BEIRUT: Lebanon’s veteran central bank chief Riad Salameh said he would not seek a new term in office once his latest six-year stint at the head of the Banque du Liban ends.
“My decision is that, at the end of the term, it will be a page I turned in my life and I will move to work outside the central bank,” Salameh told Saudi Arabia-based Asharq News.
Salameh’s term is set to end in July.
Lebanese political sources say that there is not yet consensus around a replacement to Salameh, who has held his post for three-decades and retains the support of some of Lebanon’s most powerful politicians, including House Speaker Nabih Berri.
Lebanese cental bank chief Salameh says he will not seek new term
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Lebanese cental bank chief Salameh says he will not seek new term
- Lebanese political sources say that there is not yet consensus around a replacement to Salameh
Doubts over Israel plan to move Gaza civilians out of Rafah
- HRW’s Hardman was categorical: Moving “1.5 million people in an area that is already devastated” is “absolutely impossible,” she said
JERUSALEM: Israel has vowed to let Palestinians crammed into southern Gaza leave before its planned invasion of Rafah, but experts have warned it was practically impossible to get those civilians out of harm’s way.
The roughly 1.5 million Gazans in the territory’s southernmost tip have the Mediterranean Sea to their west and sealed borders to the south and east, while Israeli forces are poised to push in from the north.
“Where will we go if they enter Rafah, and where will we get a tent, mattress and blankets?” said Sabah Al-Astal, 50, already displaced inside Gaza by the Israel-Hamas war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on sending troops into Rafah to root out Hamas in the area that borders Egypt and Israel.
But Netanyahu has also pledged to enable Gazans to leave, saying Sunday that his troops would not move in “while keeping the population locked in place.”
Israel, though, remains vague regarding how or when this massive evacuation would take place, a challenge that aid experts consider impossible in the devastated territory.
“People don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere safe in Gaza,” said Nadia Hardman, an expert on refugees at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on October 7 that resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also seized about 250 hostages, of whom Israel believes 130 remain in Gaza, including 33 who are presumed dead.
Israel has carried out a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive that Gaza’s health ministry says has killed at least 31,726 people, most of them women and children.
Foreign Minister Israel Katz remained evasive Monday, telling Kan public radio that “before any massive operation, we will evacuate citizens.”
“Not to the north, but to the west. There are Arab countries that can help by setting up tents, or something else” in the tiny area between Rafah and the Mediterranean, he added.
Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, Israel’s military spokesman, told the press last week about the establishment of “humanitarian islands.”
Such tent cities on Gaza’s territory would be spared the fighting and created with the international community, Hagari said.
But UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Jamie McGoldrick, said: “I honestly don’t know where they are supposedly being established.”
“How will they move people from wherever they are now? Will they be pushed, forced, encouraged?” he asked.
“That’s not something the UN will participate in because we’re not a part of any forced displacement.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on a visit to Israel on Sunday, voiced concern over the planned Israeli offensive.
“The military logic is one consideration, but there is a humanitarian logic as well,” he said.
“How should more than 1.5 million people be protected? Where should they go?“
Netanyahu has agreed to US President Joe Biden’s request to send a delegation of senior Israeli officials to Washington to discuss Israel’s Rafah plans and a possible “alternative approach,” the White House said Monday.
HRW’s Hardman was categorical: Moving “1.5 million people in an area that is already devastated” is “absolutely impossible,” she said.
Israel has declared certain areas protected humanitarian spaces, notably in Al-Mawasi, a coastal area in the south of the territory between south Gaza’s main city of Khan Yunis and Rafah.
But hundreds of thousands of people are already sheltering in tents there, and the area has been bombed several times since the war began more than five months ago.
Netanyahu has doubled down on plans for a Rafah offensive, announced more than a month ago, despite growing international pressure.
However, according to David Khalfa, Middle East specialist at the Jean-Jaures Foundation, the threat also involves psychological warfare.
“The Israelis maintain a strategic vagueness around their plans because they do not want to devalue their cards in order to keep Hamas in uncertainty,” he said.
Khalfa called the threat of a major offensive in Rafah “a card in a game of liar’s poker” with Hamas, a means to force the militants to soften their positions in ongoing truce negotiations.
Israel ‘deliberately’ blocking aid to Gaza: Oxfam
LONDON: Anti-poverty charity Oxfam on Monday accused Israel of intentionally preventing the delivery of aid into Gaza during its war with Hamas, in violation of international humanitarian law.
The nongovernmental organization said in a report that Israel continued to “systematically and deliberately block and undermine any meaningful international humanitarian response” in the Palestinian territory.
It alleged that Israel was defying an order by the International Court of Justice in January to boost aid in Gaza, and was failing its legal responsibility to protect people in land it occupies.
“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” said Oxfam Middle East and North Africa director Sally Abi Khalil.
“Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it. We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”
Oxfam said that “unjustifiably inefficient” inspection rules were causing aid trucks trying to get into Gaza to be stuck in queues for 20 days on average.
It said that Israeli authorities arbitrarily reject “dual-use” items — civilian goods that also have potential military use such as backup generators and torches.
“The list of rejected items is overwhelming and ever changing,” Oxfam said.
It recalled that water bags and water testing kits in an Oxfam shipment were rejected with no reason provided, before later being permitted entry.
The group also denounced “attacks on aid workers, humanitarian facilities and aid convoys” and “access restrictions” for relief staff, particularly to northern Gaza.
IAEA to help Iraq develop nuclear program
BAGHDAD: The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi met Iraq’s prime minister in Baghdad on Monday as part of a visit to help the country develop a peaceful nuclear program.
“We have discussed several projects in Iraq, including building a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes,” Iraqi Education Minister Naim Al-Aboudi told reporters following a meeting between Grossi and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani.
Grossi said that a team of Iraqi experts would visit the agency’s headquarters in Vienna in a few days to hold meetings to “set out a road map for the Iraqi peaceful nuclear program” amid growing interest in nuclear energy in the region.
Iraq in the past had three nuclear reactors in Tuwaitha, its main nuclear research site, south of Baghdad. One was destroyed by an Israeli air raid in 1981 and the two others by US warplanes in the 1991 Gulf war that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“Definitely, turning the page on this complex past is of the essence and we’re doing just that,” Grossi said.
Iraqi Kurdish party to boycott local polls in tussle with federal Supreme Court
IRBIL: The main party in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region said on Monday it would boycott local elections, accusing the Baghdad-based Supreme Court of interfering in regional affairs.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party or KDP said it would not take part in the June 10 vote following a February ruling by the Federal Supreme Court to amend the electoral law.
That decision reduced the number of seats in the Kurdish parliament from 111 to 100, effectively eliminating a quota reserved for Turkmen, Armenian and Christian minorities.
It also ruled that the Iraqi Electoral Commission should oversee the vote instead of local committees.
The KDP said in a statement: “We believe that it is in the interest of our people for our party not to comply with an unconstitutional decision and a system imposed from the outside.”
It added that the KDP will not participate in a vote “imposed” by the court that “violates the law and the constitution.”
The KDP is the largest party in the outgoing Kurdish parliament, with 45 seats.
It is followed by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan or PUK, which has 21 seats and enjoys friendlier ties with the federal government in Baghdad.
Under a tacit agreement between the two parties, a PUK member holds the Iraqi presidency, reserved for a Kurd, while the president of the Kurdish region is selected from the KDP.
A KDP boycott of local polls might further delay the election, originally slated for Oct. 22.
Last week, Christian and Turkman political parties announced plans to boycott the vote.
The Kurdistan region has been autonomous since 1991.
Relations with Baghdad have long been tense, mainly over funds allocated by federal authorities to the Kurdistan region and revenues from its large oil wealth.
Palestinian unemployment rate spikes to over 50 percent: ILO
GENEVA: The Israel-Palestinian conflict is pushing the rate of Palestinian unemployment in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to above 50 percent, the International Labour Organization said.
Already more than half a million jobs have been lost since Oct. 7, 2023, when Israel began a retaliatory military campaign in Gaza after Hamas militants launched deadly cross-border attacks, the new report showed. If the conflict continues until the end of March, then the unemployment rate will soar to 57 percent, it said.
ILO Regional Director for Arab States Ruba Jaradat said that the destruction of infrastructure and schools, hospitals and business in Gaza had “decimated entire economic sectors and paralyzed labor market activity, with untold repercussions on the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians for generations to come.”
In Gaza, some 200,000 jobs have been lost, accounting for about two-thirds of total employment in the enclave.
In the West Bank, the report described “near lockdown” conditions with more than 650 permanent and temporary checkpoints across the territory having significant negative effects on the economy. More than 300,000 jobs, or about a third of total employment, have already been lost there, it said.