作者： admin

Dawn breaks slowly over the spread-out tent homes and livestock enclosures of Ras al-Ahmar, a small Palestinian community tucked into the arid northern Jordan Valley. The only sound cutting through the still morning air is the desperate bleating of thirsty cattle and sheep, waiting for water that will not flow from the community’s destroyed wells.

Just days after Israeli military forces demolished three of the village’s primary water wells, hundreds of residents are locked in a desperate race to secure enough water to sustain their households, their subsistence crops, and their grazing livestock — all in one of the occupied West Bank’s most parched, water-scarce regions.

For 60-year-old Ali Bani Odeh, the demolition of the wells was far more than the loss of basic infrastructure. A father of four and grandfather to 14 children, Odeh has spent his entire adult life working this land, tending crops and raising animals to support his extended family. Today, he and dozens of other local families face an uncertain future: with no consistent water source, it is unclear how much longer they can remain on their ancestral land.

“Water is everything for us,” Odeh told reporters from Middle East Eye. “Without water, we cannot live. We need it for our families, our sheep and our crops. Since the wells were destroyed, we have been forced to bring water from town at a much higher cost, and even then, we’re not always allowed to pass.”

Families are now forced to haul water from distant urban centers at prices three times the standard rate, while Israeli military checkpoints and strict movement restrictions often block or delay water tankers from reaching the isolated village entirely.

Abdullah Bisharat, head of the Ras al-Ahmar village council, described the destroyed wells as the beating heart of the community. “The wells were the lifeline of this community,” Bisharat said. According to his accounting, the three wells supplied more than 47 local families, totaling more than 600 residents, and irrigated roughly 7,500 dunams (more than 1,850 acres) of working farmland. They also provided water for thousands of sheep and goats, the primary source of household income for nearly all families in the community.

“Their destruction has affected every aspect of daily life, from drinking water and agriculture to livestock, leaving dozens of families struggling to meet their most basic needs,” Bisharat added.

Residents note that the demolition of the wells marks the most severe escalation in a months-long water crisis driven by repeated attacks from Israeli settlers. For months, settlers have repeatedly cut the above-ground pipelines that brought water to the community, forcing families to already rely on overpriced water tankers. This attack, however, eliminated the community’s last independent water source by destroying the wells themselves.

Obeida Bani Odeh, Ali’s son, says the loss of the wells threatens not just his family’s livelihood, but their ability to remain in Ras al-Ahmar at all. “We cannot survive here without water,” he said. “For months, the pipelines supplying our community were repeatedly cut, and we had to bring water from nearby towns, often at three times the usual cost. Now the wells have been destroyed, and there is no reliable source of water left for our families or our livestock.”

He explained that the crisis extends far beyond water scarcity. Frequent settler violence and strict movement controls have made it nearly impossible to bring in not just water, but animal feed and other essential supplies. “The settlers attack everyone, from the young to the old,” Obeida said. “They want to make people afraid and force them to leave. But we have been living on this land for generations.”

Today, roughly 700,000 Israeli settlers reside in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, spread across more than 300 formal settlements and unauthorized outposts. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory violate international law, a finding that Israel has repeatedly rejected.

Settler violence and targeted attacks against Palestinian herding and farming communities in the West Bank have spiked dramatically in recent years. United Nations data shows that between January 2023 and April 2026, at least 5,910 Palestinians have been internally displaced from their homes in the West Bank as a direct result of settler violence.

Aref Daraghmeh, a prominent Palestinian human rights activist working in the Jordan Valley, says the demolition of water infrastructure in Ras al-Ahmar is part of a broader, systematic campaign to take control of the region’s limited natural resources. “Water has become a silent war against Palestinians in the Jordan Valley,” Daraghmeh told Middle East Eye. “The occupation has taken control of many Palestinian water sources, while the water available to Palestinian communities is insufficient for agriculture and sustaining life on the land.”

Daraghmeh explains that restricted water access has gutted Palestinian agricultural activity across the Jordan Valley, making it increasingly impossible for small-scale farmers and herders to maintain their livelihoods. As water becomes harder to access, communities face mounting pressure to abandon their land, even as Israeli settlement agriculture expands across the region. Strict movement controls have compounded these challenges, he added. “The Jordan Valley is effectively under closure,” Daraghmeh said. “Military checkpoints control movement, roads are restricted, and residents often have to wait for hours before they can enter or leave their communities.”

These restrictions also block farmers from accessing grazing lands and transporting livestock, crops, and supplies to market, piling additional pressure on communities already crippled by water scarcity.

For Ali Bani Odeh, however, leaving Ras al-Ahmar is not a choice he is willing to make. Displaced from his original family home as a child, he says he will not be forced to move again. “I have left before, but I will not leave this place,” Ali said. “If we leave, they will take over the land. We are staying because this is where our lives and our history are.”

A sharp public rebuke from Iran’s top foreign affairs spokesperson has laid bare a dramatic breakdown in what was once a steadily improving relationship between Iran and Kuwait, bringing long-simmering regional tensions to a head.

Last week, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, took to social media to label Kuwait as “part of the fire of the wicked,” warning that “the smoke of ingratitude and the absence of foresight will blind the eyes of the ungrateful.” The fiery comments came amid a wave of Iranian missile strikes targeting U.S. military installations hosted on Kuwaiti territory, part of a broader campaign Tehran has waged against American bases across the Gulf region since the start of 2024. Leveraging its long-standing strategy of asymmetric warfare to avoid direct confrontation, Iran’s strikes have inflicted substantial damage on the targeted facilities.

Kuwait has pushed back firmly against Iranian claims, denying that it allows the U.S. to launch offensive strikes from its soil and dismissing Iran’s attacks as “criminal aggression.”

To understand the current rupture, it is necessary to unpack the decades-long, roller-coaster history of relations between the two neighboring Persian Gulf states. The first major fracture came just one year after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, when Saddam Hussein launched his 1980 invasion of Iran. Kuwait aligned firmly with Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, providing billions of dollars in loans to Baghdad, opening its ports to Iraqi weapons shipments, and granting critical logistical support for Iraq’s war effort.

Dr. Alam Saleh, a Middle East affairs lecturer at the Australian National University, notes that Kuwait’s stance grew out of two core strategic fears. After the Islamic Revolution, Kuwait’s ruling Al-Sabah monarchy worried that Iran’s new revolutionary government would seek regional hegemony in the Persian Gulf, and would incite Kuwait’s large Shia population to rise up against royal rule. During the war, Iran was widely blamed for a string of attacks on Kuwaiti targets, including oil tankers, the U.S. and French embassies, Kuwait International Airport, and multiple hijackings of Kuwait Airways flights. But Saleh emphasizes that direct responsibility for these attacks on the Iranian state has never been definitively proven.

The dynamic shifted dramatically in 1990, when Saddam turned on his former ally and invaded Kuwait. Saddam justified the invasion by claiming Kuwait was using American-assisted drilling technology to overextract oil from the shared Rumaila field, driving down global oil prices and crippling Iraq’s already war-debt-burdened economy. Days before the invasion, a meeting with then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie left Saddam believing the U.S. would not intervene in the conflict, giving him what he saw as a green light to seize the territory he had long claimed as Iraq’s own. But the U.S. ultimately led a 42-nation coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

In the wake of the invasion, Iran stepped in as a key partner for Kuwait, extending critical humanitarian assistance that is still referenced by Iranian officials today. As more than a million Kuwaitis fled the invasion to neighboring countries, Iran welcomed tens of thousands of refugees, including foreign workers, stateless people, and Iraqi nationals opposed to Saddam. The Iranian government set up temporary refugee camps in the southwestern border province of Khuzestan, providing food, shelter, safe passage, political asylum, and evacuation flights for those stranded by the conflict. Contemporary records show that British MPs who visited the camps praised Iran’s response to the crisis, with Conservative MP Michael Jopling noting in a 1991 parliamentary debate that “the Iranians seemed to be dealing adequately with the massive crisis which confronted them.”

Before retreating, Iraqi forces launched a campaign of systematic sabotage against Kuwait’s critical infrastructure, blowing up oil facilities, dumping millions of barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf (creating the largest marine oil spill in recorded history at that time), and igniting more than 600 burning oil wells. The toxic smoke from the wells spread as far as southwestern Iran, causing widespread air pollution, public health risks, and environmental damage in Iranian territory.

Iran again contributed to international recovery efforts, sending a team of 47 experienced oil industry experts and engineers to help extinguish the fires. Having built extensive expertise in oil facility repair and firefighting during the Iran-Iraq War, when Iraqi forces repeatedly targeted Iran’s energy infrastructure, the Iranian team was assigned to the heavily damaged Burgan oil field, Kuwait’s largest. Operating in dangerous conditions amid unexploded Iraqi landmines, the team successfully capped 28 burning wells. The operation was widely seen as a goodwill gesture that helped repair bilateral relations, as both countries now shared Iraq as a common enemy.

Over the following decade, relations warmed steadily. “Throughout the 1990s Iran and Kuwait expanded diplomatic dialogue, trade and security cooperation while managing their differences pragmatically,” Saleh explained.

But the growing U.S. military presence in the region, anchored in Kuwait, created a new fault line in the relationship. Following the Gulf War, the U.S. began building and expanding military bases across the Middle East; today, it hosts 13,500 troops across five bases in Kuwait, more than any other Middle Eastern country. Some analysts have even argued that the U.S. deliberately encouraged Saddam’s invasion to create a pretext for a permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf to control regional oil production.

Tehran has long viewed the permanent U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to its sovereignty and a form of Western imperialism. “Iran opposes all long-term US military bases in the Persian Gulf, arguing that they undermine regional security, but generally separates this issue from its bilateral relations with Kuwait,” Saleh notes. Still, public evidence confirms that Kuwait has served as a key logistics and command hub for U.S. regional operations, contradicting Kuwait’s claims that it does not allow its territory to be used for offensive strikes. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kuwait joined Bahrain in secretly launching airstrikes against Iranian drone and missile storage facilities, a move that deepened Iranian anger. Tehran has also criticized Kuwait for backing former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hardline policy toward Iran, which Iranian analysts view as evidence of Kuwaiti complicity in anti-Iran aggression.

The latest source of tension is Kuwait’s recent ratification of a five-year defense pact with Pakistan, the country that has been tapped to mediate between Iran and the U.S. in ongoing negotiations. While Kuwait and Pakistan first signed a defense partnership in 2023, the new agreement expands cooperation to include military training, personnel exchanges, intelligence sharing, and technology collaboration. While the pact itself is not unusual, analysts note its timing is significant, signaling a shift in Kuwait’s approach to regional security amid ongoing regional conflict.

Iran has responded cautiously so far. “Iran will monitor the agreement but is unlikely to oppose it unless it is used against Iranian interests,” Saleh observed. “Since Pakistan has also acted as a mediator, Tehran is expected to maintain constructive relations with both countries while closely watching developments in the Persian Gulf.”

Five years have passed since Tunisian President Kais Saied consolidated sweeping executive authority and dismantled the country’s post-Arab Spring democratic framework, but supporters of Tunisia’s largest Islamist movement, Ennahda, say the group is not finished — it is gearing up to rebuild and reemerge from the toughest crackdown in its modern history.

For many of the movement’s younger activists, the half-decade of targeted repression that followed Saied’s 2021 power grab is not the final chapter of Ennahda, but just the latest episode in a 40-year history defined by imprisonment, exile and systematic political persecution. Far from breaking the movement, they argue, the crackdown has pushed Ennahda to confront its past strategic mistakes, renew its internal leadership and lay the groundwork for a political future beyond Saied’s authoritarian rule.

“The idea that Ennahda has been defeated and that Tunisians no longer want Islamic parties is simply not true,” said 23-year-old Ahmed, a resident of Ettadhamen, a working-class Tunis suburb with deep historical roots of support for Islamist political movements. “More and more young people want a movement that is rooted in Islam, a movement that speaks to our identity and will stand up for Muslims being oppressed across the world. We are witnessing a resurgence and we will rise again.”

Ahmed’s public optimism stands in sharp contrast to the stark reality of Ennahda’s current position. Since Saied suspended Tunisia’s elected parliament on July 25, 2021, Ennahda’s iconic leader Rached Ghannouchi and dozens of senior opposition figures have been imprisoned, while much of the movement’s top leadership has faced prosecution or forced exile. Once the dominant political force in Tunisia’s decade-long democratic transition, Ennahda is weaker today than at any point since the overthrow of former authoritarian ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. Yet even amid this unprecedented pressure, few within the movement accept that its political journey is over.

Founded in the early 1980s, Ennahda first emerged as Tunisia’s leading Islamist opposition movement under Ben Ali’s repressive regime, with thousands of its members imprisoned, tortured or forced into exile. When the 2011 Arab Spring uprising toppled Ben Ali’s 23-year authoritarian rule, the movement reentered public political life and won the country’s first democratic elections, positioning itself as a global model of what its leaders called “Muslim democracy.”

Unlike many Islamist groups across the Middle East and North Africa, Ennahda long argued that Islam and democratic governance were complementary, not incompatible. Over decades of political evolution, the movement shifted away from framing itself as a strictly Islamist party toward what Ghannouchi described as a party of “Muslim democrats,” formally committed to political pluralism, constitutional rule and peaceful transfers of power. At its landmark 2016 national congress, Ennahda formally separated its political and religious activities, ruling out the use of mosques as platforms for partisan campaigning.

Rather than advocating for the full implementation of Islamic sharia law as state law, Ennahda framed religion as a source of moral guidance for Tunisian society, while upholding democratic institutions, competitive multi-party elections and an independent judiciary as the legitimate foundation of governance. The movement’s official manifesto enshrined commitments to civil liberties, equal citizenship and political pluralism, positions that set it apart from many more hardline Islamist parties across the region. This gradual, moderate evolution won cautious backing from Western governments, which saw Tunisia as the only lasting success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Following Ennahda’s 2011 election victory, the U.S. State Department said it looked forward to working with the newly elected government to build a “democratic future,” while the UK Foreign Office welcomed the country’s free and fair polls and pledged long-term support for the democratic transition.

For Ennahda’s founding leadership, Tunisia represented a rare chance to prove that political Islam and inclusive democratic governance could coexist. But that vision was quickly tested by the harsh realities of governing. Though Ennahda never held power alone, governing instead in successive coalitions with secular political partners, Tunisia’s economy stagnated, youth unemployment remained persistently high, and successive governments failed to deliver the widespread economic improvements many Tunisians expected after the 2011 revolution. Over time, Ennahda became the public face of popular frustration with the slow pace of change during the democratic transition, creating a political opening that Saied exploited to cast himself as an outsider who would sweep away the corrupt old political class.

Saied’s July 2021 power grab reshaped Tunisia’s entire political landscape almost overnight. Ennahda supporters widely agree the movement’s biggest failures were not ideological, but strategic. They argue that years of prioritizing consensus-building with secular rivals and attempting to reassure domestic and international critics ultimately left the democratic system Ennahda helped build after 2011 vulnerable to authoritarian rollback. A key example of this miscalculation came during the 2019 presidential runoff: after Ennahda’s own candidate was eliminated in the first round, the movement refused to back polarizing media magnate Nabil Karoui and instead threw its support behind Saied. At the time, many party leaders viewed Saied as the safer, more neutral option, dismissing Karoui as a controversial figure too closely tied to the old Ben Ali-era political establishment.

Ahmed Gaaloul, a senior Ennahda official, says the movement seriously underestimated both the determination of its domestic and regional opponents, and the willingness of Tunisia’s international partners to accept the dismantling of the country’s democratic institutions. “We believed that no one would dare overthrow a democratic system that Tunisians had sacrificed so much to build,” he said. “We misread the moment.” He added that while regional powers hostile to the Arab Spring had worked to undermine Tunisia’s democratic transition, both Europe and the U.S. failed to step in to defend the country’s democratic gains. “The fragmentation and weakness was mainly in Europe,” he said. “They did not defend our democracy.” Instead, Gaaloul argues, Western governments increasingly accepted the narrative that Tunisia’s democratic experiment had failed, while turning a blind eye to Saied’s authoritarian reversal. “The whole democracy that survived for 10 years after the revolution was being let down,” he said.

For many of Ennahda’s younger members, this experience has sparked a broad internal reassessment of the movement’s long-standing approach to power. The arrest of most of Ennahda’s senior leadership has accelerated internal debates over whether the consensus-focused politics that defined the post-2011 transition ultimately left the movement open to being dismantled. “Many of us respect what Ennahda achieved after the revolution, but we also think it compromised too much,” said Hatim, a 28-year-old engineer and Ennahda member. “We spent years trying to appease everyone at the expense of our own party. Now, the younger generation, including myself, want leaders who are confident enough to pursue their programme instead of always making concessions. We don’t want endless consensus if it means abandoning our Islamic values.”

This view is increasingly widespread among younger Ennahda activists, many of whom argue the movement spent decades expending enormous energy proving to secular and international critics that political Islam could coexist with democracy, only to watch those same democratic institutions dismantled by Saied. Former Ennahda MP Maher Madhioub says the past five years of repression have given the movement space to reflect on its past mistakes. “Ennahda was not born in a government or one of the state’s institutions, but out of the huge sacrifices of its members over more than four decades,” he said. “It was born as a civil, public and universal movement. It won some elections and lost others, but it has always stood with the Tunisian people’s aspirations for liberty, dignity and justice. Governing was always a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

If Tunisia eventually restores democratic politics, Madhioub says Ennahda will reemerge as a changed movement. “There is no doubt that it has learned a lot from what happened,” he said. “It will be more confident in itself, its choices and its competent members, and it will take all its responsibilities.”

Whether a democratic opening will come anytime soon remains deeply uncertain. Saied continues to enjoy strong backing from neighboring Algeria, whose President Abdelmadjid Tebboune recently described Tunisia’s security as inseparable from Algeria’s own, and pledged to defend Tunisia against “any threat.” The remarks, made just days after the fifth anniversary of Saied’s power grab, underscore continued regional support for the Tunisian president despite growing international criticism of his authoritarian rule.

Even so, Ennahda members hold little expectation of an imminent return to power. They say their current priority is preserving the movement’s grassroots organizational networks, supporting imprisoned members and their families, and preparing for the day when Tunisia’s political space eventually reopens. “We haven’t left the political scene and are still here,” said Mohamed, a 31-year-old small business owner. “But in the future we expect the movement to speak more forcefully about what is happening beyond our borders. Whether it’s Palestine, Sudan or other crises affecting Muslims, Ennahda should have a stronger voice and stand up for people facing oppression. We want a leadership that will challenge others that are harming Muslims. We will not accept silence for the sake of diplomacy.”

Despite five years of systematic repression, Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, argues Ennahda remains too deeply rooted in Tunisian civil society to disappear entirely. “Ennahda specifically, and moderate Islamist parties in general, are here to stay,” he said. “Any real democracy in Tunisia or in the Arab world cannot exclude such an important and critical part of society. I do think there will be a place for Ennahda in a new democratic Tunisia, just like there will be a place for all other Islamic and secular political movements.”

For Ennahda’s supporters, the movement’s future ultimately depends not on when it returns to government, but on whether Tunisia restores democratic rule. “People thought we had disappeared before,” Madhioub said. “If Ennahda wins the first democratic elections held after the end of this terrible coup, it will be because it learned from what happened.”