expended the last of his dwindling energy, he sinks back onto the sweat-stained mattress and exhales. “Inshallah those times will return,” he says. “Inshallah.”

Gaza City, Gaza Strip – Sohair al-Bordani was displaced and living in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp, trying to take care of her four children, as war raged all around her.

And while she survived, her 10-year marriage has not. Al-Bordani, 30, explained that the arguments between her and her ex-husband had intensified since the war began in 2023, as the stress of merely existing in Gaza weighed down on them.

But al-Bordani encountered a problem. Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza – in which Israel has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians – has devastated many aspects of the Palestinian enclave’s administration, including its legal system.

To get a court-ordered divorce, with the accompanying financial claims she would be eligible for, al-Bordani would have to go before a religious court and establish her case. She said that she initiated legal proceedings in February 2025. But, because of delays to the judicial process brought on by the war, the case dragged on.

And so, al-Bordani chose the speedier option available to her – khulu, a form of divorce initiated by the wife that can involve relinquishing financial rights. In her case, this meant that she returned her dowry to her ex-husband and gave up the financial support she would have been entitled to.

“I gave up everything because obtaining my rights under these circumstances had become extremely difficult,” al-Bordani said. “I only wanted to find peace and start a new life away from everything I experienced during that period.”

Legal delays

Al-Bordani’s story reflects the experience of many women in Gaza who have found themselves trapped between delayed legal cases and a war that has disrupted access to the justice system, leaving decisions that are supposed to determine their futures suspended until conditions allow courts to resume their work fully.

Some personal status cases – including divorces – have reached Gaza’s religious courts, which oversee the matters.

According to Sheikh Hassan al-Jojo, the head of the Supreme Council of Sharia Judiciary in Gaza, courts have handled more than 8,700 divorce cases from the beginning of the war in October 2023 until the end of May.

That is despite the many challenges they face, including – but not limited to – damage to court buildings and shortages of judges and other staff.

Al-Jojo also said that courts had returned to near-full judicial work, while services continued even during periods when court buildings were closed.

But he also pointed out that the courts were operating with severely limited resources. Each court – according to al-Jojo – has only one computer, while repeated power cuts, shortages of printed materials and a lack of basic office supplies continue to affect their work.

“Essential services, including marriages and divorces, and other procedures needed by citizens, did not stop,” al-Jojo said. “But the priority at this stage is to keep providing the service, rather than improving it.”

Troubling consequences

Yet divorce figures alone do not reflect the full impact of the war on families. The delays in accessing the legal system have meant that women like al-Bordani have been unable to pursue their legal rights after separation, particularly in cases involving child custody, spousal and child maintenance, and other financial payments that are typically due to the wife.

Mohammad al-Talaa, a lawyer in Gaza, says that the war has significantly affected the functioning of judicial institutions, leading to the postponement of thousands of hearings and the suspension of many cases.

He added that thousands of files and documents have been lost due to Israeli bombing and the destruction of offices, making it difficult to prove rights, particularly in civil and property-related cases.

And with regard to personal status cases, al-Talaa pointed out that the suspension of enforcement departments in courts has left women entitled to payments without that financial support, and has also affected child visitation and custody cases, leaving some parents unable to implement decisions related to maintaining contact with their children.

The problems are not just legal. Al-Talaa explained that the continued delay in divorce and separation cases has left some women trapped in marriages they want to get out of. It has also prevented them from moving on with their lives, while delays in access to financial payments they are owed have increased the burden on families, and a lack of resolution on cases involving children has led to increased psychological stress for all involved, alongside the trauma caused by the war itself.

Suad al-Naami was not willing to deal with being stuck in limbo, and decided to get a khulu divorce even if it meant giving up on the rights a court-mandated divorce would have granted her.

The 22-year-old had only been married for five months, but with disputes with her ex-husband increasing, she left.

“I never imagined my married life would begin this way,” al-Naami said. “I hoped we would have a home and a stable life, but displacement and living in a tent made everything more difficult.”

For the young woman, the promise of a new start, amid all the destruction around her in Gaza, was better than a drawn-out case.

“Giving up on my rights was not an easy matter, but I felt that entering a long legal process and waiting for years would only increase my suffering,” al-Naami said. “I only wanted to end the disputes and start over, because staying in a relationship full of problems under these circumstances would have been harder than the decision to separate itself.”

New Delhi, India – The vapour heat treatment (VHT) facility in Rehmanpur village of Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh – used to sterilise fruit and vegetables – was preparing for the busiest time of the year when Japanese quarantine inspectors turned up in March.

Export documents had been cleared, shipping schedules finalised, and growers in the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat reserved their best Alphonso and Kesar mangoes for export to Japan, one of Asia’s premium markets.

Everything appeared set for the season to begin when production ground to a halt. Japanese inspectors reviewing the fumigation, disinfection and certification procedures raised concerns about the whole process, prompting Japan to suspend imports of the fruits.

However, on March 31, the plant protection authorities in Yokohama sent a formal letter, saying all Indian mango shipments bearing inspection certificates issued on or after March 25 would be barred until inspectors could confirm that operational standards had improved.

It was the first major disruption in India-Japan mango trade in nearly two decades. In 1986, imports of the fruit were barred over fruit fly concerns. Restrictions were lifted in 2006 after the country built VHT infrastructure, strengthened pest surveillance and agreed to annual inspections.

Japan ‘gave us credibility’

The 2026 halt now affects six approved varieties of mango – Alphonso, Kesar, Langra, Banganapalli, Chausa and Mallika – covering the peak export window of April through to June.

Japan imported roughly $1.54m worth of fresh and processed mango products from India between 2025 and 2026. It might appear to be a modest sum, but the Japanese market holds huge significance for the rest of the global trade. Japan pays premium prices for mangoes and the country’s approval signals quality to the rest of the world.

The suspension came at an already challenging time for mango farmers in India. Sustained heatwaves through the Konkan belt had destroyed much of Maharashtra’s Alphonso crop. Geopolitical disruptions in West Asia had pushed freight costs higher, and exporters who had spent years establishing relations with the Japanese suddenly faced cancelled contracts and inventories rotting in storage.

Vikram Shah, a Mumbai-based exporter who shipped about 2.5 tonnes of mangoes to Japan in 2025, highlighted the importance of its market.

“Japan was never our biggest market in terms of quantity, but it was the one that gave us credibility,” Shah told Al Jazeera. “We spent six years building trust with buyers there. I travelled to Osaka twice, sat with importers, visited their cold storage facilities and learned exactly what they expected from us. Relationships like that take years to build and can disappear in a single season.”

Rajesh Patil, an Alphonso grower in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, said his family had cultivated mangoes on a three-acre (1.2-hectare) orchard along the Konkan coast for two generations. The Japanese market, he said, consistently delivered far higher returns than domestic auctions, leading him to invest heavily in meeting Japan’s stringent import standards.

“We upgraded the orchard because Japan rewarded quality,” Patil said. “I spent nearly ₹80,000 [$840] on grading and handling equipment, attended pest-management training sessions, and changed the way we harvest and pack fruit,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The Japanese market paid almost twice what I could earn locally. When you make those investments, you expect the system supporting exports to be as reliable as the fruit you grow.”

China objects to rice

On April 17, China revoked the import licences of three Indian rice exporters after the General Administration of Customs rejected their consignments, claiming traces of genetically modified organisms (GMO).

The exporters disputed the finding, pointing out that their shipments received GMO-free certification before their departure and that the Indian government also said all domestic paddy and rice fields are free of genetic modification.

Rice makes up more than 20 percent of India’s agricultural exports, with a record-breaking $12.5bn of it shipped in the last financial year (2025-26). The three suspended exporters now face an uncertain path back into China, rattling their community.

Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), under India’s Ministry of Commerce and Industry, notified the companies and, on June 8, published a list of laboratories approved for GMO tests on China-bound shipments.

SK Singh, an agricultural scientist in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera the dispute exposed weaknesses in India’s testing system.

“Our labs built expertise in pesticide residue and aflatoxin testing because that’s what most markets wanted,” he said. “China’s demand for GMO verification calls for a different scale of capacity.”

The exporters’ certificates came from accredited labs even if the certification network remains uneven, he added.

Only a handful of facilities, concentrated in New Delhi and Hyderabad in the southeastern state of Telangana, run the required protein analysis, forcing exporters in northern Punjab and Haryana states to ship samples hundreds of kilometres away.

Fragmented supply chain

There were other warning signs before the crisis hit mangoes and rice.

Hong Kong suspended several Indian spice products over pesticide residues, and testing found quality deviations in nearly 12 percent of the samples. The European Union also raised the inspection frequency on Indian cumin to 30 percent in January 2025, following 312 spice alerts on its rapid alert system in 2024.

Ananya Bose, a food safety scientist in Kochi in the southern state of Kerala, traced the problem to a fragmented supply chain.

“A farmer sells to an aggregator, who sells to a trader, who supplies a processor. Somewhere in that chain, the record of what was sprayed disappears,” she said. “The trail is detailed until the first sale, then it effectively ends.”

Bose has pushed for mandatory digital pesticide records, since regulators abroad expect traceability from field to shipment, a standard many states still treat as optional.

These setbacks may read as isolated incidents, but they expose a gap between India’s agricultural strength and the traceability, food safety and certification standards that Japan, the EU, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada now demand. Those standards are tightened by consumer pressure for transparency, climate-driven pest concerns, food-security strategy and the COVID pandemic.

At the same time, competitors have moved faster, with Thailand building a nationwide traceability programme, Vietnam investing in farmers’ training, and Brazil and Chile pouring money into cold-chain systems.

India’s progress has lagged with just 207 registered pack houses, 72 percent of them concentrated in Maharashtra. Moreover, scarce cold storage facilities and logistical costs eat up roughly 15 percent of export value, almost double that of advanced nations. Small farmers owning less than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land make up more than 86 percent of India’s cultivators, making standardisation difficult at scale.

“India built its strategy around producing more, while premium markets reward proving quality along the way,” agricultural economist Anil Gupta told Al Jazeera.

Gupta pointed to some real gains: recognised laboratories grew from 22 to 89 over the past decade, and approved export certificates climbed from roughly 61,000 to more than 170,000.

“The progress is measurable, but so is the scale of the challenge,” he said. “These improvements mark a beginning, well short of the finish line.”

Ujjwal Kumar Ghosh, a senior official in the government’s Department of Commerce, has called for tighter controls on antibiotic residues, pesticides and aflatoxins in spices, tea, fruits and vegetables. He said funds have been set aside to upgrade laboratories, though without a timeline.

“The government is strengthening the system from testing to inspection and traceability. We are tightening controls on antibiotic and pesticide residues and aflatoxins, expanding laboratory capacity, introducing risk-based inspections and using digital systems and rapid screening to identify problems faster. The objective is to help exporters meet stricter global food-safety standards while protecting India’s access to international markets,” said Ghosh.

India still holds just 2.4 percent of global agri-exports despite ranking as the world’s second-largest agricultural producer, with processed exports stuck near 17 percent, against 25 percent in the US and 50 percent in China.

And growers are facing the fallout.

Gujarat’s Kesar mango farmers lost their strongest Japanese buyer. A basmati rice farmer in Haryana’s Karnal said local prices had already dropped 8 percent. And a turmeric processor in Kerala’s Erode said residue testing cost him 15,000 rupees ($157) last quarter, almost 10 percent of his profit.

Agriculture still employs about 42 percent of India’s workforce while producing less than a fifth of the national output.

“This is about far more than a few rejected shipments,” Gupta said. “The countries that succeed will consistently meet the standards global buyers demand.”

Indian farmers have long proven they can grow for the world. The task now is building systems that convince the world to keep buying.

Cali, Colombia – A day after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake shook western Colombia, rescue teams are frantically fighting through the rubble of collapsed buildings to find survivors and recover bodies.

The powerful quake has caused at least 254 deaths nationwide, most of them concentrated in the cities of Pereira and Cali, according to government figures.

“For me, the earthquake felt eternal,” recalled Luis Saenz, a 22-year-old journalism student from Cali.

Saenz was at home enjoying his morning coffee when the quake struck at 7:34am (12:34 GMT) on Monday. He remembers his cat darting under the bed, then chaos as his family fled into the street.

Some 5,000 homes suffered damage, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, while dozens of buildings – many of them residential – collapsed entirely.

In Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, at least 95 people died, and 45 structures have fully or partially collapsed, according to local government statistics.

“I never thought I would see my city like this,” resident Maria Isabel Cumbal said between sobs, as she watched rescue efforts unfold at the Vanessa Building in the south of the city.

The seven-storey residential apartment block was reduced to wreckage in Monday’s earthquake.

Rescuers now wield hammers, shovels and heavy machinery in an attempt to pierce through thick slabs of concrete and rescue the estimated 20 people trapped underneath.

On and around the collapsed residence, hundreds of volunteers help to clear the rubble by forming a human chain to pass buckets from atop the mound of debris down to dump trucks.

Every so often, a rescuer will hold up a fist to call for silence, so that emergency responders can listen for signs of life.

For five decades, Top Of The Pops defined the music industry.

Before streaming, YouTube, and TikTok, the hit BBC show was the go-to place for both fledgling singers looking for a big break and superstars alike.

Now the show’s assistant floor manager Gareth Davies, 51, has lifted the lid on what really went on behind the scenes — branding Jennifer Lopez and Shania Twain the biggest divas.

He also recalls how Madonna was left twiddling her thumbs after her clothes went missing.

Gareth, who worked on the show from the mid-to-late Nineties through to the early Noughties, said: “My job was to get artists from backstage and guide them to the stage for their performance.

“Jennifer Lopez had the most demands, for sure.

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“The dressing rooms were all along this narrow corridor — so nothing special, really, quite old-fashioned. But for that small stretch of space, she made it completely her own.

“The best way to describe it is that she turned her dressing room entirely white.

“I’m not sure where the fascination with white came from, but she wanted everything transformed.

“The whole room was covered from top to bottom, which was quite unusual.

“She didn’t paint it. She had plastic sheeting put up everywhere instead, so it created this striking, all-white environment.”

It’s a far cry from the image of the Bronx girl done good portrayed in the lyrics of her 2002 hit Jenny From The Block.

But J.Lo’s antics pale into insignificance compared to country legend Shania Twain.

Recalling how the superstar was flanked by her team at all times, Gareth said: “Shania Twain had a really large entourage with her, and my lasting memory was watching her walk from the dressing rooms to the studio.

“There was this long line of people moving ahead of her, like a relay.

“Apparently she didn’t open doors, so someone would always be one step ahead holding it open for her. It was this perfectly choreographed system so she could just keep walking.”

Shania appeared on the show four times during Gareth’s time on the series, making her debut in June 1999 with That Don’t Impress Me Much before returning in December that same year. She also performed in 2000 and 2002.

But for every diva, there was also an unlikely down-to-earth performer.

Perhaps the most surprising was Janet Jackson, sister of the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

Gareth said: “I remember everyone on the studio floor waiting quite a long time for Janet to arrive.

“We were all being very casual about it, thinking, well, she’s a major A-lister, of course she’s going to be late. So we just waited around.

“But it turned out Janet and all her dancers had been there the whole time, quietly waiting on stage themselves while we were all waiting for her.

“She was just there in her tracksuit bottoms and hoodie, completely relaxed in that effortlessly cool way.

“What really stayed with me was how kind, gentle, and soft she was. Everyone was genuinely taken aback.

“She felt like one of the dancers, really, just keen to be part of the group rather than setting herself apart as the star.”

Kylie Minogue was also reportedly a total sweetheart.

Speaking about the I Should Be So Lucky singer, Gareth said: “I was quite obsessed with Kylie.

“I remember knocking on her dressing room door with my little script in hand.

“I’d already managed to get Gina G’s autograph — it was around the time she was doing the Eurovision Song Contest (in 1996) — so I thought, right, I’m going to get Kylie Minogue’s on here too.

“I knocked on the door, told her I was a big fan, and she was so lovely.

“She invited me in and chatted with me for a bit, just as a person rather than as a BBC employee. That really stayed with me.”

As well as performing on the show, Kylie went on to make a number of presenting cameos.

Music legend Madonna made her Top Of The Pops debut in January 1984, belting out her single Holiday. She went on to perform a further 13 times, all of which were lapped up by fans. But Gareth recalls how one performance almost didn’t happen after she lost her costume.

He told online gambling platform Zingo Bingo: “I do remember that one time when Madonna came over, everything felt much tighter and more rushed than usual.

“Sometimes an artist would record several songs from an album in one go, so they wouldn’t have to keep coming back again and again.

“From the moment she arrived, it was straight into the studio, rehearsing, back to get ready, then out on stage.

“But she and her team had all rushed in from a hotel in central London, and somehow her stylist had left all the outfits behind.

“We actually had to delay because Madonna had nothing to wear.

“It really felt like she had someone responsible for every tiny detail, so you can imagine whoever was in charge of the wardrobe that day was probably in serious trouble.”

First broadcast on the BBC on New Year’s Day in 1964, Top Of The Pops ran for over four decades.

But despite the huge names and viewing figures, the show was actually as humble as it gets, with greasy-spoon breakfasts being served metres away from where LA-based megastars were doing their pre-show yoga.

Gareth said: “It was filmed at Elstree Studios, where EastEnders was shot, and Grange Hill was filmed there too.

“It was a very traditional, slightly old-fashioned BBC studio that hadn’t really been updated for years. You had this classic canteen staffed by people who’d been there forever, serving no-frills British fry-ups, along with old-school dressing rooms.

“Elstree felt quite remote, almost in the middle of nowhere. So when artists came over, especially from America, they were expecting to appear on the BBC’s biggest music show.

“They probably imagined being right in the heart of London where everything’s happening.

“Instead, they were on the quiet outskirts with very little going on.

“It did make for some surreal moments. You’d spot a big star sitting near a soap star legend, tucking into a breakfast.”

The show was so big that from 2001 to 2005, the BBC hosted the Top Of The Pops Awards at the Manchester Arena.

Explaining how the show felt more like a family at times, Gareth said: “What was so nice was that there really wasn’t much for anyone to do.

“An artist might rehearse at ten in the morning, and then we wouldn’t record until seven in the evening, so they’d just be hanging around.

“It created a real sense of community. You got to see people as much backstage and offstage as you did onstage, which was quite unique.

“Normally, artists come in, rehearse, and then disappear until they’re needed.

“But there, everyone stayed, mingled, and just spent time together, which gave it a very different, much more relaxed atmosphere.

“I remember the first time the Spice Girls got on stage for their rehearsals, they were all jumping around and hugging each other. That was a moment where they felt they had made it.

“The five of them just had this amazing chemistry together. Their personalities worked so well and it wasn’t faked for cameras.

“You’d go into the dressing room and the energy was electric. They were so fun.”

After five decades of being “still number one”, the final Top Of The Pops aired on July 30, 2006.

The BBC said in a statement: “The decision to bring the show to an end after 42 years has not been taken lightly and over the past few years every effort has been made to maintain the quality and distinctiveness of the show.

“However, the BBC’s Creative Future Music Strategy has concluded that in a rapidly changing musical landscape, Top Of The Pops no longer occupies the central role it once did.”

Scottish rock band Snow Patrol were the final ever act to play on the show — belting out their single Chasing Cars.

Despite risks in the Strait of Hormuz and Black Sea, seafarers from the Philippines are still competing for jobs.

Manila, Philippines – Monsoon rains may have forced schools to shut down and suspended government services in the Philippine capital last week, but applicants at shipping companies and employment agencies still formed long lines that snaked around street corners.

The rain was the least of their worries. They were taking the first step on a journey that would take them to increasingly treacherous waters – and they say they are fully aware of the risks.

Gerald, a veteran sailor, was sorting out some last-minute paperwork for his next deployment next week. He is going to board the same ship he was last on – a cargo vessel off the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. The last time he was there, he was stuck for two months. He was due to return to the Philippines when the United States and Israel launched air attacks on Iran in late February.

“There was one missile that flew over. The navy intercepted it right when it was above us, so we hid,” recalled Gerald, who asked for his full name not to be used to protect his job. “We knew fragments could land on our ship. But what can we do? There was nowhere safe.”

He said he had never had to face and fear and uncertainty in 15 years as a commercial seafarer. As the US-Israel war on Iran spread across the region, effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz, he and his stranded colleagues for weeks watched projectiles from both directions blow up mid-air. Shrapnel mostly ended up in the water, but the crossfire prevented their usual rations from coming through. They had to brave the danger and fish on the deck to survive.

But none of that has deterred him – not even the on-and-off diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.

“I was able to save enough to buy a property after just two years of sailing,” he said. “I was able to build a house for my parents.”

The sea had always been a source of food and income for Gerald. He grew up in a fishing village. And while he says he was never hungry, sailing in waters beyond his hometown changed his life.

“This job has provided me with a decent income. And it’s the only job I’ve known for a long time. I can’t just go into business or farming. That’s easier said than done,” he said.

‘If I die, my family will be set for life’

At the height of the war in March, nearly 20,000 sailors on 1,500 ships were trapped in the Strait of Hormuz. At least 17 have been killed in attacks since then.

The Philippines supplies more than a quarter of the world’s seafaring workforce. Among the 6,000 sailors currently stranded in the waterway, approximately 2,500 are Filipinos, according to data from the International Maritime Organization in July.

But even when the US and Iran struck an interim deal in June to end the war, there was no mass repatriation of Filipino sailors. The Department of Migrant Workers said more than 60 have since returned home from the Gulf, but most Filipinos on vessels that have been able to transit the Strait of Hormuz remain on board.

Alberto Lobaton was also due to return to sea and was staying at the same apartment complex near Manila Bay where Gerald was. The place has served as a halfway house for seafarers for years and was fully booked despite escalating maritime conflicts.

In addition to the conflict in the Gulf, there has been an increase in attacks on merchant vessels in the Black Sea as the war between Russia and Ukraine intensifies. In July alone, 35 ships were struck, and more than 20 sailors were killed, including at least three Filipinos.

Lobaton witnessed one such strike last year.

“I felt the ship shake because the explosion was so close. It was just around 300 metres (984 feet) away; I was in our quarters, but those who were on duty that night stood up and ran,” said Lobaton.

The Philippine government has appealed to shipowners to avoid high-risk areas or disembark their Filipino crew. It’s also reminded Filipino sailors they have the right to refuse to sail.

Lobaton says it would be a lie to say he is not concerned for his safety, but the financial rewards outweigh the risk of injury or death.

“If I die, my family will be set for life because we are insured. So if something were to happen to me, I’d prefer it happened while I’m at work at sea.”