GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israel said its ground forces had made a big push into Gaza overnight to attack Hamas targets as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was still preparing for a ground invasion that could be one of several.
The United States and other countries are urging Israel to delay a full invasion; Gaza is reeling from almost three weeks of Israeli bombing triggered by a mass killing spree in southern Israel by Iranian-backed Hamas, which runs the besieged enclave.
Other Iranian-backed groups have since attacked Israel and US forces elsewhere in the region; Western leaders fear that a ground invasion with a high death toll among Palestinian civilians, who have already been killed in large numbers by Israeli air strikes, could spark a wider war.
US President Joe Biden held a call with Netanyahu, discussing “ongoing efforts to locate and secure the release” of Americans believed held hostage by militants in Gaza, the White House said overnight.
Israel said there were 224 hostages. Hamas has threatened to kill some of those it holds, who include many foreign passport holders, but has freed four since Friday. Gaza began receiving a small amount of aid the following day.
The White House said Biden and Netanyahu also discussed safe passage for other foreigners wishing to leave Gaza, a continuous flow of aid into the narrow coastal strip, and a pathway to permanent peace with the Palestinian people.
“The President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law,” the statement said.
The comments reflect a balancing act over US support for Israel’s actions after Biden was criticized for casting doubt on Palestinian casualty figures.
Netanyahu, who has suggested repeatedly that a ground invasion is imminent, told citizens in an address on Wednesday evening: “I will not elaborate on when, how or how many.”
Gaza health ministry urges people to examine its death toll
Israeli army radio said the military had overnight staged its biggest incursion into northern Gaza in the current war against Hamas, which Israel has vowed to eliminate.
The military later released video on X showing armored vehicles crossing the highly fortified barrier from Israel and blowing up buildings “in preparation for the next stages of combat.”
“Tanks and infantry struck numerous terrorist cells, infrastructure and anti-tank missile launch posts,” it said.
Palestinians in Gaza said Israeli air strikes had pounded the territory again overnight and people living in central Gaza, near the Bureij refugee camp and east of Qarara village, reported intensive tank shelling all night.
Hamas did not comment directly on the Israeli report but said its armed wing had struck an Israeli helicopter east of Bureij. The Israeli military said it was “not aware of this.”
Israel has carried out weeks of intense bombardment of the densely populated Strip following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israeli communities, which it says killed some 1,400 people.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Thursday that 7,028 Palestinians had been killed in the air strikes, including 2,913 children.
“Behind every announced number, there is a known human being with a name and an identity,” ministry spokesman Dr. Ashraf Al-Qidra said. He urged those who doubted its figures to examine its methodology.
Reuters has not been able to independently verify the death toll on either side.
In Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, an Israeli air strike hit a house, killing a mother, her three daughters and a baby boy, whose father held his body in hospital.
“Did he kill? Did he wound someone? Did he capture someone? They were innocent children inside their house,” he said.
The director of the Nasser hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, Nahed Abu Taaema, said the bodies of 77 people killed in air strikes had been brought in overnight, most of them women and children, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa radio station reported.
Many Palestinians are sheltering in Khan Younis’s hospitals, schools, homes and existing refugee camps and on the street after Israel warned them to leave their homes in the north.
Israel did not respond directly to the report but said its forces had struck a Hamas missile launch post in the Khan Younis area that was next to a mosque and kindergarten.
It was not clear if both sides were referring to the same incident.
Aid, hostages, US troops all in the mix
Humanitarian supplies are critically low but world powers failed at the United Nations to agree on how to call for a lull to the fighting to deliver significant amounts of aid. Mass graves have begun to be used as the civilian toll has mounted.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said 74 trucks carrying food, water and medical supplies had crossed from Egypt since Saturday, a small fraction of Gaza’s peacetime needs. Israel has cut off electricity as well as fuel for pumps and generators, saying Hamas would just divert it.
Two Egyptian security sources have told Reuters that any scaling-up of aid will be linked to Hamas’s willingness to free hostages. Israel has not confirmed this, saying that it fears Hamas will smuggle weapons in.
Reflecting concerns the Gaza war may spread, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel had agreed to delay invading Gaza until US air defense systems can be placed in the region, potentially as early as this week, to protect American forces.
Asked about the report, US officials told Reuters that Washington had raised concerns with Israel that an incursion into Gaza could be a trigger for Iranian proxies to attack US troops in the Middle East.
Iran, Israel’s arch-enemy, which backs armed groups in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen as well as Hamas as part of a long-running bid for regional ascendancy, has warned Israel to stop its onslaught on Gaza.
Israel mounts new sortie into Gaza, hints there may be several ‘invasions’
https://arab.news/y6z7e
Israel mounts new sortie into Gaza, hints there may be several ‘invasions’
- Gaza is reeling from almost three weeks of Israeli bombing
- Western leaders fear ground invasion could spark a wider war
Trump says Fed’s rate cut was ‘political move’
WASHINGTON: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday the US Federal Reserve’s decision to cut interest rates by half of a percentage point was “a political move.”
“It really is a political move. Most people thought it was going to be half of that number, which probably would have been the right thing to do,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday kicked off what is expected to be a series of interest rate cuts with an unusually large half-percentage-point reduction.
Trump said last month that US presidents should have a say over decisions made by the Federal Reserve.
The Fed chair and the other six members of its board of governors are nominated by the president, subject to confirmation by the Senate. The Fed enjoys substantial operational independence to make policy decisions that wield tremendous influence over the direction of the world’s largest economy and global asset markets.
Gaza ceasefire deal unlikely in Biden’s term, WSJ reports
WASHINGTON: US officials now believe that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza is unlikely before President Joe Biden leaves office in January, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The newspaper cited top-level officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon without naming them. Those bodies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“I can tell you that we do not believe that deal is falling apart,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday before the report was published.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.
The United States and mediators Qatar and Egypt have for months attempted to secure a ceasefire but have failed to bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.
Two obstacles have been especially difficult: Israel’s demand to keep forces in the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt and the specifics of an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The United States has said a Gaza ceasefire deal could lower tensions across the Middle East amid fears the conflict could widen.
Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 that he said at the time Israel agreed to. As the talks hit obstacles, officials have for weeks said a new proposal would soon be presented.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.
Macron says ‘diplomatic path exists’ in Lebanon
PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that a “diplomatic path exists” in Lebanon, where fears of an all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel spiked after deadly explosions of hand-held devices.
War is “not inevitable” and “nothing, no regional adventure, no private interest, no loyalty to any cause merits triggering a conflict in Lebanon,” Macron said in a video to the Lebanese people posted on social media.
Sweden charges woman with genocide, crimes against humanity in Syria
- Daesh ‘tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,’ prosecutor Reena Devgun says
DENMARK: Swedish authorities have charged a 52-year-old woman associated with the Daesh group with genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria — in the first such case of a person to be tried in the Scandinavian country.
Lina Laina Ishaq, who’s a Swedish citizen, allegedly committed the crimes from August 2014 to December 2016 in Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed Daesh caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.
The crimes “took place under Daesh rule in Raqqa, and this is the first time that Daesh attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden,” senior prosecutor Reena Devgun said in a statement.
“Women, children, and men were regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labor, deprivation of liberty, and extrajudicial executions,” Devgun said.
When announcing the charges, Devgun said that they were able to identify the woman through information from UNITAD, the UN team investigating atrocities in Iraq.
Daesh “tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,” Devgun said.
In a separate statement, the Stockholm District Court said the prosecutor claims the woman detained a number of women and children belonging to the Yazidi ethnic group in her residence in Raqqa and “allegedly exposed them to, among other things, severe suffering, torture or other inhumane treatment as well as for persecution by depriving them of fundamental rights for cultural, religious and gender reasons contrary to general international law.”
According to the charge sheet, Ishaq is suspected of holding nine people, including children, in her Raqqa home for up to seven months and treating them as slaves. She also abused several of those she held captive.
The charge sheet said that Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, is accused of having molested a baby, said to have been one month old at the time, by holding a hand over the child’s mouth when he screamed to make him shut up.
She is also suspected of having sold people to Daesh, knowing they risked being killed or subjected to serious sexual abuse.
In 2014, Daesh stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.
The woman earlier had been convicted in Sweden and was sentenced to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, an area that Daesh then controlled.
The woman claimed she had told the child’s father that she and the boy were only going on holiday to Turkiye. However, once in Turkiye, the two crossed into Syria and the Daesh-run territory.
In 2017, when Daesh’s reign began to collapse, she fled from Raqqa and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops. She managed to escape to Turkiye, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime, with a Daesh foreign fighter from Tunisia.
She was extradited from Turkiye to Sweden.
Before her 2021 conviction, the woman lived in the southern town of Landskrona.
The court said the trial was planned to start Oct. 7 and last approximately two months.
Large parts of the trial are to be held behind closed doors.
Israel violated global child rights treaty in Gaza, UN committee says
GENEVA: A UN committee has accused Israel of severe breaches of a global treaty protecting children’s rights, saying its military actions in Gaza had a catastrophic impact on them and are among the worst violations in recent history.
Palestinian health authorities say 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7. Of those killed in Gaza, at least 11,355 are children, Palestinian data shows, and thousands more are injured.
“The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history,” said Bragi Gudbrandsson, vice chair of the Committee.
“I don’t think we have seen a violation that is so massive before as we’ve seen in Gaza. These are extremely grave violations that we do not often see,” he said.
Israel, which ratified the treaty in 1991, sent a large delegation to the UN hearings in Geneva between September 3-4.
They argued that the treaty did not apply in Gaza or the West Bank and that it was committed to respecting international humanitarian law. It says its military campaign in Gaza is aimed at eliminating Hamas.
The committee praised Israel for attending but said it “deeply regrets the state party’s repeated denial of its legal obligations.”
The 18-member UN Committee monitors countries’ compliance with the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child — a widely adopted treaty that protects them from violence and other abuses.
In its conclusions, it called on Israel to provide urgent assistance to thousands of children maimed or injured by the war, provide support for orphans, and allow more medical evacuations from Gaza.
The UN body has no means of enforcing its recommendations, although countries generally aim to comply.
During the hearings, the UN experts also asked many questions about Israeli children, including details about those taken hostage by Hamas, to which Israel’s delegation gave extensive responses.
