International

‘Week of disruption’: Arrests, injuries in Israel antigovernment protests

Published

1 week ago

June 18, 2024

Protesters hold a banner saying, ‘Ceasefire Now' at a protest in West Jerusalem, on June 17, 2024 [Saeed Qaq/Anadolu Images]

‘Week of disruption’: Arrests, injuries in Israel antigovernment protests

At least nine people have been arrested during antigovernment protests in Jerusalem, with more demonstrations expected in the coming days amid Israel’s war on Gaza and fighting with Hezbollah.

Police clashed with protesters near the residence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night, with Israeli media reports indicating one of the detainees was a family member of an Israeli captive held in Gaza.

The demonstrators have been calling for new elections, a ceasefire in Gaza, as well as a deal for the release of captives being held in the Palestinian enclave.

“Because of you we are dying, get out of our lives,” read one sign carried by protesters, with a photo of Netanyahu and bloody handprints.

Police used water cannon against demonstrators, with three people reportedly sent to hospital for treatment, including a medic wearing a vest who was injured in the eye.

Israelis have been gathering in Tel Aviv every Saturday night since the start of the current conflict in October, but this week tens of thousands descended on Jerusalem. Demonstrators in front of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, were joined by opposition leader Yair Lapid.

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Organisers of the antigovernment protests called for a “week of disruption”.

They also called on local authorities and business leaders to join the protests, with the aim of holding elections before the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7.

Earlier on Monday, families of Israeli captives participated in one of the committees inside parliament, saying they are fed up with the absence of leadership and decision-making.

Pressure is building on Netanyahu, who dissolved the war cabinet on Monday after his rival Benny Gantz left it along with former army chief Gadi Eisenkot over the lack of a future plan for Gaza.

Reporting from Amman, Jordan, Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut said protesters are also demonstrating against the prolonged conflict with Hezbollah in the north, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of Israelis for months.

“Both sides have picked up the rate of their attacks in the last few weeks. The Israelis say they’re not afraid to enter a full-blown conflict with Hezbollah. However, evacuated people who live in northern Israel have now had their date of return pushed back to the end of August,” she said.

“Demonstrations from those people against the government are now happening with protesters saying there’s no plan to deal with the relentless border fire,” Salhut said.

Amir Oren, a columnist with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said anger against the government is increasing from Israelis displaced in the north because of eight months of cross-border fighting with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

“Public sentiment is now against the Netanyahu government, some three-quarters of the public has had enough of Netanyahu. They want him out. But there’s no way to convert it into parliamentary power because he still has his 64-seat member coalition intact,” Oren told Al Jazeera.

“Until such time there are fissures in this coalition, the cries of the hostage families and [northern Israel] dislocated will have no effect.”

‘Week of disruption’: Arrests, injuries in Israel antigovernment protests

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

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International

Minister arrested over alleged witchcraft

Published

3 hours ago

June 28, 2024

Trends Admin

Fathimath Shamnaz Ali Saleem

Minister arrested over alleged witchcraft

A high-ranking politician in the Maldives has been arrested and detained, reportedly on suspicion of casting spells against the country’s president.

Fathimath Shamnaz Ali Saleem, State Secretary for Environment, Climate Change, and Energy, was taken into custody along with her ex-husband and two other accomplices.

The group has been ordered to remain in jail for a week pending an investigation.

The arrests have sent shockwaves through the political landscape of the Maldives, a nation known more for its idyllic beaches and tourism than for allegations of sorcery at the highest levels of government.

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The Maldives police have not officially stated the reasons behind the arrest of the minister. However, they have declined to confirm or deny media reports suggesting that the charges involve ‘black magic’ directed at President Mohamed Muizzu.

The accusations have sparked widespread speculation and concern among the public and within political circles.

Fathimath Shamnaz Ali Saleem has been a prominent figure in the government, actively involved in shaping policies related to climate change and sustainable development.

Her sudden arrest on such unusual charges has raised many questions about the underlying political dynamics at play.

Minister arrested over alleged witchcraft

International

Israeli forces arrest 28 Palestinians in raids in occupied West Bank

Published

13 hours ago

June 28, 2024

Trends Admin

Israeli forces detain 28 Palestinians in West Bank raids

Israeli forces arrest 28 Palestinians in raids in occupied West Bank

The Israeli military has arrested 28 Palestinians in a series of raids across the occupied West Bank, according to a Palestinian rights group.

The overnight raids, part of Israel’s increasingly violent assault on the occupied territories, targeted the governorates of Jenin, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah and el-Bireh, Nablus and Jerusalem, said the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society on Thursday.

Israeli forces had doled out “severe beatings” and made threats against detainees’ families, said the group, which keeps a daily tally of arrests.

Violence in the West Bank, already on the rise before Israel’s current war on Gaza erupted in October, has since escalated with frequent army raids on Palestinian groups, rampages by Jewish settlers in Palestinian villages, and deadly Palestinian street attacks.

Reporting from Ramallah, Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh said the Israeli military had “dramatically” increased its operations, conducting about 38 raids a day, with an uptick in detentions. Home demolitions have gone up by 25 percent since last year, displacing more than 1,000 Palestinians.

In Jenin, where nine Palestinians were arrested, armed confrontations broke out in the city and its refugee camp in the early hours of Thursday.

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Palestinian media said Israeli forces had raided a pharmacy near Jenin Government Hospital, on the outskirts of Jenin refugee camp, transferring detainees to an unknown destination.

A resident said Israeli bulldozers destroyed infrastructure inside the camp and in the city of Jenin.

During the raid, Palestinian fighters attacked Israeli armoured vehicles with explosive devices, killing one soldier and wounding 16.

“There were two explosions. The first one caused injuries. The second, that’s where the death happened,” said Odeh.

“According to preliminary Israeli investigations, the devices were buried or located a metre and a half into the ground, so deeper than the Israeli military vehicles usually dig to be able to find those improvised devices,” she said.

The Israeli military confirmed the death. The soldier “fell during operational activity in the area of Jenin”, it said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Wafa news agency reported that four Palestinians were arrested in an overnight swoop on Hebron.

Israeli forces had stormed the town of Yatta, south of the city of Hebron, arresting three people, including a female university student. Another man was arrested in the town of Dura, southwest of Hebron.

The Israeli military also arrested a man after shooting him in the foot in the Qalandiya refugee camp, while another man was taken into custody in Deir Ghassana village, northwest of Ramallah.

Since October 7, Israel has carried out a total of 9,430 arrests in the West Bank in near daily raids.

The United Nations’ human rights chief Volker Turk warned this month that the situation in the West Bank was “dramatically deteriorating”, saying earlier that people there were being “subjected to day after day of unprecedented bloodshed”.

Israeli forces arrest 28 Palestinians in raids in occupied West Bank

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

International

Palestinians in Lebanon ready to fight if Israel starts war with Hezbollah

Published

14 hours ago

June 28, 2024

Trends Admin

The PFLP-GC has a presence in Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon. Shown here, PFLP-GC members march in a parade marking Quds Day at Burj al-Barajneh on April 14, 2023 [Mohamed Azakir/Reuters]

Palestinians in Lebanon ready to fight if Israel starts war with Hezbollah

Shatila refugee camp, Beirut, Lebanon – Palestinians in Lebanon have watched Israel’s assault on Gaza with simmering anger and are now facing the prospect of a similar fate if Israel wages an all-out war against the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Hezbollah began engaging Israel almost immediately after the latter began its war on Gaza, which has killed more than 37,000 people and uprooted almost the entire population.

The Lebanese group has repeatedly said it would stop its attacks on Israel once a ceasefire took hold in Gaza and Israel stopped its bombardment on the people living there.

Israel’s assault followed a Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli communities and military outposts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and 250 taken captive.

Ready to go home

In the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, many people involved in resistance movements told Al Jazeera that they’re not scared, and would fight to support Hezbollah and the wider “axis of resistance” in the region against Israel.

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But they fear for their families and civilians, worrying that Israel would deliberately target densely populated residential areas in Lebanon, like the Palestinian camps, where tens of thousands of people live packed tightly together.

“The Israeli army has no ethics. They don’t abide by human rights or consider the rights of children,” said Ahed Mahar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command [PFLP-GC] in Shatila.

“The Israeli army is just driven by revenge.”

Some 250,000 Palestinians live in 12 refugee camps across Lebanon, fleeing there after Zionist militias expelled them from their homeland to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948 – a day referred to as the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe”.

Since then, Palestinians have longed to return to their homeland, Hassan Abu Ali, a 29-year-old man who grew up in Shatila told Al Jazeera.

If a major war erupted in the country, he said, he and his mother would grab a few belongings and head to the border between Lebanon and Israel.

“I think many Palestinians will try to go back to Palestine at once if there is a war. That’s what people in the camp talk about,” he said.

Abu Ali said he believes Israel could bomb Palestinian camps and then claim they harboured resistance fighters, justifications similar to those it has used when bombing neighbourhoods and displacement camps in Gaza, according to rights groups and legal scholars.

Palestinians will have “no other option” but to return to their homeland if the camps in Lebanon are destroyed, said Abu Ali, adding that as stateless refugees, Palestinians face harsh legal discrimination and live in poverty in Lebanon.

“The only places I’d be able to go to are Palestine or Europe,” Abu Ali told Al Jazeera. “But to go to Europe, I need $10,000 or $12,000 for a smuggler to get out of here. That’s impossible.”

Ready to fight?

In Shatila, several Palestinian men said their peers would join the armed struggle against Israel if it launched a wider war against Hezbollah.

They added that Hamas has attracted thousands of recruits among its traditional supporters and from communities that are historically aligned with Fatah, a rival faction led by Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank.

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“First of all, there are lots of resistance fighters in all of the camps in Lebanon. Secondly … if a big war starts, then we are not scared. We have thousands and thousands of fighters that are ready to be martyred to free Palestine,” said a man who goes by Fadi Abu Ahmad, a member of Hamas in the camp.

Abu Ahmad acknowledged that civilians – especially children, women and the elderly – could be disproportionately harmed if Israel targets Palestinians in Lebanon. But he claimed that most Palestinian refugees believe “their blood is the price they must pay to free Palestine”.

He drew a comparison with Algeria’s war of independence from France, which lasted from 1954 to 1962 and led to the deaths of one million Algerians. However, other Palestinians said they feared for their families and loved ones if a war in Lebanon erupted.

“I’m not scared of the Israelis or what might happen to me,” said Ahmad, 20, a Palestinian in Shatila who declined to tell Al Jazeera his last name.

“But I am afraid of what they might try to do to my little brother and sister. They’re just 14 and nine years old. I don’t want anything to happen to them.”

What to expect?

Despite Israel’s threats, many Palestinians don’t expect a larger war on Lebanon due to the strength of Hezbollah.

They believe the group’s arsenal, which reportedly includes Iran-made guided missiles and sophisticated drones, is deterring Israel from seriously escalating the conflict.

But Abu Ahmad from Hamas notes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could still start a war on Lebanon to appease his far-right coalition partners and maintain power.

“Netanyahu is a criminal,” he told Al Jazeera. “And we know that if there is a war in Lebanon, then there will be lots of killing of civilians here, including Palestinians. It could be like Gaza.”

Mahar, from PFLP-GC, said a war between Hezbollah and Lebanon would be different from the last major war.

In 2006, Hezbollah killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others in a surprise ground attack. In response, Israel targeted civilian infrastructure and power stations in Lebanon.

The fighting lasted for 34 days and led to the death of 1,200 Lebanese – mostly civilians – and 158 Israelis, mostly soldiers. However, the Palestinian camps were largely spared.

“We all expect the camps to be targeted this time around,” Mahar told Al Jazeera. “Israel doesn’t have any red lines any more.”

“Israel exists to commit crimes against Palestinians.”