US President Donald Trump openly fought with the top two Democratic politicians at an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday about government funding, throwing into question whether a deal was possible before a deadline later this month.

In a rare public argument, Trump bickered with US Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi about funding for his proposed border wall.

“If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other – whether it’s through you, through a military, through anything you want to call – I will shut down the government,” Trump said as the heated argument drew near a close.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country,” he said before reporters left the room.

Congress is seeking to finalise spending before some federal government funding expires on December 21. While Trump’s fellow Republicans control both the House and the Senate until next month, Democratic support is needed to pass any spending legislation.

The president has called for $5bn to fund the barrier along the US-Mexico border, a campaign promise that he has made into a focal point. He ended the argument by saying he was willing to make good on his repeated threat to shut down the federal government over the issue.

In a poll related on Tuesday by NPR/PBS NewsHour and Marist Poll, 57 percent of Americans said Trump should compromise on the wall to avoid a government shutdown. About 36 percent said he should not. 

‘Trump shutdown’

Tuesday’s spat was the first time Trump met Pelosi and Schumer since the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in the November 6 congressional elections – a rocky start to the relationship the White House will have with the opposition party, with which it needs to deal to advance any priorities. 

The fight kicked off when Pelosi told Trump that Americans did not want to see a “Trump shutdown,” touching a nerve. Trump cut off Pelosi, arguing that he could not advance a funding bill without Democratic votes in the Senate.

“I don’t think we should have a debate in front of the press on this,” Pelosi said.

“We’re doing this in a very friendly manner,” Trump said, as Vice President Mike Pence sat beside him, silent and stony-faced.

Trump has threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t receive his border wall funding [Mark Wilson/Getty Images/AFP]

Senior White House staff watched the melee from the corners of the room, among them Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, outgoing Chief of Staff John Kelly, immigration adviser Stephen Miller, and Shahira Knight, his legislative director.

Then Schumer brought up the “Pinocchios” that Trump had been awarded by the Washington Post for misstatements on the issue and accused him of wanting to get his own way.

“Let’s call a halt to this,” Pelosi said as the two New Yorkers went at it.

“It’s not bad, Nancy – it’s called transparency,” Trump said.

When Pelosi brought up Republican election losses in the House, Trump quickly retorted that his party won the Senate.

“When the president brags that he won North Dakota and Indiana, he’s in real trouble,” Schumer said to the astonished press capturing the back-and-forth.

Trump says military will build wall if there’s no funding

Trump has sought to sow fear over thousands of migrants and refugees who have recently arrived at the border as part of an exodus, initially dubbed the Central American caravan. More than 6,000 people are currently waiting in Tijuana to file for asylum in the US. Rights groups estimate many will have to wait up to two months before being allowed in the US to submit their claims. 

Many of the refugees and migrants have told Al Jazeera they are fleeing violence, poverty and political persecution. 

Trump has sent more than 5,000 troops to the border to offer logistic support to border patrol agents. The Department of Defense approved a plan to extend the deployment of about 4,000 active-duty troops through January. 

Prior to Tuesday’s public spat, Trump said the military would build his promised border wall if Congress did not sign off his funding proposal. 

It was unclear how Trump would try to use the US Department of Defense to build the wall, given that defence and military construction appropriation bills were signed into law for the 2019 fiscal year without any wall funding.

Sri Lanka’s deposed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is facing a lawsuit challenging his right to hold a seat in parliament amid a bitter power struggle that has driven the South Asian country progressively deeper into crisis.

A petition filed at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday accused Wickremesinghe of doing business with Sri Lanka’s government, a claim if true, would disqualify him from parliament and dash his hopes of returning to the prime minister’s post. 

The case against Wickremesinghe alleges he holds shares in a company that prints cheques for state-owned banks.

It was filed by a supporter of the overthrown leader’s successor, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has been temporarily barred from acting as prime minister by the Court of Appeal, leaving the country without a functioning government.

The decision was made pending the court’s hearing of a petition brought by members of parliament on Rajapaksa’s refusal to step down despite losing two no-confidence motions in November.

Sri Lanka has been in turmoil since October 26 when President Maithripala Sirisena sacked Wickremesinghe and replaced him with Rajapaksa, a former president accused of corruption and human rights abuses. But in the ensuing weeks, Rajapaksa could not muster enough support in parliament, and Sirisena subsequently dissolved the 225-member House and called for snap elections to take place in January. 

The Supreme Court, however, halted the president’s moves amid a legal challenge, allowing parliament to resume. The top court is due to deliver a verdict on the case later this week. 

Ajith Perera, a member of Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP), told Al Jazeera the lawsuit against the overthrown leader was “filed out of desperation”. 

“I am sure the court will throw the case out,” he said. “They have filed this case to rattle us because they have lost so much face due to previous court decisions.”

In 1999, the Court of Appeal stripped a Sri Lankan legislator of his seat after it found the politician was involved in a company supplying dental equipment to the government. 

‘People power campaign’

The lawsuit against Wickremesinghe, who insists his sacking was unconstitutional, came after he called for mass demonstrations to pressure Sirisena to reinstate him.

In a statement on Monday, he said he commanded the support of parliament and Sirisena has until Friday to recognise that.

Wickremesinghe – who is confident of a top court ruling against Sirisena – said tens of thousands of the party faithful would rally in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, if the president did not heed the court’s decision.

“After the court ruling, we will launch our ‘People Power’ campaign to force the president to end the crisis,” he said.

The UNP is also expected to table a motion requesting a vote on Wickremesinghe’s support in parliament on Wednesday.

The party commands the support of 103 legislators in the 225-member House and expects the Tamil National Alliance, a coalition of 14 legislators who represent the country’s ethnic Tamil minority, to back the resolution. 

Sirisena has previously refused to reinstate Wickremesinghe. In November, he said: “Even if the UNP has the majority, I told them not to bring Ranil Wickremesinghe before me, I will not make him prime minister … not in my lifetime.”

The former allies had fallen out over economic policy, day-to-day administration, and what Sirisena said was the involvement of a Wickremesinghe ally in an alleged assassination plot against him. 

Meanwhile, the court of appeal’s decision on December 3 to temporarily bar Rajapaksa and his cabinet has left Sri Lanka without a government. 

On the same day, Sirisena met with the top bureaucrats from government ministries and instructed them to “continue their duties and ensure there was no breakdown in public services”.

He has held regular meetings with the civil servants since. 

‘Major consequences’

Rajitha Keerthi Tennakoon, a Colombo-based political analyst, said the government’s suspension had “reduced the activities of the public sector tremendously”.

However, “there has been no breakdown as of yet and there are no problems in obtaining public services such as health and education,” Tennakoon told Al Jazeera.

“But this will have major consequences in the long term.”

Chief among the concerns was the parliament’s failure to approve a budget for 2019.

Wickremesinghe’s UNP in a post on Twitter on Tuesday said Sirisena’s refusal to “appoint a legitimate government” meant more than one million government servants will not receive salaries after January 1, 2019.

Lakshman Silva, a 62-year-old former civil servant, told Al Jazeera he was “worried” about receiving his pension payment.

The parliament’s failure to pass a budget means “I might not have an income from next year,” he said, adding: “I don’t have a lot of savings … so I am really worried about the next few months and I hope things will be sorted, I don’t care how.” 

The protracted crisis has also hit the country’s economy. The country’s currency fell to a record low of 177.20 to the dollar in November, and foreign investors pulled out more than 30bn rupees ($169.5m) since the crisis began. 

The travel industry, which makes up about 5 percent of Sri Lanka’s $87bn economy, has also reported cancellations by both businesses and leisure visitors. 

Rathindra Kuruwita contributed reporting from Colombo.

Since the exposure of Israeli undercover forces by Hamas fighters in the besieged Gaza Strip on November 11, an incident that triggered the most intense round of escalation since 2014, a number of reports have emerged about the circumstances surrounding Israel’s thwarted raid.

On November 22, Hamas published photos of individuals it said were involved, images that Israel’s military censor immediately subjected to a publication ban.

Since then, a number of articles in Israeli and international media have claimed the Israeli forces impersonated humanitarian workers, used fake ID cards of real Palestinian residents, and operated inside Gaza for weeks with a cover story of distributing medical equipment and wheelchairs.

Such reports have caused consternation; as one Israeli human rights campaigner and journalist put it: “If true, the operation could put bona fide humanitarian operations and employees at risk in the coastal strip, where two-thirds of the population is reliant on humanitarian aid”.

Israel’s actions may also have constituted a violation of international humanitarian law.

“Soldiers who disguise themselves as civilians endanger civilians and thus frustrate the objective of the principle of distinction”, Yael Stein, head of research at Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, said. 

“One danger that the prohibition seeks to prevent is that civilians would be marked for attack because of the suspicion they are combatants in disguise,” she said.

“In this last case, there’s also the danger to the status of international aid workers – that the local population might suspect in the future, putting their lives in danger and their much-needed work in question.”

Stein further noted that while undercover operations can be lawful in the context of law enforcement operations, “since Israel claims there’s a situation of war in Gaza, it cannot claim that these operations are legal”.

Israeli authorities did not respond to several requests for comment. 

Undercover forces

For human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, the operation in Gaza “shows the cynicism of the Israeli government, who for years have claimed that Palestinians are using humanitarian disguises for terrorist activity”, allegations even used “as an excuse for rejecting Palestinians seeking exit permits from the Gaza Strip for medical treatment”.

Israeli authorities do indeed frequently claim that Palestinian fighters “deliberately disguise themselves as civilians” – in May, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations told the Security Council that even Great March of Return demonstrators were “terrorists disguised as civilians”.

According to Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators, “this isn’t the only thing that Israel has lied about”.

“For example, Israel has routinely used Palestinians as human shields and it has routinely covered military targets in civilian areas while wrongly alleging that Palestinians do this”, she said. 

The botched mission inside Gaza threw light on the Israeli military’s broader use of undercover forces in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in the West Bank.

In October 2015, Israeli forces were captured on film infiltrating a protest, assaulting Palestinian youths and shooting a detained demonstrator in the leg. Weeks later, undercover forces – including one pretending to a pregnant woman – raided a Hebron hospital and killed an unarmed civilian.

A spokesperson for prisoners’ rights NGO, Addameer, told Al Jazeera “undercover forces are usually seen in protests, raids or arrest operations”, adding that the group sees those kinds of arrests as “more like a kidnapping operation” than an arrest.

Addameer stressed it “considers all arrests in the West Bank to be carried out illegally especially because almost none of them would have a legal arrest warrant to present during the arrest”.

While the NGO does not hold exact statistics as to how many Palestinians are arrested in this manner, it pointed to an example earlier this year of Israeli undercover forces raiding Birzeit University campus – reportedly posing as journalists – to detain the student union head.

No accountability

Such actions, however, generate little to no debate within Israel, according to Mack.

“Nobody is talking about it, what it means in terms of international law,” he said. “And in the case of Gaza, for most Israelis it’s not even that they don’t care – they simply don’t even see that there is a place called Gaza. It’s a blind spot; what happens in Gaza is left in Gaza.”

In the absence of public pressure, there is even less possibility of accountability, observers say.

“In Israel, no one pays for undertaking covert operations, killing Palestinians and placing foreign workers at harm,” Buttu said.

“Sadly, the international community has barely spoken out, preferring instead to focus on ‘ceasefires’ and condemning ‘both sides’.”

Mack similarly believes that the silence of the international community – including “humanitarian organisations” – is part of what emboldens Israel to conduct such operations.

“It’s very, very worrying, because one of the basic principles of international humanitarian law is that the fighting groups will not use humanitarian groups as symbols to shield themselves.”

“This kind of operation always has a risk,” Mack continued, “so if the Netanyahu government felt that there would be international accountability for using a humanitarian NGO as a cover, it wouldn’t do it.”

Yet not only has there been no accountability, but there are signs that the Israeli authorities’ own efforts to censor the story are being supported by Twitter, with a number of accounts ordered to delete tweets pertaining to Israeli undercover forces’ actions in Gaza.

Stein told Al Jazeera she would be surprised if anyone would be held to account for the actions in Gaza.

“According to publications in the press, this operation was approved by high-ranking officers in the army and in the political level”, she said.

“And in any case, as B’Tselem has written in the past, the so-called law enforcement system in the army hardly results in meaningful action against any of the forces involved and is more concerned with whitewashing than with justice and truth”.