First the Bedouin shepherd family spotted the truck, then the five armed men dressed in white. Then the gunfire started.

Israeli settlers, drawn to another shepherd’s flock grazing in the valley 200 yards below, fired what appeared to be M16 rifles in the air and toward the shepherd.

Only weeks before, the Al Araareh family was driven off their land and lost half their possessions. On Saturday, perched up the hill from the skirmish, it looked to them like they would have to pick up and move again – fast.

To prevent the settlers, whom they’d encountered before, from recognizing them, Al Araareh brothers jumped into their cars and hid them behind the hill. Mohammed Al Araareh yelled at his grandson to push their sheep hurriedly into their pen.

As the gunshots moved closer, 5-year-old Shahid ran to her father, Ali, and hid behind his legs. She tugged at his pants.

“Daddy, let’s go. Let’s move from here,” she says trembling, tears streaking her cheeks. “Let’s move again before they get us. They will get us.”

From atop a rock, Nayef Al Araareh monitored the approaching clash.

“We can’t relax for a single second,” he says, eyes trained on the gun-toting settlers and an Israeli army jeep idling above them. “They just won’t leave us in peace.”

Taylor Luck

Bedouin shepherd Nayef Al Araareh warns neighbors by phone as he watches armed settlers fire at a nearby shepherd at the edge of the Rammun, east of Ramallah, West Bank, Jan. 20, 2024.

Three months earlier, after the eruption of war in Gaza, deadly attacks by far-right Israeli settlers shook the West Bank, prompting concern from President Joe Biden and assurances from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would rein in the violence. While the attacks have decreased in lethality, they have slowed only modestly, and targeted more people.

Having driven most of the nomadic Bedouin from their land, the extremist settlers are increasingly targeting Palestinian towns and villages, encroaching on densely populated areas and inciting larger-scale brawls.

With fresh green grass heralding the West Bank winter grazing season, extremists are seeking to prevent village-dwelling farmers and herders from grazing their flocks or reaching their farms – sparking an economic and security crisis.

Gone are the settlers’ makeshift checkpoints and roving patrols of jeeps of masked gunmen. Yet the harassment continues.

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, settler attacks have dropped from their peak of seven per day in October and November to four, still above the previous record high of three per day before the Israel-Hamas war.

The U.N. reports that the ongoing violence since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack has so far displaced “at least 198 Palestinian households” from 15 Bedouin communities.

Village violence

Haroun Kahaleh, a community leader in the town of Rammun, 8 miles east of Ramallah, sat with his grandchildren in his guest room, the semi-automatics rattling and ambulances blaring nearby.

He has hosted the Al Araareh family on land behind his house at the town’s edge since they were displaced from nearby Wadi Siq in October. Now he wonders if he, too, will be displaced.

Taylor Luck

Sheep and goats graze near the temporary shelter of the Al Araareh family, with the village of Rammon above, Jan. 20, 2024.

“This is the war that no one knows about. Not Biden, not [U.S. Secretary of State Antony] Blinken,” he says between crackling gunfire. “This is [Itamar] Ben-Gvir’s war,” referring to the far-right Israeli security minister and settler activist.

Last summer gunmen pushed Mr. Kahaleh off his grazing lands; in the fall they prevented him from reaching his olive groves. Now they were a stone’s throw from his house.

“They want to displace us from this land entirely, not just from one place to another,” says Mr. Kahaleh. “They want to displace us from Palestine and push us into Jordan.”

Two hours after the skirmish, Rammun youths gathered in a coffee shop smiling, having successfully repelled the armed settler attack with sticks, a success they attribute to their large numbers.

Although three Palestinians were injured by rocks, one hospitalized, no one was killed. Most importantly, the youths say, they returned sheep seized by the settlers to the shepherd.

“We are protecting our homes and our family,” reasons Mohammed, the cafe owner. “They are at the edge of our village. If we don’t intervene and stand up to them today, tomorrow they will be in the heart of the village.”

They say they fear the settler violence will lead to Israeli military incursions.

“We no longer leave our village, and we don’t dare go out at night,” since the post-October rise in settler violence. “All we do is sit in our home and they are still coming after us,” he says. “As young Palestinian men, we know our future will be dying as martyrs, because the violence follows us.”

Taylor Luck

Community leader Haroun Kahaleh sits in his guest room as semi-automatic rifle fire closes in near his home in Rammun, West Bank, Jan. 20, 2024.

Palestinian officials and Western diplomats describe recent attacks as a natural progression they have been warning of for several years: a systematic campaign to push Palestinians off West Bank lands and into urban centers – a de facto cantonization.  

“We warned the villagers, if you do not stand with the Bedouin today, tomorrow the settlers will come after you,” says Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, director-general of the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, an official Palestinian organization that provides legal and financial aid to residents threatened with displacement. “The Bedouin were the line of defense for villages; they have fallen. Now settlers are at the edges of villages. They will be inside villages next.”

Attempts to contact settler outposts for comment were unsuccessful.

Economic costs

Unable to graze their flocks, Palestinian shepherds are relying on fodder for feed, or selling off their livestock. They do not expect their underfed flocks to produce milk this year.

In recent photos shown to Monitor reporters, cows in the Jordan Valley are gaunt, their ribs protruding.

A plan by the Palestinian Authority and the international community to distribute one month’s worth of animal feed to Palestinian shepherds has been delayed and is not seen as a sustainable solution.

“The grass is right there in front of them, and Palestinians can’t reach it,” says Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium. “This is about breaking them as communities.”

Israeli activists say government-funded regional settler councils and far-right extremists are confiscating Palestinians’ flocks of sheep and cows at gunpoint – claiming they trespassed – charging Palestinians tens of thousands of dollars to reclaim them.

The Monitor viewed documents purporting to show council-issued fees ranging from $20,000 to $200,000.

Taylor Luck

A young member of the Al Araareh family feeds animal fodder to their goats at the edge of Rammun, West Bank, Jan. 20, 2024. Although January is peak season for free-range grazing, armed settlers are preventing the Bedouin family and their flock from leaving the area near their shelter.

It is not just Bedouins and farmers facing losses, but also urban Palestinians. On Tuesday, settlers set fire to a car dealership in Baytin on the eastern outskirts of Ramallah, destroying 12 cars.

Western diplomats trace what they say is settlers’ “widespread impunity” to post-Oct. 7 – when the Israeli military allowed settler reservists to serve as the bulk of forces patrolling the West Bank – saying these reservists are reluctant to stop fellow settlers. 

When asked about the army’s inaction in the face of settler violence against Palestinians as observed by the Monitor Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit said “any claim that the IDF supports and permits settler violence is false.”

“The IDF soldiers operate as needed against attempts to harm all civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli,” the statement said, reiterating a quote by the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, from last July that “an IDF officer who stands by seeing an Israeli citizen planning to throw a Molotov cocktail at a Palestinian house cannot be an officer.”

Saturday, with the gunmen gone, the Al Araareh family debated where they could relocate when the settlers return.

They yearn for Wadi Siq, where they were born and raised, in view but out of reach, for now.

“If this war ends and the situation changes, we will return home immediately,” says Nayef Al Araareh. “But we can never return if these settlers are still there.”

Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters/File

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis arrives at a press conference in Atlanta, Aug. 14, 2023, with prosecutor Nathan Wade after a grand jury brought back indictments against former President Donald Trump and his allies. The indictments focus on alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Should Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis step aside from the sweeping Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump and others?

Even some of District Attorney Willis’ supporters are weighing that question in the wake of accusations that she had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, an attorney she hired to help run the Trump prosecution.

A co-defendant in the case made the allegation in a court filing earlier this month. Credit card statements included in a separate filing in Mr. Wade’s ongoing divorce case show that he bought airline tickets for himself and Ms. Willis on at least two occasions.

Ms. Willis has not yet directly addressed the situation. The case, while in state rather than federal court, involves some of the most consequential criminal indictments facing Mr. Trump – focusing around his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

One legal expert who has followed the case closely says that he has not yet seen any evidence that should lead to Ms. Willis’ disqualification. It appears more a political issue about how public money is spent, and less a conflict of interest that would prejudice any of the 2020 election defendants, says Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant professor in constitutional law and political scientist at Georgia State University College of Law.

“The whole thing is a bad look and the office’s silence is doing Willis no favors, but without more evidence I do not see any immediate need for Fani Willis to step aside,” says Professor Kreis in an email.

Accusation focuses on prosecutors’ ties

On Jan. 8 an attorney for Michael Roman, a former Trump election aide and co-defendant in the Georgia election case, filed a motion asking that the charges against her client be dismissed. The filing alleged that District Attorney Willis had engaged in a clandestine personal relationship with Mr. Wade, an outside attorney and former judge hired to serve as a special prosecutor for the challenging, multidefendant election case.

The filing alleged that Ms. Willis had financially benefited from the arrangement, as the supposed couple used legal fees from the case to pay for travel to Florida, Napa Valley, and other vacation spots.

The filing contained no hard evidence of this arrangement. However, Mr. Wade and his wife, Joycelyn Wade, are enmeshed in divorce proceedings, and unsealed documents filed pursuant to that case show receipts for the purchase of flights to San Francisco and Miami for Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis.

Ms. Willis responded obliquely to the charges in a speech at a church service the Sunday prior to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. She said nothing about the relationship allegations but defended her leadership of her office and pushed back against critics. She hired three special prosecutors to help with the Trump case, she said: a white man, a white woman, and a Black man. 

No one had questioned the qualifications of the white prosecutors, she said. Without mentioning Mr. Wade by name, she called him a “superstar, a great friend, and a great lawyer.”

What could come next?

Mr. Trump and his allies have used the alleged romance to accuse Ms. Willis and her office of prosecutorial misconduct. A day after the allegations became public, for instance, the former president said the case against him in Georgia should now be dropped because it was “totally compromised.”

Georgia’s Republican-controlled state Senate voted 30-19 Friday to create a special committee to determine whether Ms. Willis has misspent state tax money.

A day earlier, a lawyer for Mr. Trump filed a motion supporting Mr. Roman’s accusations, and further accusing the Fulton County district attorney of “racial animus” in her church address prior to the MLK holiday.

Mr. Roman’s filing asks Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is overseeing the election prosecution, to remove Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade from the government’s case against Mr. Trump. Judge McAfee does have the power to do so, say legal experts. But even if he were to remove them, such a move would involve considerable delay as a council of Georgia prosecutors would need to find another government attorney willing and able to lead the prosecutorial team.

Some legal experts doubt that what’s surfaced so far would lead to a disqualification for the prosecutors. A romance between prosecutors – if there were one – would reflect poor judgment, they say. But there are no state laws against it.

If Ms. Willis had hired Mr. Wade with the motive of funneling his pay back to her benefit, that would be much more problematic. But the facts do not support anything like that so far.

“Crucially, neither Willis nor Wade have any pecuniary gain that will vest if the Fulton County DA’s office secure convictions,” says Professor Kreis.

But as a political matter, the alleged affair could have a large impact, playing into Mr. Trump’s larger goal of depicting all the prosecutions against him as somehow corrupt and motivated by animus against him.

In an analysis on the legal website Just Security, attorneys Norman Eisen, Joyce Vance, and Richard Painter conclude that there is no basis for disqualifying either Ms. Willis or Mr. Wade under Georgia law, even if all factual allegations against them are true. 

The allegations may go to obligations that the pair have to the Fulton County district attorney’s office, but they do not affect the propriety of the prosecution any more than other instances in which prosecutors allegedly took office supplies for personal use or drove county vehicles for errands, according to the analysis.

Still, a personal relationship between the prosecutors would reflect “poor judgment” on their part, especially in a case of this magnitude, write the attorneys. They urge that Mr. Wade voluntarily step down, as his presence in the case has become a “distraction.”

Judge McAfee has ordered Ms. Willis to respond to Mr. Roman’s allegations in writing by Feb. 2. He has scheduled a Feb. 15 evidentiary hearing on the accusations.

A week ago, 74,000 Americans got some unexpected news: Their student loans – totaling nearly $5 billion – had been forgiven by the White House. Some 44,000 of those people were police officers, nurses, and firefighters, entitled to relief after 10 years of public service.

As of this month, the Biden-Harris administration says, it has approved $137 billion in loan forgiveness for more than 3.7 million people. Starting next month, enhancements to a program launched in August will go into effect and will have an impact on almost 7 million more people. While that’s still far short of the number covered under President Joe Biden’s initial $430 billion loan forgiveness plan, supporters say it is the most generous plan implemented to date. 

“I would say it is one of the signature accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration in terms of higher education affordability,” says Sara Partridge, a senior policy analyst for the Center for American Progress. These repayment plans “can be a little wonky and complicated, so I think what’s really major about it can be lost in the details,” Dr. Partridge adds.

Didn’t the Supreme Court kill student loan relief? What happened?

President Biden campaigned on a broad promise of student debt relief for millions of Americans. His administration offered $10,000 per borrower in debt forgiveness, plus an additional $10,000 for those with lower incomes. The Supreme Court of the United States struck down that program in 2023. The justices ruled that the secretary of education did not have authority under the pandemic-era HEROES Act to cancel student loan debt and that “the economic and political significance of the secretary’s action is staggering by any measure.”

The Biden-Harris administration then pivoted to enhancing existing loan forgiveness programs. President Biden’s most ambitious student loan relief program, the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, currently has about 7 million borrowers signed up for forgiveness. 

What is the SAVE program?

The SAVE program started this past August. Like earlier plans, it uses income and family size to determine borrowers’ monthly payments.

Old programs considered income above 150% of the federal poverty level to be discretionary income. SAVE considers anything above 225%. If a borrower is single and makes less than $15 an hour, or less than $32,800 annually, they will pay $0 a month, as long as the person’s salary remains the same. Single borrowers who make $60,000 would pay a maximum $227 a month. Estimates are that annual average savings will be $1,080 for single borrowers and $2,244 for families of four.

Perhaps the biggest change is that, unlike with earlier programs, borrowers won’t see their interest payments balloon – sometimes to thousands above the original loan amount. With SAVE, the government pays all interest costs not included in the monthly payment. In earlier income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, the government would cover half of the interest owed.

“This was a big problem before. You had these balances, and you’re like, ‘OK, well, this is affordable, but I’m not actually paying off my debt, and the debt is ballooning,’” says Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel at the Student Borrower Protection Center. Ms. Yu says compounding interest was a disincentive for potential program participants.

What happens next month?

In February, a 10-year repayment option is going into effect, six months earlier than expected. SAVE allows participants who initially borrowed less than $12,000 to be forgiven after 10 years of payments. Traditional IDR payment plans were scheduled to be complete in 20 to 25 years.

For every $1,000 borrowed above $12,000, the SAVE repayment term is increased by a year (capped at 20 years for undergraduate loans, for example). So say someone borrowed $15,000. They would be fully forgiven after 13 years of payments.

Starting in summer 2024, most borrowers will have their monthly payments reduced. Currently, IDR programs set monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income. For borrowers who have undergraduate loans, the percentage will fall to 5%. Borrowers with loans from graduate school will still have to pay 10%. 

The U.S. Department of Education has made certifying income for borrowers less cumbersome with an agreement with the IRS that allows for recertification to be done automatically, with borrowers’ permission. Under previous programs, borrowers had to prove their income annually. Many were disqualified because service providers didn’t tell them this stipulation.

Will court cases be coming for SAVE? 

In December, Congress tried to block implementation of SAVE with the Congressional Review Act, arguing that it was expensive and unfairly shifted the cost of college from borrowers to taxpayers. The Democratic-controlled Senate fell short of the votes to pass the act.

Dr. Partridge, at the Center for American Progress, says what makes SAVE and other measures more likely to stand up in court is that they are iterations of programs that started many years ago. IDRs, which started in the 1990s, were created by Congress. The act that created Public Service Loan Forgiveness also was passed by Congress in 2007.

“We haven’t seen any [court] challenges to the SAVE program right now. And then with IDR plans, really what the Biden administration has done there is very in line with established practice,” Dr. Partridge says.

If President Biden loses reelection, a new administration could come in and choose to sunset the program, she says. People who already received benefits would not see those benefits rolled back, Dr. Partridge adds.

Ms. Yu agrees it would be hard to overturn SAVE.

“It’s very challenging to take away an existing right,” she says, adding that student loans are a recognized contract with the government. 

“Student loans are different from other kinds of government programs. Once you recognize the term of the contract, you have a promissory note, just like any other loan,” she explains. “Congress or the courts coming in and then changing that contract is legally trickier.”

REUTERS

Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, meets foreign observers of the country's election, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Jan. 8.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this week’s Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire wasn’t that Donald Trump won but that voter turnout was a record high. In other words, GOP voters – who mostly believe fraud was behind Joe Biden’s national win in 2020 – thoroughly trusted the electoral system in a state where Mr. Biden clearly won. Their faith in the system said more than the primary’s result.

Such triumphs for honesty in elections – that is, honesty in ballot counting and truthfulness in accepting a valid count – are what may help ensure the comeback of democracy in a year with a near-record number of elections worldwide.

Nearly half of the global population will cast ballots for national leaders in 2024, including voters in the United States. In most of these contests, civic-minded electoral officials will try to follow recognized international standards, such as impartiality and transparency. Yet even these officials often welcome an extra layer of protection for the sovereignty of individual citizens to shape their governance through the ballot. They invite neutral foreign observers – as New Hampshire has done – who are well steeped in electoral “best practices” to scrutinize the process.

A number of groups, such as The Carter Center in Atlanta, offer this service of expert observation and expert correction. Perhaps the most influential is the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, which has observed more than 400 elections over the last 30 years on either side of the Atlantic. Founded during the Cold War, the Vienna-based group – with countries ranging from Canada to Russia – is a watchdog for civic rights and fundamental freedoms within its 57 member states.

“By helping to increase public confidence in the honesty of the election process, election observation ... builds trust in elected representatives and democratic institutions,” Matteo Mecacci, director of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, wrote in the EUobserver this week.

The OSCE, for example, called out the United States to make electoral reforms after the 2020 and 2022 elections. It is helping tiny Moldova withstand Russia’s malign influence on voters before a March presidential election. And when the authoritarian leader of Belarus refused to allow OSCE monitors to observe this February’s parliamentary vote, the organization lamented that citizens will not benefit from “an impartial, transparent, and comprehensive assessment” of the election.

Such international observers are beacons for the universal values of democratic government. Those values, if honored, help create trust in a free and fair election. As Mr. Mecacci states, “Trust is key to any election.”

And it certainly was key for Republicans in New Hampshire to accept Mr. Trump’s win in the first primary of the 2024 presidential election.