Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at Israel’s crackdown on settlers in the West Bank; more details on the defense agreement among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan; and the spread of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

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Violence in the West Bank

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Thursday dismantled “illegal outposts” set up by Israeli settlers in the West Bank village of Qusra over the weekend. The Palestinian village of 5,000 is becoming a major flash point after a group of settlers on Sunday built encampments surrounding three isolated houses on the town’s outskirts. They cut off water and electricity into the houses and blockaded the roads, trapping two Palestinian families and five visiting Italian nationals inside.

At least one of the homes surrounded by settlers is owned by an American citizen, pulling the United States into the dispute and provoking a rare rebuke from U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who called the settlers “terrorists” and denounced their “thuggish behavior” on social media. The homeowner, a Palestinian American who was born in Qusra and now lives in Toledo, Ohio, watched the siege from the United States via home security cameras while his brother and nephew remained inside.

Qusra, near the city of Nablus, is part of Area B—West Bank territory under Palestinian civil control and Israeli military control, where Jewish settlements are not allowed. The Israeli military condemned the settlers’ actions on Tuesday and declared the area around the homes a restricted military zone. The settlers dug in and defied the order the following day, prompting clashes with the IDF and forcing the military to back down.

Overnight, the IDF mounted a larger operation in collaboration with police and security services. Videos appear to show a bulldozer, armored vehicles, and vans full of troops pouring into Qusra. By Thursday morning, the IDF declared that it had “dismantled two illegal outposts” and detained one Israeli, although it was unclear when the settlers would be fully removed from the area. In the process, the IDF reportedly ordered several Palestinian residents to evacuate so that it could mount an operation against the settlers that it expected to last several days. (The military later backtracked, saying that Palestinians would not be removed from their homes.)

Settler violence and clashes in Qusra and beyond have turned the West Bank into a “powder keg that could explode at any moment,” a senior Israeli security source told Haaretz on Wednesday.

Defense officials said the military is stretched thin, unable and at times unwilling to respond to frequent clashes between Palestinians and settlers—whom the Israeli and U.S. governments have at times empowered, irrespective of Huckabee’s statement. “By revoking the Biden administration’s sanctions on violent settler groups and failing to restrain its ally, the Trump administration bears much of the blame for emboldening Israeli settler extremists,” Azriel Bermant wrote in Foreign Policy this week.

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What We’re Following

Mecca pact details. Turkey’s defense ministry provided further detail on what the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement—the newly formed pact among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan—will look like at a briefing in Ankara on Thursday.

The agreement will deepen defense industry cooperation, establish a ministerial committee, and mandate joint military exercises involving land, naval, and air forces, according to the ministry. “The aim is to provide not ?only product and system ?supply, but also ?joint development and production, technology cooperation, and sustainable maintenance and logistics support,” it said.

The pact, signed on Aug. 7, commits the countries to regard an armed attack against one as an attack against all. Turkish officials have emphasized the similarities between the pact and NATO, particularly its Article 5 deterrence clause, and are eager to extend the regional alliance beyond the founding members.

The agreement has largely been interpreted as an attempt to diversify regional relationships and decrease reliance on the United States, as the region responds to increased security concerns related to the Iran war—although Turkey’s foreign minister insisted the alliance is not directed against Iran or any single country.

“If fighting with the United States resumes and Iran strikes Saudi Arabia again, the response from Turkey and Pakistan will be an early indicator of the pact’s strength,” Saeid Jafari wrote in Foreign Policy this week. 

Disputed islands. Russian President Vladimir Putin made his first visit to the disputed Kuril Islands on Thursday, drawing condemnation from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who called the Pacific archipelago “an inherent part of Japan’s territory” and Putin’s visit “absolutely unacceptable.”

Located between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island, the Kuril Islands have been administered by Moscow since the end of World War II, when Soviet troops occupied the 56 islands and deported some 17,000 Japanese residents. Japan claims four of the southernmost islands in the archipelago, which it calls the “Northern Territories.” This dispute has prevented Russia and Japan from formally signing a postwar peace treaty.

During Putin’s trip to the island of Iturup (known as Etorofu in Japan), he visited a fish processing plant and sampled local caviar. His tour came shortly after he oversaw navy drills on the nearby Russian island of Sakhalin and a month after Russian and Chinese warships conducted a joint patrol around the Kuril Islands.

“Japan has identified Russia as a major source of threats,” Putin said on Wednesday. “I would like to point out that we are not threatening Japan. On the contrary, it has territorial claims against our country.”

Ebola spreads. The Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is on track to become the deadliest outbreak of the disease ever, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Wednesday.

The outbreak was officially declared on May 15 but likely began as early as February. It has since killed more than 2,000 people, out of more than 4,300 cases. Those numbers are expected to surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people.

The highest concentrations of new infections and registered deaths are in communities lacking proper infrastructure and equipment. Regional instability, worker strikes, and the spread of misinformation have kept people from clinics and hobbled those clinics’ ability to treat patients. There is currently no approved vaccine or treatment for the rare species of Ebola virus causing the present outbreak.

Analysts have also blamed a weakened, inequitable international health system—a partial result of the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO and dismantling of U.S. international aid systems, in addition to the suspension of the WHO Pandemic Agreement—for the outbreak’s severity.

Odds and Ends

In Britain’s Clacton constituency by-election on Thursday, Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage’s greatest competition is Count Binface, a self-described intergalactic space warrior who wears a trash can on his head. Binface, the comedic alter ego of a man who studied classics at Oxford University, is running on a platform to cap the price of ice cream and restore Pluto’s planetary status, among other noble pursuits. Farage is expected to win in a landslide, but Count Binface appears undaunted. If Farage’s competition is “33 candidates including an alien shaped like a trash can,” Binface asked the New York Times, what kind of victory is that?