Israel set to swear in government, end Netanyahu's long rule
By JOSEPH KRAUSS
1 hour ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is set to swear in a new government on Sunday that will send Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into the opposition after a record 12 years in office and a political crisis that sparked four elections in two years.
Naftali Bennett, the head of a small ultranationalist party, will take over as prime minister. But if he wants to keep the job, he will have to maintain an unwieldy coalition of parties from the political right, left and center.
The eight parties, including a small Arab faction that is making history by sitting in the ruling coalition, are united in their opposition to Netanyahu and new elections but agree on little else. They are likely to pursue a modest agenda that seeks to reduce tensions with the Palestinians and maintain good relations with the U.S. without launching any major initiatives.
Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, remains the head of the largest party in parliament and is expected to vigorously oppose the new government. If just one faction bolts, it could lose its majority and would be at risk of collapse, giving him an opening to return to power.
The country's deep divisions were on vivid display as Bennett addressed parliament ahead of the vote. He was repeatedly interrupted and loudly heckled by supporters of Netanyahu, several of whom were escorted out of the chamber.
Bennett's speech mostly dwelled on domestic issues, but he expressed opposition to U.S. efforts to revive Iran's nuclear deal with world powers.
“Israel will not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” Bennett said, vowing to maintain Netanyahu's confrontational policy. “Israel will not be a party to the agreement and will continue to preserve full freedom of action.”
Bennett nevertheless thanked President Joe Biden and the U.S. for its decades of support for Israel.
Netanyahu, speaking after him, vowed to return to power. He predicted the incoming government would be weak on Iran and give in to U.S. demands to make concessions to the Palestinians.
“If it is destined for us to be in the opposition, we will do it with our backs straight until we topple this dangerous government and return to lead the country in our way,” he said.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the new government will likely be more stable than it appears.
“Even though it has a very narrow majority, it will be very difficult to topple and replace because the opposition is not cohesive," he said. Each party in the coalition will want to prove that it can deliver, and for that they need “time and achievements."
Still, Netanyahu "will continue to cast a shadow,” Plesner said. He expects the incoming opposition leader to exploit events and propose legislation that right-wing coalition members would like to support but can't — all in order to embarrass and undermine them.
The new government is meanwhile promising a return to normalcy after a tumultuous two years that saw four elections, an 11-day Gaza war last month and a coronavirus outbreak that devastated the economy before it was largely brought under control by a successful vaccination campaign.
The driving force behind the coalition is Yair Lapid, a political centrist who will become prime minister in two years, if the government lasts that long.
He called off a planned speech to parliament, instead saying he was ashamed that his 86-year-old mother had to witness the raucous behavior of his opponents. In a brief speech, he asked for "forgiveness from my mother.”
“I wanted her to be proud of the democratic process in Israel. Instead she, along with every citizen of Israel, is ashamed of you and remembers clearly why it’s time to replace you,” he said.
The new government is expected to win a narrow majority in the 120-member assembly, after which it will be sworn in. The government plans to hold its first official meeting later this evening.
Netanyahu's supporters have held angry protests outside the homes of rival lawmakers, who say they have received death threats naming their family members. Israel's Shin Bet internal security service issued a rare public warning about the incitement earlier this month, saying it could lead to violence.
Netanyahu has condemned the incitement while noting that he has also been a target.
His place in Israeli history is secure, having served as prime minister for a total of 15 years — more than any other, including the country's founder, David Ben-Gurion.
Netanyahu began his long rule by defying the Obama administration, refusing to freeze settlement construction as it tried unsuccessfully to revive the peace process. Relations with Israel's closest ally grew even rockier when Netanyahu vigorously campaigned against President Barack Obama's emerging nuclear deal with Iran, even denouncing it in an address to the U.S. Congress.
But he suffered few if any consequences from those clashes and was richly rewarded by the Trump administration, which recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital, helped broker normalization agreements with four Arab states and withdrew the U.S. from the Iran deal.
Netanyahu has portrayed himself as a world-class statesman, boasting of his close ties with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has also cultivated ties with Arab and African countries that long shunned Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians.
But he has gotten a far chillier reception from the Biden administration and is widely seen as having undermined the long tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the United States.
His reputation as a political magician has also faded at home, where he has become a deeply polarizing figure. Critics say he has long pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy that aggravated rifts in Israeli society between Jews and Arabs and between his close ultra-Orthodox allies and secular Jews.
In November 2019, he was indicted for fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes. He refused calls to step down, instead lashing out at the media, judiciary and law enforcement, going so far as to accuse his political opponents of orchestrating an attempted coup. Last year, protesters began holding weekly rallies across the country calling on him to resign.
Netanyahu remains popular among the hard-line nationalists who dominate Israeli politics, but he could soon face a leadership challenge from within his own party. A less polarizing Likud leader would stand a good chance of assembling a coalition that is both farther to the right and more stable than the government that is set to be sworn in.
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Israeli airstrikes target Gaza sites, first since cease-fire
By JOSEF FEDERMAN
Today
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli airstrikes hit militant sites in the Gaza Strip early Wednesday, and Palestinians responded by sending a series of fire-carrying balloons back across the border for a second straight day — further testing the fragile cease-fire that ended last month’s war between Israel and Hamas.
The latest round of violence was prompted by a parade of Israeli ultranationalists through contested east Jerusalem on Tuesday. Palestinians saw the march as a provocation and sent balloons into southern Israel, causing several blazes in parched farmland. Israel then carried out the airstrikes — the first such raids since the May 21 cease-fire ended 11 days of fighting — and more balloons followed.
The airstrikes targeted facilities used by Hamas militants for meetings to plan attacks, the army said. There were no reports of injuries.
“The Hamas terror organization is responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip, and will bear the consequences for its actions,” the army said. It added that it was prepared for any scenario, “including a resumption of hostilities.”
By Wednesday afternoon, masked Palestinians sent a number of balloons, laden with fuses and flaming rags, into Israel. Several fires were reported.
The unrest provided the first test of the cease-fire at a time when Egyptian mediators have been working to reach a longer-term agreement. It comes as tensions have risen again in Jerusalem, as they did before the recent war, leading Gaza's Hamas rulers to fire a barrage of rockets at the holy city on May 10. The fighting claimed more than 250 Palestinian lives and killed 13 people in Israel.
An Egyptian security official said his government has been in “direct and around-the-clock” contacts with Israeli officials and the Gaza rulers to keep the cease-fire and to urge them to refrain from provocative acts.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing behind-the-scenes diplomacy, said the U.S. administration has also been in touch with Israel as part of the efforts.
The two sides seem to agree "not to escalate to the tipping point,” he said. “And we do every effort to prevent this.”
The flare-up also has created a test for Israel’s new government, which took office early this week. The diverse coalition includes several hard-line parties as well as dovish and centrist parties, along with the first Arab faction ever to be part of an Israeli government.
Keeping the delicate coalition intact will be a difficult task for the new prime minister, Naftali Bennett.
In Tuesday’s parade, hundreds of Israeli ultranationalists, some chanting “Death to Arabs,” marched in east Jerusalem in a show of force. Hamas called on Palestinians to “resist” the parade, which was meant to celebrate Israel’s capture of east Jerusalem in 1967. Palestinians consider it a provocation.
In a scathing condemnation on Twitter, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who heads the centrist Yesh Atid Party, said those shouting racist slogans were “a disgrace to the Israeli people.”
Bennett, who will hand over the prime minister’s job to Lapid after two years, is a hard-line Israeli nationalist who has promised a pragmatic approach as he presides over a delicate, diverse coalition government.
Mansour Abbas, whose Raam party is the first Arab faction to join an Israeli coalition, said the march was “an attempt to set the region on fire for political aims,” with the intention of undermining the new government.
Abbas said the police and public security minister should have canceled the event.
While the parade provided the immediate impetus for the balloons, Hamas is also angry because Israel has tightened its blockade of the territory since the cease-fire. The restrictions include a ban on imports of fuel for Gaza’s power plant and raw materials.
Israel imposed the blockade after Hamas, a militant group that seeks Israel’s destruction, seized control of Gaza from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in 2007. Israel and Hamas have fought four wars and numerous skirmishes since then. Israel says the blockade, enforced with Egypt, is needed to prevent Hamas from importing and developing weapons.
One of the masked activists firing the balloons said they launched hundreds of them Tuesday and will continue sending them in response to what he described as Israeli provocations in east Jerusalem.
After capturing east Jerusalem in 1967, Israel annexed the area in a move not recognized by most of the international community. It considers the entire city its capital, while the Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. The competing claims over east Jerusalem, home to Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, lie at the heart of the conflict and have sparked many rounds of violence.
___
Associated Press journalists Samy Magdy and Fares Akram in Cairo, and Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.
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New leaders, new era: US-Israel relations reach crossroads
By MATTHEW LEE and JOSEPH KRAUSS
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — Their countries at crossroads, the new leaders of the United States and Israel have inherited a relationship that is at once imperiled by increasingly partisan domestic political considerations and deeply bound in history and an engrained recognition that they need each other.
How President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett manage that relationship will shape the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.
Bennett’s government says it wants to repair relations with the Democrats and restore bipartisan support in the U.S. for Israel. Biden, meanwhile, is pursuing a more balanced approach on the Palestinian conflict and Iran.
The relationship is critical to both countries. Israel has long regarded the United States as its closest ally and guarantor of its security and international standing while the U.S. counts on Israel’s military and intelligence prowess in a turbulent Middle East.
But both Biden and Bennett are also restrained by domestic politics.
Bennett leads an uncertain coalition of eight parties from across Israel’s political spectrum whose main point of convergence was on removing Netanyahu from power after 12 years. Biden is struggling to bridge a divide in his party where near-uniform support for Israel has eroded and a progressive wing wants the U.S. to do more to end Israel’s half-century occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state.
Shortly after taking office, the new Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, recognized the challenges Israel faces in Washington.
“We find ourselves with a Democratic White House, Senate and House and they are angry,” Lapid said upon taking the helm at Israel’s foreign ministry a week ago. “We need to change the way we work with them.”
A key test will be on Iran. Biden has sought to return to the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama saw as a signature foreign policy achievement. Trump withdrew from the pact to cheers from pro-Israel U.S. lawmakers and Israel. Though Iran has not yet accepted Biden’s offer for direct negotiations, indirect discussions on the nuclear deal are now in a sixth round in Vienna.
The new Israeli government remains staunchly opposed to Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal. But it maintains it will discuss the issue behind closed doors rather than staging public confrontations, such as Netanyahu’s controversial address slamming the agreement to the U.S. Congress in 2015.
In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, Lapid said the two agreed on a “no surprises” policy and to keep lines of communication open.
Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, says that rather than trying to scuttle any agreement with Iran, the new government will press the U.S. administration to keep some sanctions on Iran in place and seek “strategic compensation” for Israel as part of any return to the deal.
Resolving differences over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be another significant challenge for the two leaders.
Biden has already moved to reverse Netanyahu-backed Trump policies that alienated the Palestinians and caused a near total rupture in official U.S.-Palestinian contacts. Almost immediately after taking office, Biden restored Trump-slashed U.S. assistance to the Palestinians, which in just four months totals more than $300 million. He announced his administration’s intent to re-open the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, closed by Trump, that handled relations with the Palestinians. And, administration officials have spoken of the imperative that Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal measures of security and prosperity.
Yet, neither Biden nor Blinken has signaled any move to alter Trump’s most significant pro-Israel steps. Those include his abandonment of longstanding U.S. policy that settlements are illegitimate under international law, his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory seized from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The administration also hopes to expand Arab-Israeli normalization agreements that the Trump administration forged in its final months in office.
In a call on Bennett's first day in office, Biden affirmed his “steadfast support for the U.S.-Israel relationship" and “unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” He pledged to work together on all security matters, including Iran.
Biden's support for Israel’s heavy airstrikes during last month's war with Gaza's militant Hamas rulers, who fired thousands of rockets at Israel, angered progressive Democrats in Congress. With newfound strength in numbers, they are demanding that the administration do more to support the Palestinians and that conditions be placed on the massive amount of military aid the U.S. provides Israel.
While well-established Democratic lawmakers remain unstintingly supportive of Israel and its absolute right to defend itself, the growing number of progressive voices in their caucus have turned the issue into a political hot potato. The change in Israel's government is unlikely to ease their calls for action as Israeli-Palestinian violence has continued in recent days.
Yet, the Biden administration has already urged the new Israeli government to ease tensions with the Palestinians. In two phone conversations with Lapid over the last week, Blinken has spoken of “the need to improve Israeli-Palestinian relations in practical ways” and pledged to deepen Arab-Israeli ties.
It's not clear that the new government will be responsive.
Centrist members like Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz clearly want to adopt a more cooperative approach with the Biden administration, while Bennett and his right-wing partners face pressure from their base to maintain Netanyahu’s hardline approach, not only on Iran but on the conflict with the Palestinians.
The former prime minister, already eyeing a return to office, has branded Bennett as weak and inexperienced, and will probably pounce on any perceived capitulations.
The Israeli government already faces tough decisions, including whether to evacuate an unauthorized settlement outpost established last month and whether to intervene in the legal process through which settler organizations are trying to evict dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in east Jerusalem.
The Biden administration is pressing Israel to refrain from any unilateral steps — such as settlement expansion or evictions — that could hinder the eventual revival of the peace process, which has been moribund for more than a decade. But Washington has yet to issue public condemnations of settlement activity beyond general calls for both sides to refrain from unilateral steps that could inflame tensions or harm prospects for an eventual peace deal.
Bennett is a strong supporter of the settlements and is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but he is also seen by many as a pragmatist. He may be able to turn his weakness into a strength, arguing that any major concession — to the Palestinians or the settlers — risks bringing down the government and returning Netanyahu to power.
“The forces that brought this coalition to power are strong enough in my judgment to sustain the pressure from the right and probably also American pressure to make a major change in the policies toward the Palestinians,” Gilboa said.
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Israeli PM: World powers must 'wake up' on Iran nuclear deal
By ILAN BEN ZION
47 mins ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opened his first Cabinet meeting on Sunday by slamming Iran's newly-elected president and calling on world powers to “wake up” to the perils of returning to a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Later in the day, Bennett warned Gaza's militant Hamas rulers that Israel would not tolerate even minor attacks from the territory in the wake of last month's 11-day war, saying “our patience is running out.”
Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi, was elected Saturday with 62% of the vote amid historically low turnout. He is sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Raisi has not commented specifically on the event.
At the Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett said Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had chosen the “hangman of Tehran” to be the country's next president, a man "infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the death committees that executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years.”
Raisi's ascendancy comes at a sensitive time for the region, as Iran and world powers ramp up efforts to resurrect Tehran’s tattered 2015 nuclear deal, which granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
For weeks, Iranian and American diplomats have been negotiating a return to the accord in Vienna through European intermediaries. Talks resumed Sunday, the first round since the election that put hard-liners firmly in control across Iran’s government.
Israel was staunchly opposed to the landmark nuclear deal and welcomed then-President Donald Trump's decision to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from it. Since then, the agreement has unraveled, with Iran abandoning all its limitations on enrichment after the Trump administration restored crippling economic sanctions. Tehran is currently enriching uranium at its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels.
Although the White House has yet to weigh in on Iran's election, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the outcome was unlikely to affect nuclear negotiations because Iran's supreme leader wants the deal restored.
“The person who makes the decision about whether Iran will go back into the Iran nuclear deal, will assume its nuclear obligations under international law, is not the president of Iran, it is the supreme leader of Iran, and that person did not change from before the election,” Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Bennett said Raisi's election was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers."
Israel, which is believed to have its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, has long opposed arch-enemy Iran's nuclear program and has vowed to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes.
Bennett heads a broad coalition of parties ranging from hard-line Jewish nationalists to liberal factions and a small Islamist party. His government was sworn in last week, sending Benjamin Netanyahu to the opposition after a record 12 years as prime minister.
Later on Sunday, at a memorial ceremony for Israelis killed in the 2014 Gaza war, Bennett warned Hamas that Israel “will not tolerate violence, we will not tolerate a drizzle.”
Last month's Gaza war was halted by an informal cease-fire. Egyptian mediators have met with Israeli and Hamas officials in recent weeks to try and shore it up, but there has been no apparent progress on Hamas' main demand, the lifting of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the territory when it seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
Israel says the blockade is needed to keep Hamas from importing military resources, while the Palestinians and human rights groups view it as collective punishment of the territory's more than 2 million Palestinian residents.
___
Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington, Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Palestinians, settlers clash in tense Jerusalem neighborhood
By LAURIE KELLMAN and JOSEPH KRAUSS
Today
JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians and Jewish settlers hurled stones, chairs and fireworks at each other overnight in a tense Jerusalem neighborhood where settler groups are trying to evict several Palestinian families, officials said Tuesday.
The threatened evictions fueled protests and clashes in the runup to last month's 11-day Gaza war and pose a test for Israel's new governing coalition, which includes three pro-settler parties but is hoping to sideline the Palestinian issue to avoid internal divisions.
Israeli police and border officials said they arrested four suspects in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. It was unclear who started the brawl. The officials said someone launched fireworks at police forces and residents’ houses and that “several Molotov cocktails were thrown and stones were thrown.” One woman was reportedly injured when she was hit in the back by a stone, police said.
The Red Crescent emergency service said its crews treated 20 Palestinians, including 16 suffering from pepper spray and tear gas and others wounded by rubber-coated bullets. Two other people were wounded, including an elderly man who was hit in the head, it said.
The Red Crescent said settlers threw stones at one of its ambulances and Israeli forces sprayed skunk water on a second ambulance belonging to the service.
And so the cycle of tension endures, in a stark early test for Israel's new coalition government, which is just over a week old.
At the helm under a rotation agreement is Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Yamina party. In two years, he'll be replaced by Yair Lapid, leader of centrist Yesh Atid. And leading the opposition is Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, ousted from the premiership after holding the post for 12 years.
An intervention by Israel’s attorney general at the height of the unrest has put the most imminent evictions on hold. But rights groups say evictions could still proceed in the coming months as international attention wanes, potentially igniting another round of bloodshed.
The settlers have been waging a decades-long campaign to evict the families from densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods in the so-called Holy Basin just outside the walls of the Old City, in one of the most sensitive parts of east Jerusalem.
Israel captured east Jerusalem, home to holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, in the 1967 war and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. Israel views the entire city as its capital, while the Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
The settlers say the homes are built on land that was owned by Jews prior to the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim such property, a right denied to Palestinians who lost lands and homes in the same conflict.
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Israel looks to renew law that keeps out Palestinian spouses
By JOSEPH KRAUSS
2 hours ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's parliament is set to vote Monday on whether to renew a temporary law first enacted in 2003 that bars Arab citizens of Israel from extending citizenship or even residency to spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Critics, including many left-wing and Arab lawmakers, say it's a racist measure aimed at restricting the growth of Israel's Arab minority, while supporters say it's needed for security purposes and to preserve Israel's Jewish character.
The law creates an array of difficulties for Palestinian families that span the war-drawn and largely invisible frontiers separating Israel from east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, territories it seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a future state.
“You want your security, it’s no problem, you can check each case by itself,” said Taiseer Khatib. His wife of more than 15 years, from the West Bank city of Jenin, must regularly apply for permits to live with him and their three children in Israel.
“There’s no need for this collective punishment just because you are Palestinian," he said.
Israel's dominant right-wing parties strongly support the law, and it has been renewed every year since being enacted. But Israel's new government includes opponents of the measure, and the right-wing opposition led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — aiming to embarrass the government — has warned it won't provide the votes needed to renew the law.
Dozens of families held a demonstration outside the Knesset, Israel's parliament, ahead of the vote, which is expected late Monday.
“We want stability in this country, like anyone else,” said Maryam Abu Arar, from the West Bank town of Bethlehem, who requires a permit to live with her husband and four children in Israel. “We want to live in a democratic country, with peace and security for us as well.”
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law was enacted as a temporary measure in 2003, at the height of the second intifada, or uprising, when Palestinians launched scores of deadly attacks inside Israel. Proponents said Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza were susceptible to recruitment by armed groups and that security vetting alone was insufficient.
The law has been continually renewed even after the uprising wound down in 2005 and the number of attacks plummeted. Today, Israel allows more than 100,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank to enter on a regular basis.
“It was passed in the middle of the intifada, and now we are in a very different period in time," said Yuval Shany, a legal expert at the Israel Democracy Institute. Not only are attacks far rarer, but Israel has vastly improved its technological abilities to monitor Palestinians who enter, he said. “I don’t think the security argument is very strong at this point in time.”
Because of the law, Arab citizens have few if any avenues for bringing spouses from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. The policy affects thousands of families.
Male spouses over the age of 35 and female spouses over the age of 25, as well as some humanitarian cases, can apply for the equivalent of a tourist permit, which must be regularly renewed. The holders of such permits are ineligible for driver's licenses, public health insurance and most forms of employment. Palestinian spouses from Gaza have been completely banned since the militant Hamas group seized power there in 2007.
The law does not apply to the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank, who have full Israeli citizenship. Under Israel's Law of Return, Jews who come to Israel from anywhere in the world are eligible for citizenship.
Israel's Arab minority, which makes up 20% of the population, has close familial ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and largely identifies with their cause. Arab citizens view the law as one of several forms of discrimination they face in a country that legally defines itself as a Jewish nation-state.
“This law sees every Palestinian as an enemy and as a threat, just because of his ethnic and national affiliation," said Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, an Arab rights group that has challenged the law in court. "The political message is very racist and very dangerous.”
Palestinians who are unable to get permits but try to live with their spouses inside Israel are at risk of deportation. Couples that move to the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation. If their children are born in the West Bank, they would be subject to the same law preventing spouses from entering Israel, though there is an exception for minors.
The citizenship law also applies to Jewish Israelis who marry Palestinians from the territories, but such unions are extremely rare.
Human Rights Watch pointed to the law as an example of the widespread discrimination faced by Palestinians — both inside Israel and in the territories it controls — in a report earlier this year that said such practices amount to apartheid.
Israel rejects such allegations and says Jewish and Arab citizens have equal rights. Arab citizens have the right to vote, and the new government for the first time includes an Arab faction, which is opposed to the citizenship law.
But even as Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a political centrist, recently urged the right-wing opposition to support the law on security grounds, he also evoked demographic concerns.
“This law is essential for safeguarding the country’s security and Jewish and democratic character, and security considerations need to be put before all political considerations,” Gantz said in a statement.
Ahmad Tibi, a prominent member of an Arab opposition party, called on fellow lawmakers to strike the law down.
“They should look at the eyes of these children and these families and then vote to prevent this most racist law," he said as he met with the demonstrators. "These families should be allowed to live normally as all other families, wherever they decide to live.”
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Israel blocks law that keeps out Palestinian spouses
By LAURIE KELLMAN
1 hour ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s parliament early on Tuesday failed to renew a law that bars Arab citizens from extending citizenship or residency rights to spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, in a tight vote that raised doubts about the viability of the country’s new coalition government.
The 59-59 vote, which came after an all-night session of the Knesset, marked a major setback for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
The new Israeli leader, who had hoped to find a compromise between his hard-line Yamina party and the dovish factions in his disparate coalition, instead suffered a stinging defeat in a vote he reportedly described as a referendum on the new government. The vote means the law is now set to expire at midnight Tuesday.
“The opposition last night delivered a direct blow to the security of the country,” Bennett said Tuesday, accusing his opponents, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of choosing “petty politics” over the nation’s wellbeing.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law was enacted as a temporary measure in 2003, at the height of the second intifada, or uprising, when Palestinians launched scores of deadly attacks inside Israel. Proponents said Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza were susceptible to recruitment by armed groups and that security vetting alone was insufficient.
Under it, Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of Israel’s population, have had few if any avenues for bringing spouses from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. Critics, including many left-wing and Arab lawmakers, say it’s a racist measure aimed at restricting the growth of Israel’s Arab minority, while supporters say it’s needed for security purposes and to preserve Israel’s Jewish character.
The law has been renewed annually and appeared to have the support of a large majority in parliament, which is dominated by hard-line nationalist parties. But Netanyahu’s Likud Party and his allies decided to oppose it to embarrass Bennett and harm his coalition, which includes a collection of eight parties across the political spectrum, including a small Islamist Arab party.
Interior Minister Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Bennett's Yamina party, said the opposition move to block the law's renewal would lead to thousands more applications for citizenship. She accused Netanyahu and his allies of choosing "petty and ugly politics, and let the country burn.”
Amichai Chikli, a renegade member of Yamina who voted with the opposition, said the outcome was a sign of deeper issues.
“Israel needs a functioning Zionist government, and not a mismatched patchwork that is reliant on” the votes of Arab lawmakers, said Chikli. He was the only member of his party to oppose the new coalition-led government last month.
Netanyahu, ousted by the new coalition after 12 years as prime minister, made clear his political goals.
“With all due respect for this law, the importance of toppling the government is greater,” Netanyahu said Monday.
Bennett reportedly proposed a compromise with liberal members of the coalition that would have extended the law by six months while offering residency rights to some 1,600 Arab families, a fraction of those affected. But the measure was defeated, in part because two Arab members of the coalition abstained. The vote exposed the deep divisions and the fragility of the new government.
The decision, however, gave some hope to Arab families that have been affected by the law. The law has created an array of difficulties for thousands of Palestinian families that span the war-drawn and largely invisible frontiers separating Israel from east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, territories it seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a future state.
“You want your security, it’s no problem, you can check each case by itself,” said Taiseer Khatib, an Arab citizen of Israel whose wife of more than 15 years, from the West Bank city of Jenin, must regularly apply for permits to live with him and their three children in Israel.
“There’s no need for this collective punishment just because you are Palestinian,” he said during a protest outside the Knesset on Monday ahead of the vote.
The law has been continually renewed even after the uprising wound down in 2005 and the number of attacks plummeted. Today, Israel allows more than 100,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank to enter on a regular basis.
Male spouses over the age of 35 and female spouses over the age of 25, as well as some humanitarian cases, can apply for the equivalent of a tourist permit, which must be regularly renewed. The holders of such permits are ineligible for driver’s licenses, public health insurance and most forms of employment. Palestinian spouses from Gaza have been completely banned since the militant Hamas group seized power there in 2007.
The law does not apply to the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank, who have full Israeli citizenship. Under Israel’s Law of Return, Jews who come to Israel from anywhere in the world are eligible for citizenship.
Israel’s Arab minority has close familial ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and largely identifies with their cause. Arab citizens view the law as one of several forms of discrimination they face in a country that legally defines itself as a Jewish nation-state.
Palestinians who are unable to get permits but try to live with their spouses inside Israel are at risk of deportation. Couples that move to the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation.
The citizenship law also applies to Jewish Israelis who marry Palestinians from the territories, but such unions are extremely rare.
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Israeli club calls off match with Barcelona over Jerusalem
20 mins ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — The owner of Israel's Beitar Jerusalem soccer club said Thursday that he called off a friendly match with international powerhouse Barcelona over its refusal to hold the event in contested Jerusalem.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, annexed it in a move not recognized internationally, and considers the entire city its capital. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, and the city's status is one of the thorniest issues in the decades-long conflict.
Beitar Jerusalem owner Moshe Hogeg said he was forced to cancel the planned Aug. 4 match “with great sadness” because he refused to give in to what he said was a “political” demand.
“After I received the contract to sign and discovered the unequivocal demand that the game not take place in the capital city, Jerusalem, and several other demands that I didn’t like, I slept with a heavy heart, thought a lot and decided that above all else I am a proud Jew and Israeli,” Hogeg wrote on Facebook. “I cannot betray Jerusalem."
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion expressed support for the decision, saying teams that intend to “boycott” Jerusalem should be barred from Israel altogether.
“Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel and the decision to boycott it is not a professional, sporting or educational decision,” he said in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from Barcelona.
Beitar Jerusalem is the only major Israeli soccer club to have never signed an Arab player, and its hard-core fans have a history of racist chants. Hogeg, who purchased the team in 2018, has vowed to combat racism and sideline the club's anti-Arab fans.
Earlier this month the Palestinian Football Association sent a letter of protest to Barcelona over the planned game in Jerusalem.
Sami Abou Shehadeh, a Balad party lawmaker in the Israeli parliament, had also petitioned Barcelona to cancel the game, saying Beitar “represents the most extremist, racist and fascist segments of Israeli society.” Palestinian soccer clubs had also written to Barcelona urging it not to play in Jerusalem.
Argentina cancelled a World Cup warmup match with Israel in 2018 following pro-Palestinian protests. Some Israeli officials accused Lionel Messi and his teammates of caving to terrorism.
The international soccer federation later imposed a year-long ban on Jibril Rajoub, the head of Palestinian soccer, for allegedly inciting fans against Argentina. Rajoub called the ban biased and “absurd.”
FIFA said Rajoub had “incited hatred and violence” by calling on soccer fans to target the Argentinian Football Association and burn jerseys and pictures of Lionel Messi.
Argentina Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said at the time players felt “totally attacked, violated” after images emerged of the team’s white and sky-blue striped jerseys stained with red paint resembling blood.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s prime minister vowed Tuesday to “act aggressively” against the decision by Ben & Jerry’s to stop selling its ice cream in Israeli-occupied territories, as the country’s ambassador to the U.S. urged dozens of state governors to punish the company under anti-boycott laws.
The strong reaction reflected concerns in Israel that the ice cream maker's decision could lead other companies to follow suit. It also appeared to set the stage for a protracted public relations and legal battle.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's office said he spoke with Alan Jope, chief executive of Ben & Jerry's parent company Unilever, and raised concern about what he called a “clearly anti-Israel step.” He said the move would have “serious consequences, legal and otherwise," and Israel "will act aggressively against all boycott actions directed against its citizens.”
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to comment directly on the company's decision. But he said the U.S. rejects the boycott movement against Israel, saying it “unfairly singles out” the country.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, Gilad Erdan, sent letters to 35 governors whose states have laws against boycotting Israel asking that they consider speaking out against Ben & Jerry’s decision “and taking any other relevant steps, including in relation to your state laws and the commercial dealings between Ben & Jerry’s and your state.”
Erdan said Israel views the company’s decision as “the de-facto adoption of anti-Semitic practices and advancement of the de-legitimization of the Jewish state and the dehumanization of the Jewish people.”
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I feel like Israeli government/ambassador types need to look up anti-Semitic. They only get it wrong 100% of the time.
It's easier to silence criticism by conflating anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric. They're well aware of how wrong they are - it's a strategy.
It's changed over the years in more progressive areas but there was a time not too long ago that if you spoke against Jews or Israel in any way you got slapped with the anti-Semitic tab.
We’re Ben and Jerry. Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle.
July 28, 2021
Image
Credit...Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images
By Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield founded Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings in 1978.
We are the founders of Ben & Jerry’s. We are also proud Jews. It’s part of who we are and how we’ve identified ourselves for our whole lives. As our company began to expand internationally, Israel was one of our first overseas markets. We were then, and remain today, supporters of the State of Israel.
But it’s possible to support Israel and oppose some of its policies, just as we’ve opposed policies of the U.S. government. As such, we unequivocally support the decision of the company to end business in the occupied territories, which a majority of the international community, including the United Nations, has deemed an illegal occupation.
While we no longer have any operational control of the company we founded in 1978, we’re proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history. In our view, ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history. It was especially brave of the company. Even though it undoubtedly knew that the response would be swift and powerful, Ben & Jerry’s took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values.
That we support the company’s decision is not a contradiction nor is it anti-Semitic. In fact, we believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights, core tenets of Judaism.
ADVERTISEMENT
Ben & Jerry’s is a company that advocates peace. It has long called on Congress to reduce the U.S. military budget. Ben & Jerry’s opposed the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But it wasn’t just talk. One of our very first social-mission initiatives, in 1988, was to introduce the Peace Pop. It was part of an effort to promote the idea of redirecting 1 percent of national defense budgets around the world to fund peace-promoting activities. We see the company’s recent action as part of a similar trajectory — not as anti-Israel, but as part of a long history of being pro-peace.
In its statement, the company drew a contrast between the democratic territory of Israel and the territories Israel occupies. The decision to halt sales outside Israel’s democratic borders is not a boycott of Israel. The Ben & Jerry’s statement did not endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The company’s stated decision to more fully align its operations with its values is not a rejection of Israel. It is a rejection of Israeli policy, which perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people who live under the occupation. As Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, we fundamentally reject the notion that it is anti-Semitic to question the policies of the State of Israel.
When we left the helm of the company, we signed a unique governance structure in the acquisition agreement with Unilever back in 2000. That structure is the magic behind both Ben & Jerry’s continued independence and its success. As part of the agreement, the company retained an independent board of directors with a responsibility to protect the company’s essential brand integrity and to pursue its social mission.
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Israeli defense minister threatens Iran with military action
By LAURIE KELLMAN
Today
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel's defense minister warned Thursday that his country is prepared to strike Iran, issuing the threat against the Islamic Republic after a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his nation blamed on Tehran.
The comments by Benny Gantz come as Israel lobbies countries for action at the United Nations over last week's attack on the oil tanker Mercer Street that killed two people. The tanker, struck off Oman in the Arabian Sea, is managed by a firm owned by an Israeli billionaire.
The U.S. and the United Kingdom also blamed Iran for the attack, but no country has offered evidence or intelligence to support the claim. Iran, which along with its regional militia allies has launched similar drone attacks, has denied being involved.
Speaking to the news website Ynet, Gantz responded to whether Israel was prepared to attack Iran with a blunt “yes.”
“We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran," Gantz said. "The world needs to take action against Iran now.”
From Tehran, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh described Gantz's threat as “another brazen violation of Int'l law" and “malign behavior" that allegedly stems from Israel's blind support for the West.
He tweeted: “We state this clearly: ANY foolish act against Iran will be met with a DECISIVE response. Don’t test us."
On Wednesday, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council, Iran's deputy ambassador to the United Nations described Israel as “the main source of instability and insecurity in the Middle East and beyond for more than seven decades.”
“This regime has a long dark record in attacking commercial navigation and civilian ships,” Zahra Ershadi wrote. “In less than two years, this regime has attacked over 10 commercial vessels carrying oil and humanitarian goods destined to Syria.”
Ershadi's comments refer to an ongoing shadow war being waged in Mideast waterways since 2019 that has seen both Iranian and Western-linked ships attacked.
The latest provocation occurred earlier this week, when hijackers stormed an asphalt tanker off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman, briefly seizing the vessel before departing on Wednesday. No one claimed responsibility for the incident, although recorded radio communication from the ship shared with The Associated Press revealed one of the crew members saying that armed Iranians had boarded the Asphalt Princess.
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Hezbollah says it fired rockets after Israeli airstrikes
By LAURIE KELLMAN and ZEINA KARAM
18 mins ago
BEIRUT (AP) — The militant Hezbollah group fired a barrage of rockets at Israel on Friday, and Israel hit back with artillery in a significant escalation between the two sides.
It was the third day of attacks along the volatile border with Lebanon, a major Middle East flashpoint where tensions between Israel and Iran, which backs Hezbollah, occasionally play out. But comments by Israeli officials and Hezbollah’s actions suggested the two were seeking to avoid a major conflict at this time.
Israel said it fired back after 19 rockets were launched from Lebanon, and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett swiftly convened a meeting with the country's top defense officials. No casualties were reported.
“We do not wish to escalate to a full war, yet of course we are very prepared for that,” said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel has long considered Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, its most serious and immediate military threat. Friday's exchanges came a day after Israel’s defense minister warned that his country is prepared to strike Iran following a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his country blamed on Tehran.
The tensions come at a politically sensitive time in Israel, where a new eight-party governing coalition is already trying to keep the peace on another border under a fragile cease-fire that ended an 11-day war with Hamas’ militant rulers in Gaza.
Sirens blared across the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee near the Lebanon border Friday morning. Hezbollah said in a statement that it hit “open fields” in the disputed Shebaa farms area.
The group said it fired 10 rockets, calling it retaliation for Israeli airstrikes the day before. Israel said those strikes were in response to rocket fire from southern Lebanon in recent days that was not claimed by any group.
Shebaa Farms is an enclave where the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet. Israel says it is part of the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967. Lebanon and Syria say Shebaa Farms belong to Lebanon, while the United Nations says the area is part of Syria.
“This is a very serious situation and we urge all parties to cease fire,” the force known as UNIFIL said. Force commander, Gen. Stefano Del Col, said the force was coordinating with the Lebanese army to strengthen security measures in the area.
Hezbollah’s decision to strike open fields in a disputed area rather than Israel proper, appeared calibrated to limit any response.
Shefler, the Israeli military spokesman, told reporters Friday that three of the 19 rockets fired fell within Lebanese territory. Ten were intercepted by the defense system known as the Iron Dome.
Israel estimates Hezbollah possesses over 130,000 rockets and missiles capable of striking anywhere in the country. In recent years, Israel also has expressed concerns that the group is trying to import or develop an arsenal of precision-guided missiles.
Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Lebanese border villages where it accuses Hezbollah of hiding rockets. An Israeli security official said Friday the military was carrying out airstrikes unlike any in years and was planning for more options. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military policy.
The attack sparked tensions between locals and Hezbollah. Videos on social media after the rocket attack showed two vehicles, including a mobile rocket launcher, being stopped by residents of Shwaya village.
Some of the villagers could be heard saying: “Hezbollah is firing rockets from between homes so that Israel hits us back.”
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Israel quietly advances settlements with little US pushback
By JOSEPH KRAUSS
Yesterday
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is quietly advancing controversial settlement projects in and around Jerusalem without making major announcements that could anger the Biden administration. Critics say the latest moves, while incremental, pave the way for rapid growth once the political climate changes.
On Wednesday, as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met with U.S. officials in Washington, a local planning committee in Jerusalem approved the expropriation of public land for the especially controversial Givat Hamatos settlement, which would largely cut the city off from Palestinian communities in the southern West Bank.
The same committee advanced plans for the construction of 470 homes in the existing east Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Zeev. Authorities have scheduled a Dec. 6 hearing for another project in east Jerusalem to build 9,000 settler homes in the Atarot area, according to Ir Amim, an Israeli rights group that closely follows developments in the city.
A military body has meanwhile scheduled two meetings in the coming weeks to discuss a planned settlement of 3,400 homes on a barren hillside outside Jerusalem known as E1. Critics say it would largely bisect the occupied West Bank, making it impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. A two-state solution is still seen internationally as the only realistic way to resolve the century-old conflict.
“The fact that simultaneously all of these very controversial plans that have been longstanding international red lines have now been advancing ... is very indicative that the Israeli government intends to advance and ultimately approve these plans," said Amy Cohen of Ir Amim.
Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum downplayed the latest developments, noting that Givat Hamatos was approved years ago. “Nothing’s changed over the last few years,” she said. “We are a city and we’re providing for our residents."
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Report: NSO spyware found on 6 Palestinian activists' phones
By FRANK BAJAK and JOSEPH KRAUSS
1 hour ago
JERUSALEM (AP) — Security researchers disclosed Monday that spyware from the notorious Israeli hacker-for-hire company NSO Group was detected on the cellphones of six Palestinian human rights activists, half affiliated with groups that Israel’s defense minister controversially claimed were involved in terrorism.
The revelation marks the first known instance of Palestinian activists being targeted by the military-grade Pegasus spyware. Its use against journalists, rights activists and political dissidents from Mexico to Saudi Arabia has been documented since 2015.
A successful Pegasus infection surreptitiously gives intruders access to everything a person stores and does on their phone, including real-time communications.
It's not clear who placed the NSO spyware on the activists’ phones, said the researcher who first detected it, Mohammed al-Maskati of the nonprofit Frontline Defenders.
Shortly after the first two intrusions were identified in mid-October, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared six Palestinian civil society groups to be terrorist organizations. Ireland-based Frontline Defenders and at least two of the victims say they consider Israel the main suspect and believe the designation may have been timed to try to overshadow the hacks’ discovery, though they have provided no evidence to substantiate those assertions.
Israel has provided little evidence publicly to support the terrorism designation, which the Palestinian groups say aims to dry up their funding and muzzle opposition to Israeli military rule. Three of the hacked Palestinians work for the civil society groups. The others do not, and wish to remain anonymous, Frontline Defenders says.
The forensic findings, independently confirmed by security researchers from Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab in a joint technical report, come as NSO Group faces growing condemnation over the abuse of its spyware and Israel takes heat for lax oversight of its digital surveillance industry.
Last week, the Biden administration blacklisted the NSO Group and a lesser-known Israeli competitor, Candiru, barring them from U.S. technology.
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Report: Israel failed to probe shootings at Gaza protests
By JOSEPH KRAUSS
Today
JERUSALEM (AP) — Rights groups said Thursday that Israel failed to investigate shootings that killed more than 200 Palestinians and wounded thousands at violent protests along the Gaza frontier in recent years, strengthening the case for the International Criminal Court to intervene.
The Israeli military rejected the findings, saying the "mass riots" organized by Gaza's militant Hamas rulers were aimed at providing cover for cross-border attacks. The military said alleged abuses were thoroughly investigated, with soldiers held accountable.
Beginning in March 2018, Gaza activists organized weekly protests that were initially aimed at highlighting the plight of Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel, who make up three-fourths of Gaza's population of more than 2 million people.
But Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, soon co-opted the protests and used them to push for the easing of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the territory when it seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
Every week for around 18 months, thousands of Palestinians gathered at different points along the frontier, often after being bused there by Hamas. Groups of protesters burned tires, hurled stones and firebombs, and tried to breach the security fence.
Israeli snipers fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets and tear gas from sand berms on the other side in what Israel said was self-defense, to prevent thousands of Palestinians — including potentially armed Hamas operatives — from rushing into Israel.
Israeli fire killed at least 215 Palestinians, most of them unarmed, including 47 people under the age of 18 and two women, according to Gaza's Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights. Hundreds of others were seriously wounded in the demonstrations, which wound down in late 2019. Many were far from the border fence when they were shot.
An Israeli soldier was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2018 and several others were wounded.
A report released Thursday by the Israeli rights group B'Tselem and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said the military failed to investigate orders issued by senior commanders and took virtually no action against any soldiers.
As of April, out of 143 cases transferred to military prosecutors by an Israeli fact-finding mechanism, 95 were closed with no further action. Only one — the killing of a 14-year-old Palestinian — led to an indictment, with the remainder still pending, the report said. It cited figures obtained from the Israeli military through a freedom of information request.
The indicted soldier was convicted of “abuse of authority to the point of endangering life or health” in a plea bargain and sentenced to one month of community service, the report said.
That's after more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded over some 18 months of protests, including more than 8,000 hit by live fire. At least 155 required amputation, the report said. It said the military's fact-finding mechanism only reviewed 234 cases in which Palestinians were killed, including some fatalities unrelated to the demonstrations.
The Israeli military issued a statement saying it carried out the investigations in a “thorough and in-depth manner” and filed indictments in two incidents in which soldiers were convicted and sentenced to “imprisonment during military service, probation and demotion.”
It said other cases are still pending “due to the complexity of the events and the need for an in-depth examination.” It said “dozens of incidents have been handled” since B'Tselem obtained its figures, which the military said were “outdated.”
The International Criminal Court launched an investigation earlier this year into potential war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza since 2014, when the two sides fought their third of four wars since Hamas seized power.
Israel has rejected the investigation, saying the court is biased against it and that Israel's justice system is capable of conducting its own investigations that meet international standards. It says its security forces make every effort to avoid civilian casualties and investigate alleged abuses.
Israel is not a party to the ICC, but Israeli officials could be subject to arrest in other countries if it hands down warrants. Israel could potentially fend off the probe by proving it has launched credible investigations of its own.
B'Tselem and the PCHR say Israel has failed to meet those requirements.
Its investigations “consist entirely of the military investigating itself and have not examined the unlawful open-fire policy regulations handed down to security forces or the policies implemented during the protests,” they said.
“Instead, they focus exclusively on lower-ranking soldiers and on the question of whether they acted contrary to these illegal orders.”
Yuval Shany, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law, said Israel could be vulnerable to ICC action over its response to the protests, but that the bar is relatively low for a country to prove it has investigated itself.
“It’s certainly not about actually prosecuting anyone. It’s really about genuinely investigating the incidents,” he said. That's for prosecutors to determine, and it's unclear whether Israel will cooperate with the court to try to prove its case.
There's also the question of whether the prosecutors view Israel's response to the protests as a law enforcement action or as an armed conflict with Hamas.
Israel has said Hamas activists were among the protesters, justifying its open-fire regulations in the context of long-running hostilities with the group.
“In the context of an armed conflict, you have greater latitude in applying lethal force toward militants," Shany said. “If this is a law enforcement operation, then you have to basically use more restraint.”
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An Israeli leader criticized Jewish ‘settler violence.’ Now he has 24/7 protection after extremist threats.
By Amy Cheng December 28 at 3:39 AM EST Israeli Public Security Minister Omer Barlev said Monday that he will receive round-the-clock protection following threats of harm from extremist Israeli Jews. The news comes amid a sharp increase in attacks targeting Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, which Barlev had criticized in recent discussions with a visiting U.S. State Department official. His remarks drew the ire of right-wing politicians in the country, including members of the coalition government in which he serves. “Jews are stabbed and shot in the streets, because they are Jews, on your shift, and you dare to talk about settler violence?” Simcha Rothman, an ultraconservative Israeli lawmaker, tweeted in response to Barlev this month. Israeli authorities also arrested a man accused of threatening Barlev on Facebook by saying that he hoped to see the minister “lynched,” according to the Times of Israel newspaper. At least one other senior official has also reportedly received increased protection as the coalition government pushes ahead with changes that threaten privileges long enjoyed by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Barlev, a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, suggested that he had expected threats from “Arab criminals” that he had targeted. “But that is not the case,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am threatened by Israeli Jews.” At a recent party meeting, Barlev also accused the right-wing Yamina party, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, of turning him into “the enemy of all settlers, and one who doesn’t understand security and terrorism by Palestinians,” the Associated Press reported. The security chief’s criticism of “settler violence” is significant because both Barlev and his father have held important positions in the country’s defense establishment, said David Makovsky, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The announcement that Barlev needs regular protection shines “a spotlight on a growing phenomenon that can no longer be ignored as the actions of just a handful of unruly youths,” Makovsky added. Barlev and Yamina did not return requests for comment early Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Israeli government could not immediately be reached for comment. The West Bank has in recent months seen a spike in beatings, arson, vandalism and rock-throwing — most taking place where Palestinian farms and groves are next to Jewish settlements established on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war. The United Nations Security Council has called such settlements a violation of international law, and some leaders of Israel’s governing coalition have called for a crackdown on violence by settlers. [‘Hate crime’ attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians spike in the West Bank] Videos compiled by rights groups suggest that Israeli soldiers, who are tasked with providing security in these neighborhoods, do little to intervene in violent incidents. Some watchdogs also allege that Israel Defense Forces members have, in some cases, aided in such attacks. The IDF says such allegations are false. Last month, Commanders for Israel’s Security — a group of more than 300 retired Israeli military, security and intelligence officials — delivered a letter to members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, decrying settler violence against Palestinians as a threat to the rule of law and the country’s international standing. Bennett’s government has approved the construction of some 3,000 new homes in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The country has also designated six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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Opinion: Israel must choose: Withdraw from the occupied territories or grant Palestinians under its control full rights
Opinion by Mairav Zonszein January 06 at 1:50 PM EST Mairav Zonszein is a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. When Israel’s new president, Isaac Herzog, marked the first night of Hannukah in December by lighting candles in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, where some 850 Israeli settlers live under military protection among over 200,000 Palestinians, he offered yet another insulting reminder of Israel’s brutal occupation. Herzog talked about the need to denounce “all forms of hatred and violence” in a place where systemic violence against Palestinians is blatant. The hodgepodge Israeli coalition that ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure has tried to turn the page by practicing respectful diplomacy abroad. As foreign minister, centrist politician Yair Lapid has been trying to repair Israel’s relations with Democrats in the U.S. and with European Union governments, whom Netanyahu treated with disdain, in an effort to bolster Israel’s image as a liberal democracy that plays nice. The approach appeals to many Western officials who, understandably, given their experience with Netanyahu, are holding out hope for change. “We will not immediately declare that everyone who doesn’t agree with us is an antisemite and Israel-hater. This is not how you handle a country’s foreign relations,” Lapid said in July. But that same month, after Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would no longer be selling its ice cream in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, where 670,000 Israelis reside illegally, Lapid called the move “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.” Presenting a settlement boycott as a boycott of Israel erases the distinction between Israel’s internationally recognized 1948 borders and the land — and people — it has occupied since 1967. Though the Naftali Bennett-Lapid coalition claims it is the antidote to Netanyahu’s rule, it is continuing the same policies of settlement expansion, demolitions and threats of eviction, state repression of Palestinians and refusal to engage in even the semblance of a political process. The new government has also, if anything, doubled down in conflating Israel and the West Bank. Israel’s education minister recently upheld her predecessor’s decision to withhold the Israel Prize from math professor Oded Goldreich because he endorses a boycott of Ariel University, located in a large West Bank settlement. “I cannot award the Israel Prize for academic achievements, impressive as they are, [to someone] who calls for boycotting Israel,” she said, accusing him of boycotting “academic institutions in Israel,” even though Ariel is not in Israel. Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll cancelled scheduled meetings with Belgian officials after their government announced it would begin labeling products made in the settlements — not a boycott, just consumer transparency. Roll said the decision to label products “strengthens extremists, does not help promote peace in the region and shows Belgium as not contributing to regional stability.” The Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the move “anti-Israeli” and said “it is inconsistent with the Israeli government policy focused on improving the lives of Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian Authority, and with improving Israel’s relations with European countries.”
According to this logic, even under a prime minister who claims to “shrink” the conflict, a defense minister who seeks to strengthen the Palestinian economy and a foreign minister who supports a two-state solution, Israeli policy is keeping the West Bank, legitimizing settlements and keeping Palestinians under military rule while professing to be improving their lives.
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Nice. And to think PAC money is being used to defeat liberal Dems who desire a two state solution? Really nice.
JERUSALEM — The funeral of slain Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh began in chaos Friday, as Israeli police set off stun grenades and beat mourners with batons, after a group of them tried to carry her coffin on their shoulders rather than let it be loaded in a hearse.
Nice. And to think PAC money is being used to defeat liberal Dems who desire a two state solution? Really nice.
JERUSALEM — The funeral of slain Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh began in chaos Friday, as Israeli police set off stun grenades and beat mourners with batons, after a group of them tried to carry her coffin on their shoulders rather than let it be loaded in a hearse.
Independent probe points to Israeli fire in journalist death
By JOSEF FEDERMAN
Today
JERUSALEM (AP) — As Israel and the Palestinians wrangle over the investigation into the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, several independent groups have launched their own probes. One open-source research team said its initial findings lent support to Palestinian witnesses who said she was killed by Israeli fire.
The outcome of these investigations could help shape international opinion over who is responsible for Abu Akleh's death, particularly if an official Israeli military probe drags on. Israel and the Palestinians are locked in a war of narratives that already has put Israel on the defensive.
Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American and a 25-year veteran of the satellite channel, was killed last Wednesday while covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was a household name across the Arab world, known for documenting the hardship of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, now in its sixth decade.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said he had spoken to Abu Akleh's family to express condolences and respect for her work “as well as the need to have an immediate and credible investigation” into her death.
Palestinian officials and witnesses, including journalists who were with her, say she was killed by army fire. The military, after initially saying Palestinian gunmen might have been responsible, later backtracked and now says she may also have been hit by errant Israeli fire.
Israel has called for a joint investigation with the Palestinians, saying the bullet must be analyzed by ballistics experts to reach firm conclusions. Palestinian officials have refused, saying they don't trust Israel. Human rights groups says Israel has a poor record of investigating wrongdoing by its security forces.
After earlier saying they would accept an outside partner, the Palestinians said late Sunday that they would handle the investigation alone and deliver results very soon.
“We also refused to have an international investigation because we trust our capabilities as a security institution,” Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh announced. “We will not hand over any of the evidence to anyone because we know that these people are able to fasify the facts.” He stood with Abu Akleh's brother, Anton, and Al Jazeera's local bureau chief, Walid Al-Omari.
With the two sides at loggerheads over the Abu Akleh probe, several research and human rights groups have launched their own investigations.
Over the weekend, Bellingcat, a Dutch-based international consortium of researchers, published an analysis of video and audio evidence gathered on social media. The material came from both Palestinian and Israeli military sources, and the analysis looked at such factors as time stamps, the locations of the videos, shadows and a forensic audio analysis of gunshots.
The group found that while gunmen and Israeli soldiers were both in the area, the evidence supported witness accounts that Israeli fire killed Abu Akleh.
“Based on what we were able to review, the IDF (Israeli soldiers) were in the closest position and had the clearest line of sight to Abu Akleh,” said Giancarlo Fiorella, the lead researcher of the analysis.
Bellingcat is among a growing number of firms that use “open source” information, such as social media videos, security camera recordings and satellite imagery, to reconstruct events.
Fiorella acknowledged that the analysis cannot be 100% certain without such evidence as the bullet, weapons used by the army and GPS locations of Israeli forces. But he said the emergence of additional evidence typically bolsters preliminary conclusions and almost never overturns them.
“This is what we do when we don’t have access to those things,” he said.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said it too is conducting its own analysis. The group last week played a key role in the military’s backtracking from its initial claims that Palestinian gunmen appeared to be responsible for her death.
The Israeli claim was based on a social media video in which a Palestinian gunman fires into a Jenin alleyway, and then other militants come running to claim they have shot a soldier. The army said that because no soldiers were hurt that day, the gunmen might have been referring to Abu Akleh, who was wearing a protective helmet and flak jacket.
A B’Tselem researcher went to the area and took a video showing that the Palestinian gunmen were some 300 meters (yards) away from where Abu Akleh was shot, separated by a series of walls and alleyways.
Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the group, said B’Tselem has begun gathering testimonies from witnesses and may attempt to reconstruct the shooting with videos from the scene. But she said at this point, it has not been able to come to a conclusion about who was behind the shooting.
Sadot said any bullet would need to be matched to the barrel of the gun. The Palestinians have refused to release the bullet, and it is unclear whether the military has confiscated the weapons used that day.
“The bullet on its own can’t say a lot” because it could have been fired by either side, she said. “What can be done is to match a bullet to the barrel,” she said.
The Israeli military did not respond to interview requests to discuss the status of its probe.
Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesman and expert on military affairs, said reconstructing a gunfight in densely populated urban terrain is “very complex” and said forensic evidence, such as the bullet, is crucial to reach firm conclusions. He accused the Palestinian Authority of refusing to cooperate for propaganda purposes.
“Without the bullet, any investigation will only be able to reach partial and questionable conclusions,” Conricus said. “One might assume that the strategy of the Palestinian Authority is exactly that: to deny Israel the ability to clear its name, while leveraging global sympathy for the Palestinian cause.”
Meanwhile, Israeli police over the weekend launched an investigation into the conduct of the officers who attacked the mourners at Abu Akleh's funeral, causing the pallbearers to nearly drop her coffin.
Newspapers on Sunday were filled with criticism of the police and what was portrayed as a public relations debacle.
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AL-MARKAZ
VILLAGE, West Bank — The Najjar family knew what to expect on the
morning of May 11 when a neighbor called: “The bulldozer is coming.” For
the second time in five months, the Israeli military had come to knock
down their house.
But
this time there was reason to fear that the house would be gone for
good. After decades of demolition, rebuilding and a more than 20-year
legal battle, Israel’s highest court this month gave the military
permission to permanently evict more than 1,000 Palestinians here and
repurpose the land for an army firing range.
Less
than a week after the high court ruling, the Najjars’ house was
demolished, marking the start of what activists say will probably be the
biggest mass expulsion of Palestiniansin the occupied West Bank
since the 1967 war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or
were driven from territories captured by Israel.
The
court was unswayed by historical documents presented by advocates for
the Palestinians, showing what they said was evidence that the proposal
to establish a firing range, decades ago, was meant to prevent
Palestinians from claiming the land.
“We
had 30 minutes to get out what we could,” said Yusara al-Najjar, who
was born in a hand-hewn cave on this same slope in the Negev desert 60
years ago. She looked over the pile of broken blocks and twisted metal
that had been her family home and wiped her hands with a slap. “It took
no time and our house was gone, again.”
The
demolitions have sparked expressions of concern from Washington ahead
of a planned June visit to Israel by President Biden, coming at a time
of mounting instability in Israel’s coalition government
and the recent approval of more than 4,200 new housing units in Israeli
settlements in the West Bank. U.S. State Department spokesman Ned
Price, responding to a question about the high court ruling, beseeched
both Israelis and Palestinians to avoid steps that raise tensions. “This
certainly includes evictions,” he said.
The
European Union urged Israel to halt the demolitions. A United Nations
human rights panel warned that the “forcible transfer” of residents
would amount to “a serious breach of international and humanitarian and
human rights laws.”
The
Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the demolitions were in
accordance with the high court’s years-long review and its unanimous
ruling on behalf of the military.
“The
Supreme Court fully accepted the State Of Israel’s position, and ruled
that the petitioners were not permanent residents of the area,” the
statement said. “The court also noted that the petitioners rejected any
attempted compromise offered to them.”
The
tug of war for these dry rolling hills south of the biblical city of
Hebron began in the 1980s, when Israeli officials laid claim to several
areas of the West Bank for the stated reason of creating military
training grounds.
This
region of 8,000 to 14,000 acres — known in Arabic as Masafer Yatta and
in English as the South Hebron Hills — was designated as Firing Zone
918.
“The
vital importance of this firing zone to the Israel Defense Forces stems
from the unique topographical character of the area, which allows for
training methods specific to both small and large frameworks, from a
squad to a battalion,” the military said in court documents reported by
the Times of Israel.
But
human rights activists, both Palestinian and Israeli, contend that the
real purpose of many of the firing zones has been to clear away Arab
residents and strengthen Israel’s grip on more occupied Palestinian
territory. Often, the designation has made way for expanding Israeli
settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international
community.
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These sixteen Palestinian children were looking forward to a summer filled with joy. They planned to play football, head to the beach and attend summer camp.
But over the course of three horrific days, Israeli forces unleashed a wave of air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, killing 45 people, including the 16 children, and wounding at least 360 others.
"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip for Palestinian children and their families and they increasingly bear the brunt of Israel’s repeated military offensives," Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the accountability programme director at the NGO Defence for Children International - Palestine (DCIP), said in a statement.
While a ceasefire came into effect on Sunday following an agreement brokered by Egypt, Palestinians have lamented the devastating bombing campaign as more details emerge of those who died.
The Israeli army has claimed that some of the civilian casualties were killed by misfired rockets, without providing independently-verified evidence. The Palestinian health ministry says all of the people killed, including the 16 children, died as a result of Israeli air strikes.
Some families have been willing to share their stories, while others have been in a state of mourning and have asked for privacy.
Here are the names and faces of the children that died:
Alaa Abdullah Qaddoum, aged five
Alaa Abdullah Qaddoum, five, was killed on 5 August 2022 by an Israeli air strike in the Shujaiya neighbourhood in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Alaa Abdullah Qaddoum was among the first casualties on Friday following Israel's decision to launch air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip.
She died on 5 August while she was playing with friends outside her home in the Shujaiya neighbourhood in the northern Gaza Strip.
Her seven-year-old brother and father were wounded in the strike.
"Alaa was an innocent five-year-old playing in the street with her brothers and cousins. What did she do to be killed?" her cousin, Abu Diab Qaddoum, told Middle East Eye.
Momen Muhammed Ahmed al-Nairab, aged five
Momen Muhammed ِAhmed al-Nairab, five, was killed on 6 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Momen Muhammed ِAhmed al-Nairab, five, was killed in a suspected Israeli air strike on Saturday on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
The camp is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and houses more than 114,000 people.
Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, aged nine
Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, nine, was killed on 6 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
According to documentation collected by Defence for Children International, Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, nine, was among the four children in the blast on the Jabalia refugee camp on Saturday.
Israel says it wasn't behind the raid, but Palestinian sources say it could not have come from anywhere else.
Ahmed Muhammed al-Nairab, aged 11
Ahmed Muhammed al-Nairab, 11, was killed on 6 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Ahmed Muhammed al-Nairab, 11, was among the four children killed on Saturday when suspected Israeli warplanes struck the Jabalia refugee camp.
Ahmed Walid Ahmed al-Farram, aged 16
Ahmed Walid Ahmed al-Farram, 16, was killed on 6 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Ahmed Walid Ahmed al-Farram, 16, was also killed on Saturday when suspected Israeli warplanes struck the Jabalia refugee camp.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), the camp suffers from high unemployment, regular electricity cuts and a contaminated water supply.
Muhammed Iyad Muhammed Hassouna, aged 14
Muhammed Iyad Muhammed Hassouna, 14, was killed on 6 August 2022 by an Israeli air strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Muhammed Iyad Muhammed Hassouna, 14, was killed when an Israeli air strike targeted his home in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Adeeb Ahmad, an eyewitness to the attack, told MEE that at least eight people were killed in the raid.
"The house was hit without any prior notice," Ahmad said. "Homes are overcrowded here, housing seven to eight people each, and they are so close to each other, so when one house is hit several houses around it are impacted."
Fatma Aaed Abdulfattah Ubaid, aged 15
Fatma Aaed Abdulfattah Ubaid, 15, was killed on 7 August 2022 by an Israeli air strike in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip (Social media)
Fatma Aaed Abdulfattah Ubaid, 15, was among nine children killed in the space of 30 minutes, shortly before the ceasefire was announced on Sunday.
Ubaid was killed in Beit Hanoun on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip.
Ahmed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged nine
Muhammed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged 12
Dalia Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged 13
Siblings Muhammed (L), Ahmed (C) and Dalia (R) were killed on 7 August 2022 by an Israeli air strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip (Social media)
An Israeli air strike on the Bureij refugee camp on Sunday killed Yasser al-Nabahin and his three children, Muhammed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, 13 (left); Ahmed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, nine (centre); and their sister, Dalia Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, 13 (right).
Muhammed Salah Nijm, aged 16
Muhammed Salah Nijm, 16, was killed on 7 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza (Social media)
A suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza on Sunday killed five boys as they sat near a grave.
Muhammed Salah Nijm, 16, was among those killed.
Hamed Haidar Hamed Nijm, aged 16
Hamed Haidar Hamed Nijm, 16, was killed on 7 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza (Social media)
Hamed Haidar Hamed Nijm, 16, was among those killed in Sunday's raid on the graveyard. Eyewitness Mohammad Sami told MEE that four of the boys were cousins and the fifth was their friend.
"They come to sit here every day," Sami said. "This is a safe area."
Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm, aged four
Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm, four, was killed on 7 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza (Social media)
Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm was the youngest child to be killed during Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip. He was only four years old.
Jamil Ihab Nijm, aged 13
Jamil Ihab Nijm, 13, was killed on 7 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza (Social media)
Jamil Ihab Nijm, 13, was the fourth child from the Nijm family to be killed in Sunday's suspected air strike.
Nazmi Fayez Abdulhadi Abukarsh, aged 16
Nazmi Fayez Abdulhadi Abukarsh, 16, was killed on 7 August 2022 by a suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza (Social media)
Nazmi Fayez AbdulhadiAbukarsh, 16, a friend of the Nijm boys, was killed in the suspected air strike on the graveyard.
Hanin Walid Muhammed Abuqaida, aged 10
Hanin Walid Muhammed Abuqaida, 10, succumbed to wounds on 8 August 2022 sustained from a suspected Israeli air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza (Social media)
Hanin Walid Muhammed Abuqaida, 10, was injured in an air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp on Sunday but succumbed to her wounds on Monday.
US President Joe Biden has disputed charges that Israel is an “apartheid” nation, instead calling it a “democracy” and a “friend” while touting billions in additional military support.
Speaking to Israel’s N12 News just before embarking on a trip to the Middle East on Wednesday, Biden was asked about “voices in the Democratic Party” which consider Israel an apartheid state and urge for an end to unconditional US aid.
“There are a few of them. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend, and I think I make no apology,” he said in response, adding that his administration has devoted around $5 billion to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Though some Democrats, such as progressive lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), have repeatedly slammed Israeli policies toward the Palestinians as an example of apartheid, Biden insisted there is “no possibility” of Democrats or Republicans ever “walking away from Israel.”
In May, Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, penned a statement accusing the Israeli government of “ethnic cleansing” against Arabs, while fellow members of the left-leaning ‘Squad’ argued that “apartheid states aren’t democracies” around the same time, apparently referring to Israel.
Just two months prior, the UN’s human rights body issued a report which concluded that Israel’s system “ensures the supremacy of one group over, and to the detriment of, the other,” particularly in the occupied West Bank, arguing that it meets the legal definition for apartheid. The report went on to state that Palestinians have been forced to “live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule,” echoing previous findings by rights groups such as Amnesty International and B’Tselem.
Not long after his interview with N12, Biden took off for his first presidential trip to the Middle East, making his initial stop in Israel. After high-level meetings with Israeli officials, he will go to the West Bank to meet the Palestinian leadership, with security expected to be the focus of the talks. From there Biden will travel to Saudi Arabia for a regional summit, where he will meet with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.
During an arrival ceremony in Tel Aviv, Israel on Wednesday, Biden declared that ties between Americans and Israelis are “bone deep,” saying the bilateral relationship is “deeper and stronger” than it has ever been.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is set to swear in a new government on Sunday that will send Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into the opposition after a record 12 years in office and a political crisis that sparked four elections in two years.
Naftali Bennett, the head of a small ultranationalist party, will take over as prime minister. But if he wants to keep the job, he will have to maintain an unwieldy coalition of parties from the political right, left and center.
The eight parties, including a small Arab faction that is making history by sitting in the ruling coalition, are united in their opposition to Netanyahu and new elections but agree on little else. They are likely to pursue a modest agenda that seeks to reduce tensions with the Palestinians and maintain good relations with the U.S. without launching any major initiatives.
Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, remains the head of the largest party in parliament and is expected to vigorously oppose the new government. If just one faction bolts, it could lose its majority and would be at risk of collapse, giving him an opening to return to power.
The country's deep divisions were on vivid display as Bennett addressed parliament ahead of the vote. He was repeatedly interrupted and loudly heckled by supporters of Netanyahu, several of whom were escorted out of the chamber.
Bennett's speech mostly dwelled on domestic issues, but he expressed opposition to U.S. efforts to revive Iran's nuclear deal with world powers.
“Israel will not allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” Bennett said, vowing to maintain Netanyahu's confrontational policy. “Israel will not be a party to the agreement and will continue to preserve full freedom of action.”
Bennett nevertheless thanked President Joe Biden and the U.S. for its decades of support for Israel.
Netanyahu, speaking after him, vowed to return to power. He predicted the incoming government would be weak on Iran and give in to U.S. demands to make concessions to the Palestinians.
“If it is destined for us to be in the opposition, we will do it with our backs straight until we topple this dangerous government and return to lead the country in our way,” he said.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the new government will likely be more stable than it appears.
“Even though it has a very narrow majority, it will be very difficult to topple and replace because the opposition is not cohesive," he said. Each party in the coalition will want to prove that it can deliver, and for that they need “time and achievements."
Still, Netanyahu "will continue to cast a shadow,” Plesner said. He expects the incoming opposition leader to exploit events and propose legislation that right-wing coalition members would like to support but can't — all in order to embarrass and undermine them.
The new government is meanwhile promising a return to normalcy after a tumultuous two years that saw four elections, an 11-day Gaza war last month and a coronavirus outbreak that devastated the economy before it was largely brought under control by a successful vaccination campaign.
The driving force behind the coalition is Yair Lapid, a political centrist who will become prime minister in two years, if the government lasts that long.
He called off a planned speech to parliament, instead saying he was ashamed that his 86-year-old mother had to witness the raucous behavior of his opponents. In a brief speech, he asked for "forgiveness from my mother.”
“I wanted her to be proud of the democratic process in Israel. Instead she, along with every citizen of Israel, is ashamed of you and remembers clearly why it’s time to replace you,” he said.
The new government is expected to win a narrow majority in the 120-member assembly, after which it will be sworn in. The government plans to hold its first official meeting later this evening.
It's unclear if Netanyahu will move out of the official residence. He has lashed out at the new government in apocalyptic terms and accused Bennett of defrauding voters by running as a right-wing stalwart and then partnering with the left.
Netanyahu's supporters have held angry protests outside the homes of rival lawmakers, who say they have received death threats naming their family members. Israel's Shin Bet internal security service issued a rare public warning about the incitement earlier this month, saying it could lead to violence.
Netanyahu has condemned the incitement while noting that he has also been a target.
His place in Israeli history is secure, having served as prime minister for a total of 15 years — more than any other, including the country's founder, David Ben-Gurion.
Netanyahu began his long rule by defying the Obama administration, refusing to freeze settlement construction as it tried unsuccessfully to revive the peace process. Relations with Israel's closest ally grew even rockier when Netanyahu vigorously campaigned against President Barack Obama's emerging nuclear deal with Iran, even denouncing it in an address to the U.S. Congress.
But he suffered few if any consequences from those clashes and was richly rewarded by the Trump administration, which recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital, helped broker normalization agreements with four Arab states and withdrew the U.S. from the Iran deal.
Netanyahu has portrayed himself as a world-class statesman, boasting of his close ties with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has also cultivated ties with Arab and African countries that long shunned Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians.
But he has gotten a far chillier reception from the Biden administration and is widely seen as having undermined the long tradition of bipartisan support for Israel in the United States.
His reputation as a political magician has also faded at home, where he has become a deeply polarizing figure. Critics say he has long pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy that aggravated rifts in Israeli society between Jews and Arabs and between his close ultra-Orthodox allies and secular Jews.
In November 2019, he was indicted for fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes. He refused calls to step down, instead lashing out at the media, judiciary and law enforcement, going so far as to accuse his political opponents of orchestrating an attempted coup. Last year, protesters began holding weekly rallies across the country calling on him to resign.
Netanyahu remains popular among the hard-line nationalists who dominate Israeli politics, but he could soon face a leadership challenge from within his own party. A less polarizing Likud leader would stand a good chance of assembling a coalition that is both farther to the right and more stable than the government that is set to be sworn in.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli airstrikes hit militant sites in the Gaza Strip early Wednesday, and Palestinians responded by sending a series of fire-carrying balloons back across the border for a second straight day — further testing the fragile cease-fire that ended last month’s war between Israel and Hamas.
The latest round of violence was prompted by a parade of Israeli ultranationalists through contested east Jerusalem on Tuesday. Palestinians saw the march as a provocation and sent balloons into southern Israel, causing several blazes in parched farmland. Israel then carried out the airstrikes — the first such raids since the May 21 cease-fire ended 11 days of fighting — and more balloons followed.
The airstrikes targeted facilities used by Hamas militants for meetings to plan attacks, the army said. There were no reports of injuries.
“The Hamas terror organization is responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip, and will bear the consequences for its actions,” the army said. It added that it was prepared for any scenario, “including a resumption of hostilities.”
By Wednesday afternoon, masked Palestinians sent a number of balloons, laden with fuses and flaming rags, into Israel. Several fires were reported.
The unrest provided the first test of the cease-fire at a time when Egyptian mediators have been working to reach a longer-term agreement. It comes as tensions have risen again in Jerusalem, as they did before the recent war, leading Gaza's Hamas rulers to fire a barrage of rockets at the holy city on May 10. The fighting claimed more than 250 Palestinian lives and killed 13 people in Israel.
An Egyptian security official said his government has been in “direct and around-the-clock” contacts with Israeli officials and the Gaza rulers to keep the cease-fire and to urge them to refrain from provocative acts.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing behind-the-scenes diplomacy, said the U.S. administration has also been in touch with Israel as part of the efforts.
The two sides seem to agree "not to escalate to the tipping point,” he said. “And we do every effort to prevent this.”
The flare-up also has created a test for Israel’s new government, which took office early this week. The diverse coalition includes several hard-line parties as well as dovish and centrist parties, along with the first Arab faction ever to be part of an Israeli government.
Keeping the delicate coalition intact will be a difficult task for the new prime minister, Naftali Bennett.
In Tuesday’s parade, hundreds of Israeli ultranationalists, some chanting “Death to Arabs,” marched in east Jerusalem in a show of force. Hamas called on Palestinians to “resist” the parade, which was meant to celebrate Israel’s capture of east Jerusalem in 1967. Palestinians consider it a provocation.
In a scathing condemnation on Twitter, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who heads the centrist Yesh Atid Party, said those shouting racist slogans were “a disgrace to the Israeli people.”
Bennett, who will hand over the prime minister’s job to Lapid after two years, is a hard-line Israeli nationalist who has promised a pragmatic approach as he presides over a delicate, diverse coalition government.
Though there were concerns the march would raise tensions, canceling it would have opened Bennett and other right-wing members of the coalition to intense criticism from those who would view it as a capitulation to Hamas.
Mansour Abbas, whose Raam party is the first Arab faction to join an Israeli coalition, said the march was “an attempt to set the region on fire for political aims,” with the intention of undermining the new government.
Abbas said the police and public security minister should have canceled the event.
While the parade provided the immediate impetus for the balloons, Hamas is also angry because Israel has tightened its blockade of the territory since the cease-fire. The restrictions include a ban on imports of fuel for Gaza’s power plant and raw materials.
Israel imposed the blockade after Hamas, a militant group that seeks Israel’s destruction, seized control of Gaza from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority in 2007. Israel and Hamas have fought four wars and numerous skirmishes since then. Israel says the blockade, enforced with Egypt, is needed to prevent Hamas from importing and developing weapons.
One of the masked activists firing the balloons said they launched hundreds of them Tuesday and will continue sending them in response to what he described as Israeli provocations in east Jerusalem.
After capturing east Jerusalem in 1967, Israel annexed the area in a move not recognized by most of the international community. It considers the entire city its capital, while the Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. The competing claims over east Jerusalem, home to Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, lie at the heart of the conflict and have sparked many rounds of violence.
___
Associated Press journalists Samy Magdy and Fares Akram in Cairo, and Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Their countries at crossroads, the new leaders of the United States and Israel have inherited a relationship that is at once imperiled by increasingly partisan domestic political considerations and deeply bound in history and an engrained recognition that they need each other.
How President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett manage that relationship will shape the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.
They are ushering in an era no longer defined by the powerful personality of long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu, who repeatedly defied the Obama administration and then reaped the rewards of a warm relationship with President Donald Trump.
Bennett’s government says it wants to repair relations with the Democrats and restore bipartisan support in the U.S. for Israel. Biden, meanwhile, is pursuing a more balanced approach on the Palestinian conflict and Iran.
The relationship is critical to both countries. Israel has long regarded the United States as its closest ally and guarantor of its security and international standing while the U.S. counts on Israel’s military and intelligence prowess in a turbulent Middle East.
But both Biden and Bennett are also restrained by domestic politics.
Bennett leads an uncertain coalition of eight parties from across Israel’s political spectrum whose main point of convergence was on removing Netanyahu from power after 12 years. Biden is struggling to bridge a divide in his party where near-uniform support for Israel has eroded and a progressive wing wants the U.S. to do more to end Israel’s half-century occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state.
Shortly after taking office, the new Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, recognized the challenges Israel faces in Washington.
“We find ourselves with a Democratic White House, Senate and House and they are angry,” Lapid said upon taking the helm at Israel’s foreign ministry a week ago. “We need to change the way we work with them.”
A key test will be on Iran. Biden has sought to return to the Iran nuclear deal that President Barack Obama saw as a signature foreign policy achievement. Trump withdrew from the pact to cheers from pro-Israel U.S. lawmakers and Israel. Though Iran has not yet accepted Biden’s offer for direct negotiations, indirect discussions on the nuclear deal are now in a sixth round in Vienna.
The new Israeli government remains staunchly opposed to Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal. But it maintains it will discuss the issue behind closed doors rather than staging public confrontations, such as Netanyahu’s controversial address slamming the agreement to the U.S. Congress in 2015.
In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday, Lapid said the two agreed on a “no surprises” policy and to keep lines of communication open.
Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, says that rather than trying to scuttle any agreement with Iran, the new government will press the U.S. administration to keep some sanctions on Iran in place and seek “strategic compensation” for Israel as part of any return to the deal.
Resolving differences over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be another significant challenge for the two leaders.
Biden has already moved to reverse Netanyahu-backed Trump policies that alienated the Palestinians and caused a near total rupture in official U.S.-Palestinian contacts. Almost immediately after taking office, Biden restored Trump-slashed U.S. assistance to the Palestinians, which in just four months totals more than $300 million. He announced his administration’s intent to re-open the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, closed by Trump, that handled relations with the Palestinians. And, administration officials have spoken of the imperative that Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal measures of security and prosperity.
Yet, neither Biden nor Blinken has signaled any move to alter Trump’s most significant pro-Israel steps. Those include his abandonment of longstanding U.S. policy that settlements are illegitimate under international law, his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, territory seized from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The administration also hopes to expand Arab-Israeli normalization agreements that the Trump administration forged in its final months in office.
In a call on Bennett's first day in office, Biden affirmed his “steadfast support for the U.S.-Israel relationship" and “unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” He pledged to work together on all security matters, including Iran.
Biden's support for Israel’s heavy airstrikes during last month's war with Gaza's militant Hamas rulers, who fired thousands of rockets at Israel, angered progressive Democrats in Congress. With newfound strength in numbers, they are demanding that the administration do more to support the Palestinians and that conditions be placed on the massive amount of military aid the U.S. provides Israel.
While well-established Democratic lawmakers remain unstintingly supportive of Israel and its absolute right to defend itself, the growing number of progressive voices in their caucus have turned the issue into a political hot potato. The change in Israel's government is unlikely to ease their calls for action as Israeli-Palestinian violence has continued in recent days.
Yet, the Biden administration has already urged the new Israeli government to ease tensions with the Palestinians. In two phone conversations with Lapid over the last week, Blinken has spoken of “the need to improve Israeli-Palestinian relations in practical ways” and pledged to deepen Arab-Israeli ties.
It's not clear that the new government will be responsive.
Centrist members like Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz clearly want to adopt a more cooperative approach with the Biden administration, while Bennett and his right-wing partners face pressure from their base to maintain Netanyahu’s hardline approach, not only on Iran but on the conflict with the Palestinians.
The former prime minister, already eyeing a return to office, has branded Bennett as weak and inexperienced, and will probably pounce on any perceived capitulations.
The Israeli government already faces tough decisions, including whether to evacuate an unauthorized settlement outpost established last month and whether to intervene in the legal process through which settler organizations are trying to evict dozens of Palestinian families from their homes in east Jerusalem.
The Biden administration is pressing Israel to refrain from any unilateral steps — such as settlement expansion or evictions — that could hinder the eventual revival of the peace process, which has been moribund for more than a decade. But Washington has yet to issue public condemnations of settlement activity beyond general calls for both sides to refrain from unilateral steps that could inflame tensions or harm prospects for an eventual peace deal.
Bennett is a strong supporter of the settlements and is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but he is also seen by many as a pragmatist. He may be able to turn his weakness into a strength, arguing that any major concession — to the Palestinians or the settlers — risks bringing down the government and returning Netanyahu to power.
“The forces that brought this coalition to power are strong enough in my judgment to sustain the pressure from the right and probably also American pressure to make a major change in the policies toward the Palestinians,” Gilboa said.
___
Krauss reported from Jerusalem.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett opened his first Cabinet meeting on Sunday by slamming Iran's newly-elected president and calling on world powers to “wake up” to the perils of returning to a nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Later in the day, Bennett warned Gaza's militant Hamas rulers that Israel would not tolerate even minor attacks from the territory in the wake of last month's 11-day war, saying “our patience is running out.”
Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi, was elected Saturday with 62% of the vote amid historically low turnout. He is sanctioned by the U.S. in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Raisi has not commented specifically on the event.
At the Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Bennett said Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had chosen the “hangman of Tehran” to be the country's next president, a man "infamous among Iranians and across the world for leading the death committees that executed thousands of innocent Iranian citizens throughout the years.”
Raisi's ascendancy comes at a sensitive time for the region, as Iran and world powers ramp up efforts to resurrect Tehran’s tattered 2015 nuclear deal, which granted Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
For weeks, Iranian and American diplomats have been negotiating a return to the accord in Vienna through European intermediaries. Talks resumed Sunday, the first round since the election that put hard-liners firmly in control across Iran’s government.
Israel was staunchly opposed to the landmark nuclear deal and welcomed then-President Donald Trump's decision to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from it. Since then, the agreement has unraveled, with Iran abandoning all its limitations on enrichment after the Trump administration restored crippling economic sanctions. Tehran is currently enriching uranium at its highest levels ever, though still short of weapons-grade levels.
Although the White House has yet to weigh in on Iran's election, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the outcome was unlikely to affect nuclear negotiations because Iran's supreme leader wants the deal restored.
“The person who makes the decision about whether Iran will go back into the Iran nuclear deal, will assume its nuclear obligations under international law, is not the president of Iran, it is the supreme leader of Iran, and that person did not change from before the election,” Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Bennett said Raisi's election was “the last chance for the world powers to wake up before returning to the nuclear agreement and to understand who they’re doing business with. These guys are murderers, mass murderers."
Israel, which is believed to have its own undeclared nuclear arsenal, has long opposed arch-enemy Iran's nuclear program and has vowed to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes.
Earlier this month, Israel's outgoing Mossad intelligence chief signaled that Israel was behind a string of recent attacks targeting the country’s nuclear program.
Bennett heads a broad coalition of parties ranging from hard-line Jewish nationalists to liberal factions and a small Islamist party. His government was sworn in last week, sending Benjamin Netanyahu to the opposition after a record 12 years as prime minister.
Later on Sunday, at a memorial ceremony for Israelis killed in the 2014 Gaza war, Bennett warned Hamas that Israel “will not tolerate violence, we will not tolerate a drizzle.”
He appeared to be referring to incendiary balloons launched from Gaza in recent days that have set fields ablaze inside Israel. Last week, Israel launched airstrikes on two occasions in response to the balloons sent by activists mobilized by Hamas.
Last month's Gaza war was halted by an informal cease-fire. Egyptian mediators have met with Israeli and Hamas officials in recent weeks to try and shore it up, but there has been no apparent progress on Hamas' main demand, the lifting of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the territory when it seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
Israel says the blockade is needed to keep Hamas from importing military resources, while the Palestinians and human rights groups view it as collective punishment of the territory's more than 2 million Palestinian residents.
___
Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington, Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinians and Jewish settlers hurled stones, chairs and fireworks at each other overnight in a tense Jerusalem neighborhood where settler groups are trying to evict several Palestinian families, officials said Tuesday.
The threatened evictions fueled protests and clashes in the runup to last month's 11-day Gaza war and pose a test for Israel's new governing coalition, which includes three pro-settler parties but is hoping to sideline the Palestinian issue to avoid internal divisions.
Israeli police and border officials said they arrested four suspects in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. It was unclear who started the brawl. The officials said someone launched fireworks at police forces and residents’ houses and that “several Molotov cocktails were thrown and stones were thrown.” One woman was reportedly injured when she was hit in the back by a stone, police said.
The Red Crescent emergency service said its crews treated 20 Palestinians, including 16 suffering from pepper spray and tear gas and others wounded by rubber-coated bullets. Two other people were wounded, including an elderly man who was hit in the head, it said.
The Red Crescent said settlers threw stones at one of its ambulances and Israeli forces sprayed skunk water on a second ambulance belonging to the service.
The eruption of violence is the latest friction in Sheikh Jarrah, where weeks of unrest captured international attention ahead of the 11-day Israel-Hamas war last month. The cease-fire took effect on May 21, but the long-running campaign by Jewish settlers to evict dozens of Palestinian families continues.
And so the cycle of tension endures, in a stark early test for Israel's new coalition government, which is just over a week old.
At the helm under a rotation agreement is Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Yamina party. In two years, he'll be replaced by Yair Lapid, leader of centrist Yesh Atid. And leading the opposition is Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, ousted from the premiership after holding the post for 12 years.
An intervention by Israel’s attorney general at the height of the unrest has put the most imminent evictions on hold. But rights groups say evictions could still proceed in the coming months as international attention wanes, potentially igniting another round of bloodshed.
The settlers have been waging a decades-long campaign to evict the families from densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods in the so-called Holy Basin just outside the walls of the Old City, in one of the most sensitive parts of east Jerusalem.
Israel captured east Jerusalem, home to holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims, in the 1967 war and annexed it in a move not recognized internationally. Israel views the entire city as its capital, while the Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
The settlers say the homes are built on land that was owned by Jews prior to the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim such property, a right denied to Palestinians who lost lands and homes in the same conflict.
___
Kellman reported from Tel Aviv, Israel.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's parliament is set to vote Monday on whether to renew a temporary law first enacted in 2003 that bars Arab citizens of Israel from extending citizenship or even residency to spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Critics, including many left-wing and Arab lawmakers, say it's a racist measure aimed at restricting the growth of Israel's Arab minority, while supporters say it's needed for security purposes and to preserve Israel's Jewish character.
The law creates an array of difficulties for Palestinian families that span the war-drawn and largely invisible frontiers separating Israel from east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, territories it seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a future state.
“You want your security, it’s no problem, you can check each case by itself,” said Taiseer Khatib. His wife of more than 15 years, from the West Bank city of Jenin, must regularly apply for permits to live with him and their three children in Israel.
“There’s no need for this collective punishment just because you are Palestinian," he said.
Israel's dominant right-wing parties strongly support the law, and it has been renewed every year since being enacted. But Israel's new government includes opponents of the measure, and the right-wing opposition led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — aiming to embarrass the government — has warned it won't provide the votes needed to renew the law.
Dozens of families held a demonstration outside the Knesset, Israel's parliament, ahead of the vote, which is expected late Monday.
“We want stability in this country, like anyone else,” said Maryam Abu Arar, from the West Bank town of Bethlehem, who requires a permit to live with her husband and four children in Israel. “We want to live in a democratic country, with peace and security for us as well.”
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law was enacted as a temporary measure in 2003, at the height of the second intifada, or uprising, when Palestinians launched scores of deadly attacks inside Israel. Proponents said Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza were susceptible to recruitment by armed groups and that security vetting alone was insufficient.
The law has been continually renewed even after the uprising wound down in 2005 and the number of attacks plummeted. Today, Israel allows more than 100,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank to enter on a regular basis.
“It was passed in the middle of the intifada, and now we are in a very different period in time," said Yuval Shany, a legal expert at the Israel Democracy Institute. Not only are attacks far rarer, but Israel has vastly improved its technological abilities to monitor Palestinians who enter, he said. “I don’t think the security argument is very strong at this point in time.”
Because of the law, Arab citizens have few if any avenues for bringing spouses from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. The policy affects thousands of families.
Male spouses over the age of 35 and female spouses over the age of 25, as well as some humanitarian cases, can apply for the equivalent of a tourist permit, which must be regularly renewed. The holders of such permits are ineligible for driver's licenses, public health insurance and most forms of employment. Palestinian spouses from Gaza have been completely banned since the militant Hamas group seized power there in 2007.
The law does not apply to the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank, who have full Israeli citizenship. Under Israel's Law of Return, Jews who come to Israel from anywhere in the world are eligible for citizenship.
Israel's Arab minority, which makes up 20% of the population, has close familial ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and largely identifies with their cause. Arab citizens view the law as one of several forms of discrimination they face in a country that legally defines itself as a Jewish nation-state.
“This law sees every Palestinian as an enemy and as a threat, just because of his ethnic and national affiliation," said Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, an Arab rights group that has challenged the law in court. "The political message is very racist and very dangerous.”
Palestinians who are unable to get permits but try to live with their spouses inside Israel are at risk of deportation. Couples that move to the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation. If their children are born in the West Bank, they would be subject to the same law preventing spouses from entering Israel, though there is an exception for minors.
The citizenship law also applies to Jewish Israelis who marry Palestinians from the territories, but such unions are extremely rare.
Human Rights Watch pointed to the law as an example of the widespread discrimination faced by Palestinians — both inside Israel and in the territories it controls — in a report earlier this year that said such practices amount to apartheid.
Israel rejects such allegations and says Jewish and Arab citizens have equal rights. Arab citizens have the right to vote, and the new government for the first time includes an Arab faction, which is opposed to the citizenship law.
But even as Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a political centrist, recently urged the right-wing opposition to support the law on security grounds, he also evoked demographic concerns.
“This law is essential for safeguarding the country’s security and Jewish and democratic character, and security considerations need to be put before all political considerations,” Gantz said in a statement.
Ahmad Tibi, a prominent member of an Arab opposition party, called on fellow lawmakers to strike the law down.
“They should look at the eyes of these children and these families and then vote to prevent this most racist law," he said as he met with the demonstrators. "These families should be allowed to live normally as all other families, wherever they decide to live.”
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s parliament early on Tuesday failed to renew a law that bars Arab citizens from extending citizenship or residency rights to spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza, in a tight vote that raised doubts about the viability of the country’s new coalition government.
The 59-59 vote, which came after an all-night session of the Knesset, marked a major setback for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
The new Israeli leader, who had hoped to find a compromise between his hard-line Yamina party and the dovish factions in his disparate coalition, instead suffered a stinging defeat in a vote he reportedly described as a referendum on the new government. The vote means the law is now set to expire at midnight Tuesday.
“The opposition last night delivered a direct blow to the security of the country,” Bennett said Tuesday, accusing his opponents, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of choosing “petty politics” over the nation’s wellbeing.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law was enacted as a temporary measure in 2003, at the height of the second intifada, or uprising, when Palestinians launched scores of deadly attacks inside Israel. Proponents said Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza were susceptible to recruitment by armed groups and that security vetting alone was insufficient.
Under it, Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of Israel’s population, have had few if any avenues for bringing spouses from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel. Critics, including many left-wing and Arab lawmakers, say it’s a racist measure aimed at restricting the growth of Israel’s Arab minority, while supporters say it’s needed for security purposes and to preserve Israel’s Jewish character.
The law has been renewed annually and appeared to have the support of a large majority in parliament, which is dominated by hard-line nationalist parties. But Netanyahu’s Likud Party and his allies decided to oppose it to embarrass Bennett and harm his coalition, which includes a collection of eight parties across the political spectrum, including a small Islamist Arab party.
Interior Minister Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Bennett's Yamina party, said the opposition move to block the law's renewal would lead to thousands more applications for citizenship. She accused Netanyahu and his allies of choosing "petty and ugly politics, and let the country burn.”
Amichai Chikli, a renegade member of Yamina who voted with the opposition, said the outcome was a sign of deeper issues.
“Israel needs a functioning Zionist government, and not a mismatched patchwork that is reliant on” the votes of Arab lawmakers, said Chikli. He was the only member of his party to oppose the new coalition-led government last month.
Netanyahu, ousted by the new coalition after 12 years as prime minister, made clear his political goals.
“With all due respect for this law, the importance of toppling the government is greater,” Netanyahu said Monday.
Bennett reportedly proposed a compromise with liberal members of the coalition that would have extended the law by six months while offering residency rights to some 1,600 Arab families, a fraction of those affected. But the measure was defeated, in part because two Arab members of the coalition abstained. The vote exposed the deep divisions and the fragility of the new government.
The decision, however, gave some hope to Arab families that have been affected by the law. The law has created an array of difficulties for thousands of Palestinian families that span the war-drawn and largely invisible frontiers separating Israel from east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, territories it seized in the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a future state.
“You want your security, it’s no problem, you can check each case by itself,” said Taiseer Khatib, an Arab citizen of Israel whose wife of more than 15 years, from the West Bank city of Jenin, must regularly apply for permits to live with him and their three children in Israel.
“There’s no need for this collective punishment just because you are Palestinian,” he said during a protest outside the Knesset on Monday ahead of the vote.
The law has been continually renewed even after the uprising wound down in 2005 and the number of attacks plummeted. Today, Israel allows more than 100,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank to enter on a regular basis.
Male spouses over the age of 35 and female spouses over the age of 25, as well as some humanitarian cases, can apply for the equivalent of a tourist permit, which must be regularly renewed. The holders of such permits are ineligible for driver’s licenses, public health insurance and most forms of employment. Palestinian spouses from Gaza have been completely banned since the militant Hamas group seized power there in 2007.
The law does not apply to the nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in the West Bank, who have full Israeli citizenship. Under Israel’s Law of Return, Jews who come to Israel from anywhere in the world are eligible for citizenship.
Israel’s Arab minority has close familial ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and largely identifies with their cause. Arab citizens view the law as one of several forms of discrimination they face in a country that legally defines itself as a Jewish nation-state.
Palestinians who are unable to get permits but try to live with their spouses inside Israel are at risk of deportation. Couples that move to the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation.
The citizenship law also applies to Jewish Israelis who marry Palestinians from the territories, but such unions are extremely rare.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — The owner of Israel's Beitar Jerusalem soccer club said Thursday that he called off a friendly match with international powerhouse Barcelona over its refusal to hold the event in contested Jerusalem.
Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, annexed it in a move not recognized internationally, and considers the entire city its capital. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, and the city's status is one of the thorniest issues in the decades-long conflict.
Beitar Jerusalem owner Moshe Hogeg said he was forced to cancel the planned Aug. 4 match “with great sadness” because he refused to give in to what he said was a “political” demand.
“After I received the contract to sign and discovered the unequivocal demand that the game not take place in the capital city, Jerusalem, and several other demands that I didn’t like, I slept with a heavy heart, thought a lot and decided that above all else I am a proud Jew and Israeli,” Hogeg wrote on Facebook. “I cannot betray Jerusalem."
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion expressed support for the decision, saying teams that intend to “boycott” Jerusalem should be barred from Israel altogether.
“Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel and the decision to boycott it is not a professional, sporting or educational decision,” he said in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from Barcelona.
Beitar Jerusalem is the only major Israeli soccer club to have never signed an Arab player, and its hard-core fans have a history of racist chants. Hogeg, who purchased the team in 2018, has vowed to combat racism and sideline the club's anti-Arab fans.
Earlier this month the Palestinian Football Association sent a letter of protest to Barcelona over the planned game in Jerusalem.
Sami Abou Shehadeh, a Balad party lawmaker in the Israeli parliament, had also petitioned Barcelona to cancel the game, saying Beitar “represents the most extremist, racist and fascist segments of Israeli society.” Palestinian soccer clubs had also written to Barcelona urging it not to play in Jerusalem.
Argentina cancelled a World Cup warmup match with Israel in 2018 following pro-Palestinian protests. Some Israeli officials accused Lionel Messi and his teammates of caving to terrorism.
The international soccer federation later imposed a year-long ban on Jibril Rajoub, the head of Palestinian soccer, for allegedly inciting fans against Argentina. Rajoub called the ban biased and “absurd.”
FIFA said Rajoub had “incited hatred and violence” by calling on soccer fans to target the Argentinian Football Association and burn jerseys and pictures of Lionel Messi.
Argentina Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said at the time players felt “totally attacked, violated” after images emerged of the team’s white and sky-blue striped jerseys stained with red paint resembling blood.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s prime minister vowed Tuesday to “act aggressively” against the decision by Ben & Jerry’s to stop selling its ice cream in Israeli-occupied territories, as the country’s ambassador to the U.S. urged dozens of state governors to punish the company under anti-boycott laws.
The strong reaction reflected concerns in Israel that the ice cream maker's decision could lead other companies to follow suit. It also appeared to set the stage for a protracted public relations and legal battle.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's office said he spoke with Alan Jope, chief executive of Ben & Jerry's parent company Unilever, and raised concern about what he called a “clearly anti-Israel step.” He said the move would have “serious consequences, legal and otherwise," and Israel "will act aggressively against all boycott actions directed against its citizens.”
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price declined to comment directly on the company's decision. But he said the U.S. rejects the boycott movement against Israel, saying it “unfairly singles out” the country.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations and the United States, Gilad Erdan, sent letters to 35 governors whose states have laws against boycotting Israel asking that they consider speaking out against Ben & Jerry’s decision “and taking any other relevant steps, including in relation to your state laws and the commercial dealings between Ben & Jerry’s and your state.”
Erdan said Israel views the company’s decision as “the de-facto adoption of anti-Semitic practices and advancement of the de-legitimization of the Jewish state and the dehumanization of the Jewish people.”
continues.....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
GUEST ESSAY
We’re Ben and Jerry. Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle.
By Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield founded Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings in 1978.
We are the founders of Ben & Jerry’s. We are also proud Jews. It’s part of who we are and how we’ve identified ourselves for our whole lives. As our company began to expand internationally, Israel was one of our first overseas markets. We were then, and remain today, supporters of the State of Israel.
But it’s possible to support Israel and oppose some of its policies, just as we’ve opposed policies of the U.S. government. As such, we unequivocally support the decision of the company to end business in the occupied territories, which a majority of the international community, including the United Nations, has deemed an illegal occupation.
While we no longer have any operational control of the company we founded in 1978, we’re proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history. In our view, ending the sales of ice cream in the occupied territories is one of the most important decisions the company has made in its 43-year history. It was especially brave of the company. Even though it undoubtedly knew that the response would be swift and powerful, Ben & Jerry’s took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values.
That we support the company’s decision is not a contradiction nor is it anti-Semitic. In fact, we believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights, core tenets of Judaism.
Ben & Jerry’s is a company that advocates peace. It has long called on Congress to reduce the U.S. military budget. Ben & Jerry’s opposed the Persian Gulf war of 1991. But it wasn’t just talk. One of our very first social-mission initiatives, in 1988, was to introduce the Peace Pop. It was part of an effort to promote the idea of redirecting 1 percent of national defense budgets around the world to fund peace-promoting activities. We see the company’s recent action as part of a similar trajectory — not as anti-Israel, but as part of a long history of being pro-peace.
In its statement, the company drew a contrast between the democratic territory of Israel and the territories Israel occupies. The decision to halt sales outside Israel’s democratic borders is not a boycott of Israel. The Ben & Jerry’s statement did not endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
The company’s stated decision to more fully align its operations with its values is not a rejection of Israel. It is a rejection of Israeli policy, which perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people who live under the occupation. As Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, we fundamentally reject the notion that it is anti-Semitic to question the policies of the State of Israel.
When we left the helm of the company, we signed a unique governance structure in the acquisition agreement with Unilever back in 2000. That structure is the magic behind both Ben & Jerry’s continued independence and its success. As part of the agreement, the company retained an independent board of directors with a responsibility to protect the company’s essential brand integrity and to pursue its social mission.
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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel's defense minister warned Thursday that his country is prepared to strike Iran, issuing the threat against the Islamic Republic after a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his nation blamed on Tehran.
The comments by Benny Gantz come as Israel lobbies countries for action at the United Nations over last week's attack on the oil tanker Mercer Street that killed two people. The tanker, struck off Oman in the Arabian Sea, is managed by a firm owned by an Israeli billionaire.
The U.S. and the United Kingdom also blamed Iran for the attack, but no country has offered evidence or intelligence to support the claim. Iran, which along with its regional militia allies has launched similar drone attacks, has denied being involved.
Speaking to the news website Ynet, Gantz responded to whether Israel was prepared to attack Iran with a blunt “yes.”
“We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran," Gantz said. "The world needs to take action against Iran now.”
From Tehran, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh described Gantz's threat as “another brazen violation of Int'l law" and “malign behavior" that allegedly stems from Israel's blind support for the West.
He tweeted: “We state this clearly: ANY foolish act against Iran will be met with a DECISIVE response. Don’t test us."
On Wednesday, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council, Iran's deputy ambassador to the United Nations described Israel as “the main source of instability and insecurity in the Middle East and beyond for more than seven decades.”
“This regime has a long dark record in attacking commercial navigation and civilian ships,” Zahra Ershadi wrote. “In less than two years, this regime has attacked over 10 commercial vessels carrying oil and humanitarian goods destined to Syria.”
Ershadi's comments refer to an ongoing shadow war being waged in Mideast waterways since 2019 that has seen both Iranian and Western-linked ships attacked.
The latest provocation occurred earlier this week, when hijackers stormed an asphalt tanker off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman, briefly seizing the vessel before departing on Wednesday. No one claimed responsibility for the incident, although recorded radio communication from the ship shared with The Associated Press revealed one of the crew members saying that armed Iranians had boarded the Asphalt Princess.
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www.headstonesband.com
BEIRUT (AP) — The militant Hezbollah group fired a barrage of rockets at Israel on Friday, and Israel hit back with artillery in a significant escalation between the two sides.
It was the third day of attacks along the volatile border with Lebanon, a major Middle East flashpoint where tensions between Israel and Iran, which backs Hezbollah, occasionally play out. But comments by Israeli officials and Hezbollah’s actions suggested the two were seeking to avoid a major conflict at this time.
Israel said it fired back after 19 rockets were launched from Lebanon, and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett swiftly convened a meeting with the country's top defense officials. No casualties were reported.
“We do not wish to escalate to a full war, yet of course we are very prepared for that,” said Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel has long considered Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, its most serious and immediate military threat. Friday's exchanges came a day after Israel’s defense minister warned that his country is prepared to strike Iran following a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his country blamed on Tehran.
The tensions come at a politically sensitive time in Israel, where a new eight-party governing coalition is already trying to keep the peace on another border under a fragile cease-fire that ended an 11-day war with Hamas’ militant rulers in Gaza.
Sirens blared across the Golan Heights and Upper Galilee near the Lebanon border Friday morning. Hezbollah said in a statement that it hit “open fields” in the disputed Shebaa farms area.
The group said it fired 10 rockets, calling it retaliation for Israeli airstrikes the day before. Israel said those strikes were in response to rocket fire from southern Lebanon in recent days that was not claimed by any group.
Shebaa Farms is an enclave where the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria meet. Israel says it is part of the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967. Lebanon and Syria say Shebaa Farms belong to Lebanon, while the United Nations says the area is part of Syria.
“This is a very serious situation and we urge all parties to cease fire,” the force known as UNIFIL said. Force commander, Gen. Stefano Del Col, said the force was coordinating with the Lebanese army to strengthen security measures in the area.
Hezbollah’s decision to strike open fields in a disputed area rather than Israel proper, appeared calibrated to limit any response.
Shefler, the Israeli military spokesman, told reporters Friday that three of the 19 rockets fired fell within Lebanese territory. Ten were intercepted by the defense system known as the Iron Dome.
Israel estimates Hezbollah possesses over 130,000 rockets and missiles capable of striking anywhere in the country. In recent years, Israel also has expressed concerns that the group is trying to import or develop an arsenal of precision-guided missiles.
Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Lebanese border villages where it accuses Hezbollah of hiding rockets. An Israeli security official said Friday the military was carrying out airstrikes unlike any in years and was planning for more options. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military policy.
The attack sparked tensions between locals and Hezbollah. Videos on social media after the rocket attack showed two vehicles, including a mobile rocket launcher, being stopped by residents of Shwaya village.
Some of the villagers could be heard saying: “Hezbollah is firing rockets from between homes so that Israel hits us back.”
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is quietly advancing controversial settlement projects in and around Jerusalem without making major announcements that could anger the Biden administration. Critics say the latest moves, while incremental, pave the way for rapid growth once the political climate changes.
On Wednesday, as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met with U.S. officials in Washington, a local planning committee in Jerusalem approved the expropriation of public land for the especially controversial Givat Hamatos settlement, which would largely cut the city off from Palestinian communities in the southern West Bank.
The same committee advanced plans for the construction of 470 homes in the existing east Jerusalem settlement of Pisgat Zeev. Authorities have scheduled a Dec. 6 hearing for another project in east Jerusalem to build 9,000 settler homes in the Atarot area, according to Ir Amim, an Israeli rights group that closely follows developments in the city.
A military body has meanwhile scheduled two meetings in the coming weeks to discuss a planned settlement of 3,400 homes on a barren hillside outside Jerusalem known as E1. Critics say it would largely bisect the occupied West Bank, making it impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. A two-state solution is still seen internationally as the only realistic way to resolve the century-old conflict.
“The fact that simultaneously all of these very controversial plans that have been longstanding international red lines have now been advancing ... is very indicative that the Israeli government intends to advance and ultimately approve these plans," said Amy Cohen of Ir Amim.
Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum downplayed the latest developments, noting that Givat Hamatos was approved years ago. “Nothing’s changed over the last few years,” she said. “We are a city and we’re providing for our residents."
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Security researchers disclosed Monday that spyware from the notorious Israeli hacker-for-hire company NSO Group was detected on the cellphones of six Palestinian human rights activists, half affiliated with groups that Israel’s defense minister controversially claimed were involved in terrorism.
The revelation marks the first known instance of Palestinian activists being targeted by the military-grade Pegasus spyware. Its use against journalists, rights activists and political dissidents from Mexico to Saudi Arabia has been documented since 2015.
A successful Pegasus infection surreptitiously gives intruders access to everything a person stores and does on their phone, including real-time communications.
It's not clear who placed the NSO spyware on the activists’ phones, said the researcher who first detected it, Mohammed al-Maskati of the nonprofit Frontline Defenders.
Shortly after the first two intrusions were identified in mid-October, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared six Palestinian civil society groups to be terrorist organizations. Ireland-based Frontline Defenders and at least two of the victims say they consider Israel the main suspect and believe the designation may have been timed to try to overshadow the hacks’ discovery, though they have provided no evidence to substantiate those assertions.
Israel has provided little evidence publicly to support the terrorism designation, which the Palestinian groups say aims to dry up their funding and muzzle opposition to Israeli military rule. Three of the hacked Palestinians work for the civil society groups. The others do not, and wish to remain anonymous, Frontline Defenders says.
The forensic findings, independently confirmed by security researchers from Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab in a joint technical report, come as NSO Group faces growing condemnation over the abuse of its spyware and Israel takes heat for lax oversight of its digital surveillance industry.
Last week, the Biden administration blacklisted the NSO Group and a lesser-known Israeli competitor, Candiru, barring them from U.S. technology.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Rights groups said Thursday that Israel failed to investigate shootings that killed more than 200 Palestinians and wounded thousands at violent protests along the Gaza frontier in recent years, strengthening the case for the International Criminal Court to intervene.
The Israeli military rejected the findings, saying the "mass riots" organized by Gaza's militant Hamas rulers were aimed at providing cover for cross-border attacks. The military said alleged abuses were thoroughly investigated, with soldiers held accountable.
Beginning in March 2018, Gaza activists organized weekly protests that were initially aimed at highlighting the plight of Palestinian refugees from what is now Israel, who make up three-fourths of Gaza's population of more than 2 million people.
But Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, soon co-opted the protests and used them to push for the easing of the Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the territory when it seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007.
Every week for around 18 months, thousands of Palestinians gathered at different points along the frontier, often after being bused there by Hamas. Groups of protesters burned tires, hurled stones and firebombs, and tried to breach the security fence.
Israeli snipers fired live ammunition, rubber-coated bullets and tear gas from sand berms on the other side in what Israel said was self-defense, to prevent thousands of Palestinians — including potentially armed Hamas operatives — from rushing into Israel.
Israeli fire killed at least 215 Palestinians, most of them unarmed, including 47 people under the age of 18 and two women, according to Gaza's Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights. Hundreds of others were seriously wounded in the demonstrations, which wound down in late 2019. Many were far from the border fence when they were shot.
An Israeli soldier was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2018 and several others were wounded.
A report released Thursday by the Israeli rights group B'Tselem and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said the military failed to investigate orders issued by senior commanders and took virtually no action against any soldiers.
As of April, out of 143 cases transferred to military prosecutors by an Israeli fact-finding mechanism, 95 were closed with no further action. Only one — the killing of a 14-year-old Palestinian — led to an indictment, with the remainder still pending, the report said. It cited figures obtained from the Israeli military through a freedom of information request.
The indicted soldier was convicted of “abuse of authority to the point of endangering life or health” in a plea bargain and sentenced to one month of community service, the report said.
That's after more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded over some 18 months of protests, including more than 8,000 hit by live fire. At least 155 required amputation, the report said. It said the military's fact-finding mechanism only reviewed 234 cases in which Palestinians were killed, including some fatalities unrelated to the demonstrations.
MORE ON ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS
The Israeli military issued a statement saying it carried out the investigations in a “thorough and in-depth manner” and filed indictments in two incidents in which soldiers were convicted and sentenced to “imprisonment during military service, probation and demotion.”
It said other cases are still pending “due to the complexity of the events and the need for an in-depth examination.” It said “dozens of incidents have been handled” since B'Tselem obtained its figures, which the military said were “outdated.”
The International Criminal Court launched an investigation earlier this year into potential war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza since 2014, when the two sides fought their third of four wars since Hamas seized power.
Israel has rejected the investigation, saying the court is biased against it and that Israel's justice system is capable of conducting its own investigations that meet international standards. It says its security forces make every effort to avoid civilian casualties and investigate alleged abuses.
Israel is not a party to the ICC, but Israeli officials could be subject to arrest in other countries if it hands down warrants. Israel could potentially fend off the probe by proving it has launched credible investigations of its own.
B'Tselem and the PCHR say Israel has failed to meet those requirements.
Its investigations “consist entirely of the military investigating itself and have not examined the unlawful open-fire policy regulations handed down to security forces or the policies implemented during the protests,” they said.
“Instead, they focus exclusively on lower-ranking soldiers and on the question of whether they acted contrary to these illegal orders.”
Yuval Shany, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and a member of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law, said Israel could be vulnerable to ICC action over its response to the protests, but that the bar is relatively low for a country to prove it has investigated itself.
“It’s certainly not about actually prosecuting anyone. It’s really about genuinely investigating the incidents,” he said. That's for prosecutors to determine, and it's unclear whether Israel will cooperate with the court to try to prove its case.
There's also the question of whether the prosecutors view Israel's response to the protests as a law enforcement action or as an armed conflict with Hamas.
Israel has said Hamas activists were among the protesters, justifying its open-fire regulations in the context of long-running hostilities with the group.
“In the context of an armed conflict, you have greater latitude in applying lethal force toward militants," Shany said. “If this is a law enforcement operation, then you have to basically use more restraint.”
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December 28 at 3:39 AM EST
Israeli Public Security Minister Omer Barlev said Monday that he will receive round-the-clock protection following threats of harm from extremist Israeli Jews.
The news comes amid a sharp increase in attacks targeting Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, which Barlev had criticized in recent discussions with a visiting U.S. State Department official. His remarks drew the ire of right-wing politicians in the country, including members of the coalition government in which he serves.
“Jews are stabbed and shot in the streets, because they are Jews, on your shift, and you dare to talk about settler violence?” Simcha Rothman, an ultraconservative Israeli lawmaker, tweeted in response to Barlev this month.
Israeli authorities also arrested a man accused of threatening Barlev on Facebook by saying that he hoped to see the minister “lynched,” according to the Times of Israel newspaper. At least one other senior official has also reportedly received increased protection as the coalition government pushes ahead with changes that threaten privileges long enjoyed by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Barlev, a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, suggested that he had expected threats from “Arab criminals” that he had targeted. “But that is not the case,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am threatened by Israeli Jews.”
At a recent party meeting, Barlev also accused the right-wing Yamina party, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, of turning him into “the enemy of all settlers, and one who doesn’t understand security and terrorism by Palestinians,” the Associated Press reported.
The security chief’s criticism of “settler violence” is significant because both Barlev and his father have held important positions in the country’s defense establishment, said David Makovsky, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The announcement that Barlev needs regular protection shines “a spotlight on a growing phenomenon that can no longer be ignored as the actions of just a handful of unruly youths,” Makovsky added.
Barlev and Yamina did not return requests for comment early Tuesday. A spokeswoman for the Israeli government could not immediately be reached for comment.
The West Bank has in recent months seen a spike in beatings, arson, vandalism and rock-throwing — most taking place where Palestinian farms and groves are next to Jewish settlements established on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war. The United Nations Security Council has called such settlements a violation of international law, and some leaders of Israel’s governing coalition have called for a crackdown on violence by settlers.
[‘Hate crime’ attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians spike in the West Bank]
Videos compiled by rights groups suggest that Israeli soldiers, who are tasked with providing security in these neighborhoods, do little to intervene in violent incidents. Some watchdogs also allege that Israel Defense Forces members have, in some cases, aided in such attacks. The IDF says such allegations are false.
Last month, Commanders for Israel’s Security — a group of more than 300 retired Israeli military, security and intelligence officials — delivered a letter to members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, decrying settler violence against Palestinians as a threat to the rule of law and the country’s international standing.
Bennett’s government has approved the construction of some 3,000 new homes in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The country has also designated six Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations.
Steve Hendrix in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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January 06 at 1:50 PM EST
Mairav Zonszein is a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.
When Israel’s new president, Isaac Herzog, marked the first night of Hannukah in December by lighting candles in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, where some 850 Israeli settlers live under military protection among over 200,000 Palestinians, he offered yet another insulting reminder of Israel’s brutal occupation. Herzog talked about the need to denounce “all forms of hatred and violence” in a place where systemic violence against Palestinians is blatant.
The hodgepodge Israeli coalition that ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure has tried to turn the page by practicing respectful diplomacy abroad. As foreign minister, centrist politician Yair Lapid has been trying to repair Israel’s relations with Democrats in the U.S. and with European Union governments, whom Netanyahu treated with disdain, in an effort to bolster Israel’s image as a liberal democracy that plays nice. The approach appeals to many Western officials who, understandably, given their experience with Netanyahu, are holding out hope for change. “We will not immediately declare that everyone who doesn’t agree with us is an antisemite and Israel-hater. This is not how you handle a country’s foreign relations,” Lapid said in July.
But that same month, after Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would no longer be selling its ice cream in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, where 670,000 Israelis reside illegally, Lapid called the move “anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.”
Presenting a settlement boycott as a boycott of Israel erases the distinction between Israel’s internationally recognized 1948 borders and the land — and people — it has occupied since 1967. Though the Naftali Bennett-Lapid coalition claims it is the antidote to Netanyahu’s rule, it is continuing the same policies of settlement expansion, demolitions and threats of eviction, state repression of Palestinians and refusal to engage in even the semblance of a political process. The new government has also, if anything, doubled down in conflating Israel and the West Bank.
Israel’s education minister recently upheld her predecessor’s decision to withhold the Israel Prize from math professor Oded Goldreich because he endorses a boycott of Ariel University, located in a large West Bank settlement. “I cannot award the Israel Prize for academic achievements, impressive as they are, [to someone] who calls for boycotting Israel,” she said, accusing him of boycotting “academic institutions in Israel,” even though Ariel is not in Israel.
Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll cancelled scheduled meetings with Belgian officials after their government announced it would begin labeling products made in the settlements — not a boycott, just consumer transparency. Roll said the decision to label products “strengthens extremists, does not help promote peace in the region and shows Belgium as not contributing to regional stability.” The Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the move “anti-Israeli” and said “it is inconsistent with the Israeli government policy focused on improving the lives of Palestinians and strengthening the Palestinian Authority, and with improving Israel’s relations with European countries.”
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JERUSALEM — The funeral of slain Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh began in chaos Friday, as Israeli police set off stun grenades and beat mourners with batons, after a group of them tried to carry her coffin on their shoulders rather than let it be loaded in a hearse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/13/shireen-abu-akleh-al-jazeera-israel-jenin/
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"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
JERUSALEM (AP) — As Israel and the Palestinians wrangle over the investigation into the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, several independent groups have launched their own probes. One open-source research team said its initial findings lent support to Palestinian witnesses who said she was killed by Israeli fire.
The outcome of these investigations could help shape international opinion over who is responsible for Abu Akleh's death, particularly if an official Israeli military probe drags on. Israel and the Palestinians are locked in a war of narratives that already has put Israel on the defensive.
Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American and a 25-year veteran of the satellite channel, was killed last Wednesday while covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was a household name across the Arab world, known for documenting the hardship of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, now in its sixth decade.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said he had spoken to Abu Akleh's family to express condolences and respect for her work “as well as the need to have an immediate and credible investigation” into her death.
Palestinian officials and witnesses, including journalists who were with her, say she was killed by army fire. The military, after initially saying Palestinian gunmen might have been responsible, later backtracked and now says she may also have been hit by errant Israeli fire.
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Israel has called for a joint investigation with the Palestinians, saying the bullet must be analyzed by ballistics experts to reach firm conclusions. Palestinian officials have refused, saying they don't trust Israel. Human rights groups says Israel has a poor record of investigating wrongdoing by its security forces.
After earlier saying they would accept an outside partner, the Palestinians said late Sunday that they would handle the investigation alone and deliver results very soon.
“We also refused to have an international investigation because we trust our capabilities as a security institution,” Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh announced. “We will not hand over any of the evidence to anyone because we know that these people are able to fasify the facts.” He stood with Abu Akleh's brother, Anton, and Al Jazeera's local bureau chief, Walid Al-Omari.
With the two sides at loggerheads over the Abu Akleh probe, several research and human rights groups have launched their own investigations.
Over the weekend, Bellingcat, a Dutch-based international consortium of researchers, published an analysis of video and audio evidence gathered on social media. The material came from both Palestinian and Israeli military sources, and the analysis looked at such factors as time stamps, the locations of the videos, shadows and a forensic audio analysis of gunshots.
The group found that while gunmen and Israeli soldiers were both in the area, the evidence supported witness accounts that Israeli fire killed Abu Akleh.
“Based on what we were able to review, the IDF (Israeli soldiers) were in the closest position and had the clearest line of sight to Abu Akleh,” said Giancarlo Fiorella, the lead researcher of the analysis.
Bellingcat is among a growing number of firms that use “open source” information, such as social media videos, security camera recordings and satellite imagery, to reconstruct events.
Fiorella acknowledged that the analysis cannot be 100% certain without such evidence as the bullet, weapons used by the army and GPS locations of Israeli forces. But he said the emergence of additional evidence typically bolsters preliminary conclusions and almost never overturns them.
“This is what we do when we don’t have access to those things,” he said.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said it too is conducting its own analysis. The group last week played a key role in the military’s backtracking from its initial claims that Palestinian gunmen appeared to be responsible for her death.
The Israeli claim was based on a social media video in which a Palestinian gunman fires into a Jenin alleyway, and then other militants come running to claim they have shot a soldier. The army said that because no soldiers were hurt that day, the gunmen might have been referring to Abu Akleh, who was wearing a protective helmet and flak jacket.
A B’Tselem researcher went to the area and took a video showing that the Palestinian gunmen were some 300 meters (yards) away from where Abu Akleh was shot, separated by a series of walls and alleyways.
Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for the group, said B’Tselem has begun gathering testimonies from witnesses and may attempt to reconstruct the shooting with videos from the scene. But she said at this point, it has not been able to come to a conclusion about who was behind the shooting.
Sadot said any bullet would need to be matched to the barrel of the gun. The Palestinians have refused to release the bullet, and it is unclear whether the military has confiscated the weapons used that day.
“The bullet on its own can’t say a lot” because it could have been fired by either side, she said. “What can be done is to match a bullet to the barrel,” she said.
The Israeli military did not respond to interview requests to discuss the status of its probe.
Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesman and expert on military affairs, said reconstructing a gunfight in densely populated urban terrain is “very complex” and said forensic evidence, such as the bullet, is crucial to reach firm conclusions. He accused the Palestinian Authority of refusing to cooperate for propaganda purposes.
“Without the bullet, any investigation will only be able to reach partial and questionable conclusions,” Conricus said. “One might assume that the strategy of the Palestinian Authority is exactly that: to deny Israel the ability to clear its name, while leveraging global sympathy for the Palestinian cause.”
Meanwhile, Israeli police over the weekend launched an investigation into the conduct of the officers who attacked the mourners at Abu Akleh's funeral, causing the pallbearers to nearly drop her coffin.
Newspapers on Sunday were filled with criticism of the police and what was portrayed as a public relations debacle.
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Ahead of Biden visit, Israel launches biggest eviction of Palestinians in decades
AL-MARKAZ VILLAGE, West Bank — The Najjar family knew what to expect on the morning of May 11 when a neighbor called: “The bulldozer is coming.” For the second time in five months, the Israeli military had come to knock down their house.
But this time there was reason to fear that the house would be gone for good. After decades of demolition, rebuilding and a more than 20-year legal battle, Israel’s highest court this month gave the military permission to permanently evict more than 1,000 Palestinians here and repurpose the land for an army firing range.
Less than a week after the high court ruling, the Najjars’ house was demolished, marking the start of what activists say will probably be the biggest mass expulsion of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since the 1967 war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from territories captured by Israel.
The court was unswayed by historical documents presented by advocates for the Palestinians, showing what they said was evidence that the proposal to establish a firing range, decades ago, was meant to prevent Palestinians from claiming the land.
“We had 30 minutes to get out what we could,” said Yusara al-Najjar, who was born in a hand-hewn cave on this same slope in the Negev desert 60 years ago. She looked over the pile of broken blocks and twisted metal that had been her family home and wiped her hands with a slap. “It took no time and our house was gone, again.”
The demolitions have sparked expressions of concern from Washington ahead of a planned June visit to Israel by President Biden, coming at a time of mounting instability in Israel’s coalition government and the recent approval of more than 4,200 new housing units in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, responding to a question about the high court ruling, beseeched both Israelis and Palestinians to avoid steps that raise tensions. “This certainly includes evictions,” he said.
Israel demolishes Palestinian home in flash-point Jerusalem neighborhood
The European Union urged Israel to halt the demolitions. A United Nations human rights panel warned that the “forcible transfer” of residents would amount to “a serious breach of international and humanitarian and human rights laws.”
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that the demolitions were in accordance with the high court’s years-long review and its unanimous ruling on behalf of the military.
“The Supreme Court fully accepted the State Of Israel’s position, and ruled that the petitioners were not permanent residents of the area,” the statement said. “The court also noted that the petitioners rejected any attempted compromise offered to them.”
The tug of war for these dry rolling hills south of the biblical city of Hebron began in the 1980s, when Israeli officials laid claim to several areas of the West Bank for the stated reason of creating military training grounds.
This region of 8,000 to 14,000 acres — known in Arabic as Masafer Yatta and in English as the South Hebron Hills — was designated as Firing Zone 918.
“The vital importance of this firing zone to the Israel Defense Forces stems from the unique topographical character of the area, which allows for training methods specific to both small and large frameworks, from a squad to a battalion,” the military said in court documents reported by the Times of Israel.
But human rights activists, both Palestinian and Israeli, contend that the real purpose of many of the firing zones has been to clear away Arab residents and strengthen Israel’s grip on more occupied Palestinian territory. Often, the designation has made way for expanding Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international community.
A road trip down Israel’s Route 60 reveals how remote the prospect of a Palestinian state has become
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These sixteen Palestinian children were looking forward to a summer filled with joy. They planned to play football, head to the beach and attend summer camp.
But over the course of three horrific days, Israeli forces unleashed a wave of air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, killing 45 people, including the 16 children, and wounding at least 360 others.
"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip for Palestinian children and their families and they increasingly bear the brunt of Israel’s repeated military offensives," Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the accountability programme director at the NGO Defence for Children International - Palestine (DCIP), said in a statement.
While a ceasefire came into effect on Sunday following an agreement brokered by Egypt, Palestinians have lamented the devastating bombing campaign as more details emerge of those who died.
The Israeli army has claimed that some of the civilian casualties were killed by misfired rockets, without providing independently-verified evidence. The Palestinian health ministry says all of the people killed, including the 16 children, died as a result of Israeli air strikes.
Some families have been willing to share their stories, while others have been in a state of mourning and have asked for privacy.
Here are the names and faces of the children that died:
Alaa Abdullah Qaddoum, aged five
Alaa Abdullah Qaddoum was among the first casualties on Friday following Israel's decision to launch air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip.
She died on 5 August while she was playing with friends outside her home in the Shujaiya neighbourhood in the northern Gaza Strip.
Her seven-year-old brother and father were wounded in the strike.
"Alaa was an innocent five-year-old playing in the street with her brothers and cousins. What did she do to be killed?" her cousin, Abu Diab Qaddoum, told Middle East Eye.
Momen Muhammed Ahmed al-Nairab, aged five
Momen Muhammed ِAhmed al-Nairab, five, was killed in a suspected Israeli air strike on Saturday on the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip.
The camp is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and houses more than 114,000 people.
Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, aged nine
According to documentation collected by Defence for Children International, Hazem Muhammed Ali Salem, nine, was among the four children in the blast on the Jabalia refugee camp on Saturday.
Israel says it wasn't behind the raid, but Palestinian sources say it could not have come from anywhere else.
Ahmed Muhammed al-Nairab, aged 11
Ahmed Muhammed al-Nairab, 11, was among the four children killed on Saturday when suspected Israeli warplanes struck the Jabalia refugee camp.
Ahmed Walid Ahmed al-Farram, aged 16
Ahmed Walid Ahmed al-Farram, 16, was also killed on Saturday when suspected Israeli warplanes struck the Jabalia refugee camp.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), the camp suffers from high unemployment, regular electricity cuts and a contaminated water supply.
Muhammed Iyad Muhammed Hassouna, aged 14
Muhammed Iyad Muhammed Hassouna, 14, was killed when an Israeli air strike targeted his home in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
Adeeb Ahmad, an eyewitness to the attack, told MEE that at least eight people were killed in the raid.
"The house was hit without any prior notice," Ahmad said. "Homes are overcrowded here, housing seven to eight people each, and they are so close to each other, so when one house is hit several houses around it are impacted."
Fatma Aaed Abdulfattah Ubaid, aged 15
Fatma Aaed Abdulfattah Ubaid, 15, was among nine children killed in the space of 30 minutes, shortly before the ceasefire was announced on Sunday.
Ubaid was killed in Beit Hanoun on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip.
Ahmed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged nine
Muhammed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged 12
Dalia Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, aged 13
An Israeli air strike on the Bureij refugee camp on Sunday killed Yasser al-Nabahin and his three children, Muhammed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, 13 (left); Ahmed Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, nine (centre); and their sister, Dalia Yasser Nimr al-Nabahin, 13 (right).
Muhammed Salah Nijm, aged 16
A suspected Israeli air strike on the Falluja cemetery in northern Gaza on Sunday killed five boys as they sat near a grave.
Muhammed Salah Nijm, 16, was among those killed.
Hamed Haidar Hamed Nijm, aged 16
Hamed Haidar Hamed Nijm, 16, was among those killed in Sunday's raid on the graveyard. Eyewitness Mohammad Sami told MEE that four of the boys were cousins and the fifth was their friend.
"They come to sit here every day," Sami said. "This is a safe area."
Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm, aged four
Jamil Nijm Jamil Nijm was the youngest child to be killed during Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip. He was only four years old.
Jamil Ihab Nijm, aged 13
Jamil Ihab Nijm, 13, was the fourth child from the Nijm family to be killed in Sunday's suspected air strike.
Nazmi Fayez Abdulhadi Abukarsh, aged 16
Nazmi Fayez AbdulhadiAbukarsh, 16, a friend of the Nijm boys, was killed in the suspected air strike on the graveyard.
Hanin Walid Muhammed Abuqaida, aged 10
Hanin Walid Muhammed Abuqaida, 10, was injured in an air strike on the Jabalia refugee camp on Sunday but succumbed to her wounds on Monday.
She was 10 years old.
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US President Joe Biden has disputed charges that Israel is an “apartheid” nation, instead calling it a “democracy” and a “friend” while touting billions in additional military support.
Speaking to Israel’s N12 News just before embarking on a trip to the Middle East on Wednesday, Biden was asked about “voices in the Democratic Party” which consider Israel an apartheid state and urge for an end to unconditional US aid.
“There are a few of them. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend, and I think I make no apology,” he said in response, adding that his administration has devoted around $5 billion to Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Though some Democrats, such as progressive lawmakers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan), have repeatedly slammed Israeli policies toward the Palestinians as an example of apartheid, Biden insisted there is “no possibility” of Democrats or Republicans ever “walking away from Israel.”
In May, Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, penned a statement accusing the Israeli government of “ethnic cleansing” against Arabs, while fellow members of the left-leaning ‘Squad’ argued that “apartheid states aren’t democracies” around the same time, apparently referring to Israel.
Just two months prior, the UN’s human rights body issued a report which concluded that Israel’s system “ensures the supremacy of one group over, and to the detriment of, the other,” particularly in the occupied West Bank, arguing that it meets the legal definition for apartheid. The report went on to state that Palestinians have been forced to “live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule,” echoing previous findings by rights groups such as Amnesty International and B’Tselem.
Not long after his interview with N12, Biden took off for his first presidential trip to the Middle East, making his initial stop in Israel. After high-level meetings with Israeli officials, he will go to the West Bank to meet the Palestinian leadership, with security expected to be the focus of the talks. From there Biden will travel to Saudi Arabia for a regional summit, where he will meet with leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq.
During an arrival ceremony in Tel Aviv, Israel on Wednesday, Biden declared that ties between Americans and Israelis are “bone deep,” saying the bilateral relationship is “deeper and stronger” than it has ever been.
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