JERUSALEM: Israel has become the only country to openly support an independent Kurdish state, a result of good ties between Kurds and Jews and expectations it would be a front against Iran and extremism, experts say.
Iraq’s Kurdish region plans to hold a non-binding referendum on statehood on Sept. 25 despite the objections of Baghdad and neighboring Iran and Turkey, as well as the US.
On Monday, Iraq’s Supreme Court ordered the suspension of the referendum as legal and political pressure mounted on the Kurds to call off the vote.
Israel became the first and so far only country to openly voice support for “the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to attain a state of its own,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week, without specifying where and how.
Netanyahu’s statement came after remarks made earlier in the month by former general Yair Golan, who said he liked the “idea of independent Kurdistan.”
“Basically, looking at Iran in the east, looking at the instability (in) the region, a solid, stable, cohesive Kurdish entity in the midst of this quagmire — it’s not a bad idea,” Golan said at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
He also noted Israel’s “good cooperation with the Kurd people since the early 1960s.”
To Gideon Saar, a former Israeli minister, the Kurds are a minority group in the Middle East that, unlike the Jews, have yet to achieve statehood.
“The Kurds have been and will continue to be reliable and long-term allies of Israel since they are, like us, a minority group in the region,” he said.
“We need to encourage independence of minorities that were wronged by regional arrangements since Sykes-Picot over the past 100 years and have been repressed under authoritarian regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq and the Assads in Syria,” Saar said.
The Sykes-Picot agreement was a World War I-era deal between Britain and France laying out boundaries in the Middle East.
Saar too noted Kurdistan’s efforts in pushing back Islamist forces.
“Looking at the Kurds’ location on a map you realize they can be a dam blocking the spread of radical Islam in the region, and in practice we’ve seen them exclusively fighting IS,” he said.
“Throughout the years the Kurds were never drawn to anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist perceptions and maintained good ties with the Jewish people and Israel.”
Ofra Bengio, who heads a Kurdish studies program at Tel Aviv University, noted that Israel supplied covert military, intelligence and humanitarian aid to Kurdistan in the years 1965-1975.
When Jews living in Iraqi cities were subject to harassment under Baath rule in the early 1970s, Kurds smuggled them out of the country to safety, she said.
Former Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani visited Israel, as did his son, current president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region Massud Barzani, and many Israeli officials have visited Kurdistan, Bengio said.
“I don’t know to what extent (Kurdistan) could be an ally since it would be pressed by all kinds of Arab factors, but at least it won’t be hostile toward Israel. That’s certain,” said Bengio, author of the book “The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State Within a State.”
“What’s more important, it would be a buffer against extremist elements — not just Iran, but also others,” she said, noting IS and Iraqi Shiite militias.
A Kurdistan which emphasises “secularity, democracy, moderation and acceptance of the other” would be “a positive element in a region that is becoming increasingly extremist and unstable,” Bengio said.
The US supports the current Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq and relies on its forces in the war against Daesh, but has urged the Kurds to call off the potentially “provocative and destabilising” independence referendum.
To Saar, the former minister, Israeli leader Netanyahu should “use our leverage in the US to strengthen the Kurds in a very crucial moment of their national struggle.”
Israel sees benefits in independent Kurdistan: Experts
Israel sees benefits in independent Kurdistan: Experts
Sick, wounded Palestinians leave for Egypt as Rafah crossing reopens
- The reopening of the Rafah crossing represents a significant breakthrough
- Israel agreed to reopen the crossing after Hamas released the last living female hostages in Gaza
RAFAH CROSSING, Egypt: A group of 50 sick and wounded Palestinian children began crossing to Egypt for treatment through Gaza’s Rafah crossing on Saturday, in the first opening of the border since Israel captured it nearly nine months ago.
The reopening of the Rafah crossing represents a significant breakthrough that bolsters the ceasefire deal Israel and Hamas agreed to earlier this month. Israel agreed to reopen the crossing after Hamas released the last living female hostages in Gaza.
Egyptian television showed an Palestinian Red Cross ambulance pulling up to the crossing gate, and several children were brought out on stretchers and transferred to ambulances on the Egyptian side.
Hamas frees 3 hostages, Israel releases Palestinians as part of ceasefire deal
- Six-week phase one truce calls for the release of 33 hostages and nearly 2,000 prisoners
- Israel and Hamas are set next week to begin negotiating a second phase of the ceasefire
GAZA/CAIRO: Hamas released three hostages in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday as part of its ceasefire deal with Israel, and Israel began releasing some of the dozens of prisoners due to be freed in the fourth round of exchanges during the Gaza ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.
The six-week phase one truce calls for the release of 33 hostages and nearly 2,000 prisoners, as well as the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza and an increase in humanitarian aid to the devastated territory.
Israel and Hamas are set next week to begin negotiating a second phase of the ceasefire, which calls for releasing the remaining hostages and extending the truce indefinitely. The war could resume in early March if an agreement is not reached.
Palestinian health authorities in Gaza also announced that the long-shuttered Rafah border crossing with Egypt would reopen on Saturday for thousands of Palestinians who desperately need medical care – a breakthrough that signals the ceasefire agreement continues to gain traction.
Ofer Kalderon, a French-Israeli dual national and Yarden Bibas were handed over to Red Cross officials in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis before being transferred to Israel. Israeli-American Keith Siegel was handed over separately a few hours later at the Gaza City seaport.
Bibas is the father of the two youngest hostages, baby Kfir, only 9 months old when he was kidnapped by Hamas-led gunmen on Oct. 7, 2023, and Ariel, who was 4 at the time of the cross-border attack.
Hamas said in November 2023 that the boys and their mother Shiri, who was taken at the same time, were killed in an Israeli airstrike. There has been no word on them since.
At the newly reopened Rafah crossing on the southern border, the first Palestinian patients to be allowed to leave Gaza, including children suffering from cancer and heart conditions, were expected to cross over to Egypt in a bus provided by the World Health Organization.
Saturday’s handover saw none of the chaotic scenes that overshadowed an earlier transfer on Thursday, when Hamas guards struggled to shield hostages from a surging crowd in Gaza.
But it was once again an occasion for a show of force by uniformed Hamas fighters who paraded in the area where the handovers took place in a sign of their re-established dominance in Gaza despite the heavy losses suffered in the war.
Kalderon, whose two children Erez and Sahar were released in the first hostage exchange in November 2023, and Bibas both briefly mounted a stage in Khan Younis, in front of a poster of Hamas figures including Mohammad Deif, the former military commander whose death was confirmed by Hamas this week, before being handed over to the Red Cross officials.
“Ofer Kalderon is free! We share the immense relief and joy of his loved ones after 483 days of unimaginable hell,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.
Negotiations on release of remaining hostages
Eighteen hostages, including five Thais freed on Thursday, have now been released in exchange for 400 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Negotiations are due to start by Tuesday on agreements for the release of the remaining hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in a second phase of the deal.
During the first phase of the ceasefire, 33 children, women and older male hostages as well as sick and injured, were due to be released, with more than 60 men of military age left for a second phase which must still be negotiated.
The initial six-week ceasefire, agreed with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the United States, has so far stayed on track despite a number of incidents that have led both sides to accuse the other of violating the deal.
The Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli figures.
Israel’s campaign in response has destroyed much of the densely populated Gaza Strip and killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Gunmen kill 10 in Alawite village in Syria: monitor
DAMASCUS: Gunmen have shot dead 10 people in an Alawite-majority village in central Syria, a war monitor said on Saturday.
“Armed men committed a massacre” on Friday that killed “10 citizens in Arza village in the northern Hama countryside that is inhabited by citizens of the Alawite sect” of ousted leader Bashar Assad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Facing flak, Red Cross defends its role in Israel-Hamas war
- The Geneva-based organization had been accused of not doing enough to help hostages in Gaza or Palestinian detainees in Israel
- ICRC officials said the organization could only do so much as it is reliant on the goodwill of the belligerents
GENEVA: The Red Cross, accused of not doing enough to help hostages in Gaza or Palestinian detainees in Israel, has defended itself in a rare statement outlining the limits of its role.
Insisting on its neutrality, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the escalation of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories has triggered “a proliferation of dehumanizing language and of false and misleading information about the ICRC and our work in the current conflict.”
In recent days, ICRC vehicles have facilitated the transfer of Palestinians out of Israeli detention, and hostages held in the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s attack in Israel on October 7, 2023.
But the transfer of hostages to the ICRC has been sharply criticized following chaotic scenes on Thursday as masked fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, carrying automatic weapons, struggled to hold back a surging crowd.
ICRC officials “did nothing to interfere with this intimidating display of indignity and public humiliation,” Gerald Steinberg, president of the right-wing Israeli organization NGO Monitor, wrote in the Australian-based online magazine Quillette.
The ICRC said: “Ensuring the safety and security of the handover operations is the responsibility of the parties to the agreement.”
Furthermore, “Interfering with armed security personnel could compromise the safety of ICRC staff, and more importantly that of the hostages.”
The Geneva-based organization also said it had not given permission for “people carrying Hamas flags to get on top of our buses in Ramallah” during the release of Palestinian detainees, “nor did we have the capacity to prevent people from doing so.”
In late 2023, Israel’s then foreign minister Eli Cohen said the Red Cross had “no right to exist” if it did not visit the hostages in Gaza.
However, the organization is reliant on the goodwill of the belligerents.
“From day one, we have called for the immediate release of all the hostages, and for access to them,” it says.
In World War II, the ICRC visited prisoners of war but its mandate did not explicitly extend to civilians unless governments allowed it.
The ICRC acknowledges that during World War II, it “failed to speak out and more importantly act on behalf of the millions of people who suffered and perished in the death camps, especially the Jewish people targeted, persecuted, and murdered under the Nazi regime.”
In its statement, the ICRC reaffirmed that it was the “greatest failure” in the organization’s history, and said it unequivocally rejects anti-Semitism in all its forms.
The ICRC has been accused, particularly on social media, of not putting pressure on Israel to secure visits to Palestinian detainees since October 7, 2023, and also of not doing enough to help the wounded in the Gaza Strip.
The humanitarian organization says it has been actively engaging with the Israeli authorities “to allow for the resumption of ICRC visits and family contacts for these detainees.”
As for the wounded in Gaza, the ICRC said it had received requests to evacuate hospitals in the north, but could not regularly safely access the area due the “extremely difficult security situation — together with roads blocked and unreliable communications.”
Following the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that came into effect on January 19, the ICRC, which already had 130 staff in Gaza, is deploying more personnel, including doctors.
In 1968, Leopold Boissier, a former ICRC president, noted that the criticism most frequently levelled at the organization “is the silence with which it surrounds some of its activities.”
Nearly 60 years later, the ICRC is facing similar accusations, notably since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Founded in Geneva in 1863, the organization, which has more than 18,000 staff in over 90 countries, denies being “complicit” and says it establishes trust through “confidential dialogue with all parties to the conflict.”
“Our neutrality and impartiality are critical to our ability to operate in any context.”
Egyptians protest at Rafah border crossing against Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians
- Trump said on Saturday that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, which he called a “demolition site” following 15 months of Israeli bombardment
- Critics warned that Trump's suggestion was exactly what Israel's Zionist extremists have been trying to do, to kick out Palestinians from their homeland
CAIRO: Thousands of people demonstrated at the Rafah border crossing on Friday, an eyewitness told Reuters, in a rare state-sanctioned protest against a proposal earlier this week by US President Donald Trump for Egypt and Jordan to accept Gazan refugees.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Wednesday rejected the idea that Egypt would facilitate the displacement of Gazans and said Egyptians would take to the streets to express their disapproval.
Protesters could be heard chanting “Long Live Egypt” and waving Egyptian and Palestinian flags.
“We say no to any displacement of Palestine or Gaza at the expense of Egypt, on the land of Sinai,” said Sinai resident Gazy Saeed.
Trump said on Saturday that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, which he called a “demolition site” following 15 months of Israeli bombardment that rendered most of its 2.3 million people homeless.
On Thursday, Trump forcefully reiterated the idea, saying “We do a lot for them, and they are going to do it,” in apparent reference to abundant US aid, including military assistance, to both Egypt and Jordan.
Any suggestion that Palestinians leave Gaza — territory they hope will become part of an independent state — has been anathema to the Palestinian leadership for generations and repeatedly rejected by neighboring Arab states since the Gaza war began in October 2023.
Jordan is already home to several million Palestinians, while tens of thousands live in Egypt.
