JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face beams down from election billboards depicting him as a statesman, shaking hands with US President Donald Trump.
Opponents portray him as a criminal. Even before he called an election for April 9, he was branded “CRIME MINISTER” in huge banners at protest rallies, a reference to three corruption investigations threatening his decade of political dominance.
Love him or loathe him, the election is all about Netanyahu.
Although the names of parties will be on ballot papers, the vote will amount to a referendum on Netanyahu in the shadow of his legal woes. If he wins, he will become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister this summer.
“There’s no central issue other than Netanyahu’s reign and clean government — whether he remains prime minister and what the price is for corruption,” said Tamar Hermann, a political science professor with the Israel Democracy Institute.
Opinion polls show Netanyahu’s Likud party is likely to win about 30 seats in the 120-member parliament, enough for the right-wing leader, now 69 and in his fourth term, to form the type of nationalist-religious coalition government he already heads.
He faces a strong challenge from former armed forces chief Benny Gantz. But Gantz’s centrist Resilience party, which is second in opinion polls, would need to pursue groundbreaking political alliances to outstrip a right-wing bloc.
In power since 2009, after a first stint as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, the man ardent supporters hail as “King Bibi” has struck a chord with an electorate that has moved to the right and watched with delight as, under Trump, Washington lined up with many of Netanyahu’s policies.
That has included US withdrawal from the international deal curbing Iran’s nuclear program, Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the transfer of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and a cut-off of US aid to the Palestinian Authority over its refusal to resume peace talks that collapsed in 2014.
“He (Netanyahu) has brought us excellent achievements, he represents me with dignity. I feel like my country is flourishing because of him,” said Ronit Levy, a 49-year-old insurance agent from the northern city of Afula who goes by the handle of “Ronit the Bibi’ite” on Twitter and Facebook.
The sign on the giant city-center billboards featuring Netanyahu and Trump says: “Netanyahu. In a different league.”
Corruption cases
But in three corruption cases, Netanyahu is suspected of wrongfully accepting gifts from wealthy businessmen and dispensing favors in alleged bids for favorable coverage in an Israeli newspaper and a website.
He has denied wrongdoing, saying he is a victim of a left-wing witchhunt to topple him and that he has no intention of resigning. But his opponents are attacking his record and underlining the need for clean governance.
In a speech that boosted his ratings on Jan. 29, Gantz said Israel’s present leadership encouraged incitement, subversion and hatred, and was so detached from the people that it had adopted “the mannerisms of a French royal house.”
“There was already a king who said: ‘The State is me,’ Gantz said, referring to King Louis XIV of France. “But no. Not here. No Israeli leader is a king. The state is not me. The state is you. The state is actually us. The state is all of us.”
Netanyahu’s legal saga looks set to enter a new chapter soon. Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit could announce by the end of February whether he intends to file criminal charges, as police have recommended, in the three corruption investigations.
Indictment in court would await the outcome of pre-trial hearings in which Netanyahu would try to dissuade Mandelblit from filing formal charges.
Those hearings would be unlikely to be wrapped up before the election, meaning voters would go to the polls aware that the attorney-general believes there is sufficient evidence to convict Netanyahu of criminal activity.
“The mere notion that in Israel a prime minister can remain in office while under indictment is ridiculous,” Gantz said.
Palestinian issue
Palestinian leaders have had little to say about the Israeli election, maintaining their traditional policy of watching quietly from the sidelines.
They have already broken off contacts with the Trump administration, accusing it of pro-Israel bias. Any new Netanyahu government would be likely to include veteran allies opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Comments last week by Gantz that Israel must find a way “not to have dominion over other people” — a reference to its continued occupation of the West Bank — won praise from a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“It’s encouraging, if he succeeds and he sticks to this opinion,” the spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said.
Trump intends to present a long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan only after the election and has been trying to enlist the support of US Arab allies in the region. But expectations of a breakthrough are low.
Another question looms for after the election: will coalition partners still stick with Netanyahu if Mandelblit, after a hearing, moves ahead with indictment?
Knives are already out: former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an erstwhile political ally of Netanyahu, has predicted that right-wing parties now pledging their support would eventually turn on the Israeli leader.
Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute, said Netanyahu enjoys loyalty from his core supporters of lower-income Israelis who see him as their champion.
Netanyahu’s backers, many of them Jews with roots in the Middle East and North Africa, hold grudges against left-wing parties that once dominated Israeli politics, accusing them of maltreating immigrants from those regions.
“It doesn’t matter what he does, they don’t expect him to conduct himself by the same moral standards that bind ordinary people,” Hermann said. “You don’t regard the king the same way you do a peasant.”
Israeli election: More “King Bibi” or bye-bye Bibi?
Israeli election: More “King Bibi” or bye-bye Bibi?
- Although the names of parties will be on ballot papers, the vote will amount to a referendum on Netanyahu in the shadow of his legal woes
- Opinion polls show Netanyahu’s Likud party is likely to win about 30 seats in the 120-member parliament
Stampede at central Damascus mosque kills three: governor
The Al-Watan newspaper said it happened during the distribution of free meals
DAMASCUS: A stampede at the landmark Umayyad Mosque in Syria’s capital on Friday killed three people, the governor of Damascus said.
The crush “during a civilian event at the mosque... resulted in the death of three people,” Governor Maher Marwan told state news agency SANA.
The White Helmets rescue group said the crush in the afternoon killed three women, adding that five children suffered fractures.
They added that they managed to rescue a girl from the crowd.
The Al-Watan newspaper said it happened during the distribution of free meals by a social media personality.
A YouTuber called Chef Abu Omar, who has a restaurant in Istanbul, had earlier posted a video of preparations for the distribution of free meals at the Ummayyad Mosque.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani had visited the mosque in the morning.
Israel strikes Yemen Houthis, warns it will ‘hunt’ leaders
- “A short while ago... fighter jets struck military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime,” the Israeli military said
- It said it also struck military infrastructure in the ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa
JERUSALEM: Israel struck Houthi targets in Yemen on Friday, including a power station and coastal ports, in response to missile and drone launches, and warned it would hunt down the group’s leaders.
“A short while ago... fighter jets struck military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime on the western coast and inland Yemen,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
It said the strikes were carried out in retaliation for Houthi missile and drone launches into Israel.
The statement said the targets included “military infrastructure sites in the Hizaz power station, which serves as a central source of energy” for the Houthis.
It said it also struck military infrastructure in the ports of Hodeida and Ras Issa.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement after the strikes, said the Houthis were being punished for their repeated attacks on his country.
“As we promised, the Houthis are paying, and they will continue to pay, a heavy price for their aggression against us,” he said.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel would “hunt down the leaders of the Houthi terror organization.”
“The Hodeida port is paralyzed, and the Ras Issa port is on fire — there will be no immunity for anyone,” he said in a video statement.
The Houthis, who control Sanaa, have fired missiles and drones toward Israel since war broke out in Gaza in October 2023.
They describe the attacks as acts of solidarity with Gazans.
The Iran-backed rebels have also targeted ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, prompting retaliatory strikes by the United States and, on occasion, Britain.
Israel has also struck Houthi targets in Yemen, including in the capital.
Since the Gaza war began, the Houthis have launched about 40 surface-to-surface missiles toward Israel, most of which were intercepted, the Israeli army says.
The military has also reported the launch of about 320 drones, with more than 100 intercepted by Israeli air defenses.
Gaza war death toll could be 40 percent higher, says study
- Researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024
- They estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period, about 41 percent higher than the official Palestinian Health Ministry count
LONDON: An official Palestinian tally of direct deaths in the Israel-Hamas war likely undercounted the number of casualties by around 40 percent in the first nine months of the war as the Gaza Strip’s health care infrastructure unraveled, according to a study published on Thursday.
The peer-reviewed statistical analysis published in The Lancet journal was conducted by academics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Yale University and other institutions.
Using a statistical method called capture-recapture analysis, the researchers sought to assess the death toll from Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza between October 2023 and the end of June 2024.
They estimated 64,260 deaths due to traumatic injury during this period, about 41 percent higher than the official Palestinian Health Ministry count. The study said 59.1 percent were women, children and people over the age of 65. It did not provide an estimate of Palestinian combatants among the dead.
More than 46,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war, according to Palestinian health officials, from a pre-war population of around 2.1 million.
A senior Israeli official, commenting on the study, said Israel’s armed forces went to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
“No other army in the world has ever taken such wide-ranging measures,” the official said.
“These include providing advance warning to civilians to evacuate, safe zones and taking any and all measures to prevent harm to civilians. The figures provided in this report do not reflect the situation on the ground.”
The war began on Oct. 7 after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border with Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
The Lancet study said the Palestinian health ministry’s capacity for maintaining electronic death records had previously proven reliable, but deteriorated under Israel’s military campaign, which has included raids on hospitals and other health care facilities and disruptions to digital communications.
Israel accuses Hamas of using hospitals as cover for its operations, which the militant group denies.
STUDY METHOD EMPLOYED IN OTHER CONFLICTS
Anecdotal reports suggested that a significant number of dead remained buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings and were therefore not included in some tallies.
To better account for such gaps, the Lancet study employed a method used to evaluate deaths in other conflict zones, including Kosovo and Sudan.
Using data from at least two independent sources, researchers look for individuals who appear on multiple lists of those killed. Less overlap between lists suggests more deaths have gone unrecorded, information that can be used to estimate the full number of deaths.
For the Gaza study, researchers compared the official Palestinian Health Ministry death count, which in the first months of war was based entirely on bodies that arrived in hospitals but later came to include other methods; an online survey distributed by the health ministry to Palestinians inside and outside the Gaza Strip, who were asked to provide data on Palestinian ID numbers, names, age at death, sex, location of death, and reporting source; and obituaries posted on social media.
“Our research reveals a stark reality: the true scale of traumatic injury deaths in Gaza is higher than reported,” lead author Zeina Jamaluddine told Reuters.
Dr. Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Reuters that the statistical methods deployed in the study provide a more complete estimate of the death toll in the war.
The study focused solely on deaths caused by traumatic injuries though, he said.
Deaths caused from indirect effects of conflict, such as disrupted health services and poor water and sanitation, often cause high excess deaths, said Spiegel, who co-authored a study last year that projected thousands of deaths due to the public health crisis spawned by the war.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) estimates that, on top of the official death toll, around another 11,000 Palestinians are missing and presumed dead.
In total, PCBS said, citing Palestinian Health Ministry numbers, the population of Gaza has fallen 6 percent since the start of the war, as about 100,000 Palestinians have also left the enclave.
Syria monitor says Assad loyalist ‘executed’ in public
- The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighters affiliated with the country’s new rulers executed Mazen Kneneh on Friday morning
- Fighters shot Kneneh in the head on the street in Dummar
BEIRUT: A Syria monitor said fighters linked to the Islamist-led transitional administration publicly executed a local official on Friday, accusing him of having been an informant under ousted president Bashar Assad.
Contacted by AFP, the Damascus authorities did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighters affiliated with the country’s new rulers executed Mazen Kneneh on Friday morning, describing him as “one of the best-known loyalists of the former regime.”
Fighters shot Kneneh in the head on the street in Dummar, a suburb of the capital Damascus, said the Britain-based monitor.
It said he was “accused of writing malicious security reports that led to the persecution and jailing of many young men” who were tortured in prison under Assad, whose rule came to an end on December 8.
A video circulating online, which AFP was unable to independently verify, purportedly showed the man’s slumped body tied to a tree trunk, his clothes bloodied from what looked like a bullet wound to the head.
Members of the public including children gathered around the body, according to the video, some filming with their mobile phones and others beating the body with sticks or high-kicking it in the head.
In recent days, Syrian authorities launched security sweeps targeting “remnants of the regime” of the deposed leader in several areas.
Anas Khattab, the new General Intelligence chief, has pledged to overhaul the security apparatus, denouncing “the injustice and tyranny of the former regime, whose agencies sowed corruption and inflicted suffering on the people.”
Japan congratulates Lebanon on electing new President
- The ministry also said that Japan will continue to support Lebanon
TOKYO: The Government of Japan said it congratulates Lebanon on the election of the new President Joseph Aoun on January 9.
A statement by the Foreign Ministry said while Lebanon has been facing difficult situations such as a prolonged economic crisis and the exchange of attacks between Israel and Hezbollah, the election of a new President is an important step toward stability and development of the country.
“Japan once again strongly demands all parties concerned to fully implement the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon,” the statement added.
The ministry also said that Japan will continue to support Lebanon’s efforts on achieving social and economic stability in the country as well as stability in the Middle East region.
