Israeli influencer wields pepper spray against West Bank activists

A far-right Israeli influencer has been captured on film raiding a house of activists and journalists in the occupied West Bank, according to The Jerusalem Post newspaper. Roi Star, a 45-year-old social media personality, pepper-sprayed at least two people and verbally harassed the people living in the house, including threatening their relatives. “I know your family. I know where your cousin, your grandma, your father, your uncle, I know where everyone lives,” he said. “Do you want to talk, or do you want to get physical with me and get sprayed in the face?” Settler violence in the occupied West Bank is on the rise, with settlers rampaging in Palestinian agricultural lands, storming and destroying homes, and killing and beating Palestinian civilians. Throughout 2025, Israeli settlers or soldiers killed 240 Palestinians in the West Bank, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said earlier this month. Israeli forces killed 225 people, while settlers killed at least nine.

UK will not sign BoP, citing concerns over Russian involvement

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has said the UK will opt out of signing the Board of Peace in Davos today, joining a growing list of refusals that includes France, Norway, Sweden and Slovenia. Speaking from Davos, Cooper told the BBC that she was worried about Russia’s role in formulating peace plans for other conflicts amid its war on Ukraine. “We won’t be one of the signatories today, ​because this ‌is about a legal treaty that raises much broader issues, ‌and we do also ‌have concerns about ⁠President Putin being part of something which is talking ‌about peace,” Cooper said.

‘If you sleep, settlers will burn your house’: Fear in the West Bank

When the music stops, Naif Ghawanmeh, 45, takes a seat in front of the fire. The night is chilly, and for the first time in weeks, everything is still for a moment – the Israeli settlers’ celebrations have finished for the day. But the village of Ras Ein al-Auja, situated in the eastern West Bank’s Jericho governorate, has been all but wiped out. The village was one of the last Palestinian herding communities in this part of the Jordan Valley, but now, the herders’ sheep have gone – most of them stolen or poisoned by settlers or sold off by villagers under pressure. Their water has been cut off – the Ras Ein spring declared off-limits by neighbouring settlers for the past year. And for the past two weeks, most of the community’s homes have been dismantled. Many of the families forced out burned their furniture before they left, not wanting to leave it for the invading settlers to use. “By God, it’s a difficult feeling,” Ghawanmeh says. “Everyone left. Not one of them [remains]. They all left.”