Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday pushed back against a new wave of pressure to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza after hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested and went on strike, and U.S. President Joe Biden said Netanyahu needed to do more after nearly 11 months of fighting.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets late Sunday in grief and anger after six hostages were found dead in Gaza. The families and much of the public blamed Netanyahu, saying they could have been returned alive in a deal with Hamas to end the war in Gaza.
Late Monday, several thousand demonstrators gathered outside Netanyahu’s private home in central Jerusalem, chanting, “Deal. Now” and carrying coffins draped in the Israeli flag. Scuffles broke out when police snatched away the coffins, and several protesters were arrested.
Thousands more marched outside the headquarters of Netanyahu’s Likud party in Tel Aviv, according to Israeli media.
But others support Netanyahu’s strategy of maintaining relentless military pressure on Hamas, the militant group behind the Oct. 7 attack into Israel that triggered the war. The general strike was ignored in some areas, reflecting deep political divisions in Israel over a ceasefire deal.
Biden made his comments as he arrived at the White House for a meeting with advisers involved in negotiating a deal. Asked if Netanyahu was doing enough, Biden responded, “No.”
He insisted that negotiators remain “very close” to a deal, adding, “Hope springs eternal.”
Hamas has accused Israel of dragging out months of negotiations over a ceasefire by issuing new demands, including for lasting Israeli control over two strategic corridors in Gaza. Hamas has offered to release all hostages in return for an end to the war, the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile militants.
Netanyahu has refused to commit to an end to the offensive in Gaza as part of a ceasefire deal and has pledged “total victory” over Hamas, blaming the militant group for the failure of the negotiations.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Israel to protest the government after six hostages were found dead in a tunnel in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. Many accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not doing enough to reach a deal to release the remaining hostages.
When asked about Biden’s comments, Netanyahu said pressure should be applied to Hamas, not Israel.
“And now after this we’re asked to show seriousness? We’re asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says kill more hostages,” he told a news conference in Jerusalem.
In response to the Israeli comment, a U.S. official said that while Biden had been clear that Hamas was to blame for the hostages’ deaths, “he is also calling for urgency from the Israeli government in securing the release of the missing remaining hostages.”
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Biden’s criticism of Netanyahu was “American recognition that Netanyahu was responsible for undermining efforts to reach a deal.”
Netanyahu also rejected calls to soften his demand to keep troops in the southern Gazan border area as the price for a ceasefire deal. The issue of the so-called Philadelphi corridor, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt, has been a major sticking point in efforts to secure a deal to halt the fighting in Gaza and return Israeli hostages held by Hamas.
Hamas has rejected any Israeli presence, while Netanyahu has insisted that Israel will not abandon the corridor, where Israeli troops have uncovered dozens of tunnels they say have been used to smuggle weapons and ammunition into Gaza.
Eylon Keshet, whose relatives are among Israelis still being held hostage in Gaza after they were taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, says the discovery of six hostages who were killed in the enclave shows that more pressure needs to be put on Israel’s government, Hamas officials and world leaders to secure a ceasefire deal.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who has clashed repeatedly with Netanyahu and other ministers, called on the cabinet on Sunday to reverse an earlier decision to keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor in order to reach a deal to bring more hostages home.
Khalil al-Hayya, the Hamas official leading the negotiations, told the Qatari network Al Jazeera late Sunday that Netanyahu had deemed keeping the Philadelphi corridor “more important” than winning the hostages’ release.
Al-Hayya also said Hamas had offered “great flexibility,” including reducing its demand for Palestinian prisoners to be released. He accused Israel of introducing new conditions, including increasing the number of prisoners who would be deported upon release and banning the release of elderly or ill prisoners serving life sentences.
Strike, protests aim to put pressure on Netanyahu
The general strike, called by Israel’s largest trade union, Histadrut, ended early after a labour court said it must cease by 2:30 p.m. local time, accepting a petition from the government calling it politically motivated.
It was the first such strike since the start of the war that aimed to shut down or disrupt major sectors of the economy, including banking and health care.
“This is unbelievable that we have people killed there and our government is doing not what they’re supposed to be doing,” Gili Baruch, one of the protesters in Tel Aviv, told CBC News. “I’m here to pay respect, to resist, to shout out and say this is not the way it should be.”
Airlines at Israel’s main international airport, Ben-Gurion, were halting outgoing flights between 8 and 10 a.m. on Monday. Histadrut said banks, some large malls and government offices had joined the strike, as well as some public transit services, although there did not appear to be major disruptions.
Municipalities in Israel’s populated central area, including Tel Aviv, participated in the strike, leading to shortened school hours.
Hundreds of thousands protest over hostage deaths
The demonstrations on Sunday appeared to be the largest since the start of the war, with organizers estimating that up to 500,000 people joined nationwide events and the main rally in Tel Aviv. Israeli media estimated 200,000 to 400,000 took part.
They are demanding that Netanyahu reach a deal to return the roughly 100 hostages remaining in Gaza, even if it means leaving a battered Hamas intact and withdrawing from the territory.
Israel said Hamas killed all six hostages shortly before Israeli forces arrived in the tunnel where they were being held.
Three of them, including an Israeli American, were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a ceasefire proposal discussed in July. The Israeli Health Ministry said autopsies had determined the hostages were shot at close range and died on Thursday or Friday.
One of the six hostages was Israeli American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, a native of Berkeley, Calif. In April, Hamas issued a video that showed him alive, sparking protests in Israel. On Monday, thousands of mourners lined the streets of Jerusalem for his funeral.
“I feel he was like a symbol of the hostages,” Amnon Sadovsky, a 70-year-old teacher, told Reuters. “We need to have humanity for all people — for Jews and for Arabs.”
Some 250 hostages were taken on Oct. 7. Israel now believes about 100 remain in captivity, including 35 who are thought to be dead. More than 100 were freed during a ceasefire in November in exchange for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Eight have been rescued by Israeli forces. Israeli troops mistakenly killed three Israelis who escaped captivity in December.
Thousands of mourners attended a funeral service on Monday for Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whose body was retrieved from southern Gaza tunnels along with the bodies of five others seized in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. Jon Polin said he hoped his son’s death would not be in vain and could help prompt the release of the remaining 101 hostages still held in Gaza.
Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing, al-Qassam Brigades, announced on Monday that the group has issued new instructions to guards on how to handle hostages if Israeli forces approach their locations in Gaza.
He said the new instructions, which he didn’t detail, were given to guards of hostages after a rescue operation by Israel in June. At that time, Israeli forces freed four hostages in a deadly raid in which dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, were killed.
“Netanyahu’s insistence to free prisoners through military pressure, instead of sealing a deal, means they will be returned to their families in shrouds. Their families must choose whether they want them dead or alive,” he said.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, when they stormed into southern Israel last October, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials.
The war has displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times, and plunged the besieged territory into a humanitarian catastrophe, including new fears of a polio outbreak.
Meanwhile, Israel continued its six-day raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Associated Press reporters saw bulldozers tearing up roads. The Palestinian Red Crescent said Israeli forces were blocking their ambulances from reaching the wounded.
Palestinians in a town outside Jenin held a funeral for a 58-year-old man, Ayman Abed, who was arrested the day before and died in Israeli custody. The Israeli military said he died from a “cardiac event” but did not provide details.
Human rights groups have reported abuses of Palestinians detained by Israel, and the military has confirmed the deaths of at least 36 Palestinians in its detention centres since October.
Israel says it has killed 14 militants in Jenin and arrested 25 others. Palestinian health officials say at least 29 people have been killed, including five children.
Mohannad Hajj Hussein, a Jenin resident, said electricity and water were cut off. “We are ready to live by candlelight and we will feed our children from our bodies and teach them resistance and steadfastness in this land,” he said. “We will rebuild what the occupation destroyed and we will not kneel.”
Published at Fri, 26 Jan 2024 09:01:20 +0000
Canada took 4 months to send money after deciding to buy air defence system for Ukraine
It initially took Canada four months to get into the queue after deciding to join a plan by the United States to buy urgently needed National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) for Ukraine.
Defence Minister Bill Blair insists the lag did not contribute to the slow pace of acquiring the high-tech defensive capability, which is still months away from being delivered.
A proposal for the federal government to purchase the system was first discussed by former defence minister Anita Anand and U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin in late November 2022 at the Halifax International Security Forum, CBC News has learned.
It came at a time when Russia was engaged in a brutal ballistic missile campaign intended to wipe out Ukraine’s electrical grid, a series of attacks that hit civilian targets and killed scores of innocent people.
Anand announced the planned $406-million purchase in January 2023, but as the Defence Department recently told CBC News, the federal government didn’t transfer funds to the United States to pay for the system and start the process until March 2023, at the end of the fiscal year.
“I don’t believe that that contributed in any way to the delay,” Blair said in a recent interview with CBC News.
“It required more than just a conversation and an agreement between the secretary and the minister. There had to be a contract. And because we were purchasing through the United States, it required congressional approval as well. And so there is actually a legal process in the United States to enable them to acquire and purchase munitions that they would send to another government.”
It took Canada four months to send its payment after deciding to join a plan by the United States to buy urgently needed National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems for Ukraine, a lag Defence Minister Bill Blair insists has not contributed to the slow pace of acquiring the high-tech defensive capability.
Washington, however, could not begin to negotiate a contract with the manufacturers until it had both its own funds and Canada’s money in hand.
The U.S. Congress gave the green light in May 2023.
Blair expects delivery by end of this year
The Liberal government has faced repeated criticism for the glacial pace of acquiring the capability, especially as the civilian death toll in Ukraine increases.
The most expedient way to buy the NASAMS was through Washington and to piggyback on a purchase the United States was already making, Blair said.
On the margins of the Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland in June, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said his country is in urgent need of weapons and wished the air defence system Canada promised was already in place.
In his interview with CBC News, Blair said the latest information is that 10 NASAMS ordered by the United States will be delivered by the manufacturers Raytheon and Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace by the end of this year.
“Ours will be among that tranche of deliveries and we’ll immediately get it to Ukraine” in early 2025, the minister added.
Earlier this year, Blair blamed the holdup on the Americans and the challenges Washington faced in financing its portion of the deal. The Republican-dominated Congress held up funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan for months in a political standoff with the Biden administration.
There was one additional wrinkle, according to defence trade publications: One of the manufacturers, U.S.-based Raytheon, asked the Pentagon to waive provisions in the Truth in Negotiations Act (TINA) in order to speed up the process of delivering NASAMS.
U.S. defence officials were reluctant because the legislation requires them to demonstrate how long-term contracts save money, and — in the case of donations to Ukraine — that is difficult to establish. Complying with TINA, according to the publication Defence One, adds another six to nine months to the procurement process.
When Ukraine approached the United States about acquiring air defence systems at the onset of the full Russian invasion, the government in Kyiv was initially told it would take up to five years — an answer that left Ukrainian officials dismayed.
The average time to build a new NASAMS is two years, the CEO of Raytheon, Gregory Hayes, has been quoted as saying.
First systems have 100% interception rate
The U.S. announced in July 2022 that it was buying two NASAMS for Ukraine, then two months later added six more to the order.
The first systems, taken from an existing Pentagon order, arrived in Ukraine within 71 days of the contract signing, according to U.S. government data.
Once in action, the NASAMS had a 100 per cent success rate intercepting drones and cruise missiles from Russia, Austin told the Halifax conference where he struck the deal with Canada to finance an additional system.
Thomas Withington, an analyst who studies air defence systems and electronic warfare at the U.K.-based Royal United Services Institute, said the struggle by Canada, the U.S. and other nations over the last two years to acquire protection against missiles and drones has ramifications beyond the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve lived, in many ways, through a gilded age where, by and large, the air threat to NATO writ-large has been reduced,” said Withington.
“We’ve not faced the prospect of our own countries being attacked en masse with air delivered effects, so missiles, bombs, that kind of thing. That situation has now ended, and in many ways we find ourselves back in a similar situation to where we were during the Cold War, where we faced significant air threats and we faced significant missile threats.”
Canada’s recently updated defence policy pledges to acquire ground-based air defence systems to protect critical civilian infrastructure.
The military is currently trying to purchase an air defence system to protect troops on the ground overseas, but in a recent statement to CBC News the Defence Department said such equipment could also be deployed to protect Canadians at home.
Canada is set to spend $406M on an advanced air defence system and associated missiles for Ukraine. Defence Minister Anita Anand tells Power & Politics the Canadian government is “working with the United States to get it to Ukraine as soon as possible.”
Defence contractors struggle to handle flood of orders
Withington said either way, the country could be in for a long wait because — as Ukraine demonstrated — part of the problem involves the capacity of defence contractors to absorb the flood of new orders.
“You’ve got production lines in the major missile houses where they are configured to produce a set number of missiles in a set amount of time for a set number of customers,” he said.
“There is a degree of flexibility within those production lines to account for new customers … but they have a finite capacity, and that’s dictated by the number of employees.”
He also said any decision to add new production lines would have to be carefully thought through by the defence contractors because air defence is a specialty product.
In the medium term, Withington said he could see a number of NATO countries wanting to acquire those systems to protect themselves against the kind of attacks they’ve seen in Ukraine.
“I would argue yes, there definitely needs to be a ramp-up in production levels for ground based air defences,” he said.
“I think if you show as an alliance you’re deadly serious about this, and you are prepared to get the air defence assets you need, and more, so you’re saying to Mr. Putin … NATO is not to be trifled with.”
Blair couldn’t give a timeline for when Canada would acquire its own system, but said it is among his top purchasing priorities.
Published at Thu, 11 Apr 2024 22:52:23 +0000
