Netanyahu says Gaza war on Hamas will go on for ‘many more months,’ thanks US for new weapons sales

Netanyahu says Gaza war on Hamas will go on for ‘many more months,’ thanks US for new weapons sales
A picture taken from a position in southern Israel along the border with the Gaza Strip on December 29, 2023 shows an Israeli military helicopter firing a missile towards Gaza amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)
Short Url
Updated 31 December 2023
Follow

Netanyahu says Gaza war on Hamas will go on for ‘many more months,’ thanks US for new weapons sales

Netanyahu says Gaza war on Hamas will go on for ‘many more months,’ thanks US for new weapons sales
  • Netanyahu's comments come amid thousands of civilian deaths, hunger and mass displacement in Gaza
  • Tens of thousands more Palestinians streamed into the already crowded city of Rafah after fresh Israeli attacks

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza will continue for “many more months,” pushing back against persistent international cease-fire calls after mounting civilian deaths, hunger and mass displacement in the besieged enclave.
Netanyahu thanked the Biden administration for its continued backing, including approval for a new emergency weapons sale, the second this month, and prevention of a UN Security Council resolution seeking an immediate cease-fire. Israel argues that ending the war now would mean victory for Hamas, a stance shared by the Biden administration, which at the same time urged Israel to do more to avoid harm to Palestinian civilians.
In new fighting, Israeli warplanes struck the urban refugee camps of Nuseirat and Bureij in the center of the territory Saturday as ground forces pushed deeper into the southern city of Khan Younis.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said Saturday that more than 21,600 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s unprecedented air and ground offensive since the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel. The ministry, which does not distinguish between the deaths of civilians and combatants, said 165 Palestinians were killed over the past 24 hours. It has said about 70 percent of those killed have been women and children.
The number of Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza combat rose to 170, after the military announced two more deaths Saturday.
The war has displaced some 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, sending swells of people seeking shelter in Israeli-designated safe areas that the military has nevertheless bombed. Palestinians are left with a sense that nowhere is safe in the tiny enclave.
With Israeli forces expanding their ground offensive this week, tens of thousands more Palestinians streamed into the already crowded city of Rafah at the southernmost end of Gaza.
Thousands of tents and makeshift shacks have sprung up on Rafah’s outskirts next to UN warehouses. Displaced people arrived in Rafah on foot or on trucks and carts piled high with mattresses. Those who did not find space in overwhelmed shelters pitched tents on roadsides.
“We don’t have water. We don’t have enough food,” Nour Daher, a displaced woman, said Saturday from the sprawling tent camp. “The kids wake up in the morning wanting to eat, wanting to drink. It took us one hour to find water for them. We couldn’t bring them flour. Even when we wanted to take them to toilets, it took us one hour to walk.”
In the Nuseirat camp, resident Mustafa Abu Wawee said a strike hit the home of one of his relatives, killing two people.
“The (Israeli) occupation is doing everything to force people to leave,” he said over the phone while helping to search for four people missing under the rubble. “They want to break our spirit and will, but they will fail. We are here to stay.”
MORE US WEAPONS FOR ISRAEL
The State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress he approved a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed for 155 mm shells Israel bought previously.
It marked the second time this month that the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel. Blinken made a similar decision on Dec. 9 to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.
Both moves have come as President Joe Biden’s request for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs remains stalled in Congress, caught up in a debate over US immigration policy and border security. Some Democratic lawmakers have spoken of making the proposed $14.3 billion in American assistance to its Mideast ally contingent on concrete steps by Netanyahu’s government to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza during the war with Hamas.
THE WAR’S TIMELINE
Blinken, who has repeatedly traveled to the Middle East during the war, was expected back in Israel and other countries in the region in January. US officials have urged Israel to start shifting from high intensity combat to more targeted operations, but said they were not imposing a deadline.
Netanyahu said Israel needs more time.
“As the chief of staff said this week, the war will continue many more months,” he told a televised news conference Saturday. “My policy is clear. We will continue to fight until we have achieved all the objectives of the war, first and foremost the annihilation of Hamas and the release of all the hostages.”
More than 120 hostages remain in Gaza, after militants seized more than 240 in the Oct. 7 assault that also killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Netanyahu is also at odds with the Biden administration over who should run Gaza after the war. He has rejected the US-backed idea that a unified Palestinian government should run both Gaza and parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank as a precursor to eventual statehood. Instead, he has insisted on open-ended Israeli security control in Gaza, without saying what would come next.
TRADING FOR HOSTAGES
Families of hostages and their supporters have demanded that the government prioritize hostage releases over other war objectives, and have staged large protests every weekend, including Saturday.
Egypt, one of the mediators between Israel and Hamas, has proposed a multistage plan that would kick off with a swap of hostages for prisoners, accompanied by a temporary cease-fire — along the lines of an exchange during a weeklong truce in November.
Hamas insists the war must end before it will discuss hostage releases. Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas official in Beirut, reiterated that position Saturday, but also told The Associated Press that “we have not given any final answer so far” to the Egyptian proposal.
Asked about reports of possible progress toward a deal, Netanyahu said Saturday that “we see a possibility, maybe, for movement” but that he did not want to raise “exaggerated expectations.”
DIFFICULTIES IN DELIVERING AID
More than a week after a UN Security Council resolution called for the unhindered delivery of aid at scale across besieged Gaza, conditions have only worsened, UN agencies warned.
Aid officials said the aid entering Gaza remains woefully inadequate. Distributing goods is hampered by long delays at two border crossings, ongoing fighting, Israeli airstrikes, repeated cuts in Internet and phone services and a breakdown of law and order that makes it difficult to secure aid convoys, they said.
Nearly the entire population is fully dependent on outside humanitarian aid, said Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. A quarter of the population is starving because too few trucks enter with food, medicine, fuel and other supplies — sometimes fewer than 100 trucks a day, according to UN daily reports.


Kurdish pupils denied language lessons in Turkiye amid wider curbs, families say

Kurdish pupils denied language lessons in Turkiye amid wider curbs, families say
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

Kurdish pupils denied language lessons in Turkiye amid wider curbs, families say

Kurdish pupils denied language lessons in Turkiye amid wider curbs, families say
  • Since 2012, pupils can ask for two hours of Kurdish lessons
  • Teachers’ union says families fear stigmatization if they ask
  • Some parents say requests not met, schools can’t find teachers

ISTANBUL: A Turkish government proposal to end a decades-long conflict with Kurdish militants has put Kurdish rights back in the spotlight, at a time when Kurdish leaders say repression is rife and freedoms won more than a decade ago have eroded.
One of those is the right to receive two hours of Kurdish language education in school, a move introduced by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan in 2012 as an “historic step” in a country which once banned the Kurdish language outright.
More than a dozen parents, Kurdish politicians and education experts told Reuters their children today could not receive the language classes even in Turkiye’s largest cities, and not all Kurdish families knew of the right to ask for them.
Turkiye’s Kurds make up about a fifth of the population, numbering an estimated 17 million. Kurdish is the mother tongue for most and the right to education in Kurdish is one of their main demands.
The constitution however states, “no language other than Turkish shall be taught as mother tongue to Turkish citizens.”
“The Kurdish people’s right to education in their mother tongue is essential for the expression of their cultural identity and social equality,” said Gulistan Kilic Kocyigit, chairperson of the pro-Kurdish DEM party in parliament.
“Education in mother tongue is essential for peace, equal citizenship and the protection of cultural rights.”
Erdogan’s key ally in his ruling alliance made a shock proposal in October that jailed Kurdish militant PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan end his group’s insurgency in exchange for the possibility of his release.
Previously, a peace process with the militants was started in 2012 but collapsed in 2015 and was followed by fresh violence and a crackdown on the pro-Kurdish political movement.
“Optional Kurdish classes have become invisible in schools since the end of the peace process,” said Remezan Alan, a lecturer within the Kurdish Language and Culture department of Artuklu University in Turkiye’s southeastern Mardin province. The department was formed in 2009.
Two of Alan’s children were unable to access Kurdish class in Diyarbakir, a city of 1.8 million in the mainly Kurdish southeast. “There were enough requests, but a teacher was not available,” he said.
Asked about the classes, Turkiye’s ministry of education, which speaks for schools, said, “it is possible for a course to be taught if at least 10 students are enrolled.” It did not comment on the situation in individual schools.
Education Minister Yusuf Tekin last month denied that the state was ignoring requests from parents for the lessons or discouraging them from asking for them. If there were not enough students he said, it was because of a 2012 boycott of the lessons by DEM’s predecessor party, which said two hours were not enough.
Parents want children to learn Kurdish in school so they can read and write in the language, they say.
Hudai Morarslan, a member of teachers’ union Egitim-Bir-Sen which campaigns for teachers’ rights and educational rights, says pupils have access to optional Kurdish classes in only 13 cities across Turkiye. He is campaigning for them to be available in Bingol, a town in the mainly Kurdish southeast region.
“Everyone is afraid to ask,” he said, adding that there is a constant fear of being stigmatized by the state and linked to the PKK, designated as a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and the European Union.
In November, Turkish authorities detained 231 people and replaced six pro-Kurdish mayors over suspected PKK ties. The DEM Party said those detained included its local officials and activists.
Earlier, dozens of people singing and dancing to Kurdish songs at weddings were detained on charges of “spreading terrorist propaganda,” which the DEM party said showed “intolerance toward Kurdish identity and culture.”
Government officials said the songs were an expression of solidarity with the PKK and a threat to national unity.

SLOW PROGRESS
Turkiye’s ban on the Kurdish language was lifted in 1991. Seventeen years later, state broadcaster TRT began a Kurdish TV channel, which some Kurds boycotted and criticized as government propaganda.
Nevzat Yesilbagdan, 43, lives in Istanbul’s Bagcilar district with his family. He says three of his children’s requests to learn Kurdish have been denied by the school due to a lack of teachers or an insufficient number of students.
“Our main demand is to be educated in our mother tongue, but an optional course is an important step toward that goal.”
A study released by Rawest Research, a think tank focused on Kurdish issues, found in 2020 that only 30 percent of some 1,500 parents were aware of the optional Kurdish courses.
Ihsan Yildiz, 42, who works in the construction sector in Istanbul, said his 15-year-old daughter Meryem received no response to her request for Kurdish class from her Islamic Imam Hatip school. She then stopped asking.
His children understand some Kurdish but can’t read it.
“My mother who lives with us does not speak Turkish. I translate when my children talk to their grandmother. This is so sad.”


New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan

New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan

New militias sow future danger for war-weary Sudan
  • They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said
  • Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies”

CAIRO: Mohamed Idris, 27, has despaired of ever finding a job in war-torn Sudan. Instead, he’s now set his sights on a training camp on the Eritrean border, hoping to join a militia.
“I got my university degree but there aren’t any job opportunities, if I get into a training camp I can at least defend my country and my people,” he told AFP from Kassala in Sudan, the nearest city to the border.
Analysts say the growing role such militias and armed groups are playing in the war will only prolong the country’s suffering.
Sudan’s war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, sparking what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis.
More than eight million people have been uprooted internally and more than three million have fled abroad.
The northeast African country is on the brink of famine, according to aid agencies, and a UN investigation found both sides committed rights abuses with the RSF particularly implicated in sexual violence.
In Sudan’s east, Kassala and Gedaref have so far been spared the chaos of war, but host more than a million people who have fled fighting elsewhere.
In both cities, AFP correspondents have seen convoys of four-wheel drives mounted with anti-aircraft weapons speed through the streets.
Each vehicle, blasting its horn as it went, was manned by a handful of young men waving assault rifles — though the nearest battles are hundreds of kilometers (miles) away.
The men, like Idris, are part of a generation who have lost their futures to the flames of Sudan’s war.

Now, they represent recruiting potential for new armed groups being formed, particularly along ethnic and tribal lines in the country’s army-controlled east.
“The forces I want to join are from my tribe and my family,” said Idris.
According to Sudanese analyst and former culture and information minister Faisal Mohammed Saleh, “these groups haven’t yet joined the fray in the current war.”
“But the fear is that they could be preparing for future rounds,” he told AFP.
Sudan, which has only known brief interludes of civilian rule since independence from Britain in 1956, is rife with armed groups, some with the capacity of small armies.
For decades, many were locked in wars with the central government, claiming to champion the rights of marginalized ethnic minorities or regions.
In 2020, most signed a peace agreement with the government in Khartoum, and several rebel leaders subsequently became senior officials in the government of army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan.
“In the first months of the war, many of these groups were neutral, but have since declared allegiance to the army,” Sudanese policy researcher Qusay Hamrour told AFP.
They established the so-called joint forces to fight on the army’s side, while other groups “wavered, before throwing their weight behind the RSF,” Hamrour said.
According to former information minister Saleh, “what’s new now is the eastern Sudanese groups, most of which are training inside Eritrea.”
Eyewitnesses told AFP earlier this year that they saw Sudanese fighters being trained in at least five locations in neighboring Eritrea, which has not commented on the allegations.
The witnesses said the camps were linked to Burhan’s army or to figures from the former Islamist-backed regime of ousted dictator Omar Al-Bashir.

Historically, though ethnic or tribal armed groups “may ally themselves with the regular army, they remain essentially independent,” according to Ameer Babiker, author of the book “Sudan’s Peace: A Quagmire of Militias and Irregular Armies.”
Khartoum has long relied on armed groups to fight its wars in other parts of Sudan.
In response to an uprising in Darfur in 2003, Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militia, leading to war crimes charges against him and others.
The RSF, formalized by Bashir in 2013, are descended from the Janjaweed.
In 2021, army chief Burhan led a coup that derailed a fragile civilian transition that followed Bashir’s own ouster.
By April 2023, a long-running power struggle between Burhan and his deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, erupted into all-out war.
Now, what Babiker calls “the weakness of the Sudanese state” has compelled it to again to depend on militias to secure territory.
He said this strategy would “only lead to these groups growing stronger, making them impossible to bypass in the future.”
Already, there have emerged “multiple centers of decision-making within the army,” he told AFP.
According to a May report from the International Crisis Group think tank, “both main belligerents are struggling with command and control.”
Burhan, increasingly reliant on powers from the Bashir regime “as well as communal militias and other armed groups ... risks losing his hold on the various factions.”
Meanwhile the RSF is “an ever more motley assortment of tribal militias and warlords,” according to Crisis Group, which says that both wartime coalitions have become more unwieldy.

 


UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state

UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state

UN General Assembly pushes for Palestinian state
  • The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel
  • Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity

UNITED NATIONS, United States: The UN General Assembly on Tuesday called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories and pushed for the creation of a Palestinian state, convening an international conference in June to try to jumpstart a two-state solution.
In a resolution passed by a 157-8 vote, with the United States and Israel among those voting no, and seven abstentions, the Assembly expressed “unwavering support, in accordance with international law, for the two-state solution of Israel and Palestine.”

Palestinian UN Representative Riyad Mansour attends the General Assembly 46th plenary meeting on the Question of Palestine on December 3, 2024, at UN headquarters in New York. (AFP)

The Assembly said the two states should be “living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, based on the pre-1967 borders.”
It has called for a high-level international meeting in New York in June 2025, to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia, to breathe new life into diplomatic efforts to make the two-state solution a reality.
The assembly called for “realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, primarily the right to self-determination and the right to their independent state.”
The United Nations considers the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to be unlawfully occupied by Israel.
Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 and maintained troops and settlements there until 2005. Though it has withdrawn, it is still considered the occupying power there.
Alluding to recent rulings by the International Court of Justice, the assembly called on Israel to end its “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as rapidly as possible” and halt all new settlement activity.
“The question of Palestine has been on the UN agenda since the inception of the organization and remains the most critical test to its credibility and authority and to the very existence of an international law-based order,” Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour said.
It was a UN General Assembly resolution in 1947 that divided British-ruled Palestine into two states — one Arab and one Jewish.
But only the creation of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948. This triggered a war between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

 


UN condemns deadly shelling of Sudan displacement camp

Displaced Sudanese people sit at Zamzam camp, in North Darfur, Sudan, August 1, 2024. (REUTERS)
Displaced Sudanese people sit at Zamzam camp, in North Darfur, Sudan, August 1, 2024. (REUTERS)
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

UN condemns deadly shelling of Sudan displacement camp

Displaced Sudanese people sit at Zamzam camp, in North Darfur, Sudan, August 1, 2024. (REUTERS)
  • According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition

UNITED NATIONS, United States: The United Nations on Tuesday denounced the shelling of a displacement camp in North Darfur by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which killed at least six people.
The famine-stricken Zamzam camp, just south of state capital El-Fasher, came under intense rocket and artillery bombardment by the RSF on Sunday.
“The United Nations and humanitarian partners in Sudan strongly condemn these acts of violence against innocent civilians,” the UN resident coordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said in a statement.
She added: “I am deeply concerned by reports of the indiscriminate shelling of Zamzam camp, health clinics and shelters of displaced people. Their protection is paramount.”
Since April last year, a war between the regular army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 11 million and created what the UN has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
El-Fasher has been besieged by paramilitaries for months, paralyzing aid operations and plunging the Zamzam camp, which is home to at least half a million people, into famine.
According to the UN, which managed to deliver its first aid convoy to Zamzam in months in November, families have been reduced to eating peanut shells to survive as children die of malnutrition.
“It is now 232 days since the siege of El-Fasher began, which has resulted in unacceptable levels of human suffering,” Nkweta-Salami said.
Both sides of the conflict face accusations of war crimes, including targeting civilians, shelling residential areas and blocking or looting aid.
In recent weeks, the RSF has tightened its grip on El-Fasher, launching attacks on multiple fronts against Sudan’s military and allied armed groups.

 


Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem

Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem
Updated 04 December 2024
Follow

Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem

Doctors urge medical evacuations from war-torn Gaza to east Jerusalem
  • Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas

JERUSALEM: Medics and rights groups on Tuesday called for the immediate opening of a humanitarian corridor from Gaza to allow the urgent evacuation of patients to hospitals in east Jerusalem.
Israel controls all points of departure from the Gaza Strip which has been battered by over a year of war between Israel and militants led by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.
Rare medical evacuations have been organized by international organizations or foreign countries in coordination with Israeli authorities.
But amid mounting casualties from the war, the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) called for the immediate reopening of the Gaza to east Jerusalem medical corridor, estimating that about 25,000 patients in Gaza were in need of urgent care.
Fadi Atrash, the director of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in east Jerusalem, said the reopening of the evacuation corridor “is essential to allow us to continue to provide vital treatments in hospitals in east Jerusalem, where we have both the space and the medical expertise.”
Prior to the war, patients in Gaza who were in need of medical care unavailable in the Palestinian territory could be evacuated to hospitals in the Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem or the occupied West Bank, and in some cases in Israel.
But since the Gaza war broke out last year, that mechanism has been defunct.
During an exceptional evacuation of about 200 patients from Gaza in early November, the World Health Organization said about 14,000 people were awaiting medical evacuations.
Days later, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said “Israeli authorities blocked, without explanation, the medical evacuation of eight children and their caretakers from Gaza who are in need of medical care, including a two-year-old with leg amputations, to the MSF hospital in Jordan.”
“We strongly denounce this decision,” it said.
On Tuesday, “31 patients and caregivers left Gaza” through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel, COGAT, the Israeli Defense Ministry agency managing civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said.
It added that the patients were to be transferred to Jordan and the United States for treatment.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X that the 31 comprised 11 children with cancer awaiting treatment and 20 companions.
“Thousands of patients across Gaza still need medical evacuations for life-saving medical care. We urge that all corridors be utilized for the safe transfer of patients outside the Gaza Strip,” he said.
More than 105,000 people have been wounded in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7, 2023, according to figures from the territory’s health ministry which the United Nations deems reliable.
Gaza’s health care system has largely been decimated by the war, with only a handful of medical facilities now able to provide care.