BAGHDAD: Powerful Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr on Wednesday called on the country’s judiciary to dissolve parliament by end of next week, threatening unspecific consequences if it does not do what he says.
The populist leader has helped inflame tensions in Iraq over the last two weeks by commanding thousands of followers to storm and occupy parliament, preventing the formation of a government nearly 10 months after elections.
His political opponents, mostly fellow Shiites backed by Iran, have refused to accede to Sadr’s demands, raising fears of fresh unrest and violence in a conflict-weary Iraq.
The judiciary “must dissolve parliament by the end of next week... if not, the revolutionaries will take another stance,” Sadr said in a statement on his Twitter account, without elaborating.
Sadr has called for early elections and unspecified changes to the constitution after withdrawing his lawmakers from parliament in June.
The withdrawal was a protest against his failure to form a government despite holding nearly a quarter of parliament and having enough allies to make up more than half the chamber.
Sadr blames Iran-aligned parties for the failed government formation and accuses them of corruption, but his followers also control some of the worst-managed government departments.
Experts are divided on whether Al-Sadr has any legal basis for his demands. He won the largest share of seats in the election last October, but failed to form a majority government that excluded his Iran-aligned rivals.
Al-Sadr called his followers “revolutionaries” and said “they will take another position” if his demands were not met, hinting at possibly escalating the protest.
The judiciary stated previously it does not have the constitutional right to dissolve parliament and that only lawmakers can vote to dissolve the legislature. Because the parliament has exceeded the constitutional timeline for forming a government following the October elections, what happens next is not clear.
Al-Sadr’s political rivals in the Coordination Framework, an alliance of Iran-backed parties, said earlier that the parliament would have to convene to dissolve itself.
Last week, thousands of Al-Sadr’s followers stormed the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses Iraq’s parliament, government buildings and foreign embassies. They overran and occupied the parliament, after which all sessions of the assembly were canceled until further notice. The takeover also effectively halted efforts by the Coordination Framework to try and form the next government after Al-Sadr failed to do so.
Iraq’s political impasse, now in its tenth month, is the longest in the country since the 2003 US-led invasion reset the political order.
In their takeover of parliament, Al-Sadr’s followers stopped short of overrunning the Judicial Council building next door — an act that many consider a coup as the judiciary is the highest legal authority in the country.
(With Reuters and AP)
Iraq’s Sadr tells judiciary to dissolve parliament in a week
https://arab.news/zjmjd
Iraq’s Sadr tells judiciary to dissolve parliament in a week
- Muqtada Al-Sadr said on Twitter that the judiciary has one week to dissolve the legislature
Hamas says ‘no’ to new Israeli bid to rewrite Gaza truce
Among the victims were 10 members of the Baraka family killed in an attack on their home near Khan Younis.
The Israeli military said its troops were operating in the Shabura and Tel Al-Sultan areas near the southern city of Rafah, and in northern Gaza, where it has taken control of large areas east of Gaza City.
Last month Israel ended a two-month truce that had largely halted fighting, and it has since seized about a third of the enclave. A new Israeli offer to renew the truce for 45 days included demands that Hamas release 10 Israeli hostages and lay down its arms. The militants dismissed the proposal on Friday as imposing “impossible conditions.”
“Partial agreements are used by Benjamin Netanyahu as a cover for his political agenda ... we will not be complicit in this policy,” a Hamas spokesman said on Friday.
Hamas sought “a comprehensive deal involving a single-package prisoner exchange in return for halting the war, a withdrawal of the occupation from the Gaza Strip, and the commencement of reconstruction,” the spokesman said.
Egyptian mediators have been trying to revive the original January ceasefire deal but there has been little sign the two sides have moved closer on fundamental issues.
Tunisian court set to rule in conspiracy trial, lawyers protest
- Forty people, including high-profile politicians, businessmen and journalists, are being prosecuted in the case
- “It’s a farce, the rulings are ready, and what is happening is scandalous,” lawyer Ahmed Souab said
TUNIS: A Tunisian court is set to issue a ruling in the conspiracy case against prominent opponents, as lawyers protested and described the trial as a farce, while others called the proceedings a symbol of President Kais Saied’s authoritarian rule.
Rights groups say the trial highlights Saied’s full control over the judiciary since he dissolved the parliament in 2021 and began ruling by decree before later dissolving the independent Supreme Judicial Council.
Forty people, including high-profile politicians, businessmen and journalists, are being prosecuted in the case. More than 20 have fled abroad since being charged.
Some of the opposition defendants — including Ghazi Chaouachi, Issam Chebbi, Jawahar Ben Mbrak, Abdelhamid Jlassi, Ridha BelHajj and Khyam Turki — have been in custody since being detained in 2023.
Following the judge’s decision to clear the courtroom in preparation for deliberation and the issuance of rulings, dozens of lawyers protested, raising slogans calling for freedom and justice.
“In my entire life, I have never witnessed a trial like this. It’s a farce, the rulings are ready, and what is happening is scandalous and shameful,” Lawyer Ahmed Souab told reporters.
Journalists and civil society groups were barred from attending the trial.
Some of the country’s most prominent opposition politicians — including Nejib Chebbi, the leader of the main National Salvation Front opposition coalition — face a range of conspiracy charges in the trial that started in March and has been postponed twice.
“The authorities want to criminalize the opposition. I wouldn’t be surprised if heavy sentences are issued tonight,” Chebbi told reporters before going into the court.
Authorities say the defendants, who also include business people and former officials including the former head of intelligence, Kamel Guizani, tried to destabilize the country and overthrow Saied.
Activists and families of the defendants shouted “free the prisoners,” “stop the farce” and other slogans.
“This authoritarian regime has nothing to offer Tunisians except more repression,” the leader of the opposition Workers’ Party, Hamma Hammami, said.
Protest letters from former Israeli soldiers lay bare profound rifts over brutal war
- Tens of thousands of academics, doctors, former ambassadors, students, and high-tech workers have signed similar letters of solidarity in recent days, also demanding an end to the war
TEL AVIV: When nearly 1,000 Israeli Air Force veterans signed an open letter last week calling for an end to the war in Gaza, the military responded immediately, saying it would dismiss any active reservist who signed the document.
But in the days since, thousands of retired and reservist soldiers across the military have signed similar letters of support.
The growing campaign, which accuses the government of perpetuating the war for political reasons and failing to bring home the remaining hostages, has laid bare the deep division and disillusionment over Israel’s fighting in Gaza.
By spilling over into the military, it has threatened national unity and raised questions about the army’s ability to continue fighting at full force.
It also resembles the bitter divisions that erupted in early 2023 over the government’s attempts to overhaul Israel’s legal system, which many say weakened the country and encouraged Hamas’ attack later that year that triggered the war.
“It’s crystal clear that the renewal of the war is for political reasons and not for security reasons,” said Guy Poran, a retired pilot who was one of the initiators of the air force letter.
The catalyst for the letters was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision on March 18 to return to war instead of sticking to a ceasefire that had facilitated the release of some hostages.
In their letters, the protesters have stopped short of refusing to serve. And the vast majority of the 10,000 soldiers who have signed are retired in any case.
Nonetheless, Poran said their decision to identify themselves as ex-pilots was deliberate — given the respect among Israel’s Jewish majority for the military, especially for fighter pilots and other prestigious units.
Tens of thousands of academics, doctors, former ambassadors, students, and high-tech workers have signed similar letters of solidarity in recent days, also demanding an end to the war.
“We are aware of the relative importance and the weight of the brand of Israeli Air Force pilots and felt that it is exactly the kind of case where we should use this title in order to influence society,” said Poran.
Herders suffer in West Bank as settlers encroach on grazing land
- Israeli shepherd outposts take 14 percent of the total area of Palestinian territory, report says
AL-MUGHAVIR, West Bank: Fatima Abu Naim, a mother of five, lives in a hillside cave in the occupied West Bank, under increasing pressure from Jewish settlers who, she says, try to steal her family’s sheep and come by regularly to tell her and her husband to leave.
“They say, ‘Go, I want to live here,’” she said.
The same stark message from settlers has been heard across the West Bank with increasing frequency since the start of the war in Gaza 18 months ago, notably in the largely empty hillsides where the Bedouin graze their flocks.
According to a report last week by the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, nearly half of the over 40 settler attacks documented at the end of March and early April hit Bedouin and herding communities, “including incidents involving arson, break-ins, and destruction of critical livelihood sources.”
The West Bank, an area of some 5,600 sq. km that sits between Jordan and Israel, has been at the heart of the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since Israel seized it in the 1967 Middle East war.
FASTFACT
According to a report last week by the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, nearly half of the over 40 settler attacks documented at the end of March and early April hit Bedouin and herding communities, including incidents involving arson.
Under military occupation ever since, but seen by Palestinians as one of the core parts of a future independent state, it has been steadily cut up by fast-growing Israeli settlement clusters that now spread throughout the territory.
Most countries deem Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. Ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government talk openly about annexing the area completely.
Sparsely populated areas in the Jordan Valley, near the south Hebron hills, or in central upland areas of the West Bank have come under increasing pressure from outposts of settlers who have themselves begun grazing large flocks of sheep on the hillsides used by Bedouin and other herders.
According to a joint report last week by Israeli rights groups Peace Now and Kerem Navot, settlers have used such shepherding outposts to seize around 78,600 hectares of land, or 14 percent of the total area of the West Bank, harassing and intimidating nearby communities to expel them.
“The Jordan Valley or southern areas are where there used to be big meadows for Palestinians, and this is why these areas were targeted,” said Dror Etkes, one of the authors of the report.
“But if you look at a map, the outposts are everywhere. They keep constructing more and more.”
The report quotes documents from the attorney general’s office to show that around 8,000 hectares of West Bank land have been allocated for grazing by Israeli settlers in such outposts, who receive significant funding and other material support, including vehicles, from the government.
“The Bedouin communities are in many ways the most vulnerable,” said Yigal Bronner, an activist on the board of Kerem Navot who has monitored settler abuses for years and who says the problem has become more severe since the war in Gaza.
Without being able to graze their animals, many Bedouin cannot afford to maintain their flocks, leaving them with no way of earning a living, he said. “People are struggling to make ends meet.”
The windswept hillside where Abu Naim’s family lives in an encampment set up around two rock caves just outside the village of Al-Mughayir, is typical of the rugged terrain along the spine of the West Bank.
The family has already been forced to move from the Jordan Valley, where Bedouin communities have faced repeated attacks by violent groups of settlers who run flocks of their own.
Now living in their third home this year, she says they have once again faced aggression from intruders who she noted recently killed six of her family’s sheep and forced her husband to keep them penned up.
“The problems with the settlers started a year and a half ago, but we’ve only been harassed for two months now. The goal is to get us out of here,” she said.
“The sheep stay in the enclosure. They don’t let them out or anything.”
Abu Naim’s husband, who has confronted the settlers, was arrested this week for a reason she is unaware of. Palestinian and Israeli rights groups say there is effectively no legal redress for the herding communities, and the bitterness of the Gaza war has hardened attitudes further.
“This is our land,” said 65 year-old Asher Meth, a West Bank settler who was enjoying an outing at the springs of Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley that the nearby Bedouin community is prevented from accessing.
“And if the state of Israel would wake up, and say ‘Actually, do take the land’ and say ‘This land is now part of Israel’, the Arabs will understand better and move back from trying to kill us.”
A few hundred meters from the spring, in a large Bedouin encampment, 70-year-old Odeh Khalil has heard the message.
Ever since losing 300 sheep to a raid by settlers last August, he has kept his remaining animals in an enclosure, but he says he is determined to hang on for the moment.
“People cannot live without sheep. If we leave, it will be all gone,” he said.
“They want to deport us and say this is Israeli property.”
Hezbollah ‘will not let anyone disarm’ it, says chief
- “We will not let anyone disarm Hezbollah or disarm the resistance” against Israel, Qassem said
- Analysts have said that the once unthinkable idea of Hezbollah disarming may no longer be so, and may even be inevitable
BEIRUT: Hezbollah “will not let anyone disarm” it, the Lebanese group’s leader Naim Qassem said Friday, as Washington presses Beirut to compel the Iran-backed movement to hand over its weapons.
Hezbollah, long a dominant force in Lebanese politics, was left weakened by more than a year of hostilities with Israel sparked by the Gaza war, including an Israeli ground incursion and two months of heavy bombardment that decimated the group’s leadership.
The fighting was largely brought to an end by a November ceasefire, but not before the group’s longtime leader and Qassem’s predecessor Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air strike.
“We will not let anyone disarm Hezbollah or disarm the resistance” against Israel, Qassem said in remarks on a Hezbollah-affiliated TV channel.
“We must cut this idea of disarmament from the dictionary.”
His comments came hours after another Hezbollah official said the group refused to discuss handing over its weapons unless Israel withdrew completely from south Lebanon and halted its “aggression.”
“It is not a question of disarming,” Wafic Safa said in an interview with Hezbollah’s Al-Nur radio station.
“What the president (Joseph Aoun) said in his inauguration speech is a defensive strategy.”
Safa, believed by experts to belong to the movement’s most radical faction, said Hezbollah had conveyed its position to Aoun, who on Tuesday said he sought “to make 2025 the year of restricting arms to the state.”
In his interview, Safa asked: “Wouldn’t it be logical for Israel to first withdraw, then release the prisoners, then cease its aggression... and then we discuss a defensive strategy?
“The defensive strategy is about thinking about how to protect Lebanon, not preparing for the party to hand over its weapons.”
Analysts have said that the once unthinkable idea of Hezbollah disarming may no longer be so, and may even be inevitable.
Under the November ceasefire, Israel was meant to withdraw all of its forces from south Lebanon.
But despite the deal, its troops have remained at five south Lebanon positions that they deem “strategic.”
Israel has also continued to carry out near-daily strikes against Lebanon — including on Friday — saying it is targeting members of Hezbollah.
Under the truce, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters back north of Lebanon’s Litani River and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in the south.
Lebanon’s army has been deploying in the south as Israeli forces pulled back.
Hezbollah says the ceasefire does not apply to the rest of Lebanon, despite being based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for the disarmament of non-state groups.
Hezbollah was the only group to keep its weapons after Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990, saying that they were for “resistance” against Israel, which continued to occupy the south until 2000.
US special envoy for the Middle East Morgan Ortagus, who visited Beirut this month, said Washington continued to press Beirut “to fully fulfil the cessation of hostilities, and that includes disarming Hezbollah and all militias.”
Safa said on Friday that both Hezbollah and the Lebanese army were respecting the terms of the truce.
“The problem is Israel, which has not done so,” he said.
On Saturday, a source close to Hezbollah told AFP that the group had ceded to the Lebanese army around 190 of its 265 military positions identified south of the Litani.
