JERUSALEM: Dozens of Israeli protesters carrying lit torches, megaphones and flags gathered at dawn Wednesday outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence to highlight his corruption trial, which is set to resume next month.
Police said at least seven demonstrators were arrested for disorderly conduct. The demonstration was organized by Crime Minister, one of several groups that have sprung up in recent months calling for Netanyahu to resign over the trial and his government’s handling of the coronavirus.
The protesters read the indictment outside his residence. He was supposed to appear in court Wednesday, but the hearing was postponed to Feb. 8 because of a coronavirus lockdown that heavily restricts public gatherings.
For months, protesters have held weekly demonstrations outside the prime minister’s office and at major road intersections and bridges across the country.
Netanyahu was indicted last year on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust linked to three corruption cases. He has denied any wrongdoing and accuses the media, law enforcement and judicial officials of waging a “witch hunt” against him.
Netanyahu is once again fighting for re-election ahead of a nationwide vote in March – the fourth to be held in Israel in less than two years. Polls show his Likud party winning the most seats but being unable to form a coalition government because of rivalries with other right-wing leaders.
Israelis hold torch-lit anti-corruption protest against Benjamin Netanyahu
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Israelis hold torch-lit anti-corruption protest against Benjamin Netanyahu
- At least seven demonstrators were arrested for disorderly conduct
- Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted last year on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust
US-backed aid group begins Gaza operations
- Palestinians said there was no known visits to new sites of distribution on Monday
- UN and other international aid groups have boycotted the foundation
CAIRO: Palestinians voiced wariness on Tuesday toward a US-backed foundation set to bring aid to Gaza amid signs of famine, with Hamas warnings about biometric screening procedures keeping many away from distribution points.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said it began operations on Monday, but there was little indication of Palestinians turning up at distribution centers in southern Gaza even after almost three months of Israel blockading the enclave.
Palestinians said there was no known visits to new sites of distribution on Monday, but on Tuesday dozens headed to one of them established in Rafah to get some aid despite the warnings, at least three witnesses told Reuters.
Others stayed away.
“As much as I want to go because I am hungry and my children are hungry, I am afraid,” said Abu Ahmed, 55, a father of seven. “I am so scared because they said the company belongs to Israel and is a mercenary, and also because the resistance (Hamas) said not to go,” he said in a message on the chat app WhatsApp.
Israel says the Switzerland-based GHF is a US-backed initiative and that its forces will not be involved in the distribution points where food will be handed out.
But its endorsement of the plan, which resembles Israeli schemes floated previously, and its closeness with the US has led many to question the neutrality of the foundation, including its own former chief, who resigned unexpectedly on Sunday.
The United Nations and other international aid groups have boycotted the foundation, which they say undermines the principle that humanitarian aid should be distributed independently of the parties to a conflict, based on need.
“Humanitarian assistance must not be politicized or militarised,” said Christian Cardon, chief spokesperson of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Israel, at war with Gaza’s dominant Hamas militant group since October 2023, imposed the blockade in early March accusing Hamas of stealing supplies and using them to entrench its position. Hamas has denied such accusations.
Israeli officials said one of the advantages of the new aid system is the opportunity to screen recipients to exclude anyone found to be connected with Hamas.
Humanitarian groups briefed on the foundation’s plans say anyone accessing aid will have to submit to facial recognition technology that many Palestinians fear will end up in Israeli hands to be used to track and potentially target them.
Details of exactly how the system will operate have not been made public.
Israel makes extensive use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification in the occupied West Bank and has been reported by Israeli and international media to be using such techniques in Gaza as well.
BEGGING FOR BREAD
Hamas, which has in recent months faced protests by many Palestinians who want the devastating war to end, has also warned residents against accessing GHF sites, saying Israel was using the company to collect intelligence information.
“Do not go to Rafah ...Do not fall into the trap...Do not risk your lives. Your homes are your fortress. Staying in your neighborhoods is survival, and awareness is your protection,” a statement published by the Hamas-linked Home Front said.
“These schemes will be broken by the steadfastness of a people who do not know defeat,” it added.
The launch of the new system came days after Israel eased its blockade, allowing a trickle of aid trucks from international agencies into Gaza last week, including World Food Programme vehicles bringing flour to local bakeries.
But the amount of aid that has entered the densely populated coastal enclave has been only a small fraction of the 500-600 trucks that UN agencies estimate are needed every day.
“Before the war, my fridge used to be full of meat, chicken, dairy, soft drinks, everything, and now I am begging for a loaf of bread,” Abu Ahmed told Reuters via a chat app.
As a small aid flow has resumed, Israeli forces — now in control of large parts of Gaza — have kept up attacks on various targets around the enclave, killing 3,901 Palestinians since a two-month-old ceasefire collapsed in mid-March, according to the Gaza health ministry.
In all, more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s air and ground war, launched following a cross-border Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023 that killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage into Gaza.
EU chief slams Israel’s ‘abhorrent’ strikes on Gaza civilian sites
- “Killing civilians, including children, is abhorrent,” von der Leyen said
- “This escalation and disproportionate use of force against civilians cannot be justified“
BRUSSELS: EU chief Ursula von der Leyen denounced as “abhorrent” Israel’s deadly wave of strikes on civilian facilities in Gaza including a school, during a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Tuesday.
Rescuers said Israeli strikes killed at least 52 people in the Gaza Strip Monday, 33 in a school-turned-shelter, in a renewed offensive to destroy Hamas that has drawn international condemnation.
“The expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza targeting civilian infrastructure, among them a school that served as a shelter for displaced Palestinian families, killing civilians, including children, is abhorrent,” von der Leyen said, according to an EU readout of the call.
“The European Commission has always supported — and will continue to support — Israel’s right to security and self-defense,” she said.
“But this escalation and disproportionate use of force against civilians cannot be justified under humanitarian and international law,” von der Leyen warned.
The commission chief demanded that Israel “immediately restore aid delivery in line with humanitarian principles, with the participation of the UN and other international humanitarian partners.”
The European Union has struggled to have an impact on the conflict due to long-standing divisions within the bloc between countries who back Israel and those considered more pro-Palestinian.
Momentum to ramp up the pressure on Israel has been growing however since Israel restarted its Gaza offensive.
The EU last week launched a review of its association agreement with Israel over alleged human rights abuses in Gaza, after 17 of its 27 member states backed the move.
Syria and Israel in direct talks focused on security, sources say
DAMASCUS: Israel and Syria are in direct contact and have in recent weeks held face-to-face meetings aimed at calming tensions and preventing conflict in the border region between the two longtime foes, five people familiar with the matter said.
The contacts mark a significant development in ties between states that have been on opposite sides of conflict in the Middle East for decades, as the US encourages the new Islamist rulers in Damascus to establish relations with Israel and Israel eases its bombardment of Syria.
They also build on back-channel talks via intermediaries since Islamist rebels Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham toppled Syrian strongman Bashar Assad in December, said two Syrian and two Western sources, as well as a regional intelligence source familiar with the matter.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject for two nations with no official ties and a history of enmity. The direct talks and their scope have not been previously reported.
On the Syrian side, the sources said contacts have been led by senior security official Ahmad Al-Dalati, who was appointed governor of the province of Quneitra, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, after the fall of Assad. Earlier this week, Dalati was also put in charge of security in the southern province of Sweida, home to Syria’s Druze minority.
Reuters could not determine who participated on Israel’s side, though two of the sources said they were security officials.
Three of the sources said there had been several rounds of in-person meetings in the border region, including in territory controlled by Israel.
Israel’s foreign ministry and Syrian officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this month, Syrian interim president Ahmed Al-Sharaa confirmed indirect talks with Israel that he said were aimed at calming tensions, a striking admission that followed a Reuters report that the UAE was mediating such talks.
Israel has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and took more territory in the aftermath of Assad’s ouster in December, citing lingering concerns over the extremist past of the country’s new rulers.
It has also waged a campaign of aerial bombardment that destroyed much of the country’s military infrastructure, while at the same time lobbying Washington to keep the country weak and decentralized.
But the bombing and the criticism have subsided in recent weeks.
On May 14, a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Sharaa in Riyadh upended decades of US Syria policy, and signalled to Israel’s right-wing government that it should work to reach understandings with Sharaa.
The regional intelligence source described Trump’s engagement with Sharaa as a pivotal part of a realignment in US policy that upset Israel’s post-Assad strategy of exploiting Syria’s fragmentation.
BROADER UNDERSTANDINGS?
The relative calm in May has also seen a reduction in tensions around Sweida, which saw days of bloody clashes between Druze armed factions, some of which enjoy Israeli backing, and Sunni Muslim fighters last month.
Amid the violence, Israel had launched a series of airstrikes, including one just outside the presidential palace overlooking Damascus, which it framed as a warning over threats against the Druze, an offshoot of Islam with adherents in Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
While the direct talks are currently focused on joint security, such as preventing conflict and reducing Israeli incursions into Syrian border villages, two of the sources said they may help pave the way for broader political understandings.
“For now, they are about peace, as in the absence of war, rather than normalization,” said the person familiar with backchannel talks.
Trump indicated after meeting Sharaa that the Syrian leader was willing to eventually normalize ties with Israel, while adding that it would take some time.
Sharaa has not commented on the statement, saying instead that he supported a return to the terms of a 1974 ceasefire agreement that created a UN buffer zone in the Golan Heights.
Syria’s new rulers have made repeated efforts to show they pose no threat to Israel, meeting representatives of the Jewish community in Damascus and abroad and detaining two senior members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which participated in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
A letter sent by Syria’s foreign ministry to the US State Department last month, seen by Reuters, said “we will not allow Syria to become a source of threat to any party, including Israel.”
More recently, Syria’s leadership has shown goodwill by approving the handover of a trove of long-dead Israeli master spy Eli Cohen’s belongings.
Sweden charges man over 2014 killing of Jordan pilot in Syria
- Daesh captured Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh in December 2014
- The Swedish Prosecution Authority charged Krayem with gross war crimes and terrorism
STOCKHOLM: Swedish prosecutors pressed charges on Tuesday against a man on suspicion of war crimes and terrorism over the murder of a Jordanian air force pilot who was burned to death in Syria a decade ago.
The Swede, named in court documents as Osama Krayem, 32, has previously been convicted of involvement in attacks in Paris in 2015 and in Brussels in 2016.
The Daesh militant group, which once imposed a reign of terror over millions of people in Syria and Iraq, captured Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh in December 2014 and later published a video of him being burned alive in a cage.
The Swedish Prosecution Authority charged Krayem with gross war crimes and terrorism, the indictment showed.
“Krayem, together with and in agreement with other perpetrators belonging to IS, killed/deprived Muath Al-Kasasbeh of his life,” the authority said in the indictment.
It said Krayem had forced the pilot to the cage and that he also posed for a camera, knowing the footage would be dispersed as a manifestation of a plan and ideology advocated by Daesh.
Krayem’s Swedish lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Krayem has been temporarily transferred to Sweden from France to stand trial at the Stockholm district court.
Daesh controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, and was defeated in its last bastions in Syria in 2019.
Under Swedish legislation, courts can try people for crimes against international law committed abroad.
Israel attorney general says PM’s nomination for Shin Bet chief ‘illegal’
- Netanyahu named David Zini as his pick to lead the Shin Bet last week, after months of legal and political wrangling over his attempt to dismiss the current chief Ronen Bar
JERUSALEM: Israel’s attorney general has said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of an army major general as head of domestic intelligence is “illegal,” after the supreme court found his move to sack the incumbent chief unlawful.
Netanyahu named David Zini as his pick to lead the Shin Bet last week, after months of legal and political wrangling over his attempt to dismiss the current chief Ronen Bar.
In a letter to Netanyahu obtained by AFP on Tuesday, Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara pointed to the recent “court decisions regarding the end of the Shin Bet director’s mandate.”
“Your decision regarding major general Zini, made in a situation of conflict of interest and contradicting the conclusions of the judgment as well as the judicial directives in force, is illegitimate and illegal,” she said.
The prime minister announced Zini’s selection a day after the supreme court ruled the government’s decision to fire Bar was “improper and unlawful.”
Netanyahu said in March that he was dismissing Bar because of an “ongoing lack of trust.”
That move was challenged in court by non-profit organizations and Israel’s political opposition, which decried it as a sign of an anti-democratic drift on the part of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government.
Bar has since said he will step down in June.
Following the supreme court’s ruling that his firing was unlawful, Baharav-Miara had said Netanyahu “must refrain from any action related to the appointment of a new head of the Shin Bet.”
The prime minister, however, has insisted Zini be installed as soon as possible, calling it “a security requirement of the highest order.”
He has yet to publicly respond to Baharav Miara’s latest letter.
At least one NGO has threatened to file a challenge against the appointment, which still has to be approved by a vetting committee and the cabinet to be finalized.
A legal opinion submitted to the attorney general by her deputy acknowledged the need to fill the role quickly, and suggested that a legal workaround to Netanyahu’s conflict of interest would be to “transfer the authority to another minister, who will present a candidate to the government.”
