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Israeli Cabinet Approves Gaza Aid Boost Ahead of US Embargo Deadline
November 2023: An Israeli soldier helps to provide incubators to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot
JNS.org — The Israeli government this week approved a series of measures that will vastly expand the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip ahead of a deadline set by the Biden administration to implement 15 policy changes or risk a possible arms embargo, according to media reports on Tuesday.
Among the list of steps approved by the Security Cabinet on Sunday was an unspecified increase in the amount of aid entering the Palestinian coastal enclave.
Ministers also agreed to provide the Biden administration with a written pledge that Israel is not seeking to deport Palestinians from combat zones in Gaza, Channel 13 News reported. Another step approved by the Cabinet is the inland widening of the Al-Muwasi humanitarian zone on Gaza’’ coast.
On Tuesday, the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories announced that, “in accordance with the directive of the political echelon,” it reopened the Kissufim Crossing to transfer additional humanitarian aid from Israel to the southern Strip.
The border crossing, which served as the main route for traffic to Israeli communities in Gaza before Jerusalem’s withdrawal from the Strip, was closed as part of the disengagement from the territory on Aug. 15, 2005.
Meanwhile, Channel 13 reported the Cabinet voted not to yield to the US demand for representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to be allowed to visit Hamas terrorists in Israeli jails. Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross to see the 101 hostages it still holds captive.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly warned fellow ministers that while President-elect Donald Trump was unlikely to slap an arms embargo on Israel, US President Joe Biden could still take steps against the Jewish state in his last two-plus months in office.
In an Oct. 13 missive addressed to then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urged Jerusalem to implement more than a dozen policy changes within 30 days or risk “implications” for US policy, including an arms embargo.
Among other measures, the Biden administration called on the Jewish state to allow at least 350 aid trucks to pass daily through existing border crossings with Gaza and to immediately open a fifth crossing.
An Israeli official told Ynet that Jerusalem was unable to meet the demand for that number of trucks.
Israel was also instructed to announce “adequate humanitarian pauses across Gaza” for at least four months, rescind evacuation orders, remove a ban on the entry of “container and closed trucks,” authorize certain items with dual military use to enter, and declare that there will be no “policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.”
Citing reports of alleged abuses against Palestinian terrorists captured during Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and the Gaza war, the letter urged Israel to immediately allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit all “individuals detained in connection with this conflict.”
The Biden administration confirmed the contents of a letter, with John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, telling reporters that Washington’s criticism was prompted by a “recent decrease in humanitarian assistance reaching the people of Gaza.”
The Israel Defense Forces has been fighting to defeat Hamas in Gaza since the terror group led a mass invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 people, mainly Jewish civilians, while wounding thousands more and kidnapping 251 people to Gaza, where 101 remain.
Jerusalem has rejected any accusation that the IDF does not comply with international law or is interfering with aid efforts, and has accused Hamas of stealing most of the aid. At times, the White House and State Department have admitted that the terror group is known to seize aid.
The post Israeli Cabinet Approves Gaza Aid Boost Ahead of US Embargo Deadline first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Smotrich Says Defense Ministry to Spur Voluntary Emigration from Gaza
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends an inauguration event for Israel’s new light rail line for the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, in Petah Tikva, Israel, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
i24 News – Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that the government would establish an administration to encourage the voluntary migration of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
“We are establishing a migration administration, we are preparing for this under the leadership of the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and Defense Minister [Israel Katz],” he said at a Land of Israel Caucus at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The budget will not be an obstacle.”
Referring to the plan championed by US President Donald Trump, Smotrich noted the “profound and deep hatred towards Israel” in Gaza, adding that “sources in the American government” agreed “that it’s impossible for two million people with hatred towards Israel to remain at a stone’s throw from the border.”
The administration would be under the Defense Ministry, with the goal of facilitating Trump’s plan to build a “Riviera of the Middle East” and the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Gazans for rebuilding efforts.
“If we remove 5,000 a day, it will take a year,” Smotrich said. “The logistics are complex because you need to know who is going to which country. It’s a potential for historical change.”
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Defense Ministry: 16,000 Wounded in War, About Half Under 30
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
i24 News – The Knesset’s (Israeli parliament’s) Special Committee for Foreign Workers held a discussion on Sunday to examine the needs of wounded and disabled IDF soldiers and the response foreign caregivers could provide.
During the discussion, data from the Defense Minister revealed that the number of registered IDF wounded and disabled veterans rose from 62,000 to 78,000 since the war began on October 7, 2023. “Most of them are reservists and 51 percent of the wounded are up to 30 years old,” the ministry’s report said. The number will increase, the ministry assesses, as post-trauma cases emerge.
The committee chairwoman, Knesset member Etty Atiya (Likud), emphasized the need to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy for the wounded and to remove obstacles. “There is no dispute that the IDF disabled have sacrificed their bodies and souls for the people of Israel, for the state of Israel,” she said. Addressing the veterans, she continued: “And we, as public representatives and public servants alike, must do everything, but everything, to improve your lives in any way possible, to alleviate your pain and the distress of your family members who are no less affected than you.”
Currently, extensions are being given to the IDF veterans on a three-month basis, which Atiya said creates uncertainty and fear among the patients.
“The committee calls on the Interior Minister [Moshe Arbel] to approve as soon as possible the temporary order on our table, so that it will reach the approval of the Knesset,” she said, adding that she “intends to personally approach the Director General of the Population Authority [Shlomo Mor-Yosef] on the matter in order to promote a quick and stable solution.”
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Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians
Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaks during an interview with Sky News Arabia in Damascus, Syria in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on August 8, 2023. Syrian Presidency/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Over 1,300 people were killed in two days of fighting in Syria between security forces under the new Syrian Islamist leaders and fighters from ousted president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect on the other hand, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday.
Since Thursday, 1,311 people had been killed, according to the Observatory, including 830 civilians, mainly Alawites, 231 Syrian government security personnel, and 250 Assad loyalists.
The intense fighting broke out late last week as the Alawite militias launched an offensive against the new government’s fighters in the coastal region of the country, prompting a massive deployment ordered by new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and… we will be able to live together in this country,” al-Sharaa said, as quoted in the BBC.
The death toll represents the most severe escalations since Assad was ousted late last year, and is one of the most costly in terms of human lives since the civil war began in 2011.
The counter-offensive launched by al-Sharaa’s forces was marked by reported revenge killings and atrocities in the Latakia region, a stronghold of the Alawite minority in the country.
The post Over 1,300 Killed in Syria as New Regime Accused of Massacring Civilians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.