The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a criminal complaint to a court in Chile, seeking the prosecution of an Israeli Ukrainian who was an Israeli sniper in Gaza. Lucia Newman investigates his role in the deaths in Gaza.
Published On 18 Feb 202618 Feb 2026
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Tigray, Ethiopia – Saba Gedion was 17 when the peace deal that ended the conflict in her homeland of Tigray in northern Ethiopia was signed in 2022.
She hoped then that fighting would be a thing of the past, but the last few months have convinced her that strife is once again looming, and she feels paralysed with despair.
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“Many people are leaving the region in droves,” Gedion told Al Jazeera as she sat under the shade of a tree, selling coffee to the occasional customer in an area frequented by internally displaced people (IDPs) in Tigray’s capital, Mekelle.
Gedion – herself a displaced person – is from the town of Humera, a now-disputed area with the Amhara region that witnessed heavy clashes during the 2020-2022 war between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
The now-21-year-old remembers the horrors she witnessed. Some of her family were killed, while others were abducted into neighbouring Eritrea, she says. She has not heard from them since.
Though she made it out alive, her life was turned upside-down when she was forced to flee to Mekelle for safety.
Years later, Gedion sees similar patterns as people leave Tigray – most headed to the neighbouring Afar region – once again looking for the safety that has become elusive at home.
“Recurring conflict and civil war have made us zombies rather than citizens,” she told Al Jazeera.
In recent weeks, enmity between Ethiopia and Eritrea has escalated amid separate accusations by both sides.
Speaking to Ethiopia’s parliament in early February, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed addressed his landlocked country’s access to the sea, saying “the Red Sea and Ethiopia cannot remain separated forever”. This has led to accusations by Eritrea that Addis Ababa is seeking to invade its country and trying to reclaim the Red Sea Assab seaport, which it lost in 1993 with the independence of Eritrea.
Ethiopia, meanwhile, has accused Eritrean troops of occupying its territory along parts of their shared border, and called for the immediate withdrawal of soldiers from the towns of Sheraro and Gulomakada, among others. Addis Ababa also accuses Eritrea of arming rebels in the vast Horn of Africa country.
Observers say the heightening tensions point to an impending war between the two countries – one that could once again involve Tigray.
In Tigray’s capital, a once-booming city of tourism and business, most streets are quiet.
The young people who previously frequented cafes are now often seen applying for visas and speaking with smugglers in the hope of leaving Tigray.
Helen Gessese, 36, lives in a makeshift IDP camp on the outskirts of Mekelle. She worries about what will become of the already struggling region should another conflict erupt.
Gessese is an ethnic Irob, a persecuted Catholic minority group from the border town of Dewhan in the northeastern part of Tigray.
During the Tigray war, several of her family members were kidnapped, she said, as Eritrean troops expanded their hold of the area.
As the war intensified, she fled to Mekelle, about 150km away, looking for safety. Her elderly parents were too frail to join her on foot, so she was forced to leave them behind. Like Gedion, she has not heard from them or the rest of her family since 2022.
“My life has been held back, not knowing if my elderly parents are still alive,” she told Al Jazeera, the stress of the last few years making her seem much older than she is.
In Mekelle, it is not uncommon to meet people who are anguished or frustrated – some by the renewed tensions, and many by the trauma of the previous conflict.
More than 80 percent of hospitals were left in ruins in Tigray during the war, according to humanitarian organisations, while sexual violence that defined the two-year conflict is still a recurring issue. Hundreds of thousands of young people are still out of school, foreign investment that created jobs in the past has in large part evaporated, and the economy remains crippled after years of war.
Meanwhile, nearly four years later, the federal government’s decision to withhold foreign funds meant for the region is deepening a humanitarian crisis. The bulk of the public service in the region, for instance, has not been paid for months.
The Ethiopia-Eritrea relationship has also deteriorated in recent years.
The longstanding foes had waged war against each other between 1998 and 2000, but in 2018, they signed a peace deal. They then became allies during the 2020-2022 civil war in Tigray against common enemy, the TPLF.
But the relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea has been in sharp decline since the signing of the 2022 accord that ended the Tigray war – an agreement that Asmara was not party to.
Earlier this month, Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gedion Timothewos wrote an open letter acknowledging the presence of Eritrean troops loitering on the Ethiopian side of the border and calling for them to leave.
“The incursion of Eritrean troops …” he wrote, “is not just provocations but acts of outright aggression.”
Asmara continues to deny the presence of its troops on the Ethiopian side, and Eritrean Minister of Information Yemane Gebremeskel has called such accusations “an agenda of war against Eritrea”.
As a sign of the worsening of the relationship between the two neighbours, Ethiopia’s Abiy, in his address to lawmakers early in February, also accused Eritrean troops of committing atrocities during the Tigray war. The accusation was a first from the prime minister, following repeated denials by his government about reported mass killings, looting and the destruction of factories by Eritrean troops during the Tigray conflict.
Eritrea’s government rejected Abiy’s claims about atrocities, with Gebremeskel calling them “cheap and despicable lies”, noting that Abiy’s government had until recently been “showering praises and state medals” on Eritrean army officers.
As the tensions escalate, many observers say war between the two is now inevitable and have called for dialogue and the de-escalation of the situation.
“The situation remains highly volatile and we fear that it will deteriorate, worsening the region’s already precarious human rights and humanitarian situation,” the United Nations Human Rights spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani, said this month.
Kjetil Tronvoll, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Oslo New University College, told Al Jazeera a new war would have “wide-reaching implications for the region” – regardless of the outcome.
He believes the looming conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea could take the shape of a new civil war, positioning Addis Ababa against Tigray’s leadership yet again.
From Ethiopia’s side, he argues the objective would be regime change in both Asmara and Mekelle, noting that “regime change in Eritrea may lead to Ethiopia gaining control of Assab”. For Asmara and Mekelle, the aim would also be regime change in Addis Ababa, he suggests.
“If it erupts, it will be devastating for Tigray,” Tronvoll said. “The outcome of such a war will likely fundamentally alter the political landscape of Ethiopia and the Horn [of Africa],” he warned, pointing out that regional states could also be pulled into a proxy war.
For many in Tigray, memories of massacres committed during the 2020-2022 war are still fresh.
Axum, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the central zone of the Tigray region, is known for its tall obelisk relics of an ancient kingdom. But for 24 hours in November 2020, the city was the site of killings carried out by the Eritrean army. “Many hundreds of civilians” were killed, rights group Amnesty International said.
While the killings were denied by both the Eritrean and Ethiopian governments for many years, this month Abiy acknowledged they had taken place.
However, despite speaking of “mass killings” in Axum, he has been silent about the fact that the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies worked together openly as allies during that war.
Marta Keberom, a resident in her forties who hails from Axum, says very few people in her hometown have not been touched by violence in the last five years.
“The killings that happened during the war wasn’t just a conflict, it had the hallmark of a genocide where whole families were murdered without a cause,” she said of the killings that targeted Tigrayans.
“To relive that,” Keberom said, speaking at an IDP centre in Mekelle, would be “something I can’t begin to comprehend.”
Waiting for customers at her coffee stand in the city, Gedion is also afraid of what might come next.
She once aspired to be an engineer, but since being uprooted from her village, she now dreams of a future far away from Ethiopia.
She has already contacted a smuggler to help her leave, she says, through Libya and on towards the Mediterranean Sea – despite the extreme risks of such a journey.
“I would rather take a chance than die a slow, certain death with little future prospects,” she said.
China has previously criticised the role, accusing the US of interfering in China’s internal affairs.
Published On 18 Feb 202618 Feb 2026
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the Trump administration has appointed an envoy to the position of United States special coordinator for Tibetan issues.
The role, which was created by the US Congress in 2002, will be filled by Riley Barnes, who is currently also serving as the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labour.
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Rubio announced Barnes’s appointment in a statement on the occasion of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, on Tuesday.
“On this first day of the Year of the Fire Horse, we celebrate the fortitude and resilience of Tibetans around the world,” Rubio said in a statement.
“The United States remains committed to supporting the unalienable rights of Tibetans and their distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage,” he added.
The new appointment comes as the administration of US President Donald Trump has stepped back from speaking out on a range of human rights issues globally, and as the US has either intervened directly or threatened other countries, including Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and Denmark’s Greenland.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to Rubio’s announcement, which comes during the Chinese New Year holiday, but Beijing has criticised similar appointments in the past.
“The setting up of the so-called coordinator for Tibetan issues is entirely out of political manipulation to interfere in China’s internal affairs and destabilise Tibet. China firmly opposes that,” Zhao Lijian, a spokesman at the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said after a similar appointment was made by the US State Department in 2020, during Trump’s first presidency .
“Tibet affairs are China’s internal affairs that allow no foreign interference,” Lijian had said.
China has governed the remote region of Tibet since 1951, after its military marched in and took control in what it called a “peaceful liberation”.
Exiled Tibetan leaders have long condemned China’s policies in Tibet, accusing Beijing of separating families in the Himalayan region, banning their language, and suppressing Tibetan culture.
China has denied any wrongdoing and says its intervention in Tibet ended “backward feudal serfdom”.
More than 80 percent of the Tibetan population is ethnic Tibetan, while Han Chinese make up the remainder. Most Tibetans are also Buddhists, and while China’s constitution allows for freedom of religion, the governing Communist Party adheres strictly to atheism.
Also on Tuesday, the head of the Washington-based Radio Free Asia announced that the US-government-funded news outlet has resumed broadcasting into China, after shutting down its news operations in October due to cuts from the Trump administration.
Radio Free Asia President and CEO Bay Fang wrote on social media that the resumed broadcast to audiences in China in “Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur” languages was “due to private contracting with transmission services” and congressional funding approved by Trump.
The Israeli government has approved a plan to begin land registration in the occupied West Bank, meaning it will be able to seize land from Palestinians who cannot prove ownership.
For the first time since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967, it will register such land as property of the state – also known as settlement of land title – in Area C of the occupied West Bank.
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Area C is the part of the West Bank that remains under direct Israeli control. It covers about 60 percent of the West Bank.
According to Israeli media, Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who submitted the proposal to restart land registration with Minister of Justice Yariv Levin and Minister of Defence Israel Katz, said the move was a continuation of “the settlement revolution to control all our lands”.
The Palestinian Authority presidency said the decision amounts to “de facto annexation” of the West Bank. It is the formalisation of the ongoing process of building settlements in the West Bank in violation of international law over the past several decades.
Here’s what we know about how this could be implemented:
During Jordanian control of the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, the administration primarily followed the British Mandate of land ownership, under which land was registered as state or private property.
But only about one-third of the land in the West Bank was formally registered under this process. Large numbers of Palestinians living in the region had no documentation or other means of proving they owned their own land. Many of them had also lost documents or they had been destroyed during the 1967 six-day Arab-Israeli war, which resulted in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
When Israel took control of the West Bank, it discontinued the process of land registration.
Now, the government has decided to restart the land registration, a move that many Israeli human rights groups and political analysts have condemned.
Xavier Abu Eid, a political analyst based in the West Bank, described the Israeli government’s move as a “de facto annexation of Palestinian territory”.
“What they are doing is the implementation of annexation, packaging it as a mere bureaucratic process,” he told Al Jazeera.
He added that it reaffirms the idea that “there is a colonial power that sets two different sets of legislation depending on ethnic and religious identity, defined also as apartheid.”
In 1993 and 1995, the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. They laid out administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza and divided the occupied West Bank into three areas – Area A, Area B and Area C.
The new Palestinian Authority (PA) was granted full administrative control of 18 percent of the land – Area A – and joint control with Israel over 22 percent – Area B. Area C remained under complete Israeli military control. These areas were meant to be in place for five years, after which full administrative control would be handed to the PA. However, this transfer never took place.
The land registration that will now be restarted will apply to Area C, which is home to more than 300,000 Palestinian people.
According to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, in Area C, about 58 percent of the land remains unregistered. In a statement on Sunday, the group warned that the Israeli government’s land settlement process will now facilitate full Israeli control of this unregistered land.
Israeli authorities have provided few details about how the process will unfold, but essentially, it will likely involve transferring legal ownership of land to the Israeli state and issuing evictions to Palestinian communities, as has been happening in East Jerusalem in recent years, experts told Al Jazeera.
Michal Braier, an architect and the head of research at Bimkom, an Israeli human rights organisation that focuses on land and housing rights, said it is likely Israeli authorities will take the same approach in the West Bank as they have taken in East Jerusalem since 2018. In East Jerusalem, only 1 percent of settled land has been registered to Palestinians from 2018 to 2024, according to Bimkom.
Braier said Israel will begin by selecting the areas of land it wants to register. The government has set a goal of registering about 15 percent of the unregistered land within the next four years, she added.
“Now we can pretty clearly guess that this 15 percent will be lands where they assume that they can prove the state ownership easily or they can easily reject Palestinian ownership claims because a lot of these unregistered lands don’t have clear records and the records go a very, very long time back. So it will be very hard to prove Palestinian ownership,” she told Al Jazeera.
In theory, she said, Palestinians will be able to file land claims as part of the new process, but in practice, it is likely that they will be prevented from successfully doing so.
“Even if they do file claims, the legal bars they need to meet are very difficult to obtain. On top of this, there is the problem of Absentee Property Law, which moves land into the state’s hands and is yet unclear how exactly it will be practised in the occupied West Bank. So Palestinians are highly likely to lose their individual property rights,” she said.
The Absentee Property Law is an Israeli law enacted in 1950 that states that Israel has the right to seize property of “absentees” – people who were expelled, fled or who left the country after November 29, 1947, the day the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to end the British Mandate and recommend the creation of a Palestinian and a Jewish state. Israel was founded less than six months later.
Braier said land registration “will be used as another mechanism to grab land that they could not grab until now for different reasons and to build more settlements and push out Palestinians from Area C”.
According to a Times of Israel report, an Israeli government resolution linked to the land registration bill has allowed for an initial budget of $79m for the land registration process in Area C from 2026 to 2030. The report added that during this process, Israel, which already has civilian and military control of the area, will establish 35 ministerial positions and set up state agencies to begin the process of registering land.
Peace Now described the Israeli government’s decision to restart land registration in the West Bank as “a mega land grab of Palestinian property”.
“Land registration will result in the transfer of ownership of the vast majority of Area C to the state, leaving Palestinians with no practical ability to realise their ownership rights,” the group said in a statement on Sunday.
Abu Eid said the land registration process the government intends to undertake amounts to a “full-fledged ethnic cleansing policy” and added that it is a moment that will be “remembered as a turning point in Israeli attempts at erasing the Palestinian cause”.
But he noted that the Israeli government’s decision has not arisen in a vacuum as Israel has “allowed for a wave of terror attacks by Israeli settlers and the expansion of colonial settlements all over the West Bank” for years.
“Palestinians in general are not just dispossessed of their land and natural resources but come under attacks that are dealt with utter impunity both by the Israeli regime and by the international community,” he said.
“In al-Auja, for example, near Jericho, from 100 Palestinian families that used to live in the place a few months ago, now there is not a single family left,” he added.
He said it is likely that Israel will expect thousands of displaced people from the West Bank to go to Jordan.
“You should not forget the incitement coming out from members of the Israeli government claiming that Jordan should be turned into Palestine while Palestine should be left for the Zionist project,” Abu Eid said.
The West Bank is home to about 3.3 million Palestinians. It is divided into 11 governorates with Hebron being the most populous at 842,000 residents. Jerusalem follows with 500,000, Nablus with 440,000, Ramallah and el-Bireh with 377,000 and Jenin with 360,000.
Since the Israeli occupation in 1967, the Palestinian people have been subject to land seizures and illegal settlement expansion.
Today, about 700,000 Israelis live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in settlements and outposts that are Jewish-only communities built on Palestinian land. These range in size from a single dwelling to a collection of high rises. Last year, the Israeli government approved the construction of new settlements in the region, seeking to advance “de facto sovereignty” in the region.
In all, the number of settlements and outposts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has risen by nearly 50 percent since 2022 – from 141 to 210 now.
Besides eroding Palestinian people’s land rights, Israel has also carried out frequent raids in the West Bank, where Palestinians are also subject to checkpoints, arbitrary arrests, home demolitions and settler attacks.
The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem estimated that settler attacks against Palestinians have forcibly displaced 44 communities across the West Bank in recent years. These attacks have also resulted in the deaths of Palestinian people. Since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, settler attacks have also intensified.
At least 1,054 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers from October 7, 2023, to February 5 of this year, according to the latest United Nations figures.
Braier said Sunday’s approval of Israel’s land registration in the West Bank will result in a rise in violence in the region.
“Area C is being cleared out by what is usually regarded as settler violence, but this violence is actually state violence, backed by state mechanisms, so this is all working together to expand Israeli control over Area C and expand settlement in Area C,” she said.
In 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s “expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations, and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section are totally invalid and cannot change that status”.
The ICJ has also ruled that Israel’s long-term occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and must be terminated “as rapidly as possible”.
Braier said the Israeli government’s latest decision on land registration also contravenes international law.
“International law is clear: As an occupying power, Israel cannot exercise sovereign powers, including final determination of land ownership, in an occupied territory,” she told Al Jazeera.
“This position was reinforced by the International Court of Justice’s 2024 advisory opinion, which found that similar settlement of land title proceedings in East Jerusalem violate the laws of occupation,” she said.
“Furthermore, the decision to authorise Israeli civilian authorities to manage the land registration procedures likewise constitutes a clear indication of the annexation of the area,” she added.
On October 26, 1994, Israel and Jordan signed the Wadi Araba Treaty, which formally ended the state of war between the two nations that had existed since the creation of Israel in 1948.
Under the agreement, Israel and Jordan established diplomatic ties, agreed to exchange territory and opened the way for cooperation in trade, tourism, transport links, water resources and environmental protection. Jordan also signed the agreement seeking to ensure a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine would be established.
But the public in Jordan, opposition groups and human rights groups have repeatedly called on the government to sever relations with Israel due to its continuing aggression in Palestine.
In 2014, many Jordanians took to the streets, calling on the government to scrap its peace treaty with Israel after clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
In 2024, a similar call was issued by Jordanian activists as Israel conducted its genocidal war in Gaza, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians.
On Sunday, Jordan, which shares a 482km (300-mile) border with Israel and the West Bank, condemned Israel’s decision to reinstate land registration in the West Bank. Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described Israel’s move as a “flagrant violation of international law”.
While Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel still holds, Abu Eid said Sunday’s decision by the Israeli cabinet is a serious and sensitive matter for Jordan, particularly if thousands of people are forcibly displaced from the West Bank.
Furthermore, he said, Israel has been acting against the principles of the Jordan-Israel peace agreement for years.
“If peace agreements are aimed at creating the conditions to enhance cooperation and establish a two-state solution, Israel goes against all of such principles, seeking the expansionist ‘Greater Israel’ agenda,” he said.
“Jordan takes such matters seriously and will certainly seek to have collective action with other regional and international allies,” he added.
Five European countries say findings ‘conclusively’ confirm the deadly toxin in the Russian opposition leader’s body as Moscow calls it Western propaganda.
Five European countries – the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands – have accused Russia of poisoning and killing opposition leader Alexey Navalny in 2024 based on lab results from a sample taken from his body.
The five governments said in a statement on Saturday that tissue samples “conclusively” confirmed the lethal toxin epibatidine. The poison is found in wild dart frogs from South America.
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“The UK, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands are confident that Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a lethal toxin,” the statement issued during the Munich Security Conference said.
Russia had “the means, motive, and opportunity to administer this poison”, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office added in a statement.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told state-run RIA Novosti news agency she’ll comment once the test results are publicly presented – something she noted has not yet been done.
The five countries said they’re reporting Russia to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention. There was no immediate comment from the organisation.
Navalny, who crusaded against official corruption and staged anti-Kremlin protests as President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, died in an Arctic penal colony on February 16, 2024, while serving a 19-year sentence he called politically motivated.
Epibatidine is found naturally in dart frogs and can also be manufactured in a lab, something European scientists suspect was the case in the alleged poisoning of Navalny.
The poison works by causing shortness of breath, convulsions, seizures and a slowed heart rate and can kill on contact.
The five countries said Russia needs to be held accountable for its “repeated violations” of the convention.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper met Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, at the Munich Security Conference. She said the new findings are “shining a light on the Kremlin’s barbaric plot to silence his voice”.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot wrote on X the alleged poisoning shows “Vladimir Putin is prepared to use biological weapons against his own people in order to remain in power.”
The Russian government has repeatedly denied any involvement in Navalny’s death. Authorities said he became ill after a walk and died from natural causes.
“Once there are test results – once there are formulas for the substances – there will be a comment. Without this, all talk and statements are just information leaks aimed at distracting attention from the West’s pressing problems,” said Zakharova.
It’s unclear how the samples from Navalny’s body were obtained or where they were assessed. Cooper told reporters “UK scientists worked with our European partners to pursue the truth” on Navalny’s death.
Navalnaya said the “murder” of her husband is now a “science-proven fact”.
“Two years ago, I came on stage here and said that it was Vladimir Putin who killed my husband,” Navalnaya said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
“I was, of course, certain that it was a murder, … but back then, it was just words. But today these words have become science-proven fact,” Navalnaya added.
Navalny was the previous target of a nerve agent poisoning in 2020 that he blamed on the Kremlin.
He was flown to Germany for treatment, and when he returned to Russia five months later, he was immediately arrested and imprisoned for the remaining three years of his life.
The UK held a public inquiry into the poisoning in Britain of Russian double agent Sergey Skripal in 2018. It concluded last year that Putin must have ordered the Novichok nerve agent attack. The Kremlin has denied involvement.
Russia also denied poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian agent-turned-Kremlin critic who died in London in 2006 after ingesting the radioactive isotope polonium-210. A British inquiry concluded that two Russian agents killed Litvinenko.