��������

RABAT: Morocco’s King Mohammed VI on Friday said improving public education and health care was a priority, but made no reference to the youth movement that has been staging nationwide protests for sweeping social reforms.
“We have set as priorities... the creation of jobs for young people, and the concrete improvement of the education and health sectors,” the monarch said in his annual address to the opening session of parliament.
The royal speech had been much anticipated by the protesters, who have taken to the streets almost every night since September 27.
The unrest that has rocked the usually stable north African country has been fueled by recent reports of the deaths of eight pregnant women at a public hospital in the city of Agadir, which critics condemn as a symptom of a failing system.
Demonstrators have been calling for a change in government and for Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch to resign.
Many Moroccans have also expressed frustration at public spending as Morocco pushes ahead with major infrastructure projects in preparation for the 2030 World Cup, which it will co-host with Portugal and Spain.
The king pleaded that “there should be no contradiction or competition between major national projects and social programs.”
‘D���������Ǿ��Գٱ��’
GenZ 212, the online-based collective calling the protests – whose founders remain unknown – made no immediate reaction to the speech.
Raghd, a 23-year-old sound engineer who had joined several demonstrations in Rabat, said she was “disappointed” that there was no explicit reference to the protests in the royal speech.
“I thought he would say something stronger,” she said without giving her last name.
The collective had urged its followers to refrain from protesting on Friday night “out of respect” for the king.
Yet Driss El Yazami, the former head of the National Human Rights Council, said the king’s speech might actually amount to “a national mobilization.”
He said the monarch “heard the call of the youth.”
In his speech, the king said Morocco was “charting a steady path toward greater social and territorial justice.”
He added that efforts must also ensure “that the fruits of growth benefit everyone.”
In July, he had declared that “there is no place, today or tomorrow, for a Morocco moving at two speeds.”
On Thursday, GenZ 212 demanded a “crackdown on corruption” and a “radical modernization of school textbooks.”
They also called for a national plan to renovate hospitals, recruit more doctors and health care workers, particularly in remote areas, and raise public health insurance reimbursement rates from 50 percent to 75 percent.
Official figures show a lack of education in Morocco is a key driver of the country’s poverty, which has, nevertheless, fallen from nearly 12 percent of the population in 2014 to 6.8 percent in 2024.
‘S��ǰ��ٴڲ�������’
GenZ 212 has insisted it had no political affiliation and no formal leadership.
Members on the online messaging platform Discord where it was founded discuss issues openly and put every major decision up to a vote.
Sociologist Mehdi Alioua said it comes as “part of a long history of youth-led social mobilization in Morocco.”
The north African country had seen mass protests in February 2011 and in 2016 with the Hirak uprising in the Rif region.
Yet GenZ 212 has brought together “young, connected urbanites, from the middle or upper classes,” as well as “young rural and small-town workers, often exploited agricultural low-wage laborers with few rights.”
The government made a fresh call on Thursday for dialogue with the protesters, saying their “message has been received” and vowing to “work quickly to mobilize resources and address shortfalls.”
Rallies have been largely peaceful, though some nights have seen spates of violence and acts of vandalism.
Three people were killed in clashes with security forces last week, while police have made dozens of arrests.

RAS EIN AL-AUJA, Palestinian Territories: In the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley, Naef Jahaleen fears for the future as Israeli settlers come for the land home to one of the area’s last Bedouin herding communities.
Life was good before in Ras Ein Al-Auja, the Bedouin herder says, but settlement outposts have grown one after the other over the past two years.
Settlers’ trailers have gradually given way to houses with foundations, some built just 100 meters from Bedouin homes.
In May, settlers diverted the village’s most precious resource — the spring after which it is named.
But for the community of 130 families, the worst issue is the constant need to stand guard to avoid settlers cutting power and irrigation pipes, or bringing their own herds to graze near people’s houses.

“The settlers provoke people at night, walking around the houses, disturbing the residents, making people anxious, scaring the children and the elderly,” 49-year-old Jahaleen said, adding that calling the Israeli police in the area rarely yielded results.
“There’s no real protection,” he said.
“A settler could come to your house — you call the police, and they don’t come. The army doesn’t come. No one helps,” Jahaleen told AFP after a meeting with other villagers trying to coordinate their response.

Land grabs

Most Palestinian Bedouins are herders, which leaves them particularly exposed to violence when Israeli settlers bring herds that compete for grazing land.
It is a strategy that settlement watchdog organizations call “pastoral colonialism.”
“They have started to bring in Jewish colonizers and give them some small herd or a few sheep or cows and take over a specific area. From there, this armed colonizer starts to herd,” Younes Ara, of the Palestinian Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, told AFP.
Settlements have expanded since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, with more than 500,000 settlers living in the Palestinian territory, excluding Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem. Some three million Palestinians live in the territory.
Jahaleen said Israeli herding, combined with repeated harassment, aimed to make Palestinians leave an area.
“You never know when or how they’ll harass you. The goal is to make you leave,” Jahaleen said as he stood guard near his home one night, occasionally flashing a powerful torch up a gully near where young settlers had been bringing supplies.
That night, Jahaleen was joined on his watch by Doron Meinrath, a former army officer who sometimes leads volunteers for an Israeli organization called Looking the Occupation in the Eye.
Several foreign and Israeli activists help Jahaleen by standing watch, documenting settlers’ moves, calling the Israeli police or army, and trying to deter violence with their presence, taking turns for eight-hour shifts day and night.
“Let’s go after them,” Meinrath said as he saw a car drive down a hill on an illegal road finished last winter that connects the nascent Israeli outpost to a formal settlement.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank are deemed illegal by the United Nations under international law.
Once caught up with the young man’s Toyota — which was missing a headlight and had a cracked windscreen — Meinrath marked down the number plate and reported it to the police as a vehicle unsafe for the road.
His aim was to get the vehicle impounded, in a bid to slow further land grabs.

Changing times

Even with the inexorable growth of settler outposts, Meinrath said he felt organizations such as his posed “a problem” for the settler movement.
Although he had always been left-wing, Meinrath said his opinions fortified as he saw Israel change and the settlement movement become stronger politically.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet openly call for the West Bank’s annexation, and more specifically that of the Jordan Valley.
Abu Taleb, a 75-year-old herder from Ras Ein Al-Auja, said he saw the land he was born on change, too.
Nestled between rocky hills to the west and the flat Jordan Valley that climbs up the Jordanian plateau to the east, his community used to be self-sufficient.

But since settlers cut off access to the spring, he and his sons must pay to refill the water tank they need to quench their sheep’s thirst every three days.
After another settlement outpost sprang up a stone’s throw from his home, Taleb must now also bring his sheep into their pen when settlers arrive with their own herd, for fear of violence.
“My life as a child was good. But now, their lives are not good,” he said, pointing to three of his grandchildren milling around under the shade of a lonely acacia tree.
“They grew up in a bad life. These kids are afraid of the settlers everywhere.”