JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday indefinitely postponed planned visits this month to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain due to Israel’s ongoing coronavirus travel restrictions.
The Israeli leader had expressed his intention to travel to Abu Dhabi and Manama ahead of March 23 Israeli elections, in what would have been his first official visit since the establishment of official diplomatic relations with the two Gulf countries last year.
Israel signed agreements with Bahrain and the UAE in September to normalize diplomatic ties after years of clandestine relations.
Netanyahu has said he plans to visit Israel’s new Gulf partners for several months. It would be the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister. But those plans have been repeatedly postponed.
Earlier this week, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu was cutting his planned visit to the Gulf from three days to just three hours because of the pandemic.
Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Thursday that “despite the importance of the trip to Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to postpone the visit at this stage because of the closed skies.”
Israel closed its airport to virtually all air traffic last month in a bid to halt the arrival of new variants of the coronavirus and stop the spread of the pandemic during the country’s third nationwide lockdown.
Israel has recorded over 671,000 cases of the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic and 4,947 deaths, according to Health Ministry figures.
COVID-19 travel ban forces Netanyahu to postpone UAE, Bahrain visits
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COVID-19 travel ban forces Netanyahu to postpone UAE, Bahrain visits
- Israel closed its airport to virtually all air traffic last month
Palestinian NGO condemns Israeli act of ‘revenge’ after prisoner abuse video
- A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military priso
RAMALLAH: A Palestinian NGO has denounced what it called an Israeli act of revenge after a video showed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir overseeing the abuse of detainees in a military prison.
Just days before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Ben Gvir held a tour of Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s Channel 7 reported.
In footage filmed on Friday and broadcast by the channel, around 20 police officers are seen storming a hallway leading to prison cells, brandishing their weapons and firing stun grenades.
They then pull five detainees from their cells, their hands tied behind their backs, forcing them face-down onto the floor.
The operation took place as a bill proposing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism awaited a final vote in the Israeli parliament.
“This is all part of ongoing displays meant to take revenge on Palestinian detainees,” Abdallah al?Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, told AFP on Saturday.
“Everything Ben Gvir and the far?right government are doing affects not only the Palestinian people and prisoners in detention camps — it also impacts the global legal and human rights system,” he added.
Ben Gvir, known for his inflammatory rhetoric, is considered one of the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
“It is simply a source of pride — arriving at a prison like this, a prison for terrorists, the vilest of the vile, seeing them like this,” Ben Gvir said in the video.
“I want one more thing: to execute them — the death penalty for terrorists,” he added.
Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on Saturday said the remarks were “a new war crime and a blatant challenge to international humanitarian law regarding prisoners.”
International rights groups have repeatedly warned of alleged abuse and mistreatment inflicted in Israeli prisons since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country, with the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann the last person to be executed in 1962.
