Netanyahu added demands to Hamas ceasefire deal: New York Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington. (File/AP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington. (File/AP)
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Updated 14 August 2024
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Netanyahu added demands to Hamas ceasefire deal: New York Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington. (File/AP)
  • Report contradicts PM’s claim that Hamas is spoiling talks
  • Negotiators fear further deadlock after ‘contentious’ Israeli changes

LONDON: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu privately added new conditions to his country’s proposed ceasefire deal with Hamas, The New York Times has reported.

Negotiators on the Israeli side fear that the added conditions could prevent a peace deal being reached.

The Israeli leader has for weeks denied claims that he is trying to spoil a deal by adding further conditions.

Netanyahu repeatedly blamed Hamas’ officials for the stalled negotiation process, despite criticism leveled at him from Israeli security officials.

Unpublished documents seen by The New York Times show that Israel demanded new ceasefire conditions in late July to US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators. It modified previous demands that Israel made in late May.

Among the most contentious new proposals was an Israeli demand that it oversees the Philadelphi Corridor on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt after the fighting stops.

That proposal was absent from the Israeli conditions proposed in May.

Behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Netanyahu “has been extensive” in making the changes, the newspaper said.

Ahmad Abdul Hadi, a Hamas official, said on Tuesday that the militant group would not take part in new talks set to be held in Doha or Cairo this week.

In shifting its demands from May to July Israel also “showed less flexibility about allowing displaced Palestinians to return to their homes in northern Gaza once fighting is halted.”

Two senior Israeli officials told The New York Times that some members of the country’s negotiating team fear that a ceasefire deal will be scuppered as a result of the changes.

Critics of Netanyahu in Israel say that the prime minister is prioritizing the stability of his coalition government above the freedom of hostages — a key condition among Israel’s proposals.

Netanyahu’s small parliamentary majority depends on the support of several far-right lawmakers who have threatened to quit if a ceasefire deal is reached.

In a response to The New York Times for comment, the prime minister’s office denied that he had added new conditions to Israel’s ceasefire proposal.

Instead, he had “sought to clarify ambiguities in Israel’s May proposal, making it easier to put into effect.”

A statement said: “The July 27 letter does not introduce new terms. To the contrary, it includes essential clarifications to help implement the May 27 proposal.

“Hamas is the one that demanded 29 changes to the May 27 proposal, something the prime minister refused to do.”

Netanyahu claimed in an Aug. 4 cabinet meeting that Israel had “not added even a single demand to the outline” and that “it is Hamas which has demanded to add dozens of changes.”

But an Israeli letter to mediators on July 27 revealed that the country had added five new demands to the proposal it had issued in late May.

The second contentious change on the return of displaced Palestinians relates to proposed weapons screenings.

For months before the May offer, Israel demanded that all Palestinian civilians be screened for weapons if they moved from southern to northern Gaza in the event of a ceasefire. In May, however, that demand was softened, and Hamas agreed to it.

But the July set of proposals reversed Israel’s offer and once again demanded complete weapons screenings of all civilians.

Senior Israeli officials “believe that it is not worth holding up a deal over this point,” according to The New York Times.

In the interest of freeing hostages as quickly as possible, they want Netanyahu to “back down ahead of the planned meeting on Thursday.”


Israel strikes central Beirut: state media

A man walks amid destruction in Beirut’s southern Haret Hreik neighbourhood a day after an Israeli airstrike targeted the site.
A man walks amid destruction in Beirut’s southern Haret Hreik neighbourhood a day after an Israeli airstrike targeted the site.
Updated 41 min 32 sec ago
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Israel strikes central Beirut: state media

A man walks amid destruction in Beirut’s southern Haret Hreik neighbourhood a day after an Israeli airstrike targeted the site.
  • “Enemy aircraft targeted the vicinity of Al-Zahraa Husseiniya in the Zuqaq Al-Blat area in Beirut, with two missiles,” Lebanon’s official news agency said

BEIRUT: An Israeli air strike hit a central neighborhood of the capital Beirut on Monday, state media said, in the third such attack since Sunday.
“Enemy aircraft targeted the vicinity of Al-Zahraa Husseiniya in the Zuqaq Al-Blat area in Beirut, with two missiles,” Lebanon’s official National News Agency said, referring to a Shiite Muslim place of worship.
A security official, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, had earlier also confirmed the strike to AFP.
The densely-populated working class district of Zuqaq Al-Blat has welcomed many displaced people who fled Israeli strikes on Lebanon’s south and east, as well as south Beirut — areas where Iran-backed Hezbollah holds sway.
An AFP correspondent in a nearby area heard two blasts, while reporters in another part of Beirut heard ambulance sirens.
Lebanese authorities say more than 3,510 people have been killed since Hezbollah-Israel clashes began in October last year, with most casualties recorded since war erupted in September.


US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence

US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence
Updated 18 November 2024
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US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence

US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence
  • Sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets
  • Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began

WASHINGTON: The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on an Israeli settler group it accused of helping perpetrate violence in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians.
The Amana settler group “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement and maintains ties to various persons previously sanctioned by the US government and its partners for perpetrating violence in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The sanctions also target a subsidiary of Amana called Binyanei Bar Amana, described by Treasury as a company that builds and sell homes in Israeli settlements and settler outposts.
The sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets. The United Kingdom and Canada have also imposed sanctions on Amana.
Israel has settled the West Bank since capturing it during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say the settlements have undermined the prospects for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Israel views the West Bank as the biblical Judea and Samaria, and the settlers cite biblical ties to the land.
Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began over a year ago.
Most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position disputed by Israel which sees the territory as a security bulwark. In 2019, the then-Trump administration abandoned the long-held US position that the settlements are illegal before it was restored by President Joe Biden.
Last week, nearly 90 US lawmakers urged Biden to impose sanctions on members of members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.


Around 100 projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel: army

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepts incoming projectiles over Tel Aviv. (File/AFP)
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepts incoming projectiles over Tel Aviv. (File/AFP)
Updated 18 November 2024
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Around 100 projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel: army

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system intercepts incoming projectiles over Tel Aviv. (File/AFP)
  • Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired around 100 projectiles from Lebanon into northern Israel on Monday, with the country’s air defense system intercepting some of them.
Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel and were taken to hospital.
The military said in a first statement that “as of 15:00 (1300 GMT), approximately 60 projectiles that were fired by the Hezbollah terrorist organization have crossed from Lebanon into Israel today.”
Later it said, “following the sirens that sounded between 15:09 and 15:11 in the Western Galilee area, approximately 40 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory.”
Israel has escalated its bombing of targets in Lebanon since September 23 and has since sent in ground troops, following almost a year of limited, cross-border exchanges of fire begun by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in support of Hamas in Gaza.


‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief

‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief
Updated 18 November 2024
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‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief

‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief
  • Israel ordered ban on organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza
  • UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees

GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities,” providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organization in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency’s roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza “may have been involved” in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.
Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA’s advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organization’s “darkest moment.”
“The clock is ticking fast,” he told the commission, according to a transcript.
Describing Gaza as “an unrelenting dystopian horror,” he warned that “what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”
Anton Leis, head of Spain’s international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was “simply no alternative to UNRWA,” which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
“It is the only organization that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza,” he said.
Lazzarini agreed, saying that “If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary health care.
Lazzarini warned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza,” he said, adding that it would not be possible to coordinate the deconfliction with Israeli authorities to ensure aid convoys can move safely.
“The environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
The UNRWA chief has charged that Israel’s main objective in its attacks on the agency is to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.
“We have to be clear, even if UNRWA today would cease its operation, the statue of refugee would remain,” he said.
Without the agency, he said, the responsibility for providing services to the Palestinian refugees “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel.”
If no one steps in to fill the void, he said, it “will create a vacuum ... (and) sow the seeds for more extremism, more hate in the future.”
He called on the international community to go beyond statements of condemnation and put far more pressure on Israel.
“We feel alone.”


‘Jordan stands firm against Israeli aggression on Gaza,’ King Abdullah says as he opens parliament

King Abdullah addresses newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term on Monday. (Jordan News Agency)
King Abdullah addresses newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term on Monday. (Jordan News Agency)
Updated 18 November 2024
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‘Jordan stands firm against Israeli aggression on Gaza,’ King Abdullah says as he opens parliament

King Abdullah addresses newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term on Monday. (Jordan News Agency)
  • Addressing lawmakers, King Abdullah said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war

RIYADH: Jordan stands firm against the “aggression on Gaza and Israeli violations in the West Bank,” the country’s King Abdullah said on Monday as he opened a newly elected parliament.

Addressing lawmakers, he said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war.

“Jordan has exerted tremendous efforts, and Jordanians have valiantly been treating the wounded in the direst of circumstances. Jordanians were the first to deliver aid by air and land to people in Gaza, and we will remain by their side, now and in the future,” he said.

In his speech, the king told newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term that the current parliament was “the first step in the implementation of the political modernization project, on a track to bolster the role of platform-based parties and the participation of women and young people.”

“This requires parliamentary performance, collective action, and close cooperation between the government and parliament, in accordance with the constitution,” the king was reported as saying by Jordan News Agency.

King Abdullah said the government aimed to provide Jordanians with a decent life and empower youths while equipping them for the jobs of the future.

“We must continue implementing the Economic Modernisation Vision to unleash the potential of the national economy and increase growth rates over the next decade, capitalising on Jordan’s human competencies and international relations as catalysts for growth,” the king said.