Town…. not really. They were some ten miles from the next food depot, and they knew where it was, but just couldn’t make it. There are no real towns on Antarctica even today, and there were certainly no permanent settlements either back then.
I find it funny how you understood and quoted the sentence.
Let me requote my interpretation which is differing by 100% from your view.
The Arab world has seethed whenever the United States used its U.N. veto – as it has done with frequency – to quash efforts to send international observers into the Palestinian territories or halt the construction of Israeli settlements.
I really wonder from where you took the Chuzpe to skip some important parts of the sentence.