JERUSALEM: Israel opened up to vaccinated visitors Monday after 20 months of closure, with Jews and Palestinians reliant on tourism voicing cautious hope the pandemic’s economic devastation will gradually ease.
Rami Razouk, a Palestinian souvenir shop owner in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem’s Old City, said he was “very happy” at the prospect of increased revenue, but conceded his store was not quite ready for an influx.
“Everything is dusty,” the 35-year-old said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
Razouk and top Israeli officials said that Monday marked a partial re-opening, and that it would be premature to immediately expect busloads of tourists to start spending across the region.
“We are far from the (complete) opening of the skies,” Jerusalem deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum told reporters, saying it will become clearer in coming weeks how many tourists will visit under current rules.
As of Monday, foreigners can enter Israel with a negative COVID-19 test from the previous 72 hours and if their last vaccine dose was administered less than six months ago. Unvaccinated children remain subject to quarantine rules.
“It’s not going to happen in one day or two,” Razouk said, lamenting a long period with almost no sales. “It will take time.”
Before Israel imposed the first of several coronavirus closures in March 2020, tourism was growing at a galloping pace in a region home to countless religious sites sacred to Muslims, Christians and Jews.
A record 4.6 million people visited in 2019, an 11 percent increase on 2018, generating revenue of 23 billion shekels ($7.3 billion), or 1.5 percent of Israel’s GDP, the ministry said.
“The tourism industry had been driving 200 kilometers an hour, and we stopped suddenly because of COVID-19,” Tourism Ministry Director General Amir Halevi said Monday.
As expected, business from foreign tourists has plummeted since. Despite Monday’s opening, just 1.5 billion shekel in revenues is expected this year.
Ezechiel Grinberg, a Jerusalem-based independent tour guide, said he survived on minimum wage government subsidies for nearly 18 months.
“It’s great as a (tourism) professional,” that visitors are starting to come back, he said. But he voiced concern that burdensome entry requirements will still suppress his income.
Nader Zaro, a Palestinian who owns a coffee shop on the Old City’s Via Dolorosa (Path of Sorrow) — seen by many as the route Jesus was forced to walk to his crucifixion — said he needed “normal tourists” to come back.
Israel has allowed in select tourist groups under special arrangements, but Zaro explained such groups don’t help small operators like him.
“Everyone wants to catch them,” Zaro said. “There are big sharks and small sharks... and big sharks eat all. Me, I’m eaten.”
Despite record high COVID-19 transmission figures in late August and September, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition government avoided a new lockdown, betting that a fresh vaccination push could stem a wave blamed partly on Delta variant of the coronavirus.
Authorities launched an aggressive campaign to inoculate citizens with a third, booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which drove down infections.
Following widespread data that the Pfizer-BioNTech’s protection wanes six months after the last jab, Israel has put recent vaccinations at the center of its re-opening strategy.
Among those who landed at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv on Monday was American Lauren Solsberg, who said she had to get a booster to meet entry requirements.
“It was down to the last minute before we knew that we were going to come,” she said.
Israel opens to vaccinated tourists
https://arab.news/8n6pn
Israel opens to vaccinated tourists
- As of Monday, foreigners can enter Israel with a negative COVID-19 test from the previous 72 hours
Ukraine to evacuate more children from frontline villages
Around 110 children lived in the area affected
KYIV: Ukraine on Friday announced the mandatory evacuation of dozens of families with children from frontline villages in the eastern Donetsk region.
Russia’s troops have been grinding across the region in recent months, capturing a string of settlements, most of them completely destroyed in the fighting since Russia invaded in February 2022.
“I have decided to start a mandatory evacuation of families with children” from around two dozen frontline villages and settlements, Donetsk region governor Vadym Filashkin said on Telegram.
Around 110 children lived in the area affected, he added.
“Children should live in peace and tranquility, not hide from shelling,” he said, urging parents to heed the order to leave.
The area is in the west of the Donetsk region, close to the internal border with Ukraine’s Dnipropretovsk region.
Russia in 2022 claimed to have annexed the Donetsk region, but has not asserted a formal claim to Dnipropretovsk.
The order to leave comes a day after officials in the northeastern Kharkiv region announced the evacuation of 267 children from several settlements there under threat of Russian attack.
Trump to visit disaster zones in North Carolina, California on first trip of second term
- The president is also heading to hurricane-battered western North Carolina
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump is heading into the fifth day of his second term in office, striving to remake the traditional boundaries of Washington by asserting unprecedented executive power.
The president is also heading to hurricane-battered western North Carolina and wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles, using the first trip of his second administration to tour areas where politics has clouded the response to deadly disasters.
Kyiv says received bodies of 757 killed Ukrainian troops
- The exchange of prisoners and return of their remains is one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv
KYIV: Kyiv said Friday it had received the bodies of hundreds of Ukrainian troops killed in battle with Russian forces, in one of the largest repatriations since Russia invaded.
The exchange of prisoners and return of their remains is one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv since the Kremlin mobilized its army in Ukraine in February 2022.
The repatriation announced by the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a Ukrainian state agency, is the largest in months and underscores the high cost and intensity of fighting ahead of the war’s three-year anniversary.
“The bodies of 757 fallen defenders were returned to Ukraine,” the Coordination Headquarters said in a post on social media.
It specified that 451 of the bodies were returned from the “Donetsk direction,” probably a reference to the battle for the mining and transport hub of Pokrovsk.
The city that once had around 60,000 residents has been devastated by months of Russian bombardments and is the Kremlin’s top military priority at the moment.
The statement also said 34 dead were returned from morgues inside Russia, where Kyiv last August mounted a shock offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region.
Friday’s repatriation is at least the fifth involving 500 or more Ukrainian bodies since October.
Military death tolls are state secrets both in Russia and Ukraine but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed last December that 43,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 370,000 had been wounded since 2022.
The total number is likely to be significantly higher.
Russia does not announce the return of its bodies or give up-to-date information on the numbers of its troops killed fighting in Ukraine.
EU says it is ready to ease sanctions on Syria
- The top EU diplomat said the EU would start by easing sanctions that are necessary to rebuild the country
ANKARA: The European Union’s foreign policy chief said the 27-member bloc is ready to ease sanctions on Syria, but added the move would be a gradual one contingent on the transitional Syrian government’s actions.
Speaking during a joint news conference in Ankara with Turkiye’s foreign minister on Friday, Kaja Kallas also said the EU was considering introducing a “fallback mechanism” that would allow it to reimpose sanctions if the situation in Syria worsens.
“If we see the steps of the Syrian leadership going to the right direction, then we are also willing to ease next level of sanctions,” she said. “We also want to have a fallback mechanism. If we see that the developments are going to the wrong direction, we are also putting the sanctions back.”
The top EU diplomat said the EU would start by easing sanctions that are necessary to rebuild the country that has been battered by more than a decade of civil war.
The plan to ease sanctions on Syria would be discussed at a EU foreign ministers meeting on Monday, Kallas said.
Taliban reject ICC arrest warrant as ‘politically motivated’
- The Taliban swept back to power in 2021 after ousting US-backed government in Afghanistan
- The Afghan rulers say the court should ‘not ignore the religious and national values of people’
KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban government said on Friday an arrest warrant sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its leaders was “politically motivated.”
It comes a day after the ICC chief prosecutor said he was seeking warrants against senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan over the persecution of women — a crime against humanity.
“Like many other decisions of the (ICC), it is devoid of a fair legal basis, is a matter of double standards and is politically motivated,” said a statement from the Foreign Ministry posted on social media platform X.
“It is regrettable that this institution has turned a blind eye to war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by foreign forces and their domestic allies during the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan.”
It said the court should “not attempt to impose a particular interpretation of human rights on the entire world and ignore the religious and national values of people of the rest of the world.”
The Taliban swept back to power in 2021 after ousting the American-backed government in a rapid but largely bloodless military takeover, imposing a severe interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, on the population and heavily restricting all aspects of women’s lives.
Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister Mohammad Nabi Omari, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, said the ICC “can’t scare us.”
“If these were fair and true courts, they should have brought America to the court, because it is America that has caused wars, the issues of the world are caused by America,” he said at an event in eastern Khost city attended by an AFP journalist.
He said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should also be brought before the court over the country’s war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas’ attacks in October 2023.
The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister and three top Hamas leaders in November last year.
Afghanistan’s government claims it secures Afghan women’s rights under sharia, but many of its edicts are not followed in the rest of the Islamic world and have been condemned by Muslim leaders.
It is the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from education.
Women have been ordered to cover their hair and faces and wear all-covering Islamic dress, have been barred from parks and stopped from working in government offices.
ICC chief Karim Khan said there were reasonable grounds to suspect that Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and chief justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani “bear criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of persecution on gender grounds.”
Khan said Afghan women and girls, as well as the LGBTQ community, were facing “an unprecedented, unconscionable and ongoing persecution by the Taliban.”
“Our action signals that the status quo for women and girls in Afghanistan is not acceptable,” Khan said.
ICC judges will now consider Khan’s application before deciding whether to issue the warrants, a process that could take weeks or even months.
The court, based in The Hague, was set up to rule on the world’s worst crimes, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It has no police force of its own and relies on its 125 member states to carry out its warrants — with mixed results.
In theory, this means that anyone subject to an ICC arrest warrant cannot travel to a member state for fear of being detained.
Khan warned he would soon be seeking additional arrest warrant applications for other Taliban officials.
