JERUSALEM: Israel’s hard-line Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on Tuesday he wanted to see more Jewish settlements after European and US foreign ministers said they were troubled by a recent decision by Israel to authorize settler outposts.
The comments, in a video message, fly in the face of international calls for a de-escalation of tension between Israel and the Palestinians after months of violence in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.
“The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel,” he said in a video message that followed a statement of concern from Washington and its European allies, France, Germany, Italy and Britain over the decision on legalizing outposts.
On Sunday, Israel granted retroactive authorization to nine Jewish settler outposts in the occupied West Bank and announced mass-construction of new homes in established settlements, prompting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to say he was “deeply troubled” by the move.
No comment was immediately available from Israel’s foreign ministry but Ben-Gvir, from the hard-line religious nationalist bloc in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, said he wanted to go even further than the decision announced on Sunday.
“This is our mission. This our doctrine,” Ben-Gvir said. “Nine settlements is nice but it’s still not enough. We want much more,” he said.
Most world powers consider settlements on land captured in a 1967 war between Israel and Arab powers to be illegal, although Israel disputes this and since the war it has established 132 settlements, according to the Peace Now watchdog group.
As well as the authorized settlements, groups of settlers have built scores of outposts without government permission. Some have been razed by police, others authorized retroactively. The nine granted approval on Sunday are the first for this Netanyahu government.
Earlier the foreign ministries of France, Germany, Britain and Italy joined the United States in warning against settlement expansion on land the Palestinians see as the core of a future Palestinian state.
“We strongly oppose unilateral actions which will only serve to exacerbate tensions between Israelis and Palestinians and undermine efforts to achieve a negotiated two-state solution,” they said in a statement.
Hussein Al-Sheikh, a senior Palestinian official, welcomed the joint statement but said action needed to be taken.
“We demand that words be turned to deeds,” he said in a statement on Twitter.
Israel’s Ben-Gvir says wants more settlements after US and European concern
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Israel’s Ben-Gvir says wants more settlements after US and European concern
- Israel granted retroactive authorization to nine Jewish settler outposts in the occupied West Bank
Lebanon security official says Israel struck central Beirut
“An Israeli air strike hit close to the Al-Zahraa Husseiniya in Zuqaq Al-Blat,” he told AFP requesting anonymity, referring to a Shiite place of worship in the densely-populated district. An AFP correspondent in a nearby area heard two blasts, while reporters in another part of Beirut heard ambulance sirens.
US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence
- Sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets
- Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began
WASHINGTON: The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on an Israeli settler group it accused of helping perpetrate violence in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians.
The Amana settler group “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement and maintains ties to various persons previously sanctioned by the US government and its partners for perpetrating violence in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The sanctions also target a subsidiary of Amana called Binyanei Bar Amana, described by Treasury as a company that builds and sell homes in Israeli settlements and settler outposts.
The sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets. The United Kingdom and Canada have also imposed sanctions on Amana.
Israel has settled the West Bank since capturing it during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say the settlements have undermined the prospects for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Israel views the West Bank as the biblical Judea and Samaria, and the settlers cite biblical ties to the land.
Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began over a year ago.
Most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position disputed by Israel which sees the territory as a security bulwark. In 2019, the then-Trump administration abandoned the long-held US position that the settlements are illegal before it was restored by President Joe Biden.
Last week, nearly 90 US lawmakers urged Biden to impose sanctions on members of members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.
Around 100 projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel: army
- Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired around 100 projectiles from Lebanon into northern Israel on Monday, with the country’s air defense system intercepting some of them.
Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel and were taken to hospital.
The military said in a first statement that “as of 15:00 (1300 GMT), approximately 60 projectiles that were fired by the Hezbollah terrorist organization have crossed from Lebanon into Israel today.”
Later it said, “following the sirens that sounded between 15:09 and 15:11 in the Western Galilee area, approximately 40 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory.”
Israel has escalated its bombing of targets in Lebanon since September 23 and has since sent in ground troops, following almost a year of limited, cross-border exchanges of fire begun by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in support of Hamas in Gaza.
‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief
- Israel ordered ban on organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza
- UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees
GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities,” providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organization in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency’s roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza “may have been involved” in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.
Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA’s advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organization’s “darkest moment.”
“The clock is ticking fast,” he told the commission, according to a transcript.
Describing Gaza as “an unrelenting dystopian horror,” he warned that “what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”
Anton Leis, head of Spain’s international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was “simply no alternative to UNRWA,” which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
“It is the only organization that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza,” he said.
Lazzarini agreed, saying that “If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary health care.
Lazzarini warned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza,” he said, adding that it would not be possible to coordinate the deconfliction with Israeli authorities to ensure aid convoys can move safely.
“The environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
The UNRWA chief has charged that Israel’s main objective in its attacks on the agency is to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.
“We have to be clear, even if UNRWA today would cease its operation, the statue of refugee would remain,” he said.
Without the agency, he said, the responsibility for providing services to the Palestinian refugees “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel.”
If no one steps in to fill the void, he said, it “will create a vacuum ... (and) sow the seeds for more extremism, more hate in the future.”
He called on the international community to go beyond statements of condemnation and put far more pressure on Israel.
“We feel alone.”
‘Jordan stands firm against Israeli aggression on Gaza,’ King Abdullah says as he opens parliament
- Addressing lawmakers, King Abdullah said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war
RIYADH: Jordan stands firm against the “aggression on Gaza and Israeli violations in the West Bank,” the country’s King Abdullah said on Monday as he opened a newly elected parliament.
Addressing lawmakers, he said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war.
“Jordan has exerted tremendous efforts, and Jordanians have valiantly been treating the wounded in the direst of circumstances. Jordanians were the first to deliver aid by air and land to people in Gaza, and we will remain by their side, now and in the future,” he said.
In his speech, the king told newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term that the current parliament was “the first step in the implementation of the political modernization project, on a track to bolster the role of platform-based parties and the participation of women and young people.”
“This requires parliamentary performance, collective action, and close cooperation between the government and parliament, in accordance with the constitution,” the king was reported as saying by Jordan News Agency.
King Abdullah said the government aimed to provide Jordanians with a decent life and empower youths while equipping them for the jobs of the future.
“We must continue implementing the Economic Modernisation Vision to unleash the potential of the national economy and increase growth rates over the next decade, capitalising on Jordan’s human competencies and international relations as catalysts for growth,” the king said.
