Jordan’s King Abdullah II presses Blinken to push for a ceasefire in Gaza | Israel War on Gaza News

Jordan’s King Abdullah II has urged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to push for a ceasefire in Gaza and bring an end to the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian territory, as the months-long war continues to rage.

The king met Blinken in the Jordanian capital Amman on Sunday and warned him of the “catastrophic repercussions” of the continuation of the war which began three months ago, the royal palace said.

At least 22,835 people have been killed – including 9,600 children – in Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7, according to Palestinian officials. At least 1,139 people were killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, according to Israeli authorities.

The king reiterated “the important role of the United States in bringing pressure for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, protection of civilians, and guaranteeing delivery” of medical and humanitarian aid, the royal palace said.

Blinken, who kicked off a weeklong trip across the Middle East on Friday, aimed at calming tensions in the region and ensuring the war does not spread, arrived in Jordan from Turkey and Greece, where he noted that there was “real concern” over the Israel-Lebanon border.

“We want to do everything possible to make sure that we don’t see escalation there” and to avoid an “endless cycle of violence”, he said.

After visiting Jordan, Blinken will travel to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he will deliver a message that Washington does not want a regional escalation of the Gaza conflict.

The top US diplomat also hopes to make progress in talks about how Gaza could be governed after the war.

Future of Gaza

Earlier on Sunday Blinken met Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, who discussed a future scenario that would bring the West Bank and Gaza together as the basis of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, according to a statement from Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates.

Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and King Abdullah reaffirmed the need for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian question and underlined Jordan’s “total rejection” of any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Washington also insists on a two-state solution, something rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, some of whose cabinet members have also called for Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza to leave.

A senior US State Department official travelling with the top diplomat told Reuters that Blinken will continue pressing hesitant Muslim nations to prepare to play a role in the reconstruction, governance and security of Gaza.

The US delegation aims to gather Arab states’ views on the future of Gaza before taking those positions to Israel, the official said, acknowledging there would be a significant gap between the different parties’ positions.

Humanitarian crisis

After his meeting with Jordanian officials, Blinken visited the World Food Programme’s regional coordination warehouse near the Jordanian capital and highlighted that “it is imperative” to “maximise assistance to people in need”, by getting the aid in and distributing it effectively.

Inside the warehouse, stocked with pallets of canned food aid, the senior UN official in Jordan, Sheri Ritsema-Anderson, described the situation in Gaza as unlike anything she had seen during 15 years in the Middle East.

It is “catastrophic”, she told reporters.

Blinken said the US was working to keep aid routes into the strip open and multiply them.

“We are intensely focused on the very difficult and indeed deteriorating food situation for men, women and children in Gaza, and it’s something we’re working on 24/7.”



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Hamza, son of Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh, killed in Israeli attack in Gaza | Israel War on Gaza News

Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, has been killed by an Israeli missile strike in the western part of Khan Younis, Gaza.

Journalist Mustafa Thuraya was also killed in the attack, when the vehicle they were travelling in near al-Mawasi, a supposedly safe area towards the southwest, was struck by the missile. A third passenger, Hazem Rajab, was seriously injured.

According to reports from Al Jazeera correspondents, Hamza and Mustafa’s vehicle was targeted as they were trying to interview civilians displaced by previous bombings.

Hamza Dahdouh shared this picture of him with his brother Mahmoud with a sad message bidding him farewell in October last year [Courtesy Dahdouh family]

Hamza, 27, was a journalist like his father. Mustafa was also in his 20s.

Speaking from the cemetery where his son had been laid to rest, Wael seemed subdued yet resigned, saying he was one of the droves of people in Gaza today who are bidding bitter farewells to their loved ones every day.

He vowed to remain on his path of showing the world what is happening in Gaza, despite the pain of one loss after another.

“Hamza was everything to me, the eldest boy, he was the soul of my soul… these are the tears of parting and loss, the tears of humanity,” he said.

The body of journalist Mustafa Thuraya is taken to the morgue of the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, Gaza after he and Hamza Dahdouh were killed in Khan Younis by an Israeli missile that hit their car on January 7, 2024 [Abed Zagout/Anadolu]

The Al Jazeera Media Network strongly condemned the attack, adding: “The assassination of Mustafa and Hamza … whilst they were on their way to carry out their duty in the Gaza Strip, reaffirms the need to take immediate necessary legal measures against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity.”

Reacting to the news, Gaza’s media office condemned the killing of the two journalists, denouncing “in the strongest terms this heinous crime”.

Continuous pain

Hamza was extremely attached to his family and was devastated when he heard on October 25 that an Israeli raid had hit the house his family was sheltering at in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

He found out shortly after that his mother Amna, brother Mahmoud, 15, sister Sham, 7, and nephew Adam, 1, had been killed in the Israeli attack. His grief after their loss seemed to motivate him to work harder on covering the war on Gaza, according to his colleague.

Wael Dahdouh, centre, and his youngest son Yehia, 12, mourn his wife, son, daughter, and grandson killed in an Israeli attack on Nuseirat refugee camp, October 26, 2023 [Ali Mahmoud/AP Photo]

As news of Hamza’s killing spread, his wife of one year rushed to the cemetery, as did his surviving siblings, for one last look before he was buried.

Wael stood by his son’s head, consoling the rest of his family as they tried to comprehend the sudden loss.

His composure and strength have made Wael Dahdoud much more than the Al Jazeera Arabic bureau chief in Gaza. He is the face of the channel’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and a symbol of the resilience of Gaza’s people.

When he lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson to the Israeli air raid at the end of October, the world watched, aghast, as he ran into the hospital where the bodies of his four loved ones had been moved.

Wael Dahdouh mourns over the body of one of his children who was killed along with his wife and son in an Israeli attack, at Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip [Majdi Fathi/AFP]

After saying his emotional goodbyes to his children, grandchild, and life partner, he also seemed more determined than ever to perform his job.

Then in mid-December, he was badly injured in an attack that killed his colleague Samer Abudaqa, but he was again out and about covering the news shortly after.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has documented the killing of 102 journalists and the injury of 71 others by Israeli forces since hostilities began in October.

The list of Al Jazeera journalists and staff who have lost members of their families or have died themselves is also growing.

In December, Anas al-Sharif lost his father to an Israeli air raid that struck his family’s house in Jabalia.

A few days earlier, on December 6, Moamen Al Sharafi, a correspondent for Al Jazeera Arabic, had 22 members of his family killed when an Israeli attack hit the house they were sheltering in at the Jabalia refugee camp.

In late October, broadcast engineer Mohamed Abu Al-Qumsan lost 19 members of his family, including his father and two sisters, during Israeli air raids on the same refugee camp.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Israeli drone attack kills four brothers during Jenin raid | Israel War on Gaza

NewsFeed

A distraught mother searching a hospital found out four of her sons were killed in a drone strike during an Israeli raid on Jenin. An IED blast in the occupied West Bank city killed at least one Israeli soldier.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Thousands protest in Israel demanding captive release, government to resign | Israel War on Gaza News

Mass protests have taken place around Israel, with demonstrators calling for the return of Israeli captives held in Gaza, the removal of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government and an end to the war in Gaza.

Several thousand supporters, friends and families of the Israeli captives taken by Hamas on October 7 rallied in Tel Aviv’s “Hostage Square” on Saturday, Al Jazeera reporters on the ground said.

“This is unprecedented because, throughout the beginning of this war, everyone had agreed, including the anti-government protesters, that they needed to be unified at a time when there is war, at a time when captives are still being held in Gaza,” said Al Jazeera’s Sara Khairat, reporting from Tel Aviv.

The turnout of people in the square was much higher than in recent weeks when a few dozen to a few hundred people gathered. “Now, quite a few thousand people [are] gathered here,” our correspondent said.

Protesters shouted: “Bushah bushah, bushah”, meaning “shame, shame, shame” in reference to the government, with some also blaming Netanyahu and other officials for the events of October 7.

“This just gives you a sense of how angry some of these people are,” Khairat said.

In Jerusalem, people gathered in front of the house of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to demonstrate, demanding the return of the more than 100 captives still held in Gaza.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Could infighting threaten Israel’s government? | Show Types

Bitter divisions erupt between ministers on post-war plans for Gaza.

Israel’s far-right coalition government is at war, not just in Gaza but with itself.

Ministers are fighting about a possible inquiry into the army’s pre-October 7 role – and proposals to expel all Palestinians from Gaza.

So, how fragile is Israel’s government? And what would its collapse mean?

Presenter: Hashem Ahelbarra

Guests:

Ofer Cassif – Member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset

Gideon Levy – Columnist at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and author of, The Punishment of Gaza

Daniel Levy – President of the US Middle East Project, political negotiator under the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

US diplomat Blinken meets Turkey’s Erdogan, kicking off Gaza diplomacy tour | Israel War on Gaza News

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has met senior Turkish officials in Istanbul, kicking off a week-long trip across the Middle East aimed at calming tensions that have spiked since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October.

In his meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Blinken “emphasised the need to prevent the conflict from spreading, secure the release of hostages, expand humanitarian assistance and reduce civilian casualties,” US Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Saturday.

Blinken also stressed the need to work towards broader, lasting regional peace that ensures Israel’s security and advances the establishment of a Palestinian state, Miller added.

Erdogan, a fierce critic of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, had previously skipped a meeting with Blinken, when the US diplomat visited Ankara in November, over Washington’s staunch backing of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

On Saturday, Blinken also met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and discussions focused on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Turkey’s foreign ministry said.

In his conversation with Blinken, Fidan pointed to Israel’s escalating aggression, saying it poses a threat to the entire region. He also underlined the necessity of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, allowing the permanent delivery of aid, and stressed the need to return to two-state solution negotiations as soon as possible, the ministry added.

‘Deescalation’

The US’s strained relationship with Turkey precedes the current war, with the two nations also feuding over foreign policy issues ranging from NATO to Iraq.

Ankara is frustrated by the delay in approval from the US Congress for a $20bn deal for 40 F-16 fighter jets. Washington is waiting for Turkey to ratify Sweden’s bid to join NATO.

On Saturday, Blinken and Fidan addressed Ankara’s process to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, according to a Turkish foreign ministry statement.

US officials are confident Ankara will soon approve Sweden’s accession after it won the Turkish parliament’s backing last month, a senior State Department official travelling with Blinken told the Reuters news agency.

As part of Blinken’s whistlestop tour of several countries, he then travelled to the island of Crete on Saturday to meet Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Fellow NATO member Greece is awaiting the US Congress’s approval of a sale of F-35 fighter jets.

Post Greece, Blinken’s tour in the coming days will include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he will deliver a message that Washington does not want a regional escalation of the Gaza conflict. Blinken also hopes to make progress in talks about how Gaza could be governed if and when Israel achieves its aim of eradicating Hamas.

Blinken’s trip has “three main messages”, said Mahjoob Zweiri, a professor of Gulf studies at Qatar University: deescalation of the conflict; the humanitarian crisis; and what happens the day after the war ends.

“Washington doesn’t seem to be happy over the statements coming from the government of Netanyahu talking about the displacement of the people. They seem to want to put pressure on Netanyahu, especially with London, Paris and Germany saying the status quo of Gaza should not be changed,” Zweiri told Al Jazeera.

Blinken has said Washington wants regional countries, including Turkey, to play a role in reconstruction, governance and potentially security in the Gaza Strip, which has been run by Hamas since 2007.

At least 22,722 people have been killed and 58,166 wounded in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. The revised death toll from the October attack on Israel stands at 1,139 people.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Former US general: Israel may win in Gaza, but fail in the region | Israel War on Gaza

US General Mark Kimmitt says Israeli talk of annihilating Gaza ‘sounds good on TV’ but is impractical and illegal.

By mimicking United States tactics in World War II in Germany and Japan, Israel has made a grave mistake with its war on Gaza, according to retired US Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt.

Kimmitt tells host Steve Clemons that Israel’s tactics – firebombing and “starting new” – have made it unwelcome among the peoples of the region.

Despite Israel’s assassination of a top Hamas commander in Lebanon and disruption of shipping routes in the Red Sea, the US is less concerned about regional instability than it was in October. The situation “has not hit US red lines,” he says.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Safe zones: Israel’s technologies of genocide | Gaza

“This evacuation is for your own safety,” the Israeli military declared on October 13, when it ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to leave their homes. Thousands heeded the warning and headed south, only to be bombed along the way and upon arrival.

The massive evacuation order was only the inauguration of an array of announcements and legal technologies developed by the Israeli military and its legal team in order to organise the violence against the Palestinian population and shroud it in an obfuscating narrative of international humanitarian law precautions.

Israel’s deadly ‘humanitarian efforts’

In November, shortly after the Israeli army launched its ground offensive, it designated Gaza’s main north-south route – Salah al-Din Street – as a “safe corridor”. A map with the evacuation passage was shared by the occupation forces, underscoring their “humanitarian effort” to protect civilians. But since then, Gaza’s main road artery has become a corridor of horror where Palestinians have been randomly bombed, executed, forcibly disappeared, tortured and humiliated.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued to bombard the territory south of Wadi Gaza which it had repeatedly declared a “safe area” where Palestinians from the north could seek safety.

When at the end of November, the death toll of the war reached 15,000 Palestinians, many of whom were civilians killed in the “safe zones”, the United States administration tried to conceal its support for Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians with a cosmetic request to “expand” the so-called safe areas. So the Israeli army responded by introducing a new “humanitarian tool”: the evacuation grid system. It published on social media a grid map dividing the Gaza Strip into 600 blocks and indicating which areas were supposed to be “evacuated” and which were “safe”.

Instead of increasing the areas of safety for civilians, the system – deployed while Gaza was cut off from all forms of communication by the Israeli military – increased the level of chaos and death.

Areas previously designated as safe like Khan Younis and Rafah were transformed into urban battlegrounds. As a result, Israel ordered Palestinian civilians in these areas to leave again to new safe zones. But the areas where the evacuation grid system told the Palestinians to flee to were immediately targeted by the Israeli military.

In December, a New York Times investigation revealed that during the first month and a half of the war, Israel “routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians”. The 2,000-pound United States-made bombs dropped in the safe zones posed “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza”.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration has repeatedly commended Israel for its “efforts” to protect civilians.

Organising genocidal violence

According to international law, both in the Geneva Conventions and in the Additional Protocols, safe zones must be recognised in an agreement between the fighting parties. However, in conflicts, this rarely happens and safe zones – and the legal technologies associated with them – can become tools for the organisation of violence.

The concentration of defenceless civilians in areas designated and delimited on a map as protected, can be used and exploited by the actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.

This was the case in Bosnia, with the infamous Srebrenica “safe zone”. The area was instituted by the United Nations in 1993 in order to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone transformed it into easy prey for Serb forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the area and then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.

Safe areas became lethal also in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safety zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while blaming the Tamil Tigers for allegedly using the refugees concentrated in the safe zones as “human shields”.

Similarly, in Gaza, Israel is imposing unilaterally what and where is “safe” for Palestinian civilians. In doing so, it is deploying the discourse of safety and its associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, safe corridors, evacuation grids – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe/unsafe.

Areas or parts of the territories defined as safe serve to concentrate the displaced population and better manage the military operations and the killing of civilians. As one poignant Reuters headline put it: “Israel orders Gazans to flee, bombs where it sends them”.

In other words, by putting under evacuation order and depopulating vast swaths of Gaza’s territory, Israel has been concentrating the ethnically cleansed population into shrinking zones which it targets immediately after they are designated as “safe areas”. This shows a clear intent to liquidate Palestinian civilians after displacing them, and can become a tool for making extermination more efficient.

In overpopulated areas like Rafah with an extremely high population density due to the influx of displaced people from northern and central Gaza, one single attack can kill a large number of people at once.

Apart from serving a clear military purpose, this necropolitical appropriation of the humanitarian duty to warn and create safe spaces for civilians is also part of Israel’s legal strategy to defend itself from the accusation of having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

With the recent genocide application submitted by the Republic of South Africa to the International Court of Justice, which accuses Israel of acts “intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”, there is heightened urgency for the Israeli government to try to present itself as abiding by international law.

Israel has always tried to provide its 75 years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession with a semblance of legality. But this time the genocidal force of annihilation it has unleashed has reached such an unprecedented scale – putting 2.3 million people at concrete risk of death – that its legal discourse of safety cannot camouflage its complete disregard for the civilian status of the population in Gaza.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Genocide in Gaza: The context | Israel War on Gaza

In this special edition, we compile three interviews with experts and a journalist who discuss how the media helped enable genocide in the Gaza Strip.

After three months of destruction, displacement and the killing of Palestinians, we take a deep dive into the way the Gaza story has been covered.

Since the attacks on October 7, The Listening Post has interviewed a range of experts on the news coverage – what’s missing in it, and how it has helped enable the crimes being waged on Palestinians in Gaza.

In this special edition, we’ve compiled three interviews – with one journalist, one expert on human rights and another on digital rights. They talk us through the way the media – through their news coverage – have helped pave the way to a genocide.

Contributors:
Francesca Albanese – United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories
Marwa Fatafta – MENA Policy and Advocacy Director, Access Now
Mariam Barghouti – Writer and journalist

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Hezbollah fires rockets at Israel in ‘response’ to Hamas leader’s killing | Israel War on Gaza News

Lebanese group says it targeted Meron air base following the killing of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut.

Lebanese armed group Hezbollah has said it targeted a vital Israeli military post with a barrage of 62 rockets as a “preliminary response” to the killing of a Hamas leader in Beirut this week.

This comes as the European Union foreign policy chief met the Lebanese prime minister in Beirut on Saturday, and warned against Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict in a spillover from Israel’s war on Gaza.

“As part of the initial response to the crime of assassinating the great leader Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri … the Islamic resistance [Hezbollah] targeted the Meron air control base with 62 various types of missiles,” the Iran-aligned group said in a statement on Saturday of the attacks in northern Israel.

The Israeli military said earlier that about 40 rockets were fired towards the Meron air surveillance base and it responded by attacking a “terrorist cell” that took part in the launches. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

Later on Saturday, Lebanon’s Jama’a Islamiya group said in a statement that it had fired two volleys of rockets at Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.

Hezbollah and the Israeli army continued to exchange fire along the border area, with one Israeli attack going deep into Lebanese territory and hitting a house nearly 40km (25 miles) from the border, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Lebanon said.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday said all of Lebanon would be exposed if it did not react to the killing of Hamas deputy chief al-Arouri and warned it would “certainly not go without reaction and punishment”.

Al-Arouri was assassinated in an alleged Israeli attack on Tuesday in a Hezbollah stronghold. Nasrallah has warned Israel against expanding the conflict, saying there would be “no ceilings” and “no rules” to his group’s fighting if Israel chose to launch a war on Lebanon.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Saturday that it was “imperative” to avoid a regional escalation in the Middle East.

“It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” he said, also warning Israel that “nobody will win from a regional conflict”.

“We are seeing a worrying intensification of exchange of fire across the Blue Line,” he added, referring to the current demarcation line between the two countries, a frontier mapped by the United Nations that marks the line to which Israeli forces withdrew when they left south Lebanon in 2000.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati said that any large-scale bombing in southern Lebanon would lead to a “comprehensive explosion” in the region.

Continuing fighting

Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan, reporting from Beirut, said Hezbollah’s attack on Saturday was an expected outcome following Nasrallah’s statements on al-Arouri’s killing.

“The Israelis would have been expecting a response. They would have been on high alert,” he reported.

Khan said that amid the continuing cross-border fighting, Hezbollah had a “very political calculation” to make in Lebanon.

“It doesn’t want Lebanon to suffer as a result of an outright war. But it is talking tough. It says if Israel wants to escalate, then it will respond in kind,” he added.

Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging near-daily fire since the war in Gaza started in October last year. The violence has largely been contained to the border area.

“Israel is putting immense pressure on Hezbollah positions in the south with air strikes and drones,” Al Jazeera’s correspondent reported.

“That’s interesting because the more pressure it puts on Hezbollah, there may be a misfire or a miscalculated strike from either side and that could escalate things.”

With no end in sight to Israel’s war on Gaza and amid soaring regional tensions, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on his fourth visit to the Middle East in three months.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Exit mobile version