Israel has stated that it is willing to consider a pause for humanitarian reasons, but only if progress is made in addressing the issue of hostages.
Mark Regev, who works closely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believes that any agreement to stop the fighting should include the release of hostages.
Lyse Doucet from BBC asked Regev about Hamas saying that 60 people were killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza.
Regev says that he cannot say for sure if it’s true or not. He thinks it might just be something Hamas is saying to manipulate people’s minds.
They don’t want us to hurt them anymore, so they are saying that we are causing harm to our own people. They want us to believe something that is clearly not true.
Regev said that Israel has agreed to allow unlimited access for food, medicine, and water to enter Gaza through aid trucks.
Fuel is important because it can be used to produce electricity for hospitals, which is beneficial. However, it can also be used by Hamas to fuel their military operations, including shooting rockets at Israel.
Tag: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
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Israel demands that hostages be released during battle break
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Israel transports Jews from crisis zones in Ethiopia
Over 200 Israeli citizens and Ethiopian Jews were relocated to Addis Abeba, the nation’s capital, using a special flight that Israel stated it had dispatched from two cities in the Amhara and Oromia regions affected by recent unrest.
Jewish residents number in the thousands in the Amhara region.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he had ordered the evacuees to be removed from fighting zones and that they would travel to Israel.
Despite recent violent clashes between the army and local militias, relative quiet is still being reported in the largest cities in the Amhara region.
The army claimed to have recovered control in important areas, but local militias, according to residents of some smaller cities and rural areas, are still in command.
In the meantime, the US and the UK have joined forces with Japan, Australia, and New Zealand to voice their concerns on the deteriorating security in Ethiopia.
Recent violence in the Amhara and Oromia regions of the country “have resulted in civilian deaths and instability,” according to a joint statement made on Friday.
Prior to this, the UN’s Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia expressed its “deep concern” over the current unrest and urged the government to follow “the principles of necessity, proportionality, and non-discrimination” in enforcing a state of emergency that had been declared in response to the violence.
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Over 160,000 people demonstrated against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms
According to CNN’s Ofer Grinboim Liron, a crowd specialist, over 160,000 people protested in Tel Aviv on Saturday night against the Israeli government‘s plans to weaken the nation’s legal system.
That would then rank among the largest individual protests against the law to date.By 8 p.m. local time, Grinboim Liron, the CEO of Crowd Solutions, which focuses on crowd dynamics at events and venues, estimated the size of the gathering using drone pictures (1 p.m. ET).
An additional 130,000 protesters, according to the protest’s organizers, took part in other rallies held across the nation on Saturday night.
The figures provided by the organizers have been greater than those provided by unbiased specialists like Grinboim Liron.Tel Aviv and other cities around Israel have been seeing regular Saturday night demonstrations against the judicial overhaul plans for eight weeks.
The package of legislation would give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority. It would also give the government the power to nominate judges, which currently rests with a committee composed of judges, legal experts and politicians. It would remove power and independence from government ministries’ legal advisers, and take away the power of the courts to invalidate “unreasonable” government appointments, as the High Court did in January, forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri.
Four legislative clauses that are part of the overhaul took steps forward this week. The bills allowing Knesset override of Supreme Court decisions and removing the court’s power to rule government appointments unreasonable both passed early stages of the process on Wednesday and now go to the committee stage. Two other clauses passed first readings on Monday and require two more readings to become law.
Critics accuse Netanyahu of pushing the legislation in order to get out of corruption trials he is currently facing. Netanyahu denies that, saying the trials are collapsing on their own, and that the changes are necessary after judicial overreach by unelected judges.
About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel’s Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, a poll for the Israel Democracy Institute found last week.
People who say they voted for opposition parties were far more likely than voters for the parties in the coalition to oppose the changes. Nearly nine out of 10 (87%) people who voted for the opposition said the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Basic Laws, while only 44% of coalition voters said it should. The percentage was slightly higher among people who voted for Netanyahu’s Likud party, with nearly half (47%) saying the Supreme Court should have that power.
Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws.
The survey, which was released February 21, found that about half (53%) of Israelis believed that removing the political independence of the judiciary would harm Israel’s economy – as Israeli economists and businesspeople have been warning. About a third (35%) do not believe the changes would harm the economy.
The online and telephone survey of 756 adults in Israel was carried out between February 9 to 13, 2023, and has a margin of error of 3.56 points.
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Israel sees protests as the government of Netanyahu unveils a law to weaken the judiciary
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s administration unveiled a divisive measure to revamp the judiciary, demonstrators shut down streets in cities all over Israel on Monday.
Israeli flags that were being distributed by the event’s organisers before it started became a sea as protesters in Jerusalem filled the streets around the Supreme Court and Knesset with Israeli flags.
Several drummers, trumpet blowers, and at least one juggler balancing an Israeli flagpole on his nose were among the protestors, as well as a few dozen ladies wearing long red robes and white head coverings to resemble the handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Jerusalem demonstration was visibly smaller than one in the same location a week earlier, but still appeared to number in the tens of thousands.
The judicial overhaul bill is due for the first of three readings in parliament, the Knesset, on Monday, despite weeks of protests and calls from Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and the United States to delay the legislation and negotiate.
Netanyahu’s coalition is seeking the most sweeping overhaul of the Israeli legal system since the country’s founding. The most significant changes would allow a simple majority in the Knesset to overturn Supreme Court rulings.
The reforms also seek to change the way judges are selected, and remove government ministries’ independent legal advisers, whose opinions are binding.
US President Joe Biden has expressed concerns over the reforms, saying: “The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary. Building consensus for fundamental changes is really important to ensure that the people buy into them so they can be sustained.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu defended the judicial reform.
“Israel is a democracy and will remain a democracy, with majority rule and proper safeguards of civil liberties,” he said during an address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
“All democracies should respect the will of other free peoples, just as we respect their democratic decisions.
“There’s been a lot of rhetoric that is frankly reckless and dangerous, including calls for bloodshed in the streets and calls for a civil war. It isn’t going to happen. There’s not going to be a civil war,” the Prime Minister added.
Source: CNN
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Chad to open embassy in Israel on Thursday, says Israeli PM
Following a trip to Jerusalem by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-President Idriss Deby, diplomatic relations between Israel and Chad were restored in 2018.
Building on bilateral ties that were established five years ago, Chad will open an embassy in Israel on Thursday, according to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The announcement was made on Wednesday as Chadian President Mahamat Deby’s office announced that he was visiting Israel for a 48-hour state visit but gave no other information.
The Chadian president would preside over the opening of the embassy, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Chad cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1972 after the Organization of African Unity, the forerunner of the present-day African Union, ordered its member states to do so in support of the Palestinians.
But in November 2018, former Chadian President Idriss Deby, the late father of the current leader, paid a historic visit to Israel during which he spoke of the two countries committing to a new era of cooperation.
Netanyahu then visited Chad in January 2019, while the following year Israel signed normalisation agreements with Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates as part of a broader diplomatic push by the United States under President Donald Trump.
The agreements enraged Palestinians who condemned them as a “stab in the back” amid fears that they will weaken a long-standing pan-Arab position calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories it occupies illegally and acceptance of Palestinian statehood in return for normal ties with Arab countries.
It was not immediately clear where the Chadian embassy would be located. Most countries keep embassies in Tel Aviv.
Trump in 2017 provoked controversy by announcing he would relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and officially did so a year later. The move infuriated Palestinians and spurred international condemnation.
Previous US presidents and the leaders of nearly every other country have refrained from opening embassies in Jerusalem until the city’s final status is resolved through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Palestinian leaders see occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
Netanyahu, who returned to office last month, has cast the upgrade of relations with Chad as part of his outreach to Arab and Muslim countries, which he wants to expand.
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About 80,000 Israelis protest Supreme Court reforms
Over 80,000 Israelis have demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the new right-wing coalition government’s plans to restructure the judiciary.
The changes would, among other things, make it simpler for the parliament to overturn Supreme Court judgements.
The proposed changes by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were branded an assault on democracy by protesters.
It comes after the installation of the most pious and rigidly conservative government in Israeli history.
Local media reported that protests were also held in front of the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem and the northern city of Haifa.
One group of protesters clashed with police while attempting to block a major road, Ayalon highway, in Tel Aviv.
Critics say the reforms would cripple judicial independence, foster corruption, set back minority rights and deprive Israel’s court system of credibility.
Banners referred to the new coalition led by Mr Netanyahu as a government of shame.
Image caption,Israeli security forces with left-wing protesters during the rallies in Tel Aviv Among those opposed are Israel’s Supreme Court chief justice, Esther Hayat, and the country’s attorney-general.
The BBC’s Samantha Granville in Tel Aviv saw protesters draped in Israeli flags, carrying posters in Hebrew, and pictures of Mr Netanyahu with X’s over his mouth.
There was a group of young girls with red-painted hand prints over their mouths. They wanted to tell the government they won’t be quiet.
One woman, who asked not to use her name, said through her tears she was a second-generation Holocaust survivor.
“My parents immigrated from non-democratic regimes to live in a democracy,” she said. “They came from the totalitarian regime to live freely. So seeing that destroyed is heart-breaking.”
She and her friend said they expected Mr Netanyahu to try radical changes, but never thought they would come so fast.
These are the largest demonstrations since Mr Netanyahu’s new coalition government was sworn in, in December.
Opposition parties had called on Israelis to join the rallies to “save democracy” and in protest at the planned judicial overhaul.
Under the plans announced by Justice Minister Yariv Levin earlier this month, a simple majority in the Knesset (parliament) would have the power to effectively annul Supreme Court rulings. This could enable the government of the day to pass legislation without fear of it being struck down.
Critics fear the new government could use this to scrap Mr Netanyahu’s ongoing criminal trial, although the government has not said it would do that.
Mr Netanyahu is being tried on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – something he strongly denies.
Image caption,A huge crowd gathered in Tel Aviv to protest at the judicial reforms to reduce Supreme Court powers The reforms would also give politicians more influence over the appointment of judges, with most members of the selection committee coming from the ruling coalition.
If it passes into law, the plan could make it easier for the government to legislate in favour of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank without worrying about challenges in the Supreme Court.
Israel has previously highlighted the power of the court to rule against it, as a way of blunting international criticism of such moves.
Source: BBC.com