JERUSALEM: Israel’s cabinet on Friday approved a 2025 national budget, a wartime financial package that far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said supported the country’s ongoing wars and encouraged economic growth.
For more than a year, Israel has been locked in a war with Hamas in Gaza, and since September it has been fighting the Lebanese group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“The main objective of the 2025 budget is to maintain the security of the state and achieve victory on all fronts, while safeguarding the resilience of the Israeli economy,” Smotrich said.
The budget, totalling about 607.4 billion shekels ($162 billion), includes a nine billion shekel package to support reserve soldiers.
It will now move to the Knesset, or parliament, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition holds a majority, making approval likely.
Netanyahu welcomed the cabinet’s approval of the budget, saying Smotrich had put together “an important, difficult but necessary budget in a year of war.”
Additional allocations would be made for the defense ministry, as the military fights the two wars, as well as Iran and the groups it backs.
“This budget will help and support the needs of the war so that it will lead to a victory that will allow the strong Israeli economy to grow and prosper for many years,” Smotrich said.
The budget projects a fiscal deficit of about 4.3 percent.
But former prime minister and key opposition leader Yair Lapid criticized the budget, saying it would “increase the expenditure of every family in Israel by 20,000 shekels per year.”
Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget
https://arab.news/56yay
Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget
- Israel has been locked in a war with Hamas in Gaza, and since September it has been fighting the Lebanese group Hezbollah
Macron recognizes French soldiers killed Algerian independence hero in 1957
- France’s century-long colonization of Algeria and viciously fought 1954-62 war of independence left deep scars on both sides
PARIS: President Emmanuel Macron on Friday acknowledged that Larbi Ben M’hidi, a key figure in Algeria’s War of Independence against France, had been killed by French soldiers after his arrest in 1957, the French presidency said.
“He recognized today that Larbi Ben M’hidi, a national hero for Algeria... was killed by French soldiers,” the presidency said on the 70th anniversary of the revolt that sparked the war, in a new gesture of reconciliation by Macron toward the former colony.
France’s more than a century-long colonization of Algeria and the viciously fought 1954-62 war of independence have left deep scars on both sides.
In recent years, Macron has made several gestures toward reconciliation while stopping short of issuing any apology for French imperialism.
Since coming to power in 2017, Macron has sought “to look at the history of colonization and the Algerian War in the face, with the aim of creating a peaceful and shared memory,” the presidency said.
Ben M’hidi was one of six founding members of the National Liberation Front (FLN) that launched the armed revolt against French rule that led to the war.
The presidency said that according to the official version, Ben M’hidi after his arrest in February 1957 attempted to commit suicide and died during his transfer to the hospital.
But it said he had in fact been killed by soldiers under the command of General Paul Aussaresses, who admitted to this at the beginning of the 2000s.
In 2017, then-presidential candidate Macron dubbed the French occupation a “crime against humanity.”
A report he commissioned from historian Benjamin Stora recommended in 2020 further moves to reconcile the two countries, while ruling out “repentance” and “apologies.”
But Macron, who has sought to build a strong relationship with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, in 2022 questioned whether Algeria existed as a nation before being colonized by France, drawing an angry response from Algiers.
UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza
- British charity Project Pure Hope: ‘We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions’
- Kamal Aswan Hospital has just 2 doctors to look after more than 150 patients
LONDON: A British charity has urged the UK government to evacuate 21 critically ill children currently in a hospital in northern Gaza, Sky News reported.
The Kamal Adwan Hospital is besieged by Israeli forces and was recently raided by troops, who detained staff and left the facility with only two doctors to care for more than 150 patients.
It was also targeted by an Israeli airstrike on Thursday. Its supplies are reportedly running low and many of its facilities are no longer operational.
Project Pure Hope has called on the UK to facilitate the evacuation of vulnerable children trapped inside.
“We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions,” it said in a statement. “With each passing hour, the children’s chance of survival diminishes without advanced medical intervention — intervention that cannot be provided under the hospital’s current, catastrophic conditions.”
The charity said it has sufficient money to fund an evacuation of 21 children in critical condition at the hospital.
It added that it held a meeting with UK Foreign Office staff this week to discuss its plans, but so far the government has not agreed to take in patients.
“While other countries ... have opened their doors to these paediatric cases, the UK remains a notable outlier, having yet to implement any such programme,” the charity said.
The US, Switzerland, Italy Ireland and the UAE have taken in hospitalized children from Gaza since the start of the conflict over a year ago.
Fears for the safety of people in the area around the hospital have grown in recent weeks amid an uptick in Israeli military activity and Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid to reach displaced civilians.
Charities have warned of famine and disease, and aid workers struggle to move around Gaza, especially to the scene of military strikes to help civilian casualties.
Project Pure Hope’s concerns about the fate of patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital have been echoed by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which said it is “deeply concerned” by the situation after one of its staff members was detained by Israeli forces.
Israel claims that Hamas has been using the hospital, located in the Jabaliya refugee camp, as a base, and that it has found weapons stored at the facility. The hospital denies the allegation.
WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care
- ‘… We are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target’
GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Friday it is deeply concerned about Israeli attacks hitting health care workers and facilities in Lebanon, in its war against Hezbollah.
“We are really, really concerned, deeply concerned, about the rising attacks on health workers and the facilities in Lebanon, and we are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a media briefing in Geneva.
Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes
- Aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill
- Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month
BEIRUT: The news came by video. Law professor Ali Mourad discovered that Israel had dynamited his family’s south Lebanon home only after footage of the operation was sent to his phone.
“A friend from the village sent me the video, telling me to make sure my dad doesn’t see it,” Mourad, 43, said.
“But when he got the news, he stayed strong.”
The aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill.
Mourad’s home in Aitroun village, less than a kilometer from the border, is seen crumpling in a cloud of grey dust.
His father, an 83-year-old paediatrician, had his medical practice in the building. He had lived there with his family since shortly after Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon ended in 2000.
The family fled the region again after the Israel-Hezbollah war erupted on September 23 after a year of cross-border fire that began with the Gaza war.
South Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, has since been pummeled by Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah says it is battling Israeli forces at close range in border villages after a ground invasion began last month.
For the first 20 years of his life, Mourad could not step foot in Aitroun because of the Israeli occupation.
He wants his two children to have “a connection to their land,” but fears the war could upend any remaining ties.
“I fear my children will be orphaned of their land, as I was in the past,” he said.
“Returning is my right, a duty in my ancestors’ memory, and for the future of my children.”
According to Lebanon’s official National News Agency, Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month.
Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast footage appearing to show one of its presenters blow up a building while embedded with soldiers in the village of Aita Al-Shaab.
On October 26, the NNA said Israel “blew up and destroyed houses... in the village of Odaisseh.”
That day, Israel’s military said 400 tons of explosives detonated in a Hezbollah tunnel, which it said was more than 1.5 kilometers (around a mile) long.
It is in Odaisseh that Lubnan Baalbaki fears he may have lost the mausoleum where his mother and father, the late painter Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, are buried.
Their tomb is in the garden of their home, which was levelled in the blasts.
Baalbaki, 43, bought satellite images to keep an eye on the house which had been designed by his father, in polished white stone and clay tiles.
But videos circulating online later showed it had been blown up.
Lubnan has not yet found out whether the mausoleum was also damaged, adding that this was his “greatest fear.”
It would be like his parents “dying for a second time,” he said.
His Odaisseh home had a 2,000-book library and around 20 original artworks, including paintings by his father, he said.
His father had spent his life savings from his job as a university professor to build the home.
The family had preserved “his desk, his palettes, his brushes, just as he left them before he died,” Baalbaki said.
A painting he had been working on was still on an easel.
Losing the house filled him with “so much sadness” because “it was a project we’d grown up with since childhood that greatly influenced us, pushing us to embrace art and the love of beauty.”
Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission has said “the ongoing destruction campaign carried out by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon is a war crime.”
Between October 2023 and October 2024, locations “were wantonly and systematically destroyed in at least eight Lebanese villages,” it said, basing its findings on satellite images and videos shared on social media by Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s military used “air strikes, bulldozers, and manually controlled explosions” to level entire neighborhoods — homes, schools, mosques, churches, shrines, and archaeological sites, the commission said.
Lebanese rights group Legal Agenda said blasts in Mhaibib “destroyed the bulk” of the hilltop village, “including at least 92 buildings of civilian homes and facilities.”
“You can’t blow up an entire village because you have a military target,” said Hussein Chaabane, an investigative journalist with the group.
International law “prohibits attacking civilian objects,” he said.
Should civilian objects be targeted, “the principle of proportionality should be respected, and here it is being violated.”
Ceasefire hopes fade as Israel bombards Gaza, Lebanon
- Lebanon’s caretaker PM Mikati on Friday accused Israel of blocking progress in negotiations
- US envoys had been working to secure truces on both fronts ahead of US election next Tuesday
BEIRUT/GAZA: Prospects of a ceasefire between Israel and its foes Hamas and Hezbollah ran aground on Friday as Israeli airstrikes killed at least 64 people in the Gaza Strip, according to medics in the Palestinian enclave, and bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Later on Friday, the Israeli military said it had killed senior Hamas official Izz Al-Din Kassab, describing him as one of the last surviving high-ranking members of Hamas responsible for coordinating with other groups in Gaza, in an airstrike in Khan Younis.
US envoys had been working to secure ceasefires on both fronts ahead of the US presidential election next Tuesday.
But Hamas does not favor a temporary truce, its Al-Aqsa Hamas television reported on Friday. The ceasefire proposals failed to meet its conditions that any deal must end the year-long war in Gaza and include a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the devastated Palestinian enclave, it said.
Earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his priority was to enforce security “despite any pressure or constraints.”
His office said he relayed this message to US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk in Israel on Thursday. Israel meanwhile pressed on with its military offensives against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon on Friday.
Medics in Gaza said about 64 people were killed and dozens injured overnight and into Friday morning in Israeli strikes on the city of Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat camp and the town of Al-Zawayda, all in Gaza’s central area, as well as in its south.
Fourteen people were killed by an Israeli strike at the gate of a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Nuseirat, according to medics at the camp’s Al-Awda Hospital. Another 10 were killed in a car in Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, medics said.
The Israeli military said its troops had killed what it called armed terrorists in central Gaza and the northern Jabalia area. It had no immediate comment on the reported school strike, although it habitually denies deliberately attacking civilians.
The heads of UN humanitarian agencies said on Friday the situation in north Gaza was “apocalyptic“ with the entire Palestinian population there at “imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence” as Israel pursues its offensive against regrouping Hamas militants in the area.
Israel also pummelled Beirut’s southern suburbs on Friday morning with at least 10 strikes, Reuters journalists said. It was the first bombardment of the area — once a densely-packed district and Hezbollah stronghold — in nearly a week.
The strikes came after Israel issued evacuation orders for 10 separate neighborhoods.
Hassan Saad, speaking in a street in Lebanon’s capital Beirut, told Reuters: “This is a brutal war and Israel does not have the right to do this...There must be a limit put for Israel because it does not abide by any of the laws or human morality.”
Another Beirut man, Ali Ramadan, said he believed the Israeli airstrikes were a way to put pressure on Lebanon in the ceasefire negotiations.
The hostilities have whittled away any hope a truce could be reached before the Nov. 5 US presidential election.
Hamas television, quoting a leading source in the group, said the ceasefire proposals did not meet its conditions.
“The proposals do not include a permanent cessation of aggression, withdrawal of occupation forces from the Gaza Strip, or the return of displaced people,” the source said.
Nor did they address Palestinians’ need for security, relief and reconstruction, and the full reopening of border crossings, the source said.
The delegation also demanded the provision of food, medicine and shelter, and said any agreement must include an exchange of Palestinians held in Israel’s jails for the Israeli hostages captive in Gaza.
Israel’s Netanyahu, addressing graduating troops on Thursday, said: “Agreements, documents, proposals are not the main point.
“The main point is our ability and determination to enforce security, thwart attacks against us and act against the arming of our enemies, as necessary and despite any pressure and constraints. This is the main point,” he said.
‘ISRAELI STUBBORNNESS’
Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati on Friday accused Israel of blocking any progress in the negotiations.
“Israeli statements and diplomatic signals received by Lebanon confirm the Israeli stubbornness in rejecting the proposed solutions and insisting on the approach of killing and destruction,” he said.
Israel on Thursday also bombed the Baalbek region in Lebanon’s east, home to UNESCO-listed Roman ruins. A cultural group that organizes yearly festivals amid the ruins said some cracks were visible due to nearby Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in solidarity with Palestinians a day after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s retaliatory offensives have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians and reduced most of Gaza to rubble, as well as killed at least 2,897 people in Lebanon, its health ministry said in an update on Friday.
In northern Israel close to the Lebanese border, a farmer and four Thai workers were killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Metula on Thursday, Israeli authorities said. Two more civilians were killed by shrapnel near the town of Kiryat Ata, further south near the port city of Haifa.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah says it only fires at military targets in Israel.