Israeli defense chief challenges Netanyahu over post-war Gaza plans
Israeli defense chief challenges Netanyahu over post-war Gaza plans/node/2511136/middle-east
Israeli defense chief challenges Netanyahu over post-war Gaza plans
Displaced Palestinians drive their vehicles along a street devastated by Israeli bombardment in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 15, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Hamas group. (AFP)
Israeli defense chief challenges Netanyahu over post-war Gaza plans
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vows to oppose any long-term military rule by Israel over Gaza
Netanyahu accuses Gallant of making ‘excuses’ for not yet having destroyed Hamas in the conflict
Updated 16 May 2024
Reuters
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was publicly challenged about post-war plans for the Gaza Strip on Wednesday by his own defense chief, who vowed to oppose any long-term military rule by Israel over the ravaged Palestinian enclave.
The televised statement by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant marked the most vocal dissent from within Israel’s top echelon against Netanyahu during a seven-month-old and multi-front conflict that has set off political fissures at home and abroad.
Netanyahu hinted, in a riposte which did not explicitly name Gallant, that the retired admiral was making “excuses” for not yet having destroyed Hamas in a conflict now in its eight month.
But the veteran conservative premier soon appeared to be outflanked within his own war cabinet: Centrist ex-general Benny Gantz, the only voting member of the forum other than Netanyahu and Gallant, said the defense minister had “spoke(n) the truth.”
While reiterating the Netanyahu government’s goals of defeating Hamas and recovering remaining hostages from the Oct. 7 cross-border rampage by the faction, Gallant said these must be complemented by laying the groundwork for alternative Palestinian rule.
“We must dismantle Hamas’ governing capabilities in Gaza. The key to this goal is military action, and the establishment of a governing alternative in Gaza,” Gallant said.
“In the absence of such an alternative, only two negative options remain: Hamas’ rule in Gaza or Israeli military rule in Gaza,” he added, saying he would oppose the latter scenario and urging Netanyahu to formally forswear it.
Gallant said that, since October, he had tried to promote a plan to set up a “non-hostile Palestinian governing alternative” to Hamas — but got no response from the Israeli cabinet.
The format of his broadside, a pre-announced news conference carried live by Israeli TV and radio, recalled Gallant’s bombshell warning in March 2023 that foment over a judicial overhaul pursued by Netanyahu was threatening military cohesion.
At the time, Netanyahu announced that Gallant would be fired — but backed down amid a deluge of street demonstrations. Some defense analysts believe Gallant’s prediction was borne out by Hamas’ ability to blindside Israeli forces a few months later.
Asked on Wednesday whether he was worried he may again face being ousted, Gallant said: “I’m not blaming anyone. In a democratic country, I believe, it’s appropriate for a person, especially the defense minister who holds a position, to make it public.”
Gallant’s Gaza criticism recalled that of Israel’s chief ally, the United States, which has sought to parlay the war into a role for the internationally backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which wields limited governance in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu has refused this, describing the PA as a hostile entity — and repeated this position in a video statement he issued on social media within an hour of Gallant’s remarks.
Any move to create an alternative Gaza government requires that Hamas first be eliminated, Netanyahu said, finishing with the demand that this objective be pursued “without excuses.”
Netanyahu’s ruling coalition includes ultra-nationalist partners who want the PA dismantled and new Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Those partners have at times sparred with Gallant, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, over policy.
Netanyahu has said Israel would retain overall security control over Gaza after the war for the foreseeable future. He has stopped short of describing this scenario as an occupation — a status Washington does not want to see emerge — and has signalled opposition to Israelis settling the territory.
Over the last week, Israeli ground forces have returned to some areas of northern Gaza that they overran and quit in the first half of the war. Israel describes the new missions as planned crackdowns on efforts by Hamas holdouts to regroup, while Palestinians see evidence of the tenacity of the gunmen.
Briefing reporters on Tuesday, chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari was asked whether the absence of a post-Hamas strategy for Gaza was complicating operations.
“There is no doubt that an alternative to Hamas would generate pressure on Hamas, but that’s a question for the government echelon,” he responded.
Long silenced by fear, Syrians now speak about rampant torture under Assad
Activists and rights groups say the brutality was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities where torture, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant
Updated 11 sec ago
AP
DAMASCUS: Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks. Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists until his toes barely touched the floor and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment. That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests that had arisen against his rule. With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open. It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities where torture, brutality, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to activists, rights group and former prisoners. Security agents spared no one, not even Assad’s own soldiers. Young men and women were detained for simply living in districts where protests were held. As tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade, a blanket of fear kept the Syrian population silent. People rarely told anyone that a loved one had vanished for fear they too could be reported to security agencies. Now, everyone is talking. The insurgents who swept Assad out of power opened detention facilities, releasing prisoners and allowing the public to bear witness. Crowds swarmed, searching for answers, bodies of their loved ones, and ways to heal. The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees, some released on Dec. 8, the day Assad was ousted. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups. Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra – now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months. In an underground dungeon, he stepped into the windowless, 4-by-4-meter (yard) cell where he says he was held with 100 other inmates. Each man was allowed a floor tile to squat on, Zahra said. When ventilators weren’t running — either intentionally or because of a power failure — some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers came to collect corpses, Zahra said. “Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.” Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged Zahra was arrested along with his father after security agents killed one of his brothers, a well-known anti-Assad graffiti artist. After they were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father. They were brought to Branch 215. All were tortured and killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector that showed the corpses of thousands killed while in detention. Their bodies were never recovered, and how and when they died is unknown. Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing after anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into Assad’s prison network. Many of them were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown. Even before the uprising, Assad had ruled with an iron fist. But as peaceful protests turned into a full-fledged civil war that would last 14 years, Assad rapidly expanded his system of repression. New detention facilities sprung up in security compounds, military airports and under buildings — all run by military, security and intelligence agencies. Touring the site of his torture and detention, Zahra hoped to find some sign of his lost relatives. But there was nothing. At home, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, saw the pictures of her killed children for the first time. She had refused to look at the leaked photos before. She lost three of her six sons in Branch 215 and a fourth was killed at a protest. Her brother, she said, had three sons, now he has only one. “They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.” Syrians were tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’ The Assad regime’s tortures had names. One was called the “magic carpet,” where a detainee was strapped to a hinged wooden plank that bends in half, folding his head to his feet, which are then beaten. Abdul-Karim Hajjeko said he endured this five times. His torturers stomped on his back during interrogations at the Criminal Security branch, and his vertebrae are still broken. “My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he said. He was also put in “the tire.” His legs were bent inside a car tire as interrogators beat his back and feet with a plastic baton. When they were done, he said, a guard ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for teaching him “how to behave.” Hajjeko was later taken to the notorious Saydnaya Prison, where he was held for six years. Many prisoners said the tire was inflicted for rule violations — like making noise, raising one’s head in front of guards, or praying – or for no reason at all. Mahmoud Abdulbaki, a non-commissioned air force officer who defected from service, was put in the tire during detention at a military police facility. They forced him to count the lashes — up to 200 — and if he made a mistake, the torturer would start over. “People’s hearts stopped following a beating,” the 37-year-old said. He was later held at Saydnaya, where he said guards would terrorize inmates by rolling a tire down the corridor lined with cells and beat on the bars with their batons. Wherever it stopped, the entire cell would be subjected to the tire. Altogether, Abdulbaki spent nearly six years in prison over different periods. He was among those freed on the day Assad fled Syria. Saleh Turki Yahia said a cellmate died nearly every day during the seven months in 2012 he was held at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility run by the General Intelligence Agency. He recounted how one man bled in the cell for days after returning from a torture session where interrogators rammed a pipe into him. When the inmates tried to move him, “all his fluids poured out from his backside. The wound opened from the back, and he died,” he said. Yahya said he was given electric shocks, hanged from his wrists, beaten on his feet. He lost half his body weight and nearly tore his own skin scratching from scabies. “They broke us,” he said, breaking into tears. “Look at Syria, it is all old men ... A whole generation is destroyed.” But with Assad gone, he was back visiting the Palestine Branch. “I came to express myself. I want to tell.” The mounting evidence will be used in trials Torture continued up to the end of Assad’s rule. Rasha Barakat, 34, said she and her sister were detained in March from their homes in Saqba, a town outside Damascus. Inside a security branch, she was led past her husband, who had been arrested hours earlier and was being interrogated. He was kneeling on the floor, his face green, she said. It was her last brief glimpse of him: He died in custody. During her own hours-long interrogation, she said, security agents threatened to bring in her sons, 5- and 7-years-old, if she didn’t confess. She was beaten. Female security agents stripped her and poured cold water on her, leaving her shivering naked for two hours. She spent eight days in isolation, hearing beatings nearby. Eventually she was taken to Adra, Damascus’ central prison, tried and sentenced to five years for supporting rebel groups, charges she said were made up. There she stayed until insurgents broke into Adra in December and told her she was free. An estimated 30,000 prisoners were released as fighters opened up prisons during their march to Damascus. Barakat said she is happy to see her kids again. But “I am destroyed psychologically … Something is missing. It is hard to keep going.” Now comes the monumental task of accounting for the missing and compiling evidence that could one day be used to prosecute Assad’s officials, whether by Syrian or international courts. Hundreds of thousands of documents remain scattered through the former detention facilities, many labeled classified, in storage rooms commonly underground. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of phone conversations, even between military officers; intelligence files on activists; and a list of hundreds of prisoners killed in detention. Shadi Haroun, who spent 10 years imprisoned, has been charting Assad’s prison structure and documenting former detainees’ experiences from exile in Turkiye. After Assad’s fall, he rushed back to Syria and toured detention sites. The documents, he said, show the bureaucracy behind the killings. “They know what they are doing, it is organized.” Civil defense workers are tracking down mass graves where tens of thousands are believed to be buried. At least 10 have been identified around Damascus, mostly from residents’ reports, and five others elsewhere around the country. Authorities say they are not ready to open them. A UN body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism has offered to help Syria’s new interim administration in collecting, organizing and analyzing all the material. Since 2011, it has been compiling evidence and supporting investigations in over 200 criminal cases against figures in Assad’s government. Robert Petit, director of the UN body, said the task is so enormous, no one entity can do it alone. The priority would be to identify the architects of the brutality. Many want answers now. Officials cannot just declare that the missing are presumed dead, said Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years ago. “No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”
Syria unable to import wheat or fuel due to US sanctions, trade minister says
The sanctions were imposed during Assad’s rule, targeting his government and also state institutions such as the central bank
Updated 07 January 2025
Reuters
DAMASCUS: Syria is unable to make deals to import fuel, wheat or other key goods due to strict US sanctions and despite many countries, including Gulf Arab states, wanting to do so, Syria’s new trade minister said.
In an interview with Reuters at his office in Damascus, Maher Khalil Al-Hasan said Syria’s new ruling administration had managed to scrape together enough wheat and fuel for a few months but the country faces a “catastrophe” if sanctions are not frozen or lifted soon.
Hasan is a member of the new caretaker government set up by Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham after it launched a lightning offensive that toppled autocratic President Bashar Assad on Dec. 8 after 13 years of civil war.
The sanctions were imposed during Assad’s rule, targeting his government and also state institutions such as the central bank.
Russia and Iran, both major backers of the Assad government, previously provided most of Syria’s wheat and oil products but both stopped doing so after the rebels triumphed and Assad fled to Moscow.
The US is set to announce an easing of restrictions on providing humanitarian aid and other basic services such as electricity to Syria while maintaining its strict sanctions regime, people briefed on the matter told Reuters on Monday.
The exact impact of the expected measures remains to be seen.
The decision by the outgoing Biden administration aims to send a signal of goodwill to Syria’s people and its new Islamist rulers, and pave the way for improving basic services and living conditions in the war-ravaged country.
At the same time, US officials see the sanctions as a key point of leverage with a new ruling group that was designated a terrorist entity by Washington several years ago but which, after breaking with Islamist militant group Al Qaeda, has recently signalled a more moderate approach.
Washington wants to see Damascus embark on an inclusive political transition and to cooperate on counterterrorism and other matters.
Hasan told Reuters he was aware of reports that some sanctions may soon be eased or frozen.
Libya military says air strikes target smuggling sites
The Libyan Army said the air strikes “targeted and destroyed fuel trafficking sites in Zawiya, specifically in Asban,” a semi-rural area outside of the city
Updated 07 January 2025
AFP
ZAWIYAH, Libya: Libya’s UN-recognized authorities have launched air strikes targeting drug trafficking and fuel smuggling hubs west of the capital, a military statement said on Monday.
It remained unclear if there were casualties from the strikes in Zawiya, a city on the Mediterranean coast about 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of the capital Tripoli.
Libya was plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed strongman Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, with armed groups exploiting the situation to fund their activities through fuel smuggling and the trafficking of migrants.
The Libyan Army said the air strikes “targeted and destroyed fuel trafficking sites in Zawiya, specifically in Asban,” a semi-rural area outside of the city.
It also called on locals to clear areas it labelled as “strongholds for trafficking and crime.”
In May 2023, the Tripoli-based government carried out drone strikes as part of an anti-smuggling operation, killing at least two people and injuring several others, authorities said at the time.
Those strikes followed clashes between armed groups suspected of involvement in human trafficking and smuggling of fuel and other contraband goods.
Libya’s eastern-based parliament accused the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity of targeting the home of one of its lawmakers, an opponent of the government.
Libya is divided between the Tripoli-based GNU and a rival administration in the east, backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
Footage posted on the army’s Facebook page showed a military truck smashing into the facade of a small dwelling.
Other footage showed tanks and pickup trucks mounted with machine guns driving through Zawiya.
The city hosts Libya’s second-largest oil refinery, with smugglers trafficking the fuel across the border into neighboring Tunisia.
Grundberg’s office said his visit would also “support the release of the arbitrarily detained UN, NGO, civil society and diplomatic mission personnel”
Updated 07 January 2025
AFP
SANAA: Hans Grundberg, the United Nation’s special envoy for war-torn Yemen, arrived Monday in the rebel-held capital in a bid to breathe life into peace talks, his office said.
Grundberg last visited the capital Sanaa, controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis, in May 2023 for meetings with the rebels’ leaders in an earlier effort to advance a roadmap for peace.
The envoy’s current visit “is part of his ongoing efforts to urge for concrete and essential actions... for advancing the peace process,” Grundberg’s office said in a statement.
Yemen has been at war since 2014, when the Houthis forced the internationally recognized government out of Sanaa. The rebels have also seized population centers in the north.
A UN-brokered ceasefire in April 2022 calmed fighting and in December 2023 the warring parties committed to a peace process.
But tensions have surged during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, as the Houthis struck Israeli targets and international shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, in a campaign the rebels say is in solidarity with Palestinians.
In response to the Houthi attacks, Israel as well as the United States and Britain have hit Houthi targets in Yemen over the past year. One Israeli raid hit Sanaa’s international airport.
Grundberg’s office said his visit would also “support the release of the arbitrarily detained UN, NGO, civil society and diplomatic mission personnel.”
Dozens of staff from UN and other humanitarian organizations have been detained by the rebels, most of them since June, with the Houthis accusing them of belonging to a “US-Israeli spy network,” a charge the United Nations denies.
US says anti-Daesh operation in Iraq kills coalition soldier
US officials have said Daesh is hoping to stage a comeback in Syria following the fall in December of Syrian President Bashar Assad
Updated 07 January 2025
Reuters
WASHINGTON: The US military said on Monday operations against Daesh in Iraq over the past week led to the death of a non-US coalition soldier and wounded two other non-US personnel.
It also detailed operations in Syria against Daesh militants led by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, including one that resulted in the capture of what the US military’s Central Command said was an Daesh attack cell leader.
US officials have said Daesh is hoping to stage a comeback in Syria following the fall in December of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
