TEL AVIV: Israeli protesters on Thursday were intensifying their opposition to a contentious government proposal to overhaul the judiciary, with a bid to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s route to the airport ahead of an official trip overseas and as the US defense secretary was visiting.
Demonstrators, who have been out protesting for more than two months against the overhaul, launched a “day of resistance to dictatorship” on Thursday. Protesters waving Israeli flags descended on the country’s main international airport, blocking the artery leading to the departures area with their cars. The disruption snarled traffic and reportedly prompted Netanyahu to make alternate travel plans. He was expected to reach the airport by helicopter.
Elsewhere, protesters blocked main intersections in the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv and other cities. A small flotilla of paddleboards and kayaks tried to close off a main maritime shipping lane off the northern city of Haifa. Some protesters barricaded the Jerusalem offices of a conservative think tank helping to spearhead the judicial changes.
The uproar over Netanyahu’s legal overhaul has plunged Israel into one of its worst domestic crises. Beyond the protests, which have drawn tens of thousands of Israelis to the streets and recently became violent, opposition has surged from across society, with business leaders and legal officials speaking out against what they say will be the ruinous effects of the plan. The rift has not spared Israel’s military, which is seeing unprecedented opposition from within its own ranks.
Netanyahu, who took office in late December after a protracted political stalemate, and his allies say the measures aim to rein in a court that has overstepped its authority. Critics say the overhaul will upset the delicate system of checks and balances and slide Israel toward authoritarianism.
Critics also say Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, is driven by personal grievances and that he could find an escape route from the charges through the overhaul. Netanyahu denies wrongdoing, and says the legal changes have nothing to do with his trial.
Demonstrations were underway across the country as Netanyahu and his allies have pledged to press ahead with a series of bills that would strip the Supreme Court of its ability to review legislation and give coalition politicians control over judicial appointments. An attempt by Israel’s ceremonial president to defuse the crisis through an alternative legal reform has so far been unsuccessful.
“Israel is on the verge of becoming an autocratic country. The current government is trying to destroy our democracy, and actually destroy the country,” said Savion Or, a protester in Tel Aviv.
The protesters’ main objective Thursday was to complicate Netanyahu’s journey to the airport ahead of a state visit to Rome. Police, handing out traffic tickets as protesters held signs reading, “dictator: don’t come back!” said they would clear the demonstrators by force if they did not move.
Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported Netanyahu would fly by helicopter to the airport, circumventing the protesters. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment. Protesters waving the blue-and-white Israeli flag gathered at a Jerusalem helipad, where an air force Blackhawk helicopter idled and was reportedly set to take Netanyahu to the airport.
The police, overseen by ultranationalist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have pledged to prevent the disturbances and said they had already made arrests as the protests were underway. Police on horseback were stationed in central Tel Aviv where protesters were marching and a water canon truck was parked nearby. Red billboards festooning the city’s main highway read “resistance to dictatorship is mandatory.”
The protests have been largely peaceful, but last week police cracked down, lobbing stun grenades and scuffling with demonstrators in Tel Aviv, the country’s business center and its liberal heartland. Those protests ended with Netanyahu’s wife Sara being extracted from a ritzy Tel Aviv hair salon where demonstrators had gathered after catching wind of her presence.
Critics say Ben-Gvir, a key ally in Netanyahu’s coalition government who has dubbed the protesters “anarchists”, is trying to politicize the police.
“We support freedom of expression but not anarchy,” Ben-Gvir told reporters while touring the airport.
The visit Thursday by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was also being affected by the protests. An Israeli official said that Austin’s meetings had been moved to a factory near the airport due to the expected disruptions. The protest movement has been centered in central Tel Aviv, near the Defense Ministry. The Israeli official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.
On Thursday morning, military reservist protesters barricaded the Jerusalem offices of the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative think tank that has helped craft the overhaul, with barbed wire and sandbags, and hung a banner outside reading “Kohelet is tearing Israel apart.”
Several dozen people, including two former Navy chiefs, were gathered in the waters off Haifa on kayaks, sailboats and stand-up paddleboards in a bid to block that city’s shipping lane.
Israelis stage ‘day of resistance’ against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan
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Israelis stage ‘day of resistance’ against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan
- Demonstrators have been out protesting for more than two months against the judicial overhaul
- Uproar over Netanyahu’s legal revamp has plunged Israel into one of its worst domestic crises
Tunisia’s financial crisis leaves the sick struggling to find medicine
- Hundreds of medicines have been missing for months, pharmacies say, including important treatments for heart disease, cancer and diabetes
- "The issue of missing medicine has become very hard for patients," said Douha Maaoui Faourati, a Tunis doctor
TUNIS: Sick Tunisians face a frantic struggle to find some medicines because the cash-strapped state has reduced imports, leaving doctors unable to control debilitating health problems and patients turning to informal markets for their medication.
Hundreds of medicines have been missing for months, pharmacies say, including important treatments for heart disease, cancer and diabetes as well as more basic products such as medicated eye drops whose absence worsens chronic conditions.
“The issue of missing medicine has become very hard for patients. We have a real problem with some medicines for which there are no generics available,” said Douha Maaoui Faourati, a Tunis doctor specializing in kidney and blood pressure disease.
Faourati has had to ask patients to try to get drugs from Europe, including ones used to control dangerously irregular heartbeat, swelling and clotting, and for which she says no good alternative is available in Tunisia.
Her difficulties show how Tunisia’s worsening fiscal problems are hitting ordinary people and adding to public anger at a state barely able to maintain even basic services.
Since last year Tunisia has struggled to pay for other goods that are sold at subsidised rates, causing periodic shortages of bread, dairy products and cooking oil as foreign currency reserves dropped from 130 days of imports to 93 days.
Tunisia wants a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund bailout, without which ratings agencies have warned it may default on sovereign debt, but President Kais Saied has rejected key terms of the deal and donors say talks have stalled.
Tunisia imports all medicine through the state-owned Central Pharmacy, which provides drugs to hospitals and pharmacies around the country which offer them to patients at a subsidised rate.
The head of Tunisia’s Syndicate of Pharmacies, Naoufel Amira, said hundreds of medicines are no longer available, including for diabetes, anaesthesia and cancer treatment.
Amira and two officials at the Central Pharmacy who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to media, said the body owed large sums to foreign suppliers, which had restricted their sales to Tunisia in response.
“The problem is primarily financial,” Amira said.
Amira said the Central Pharmacy owed about 1 billion dinars ($325 million) to suppliers. The officials there said it owed about 800 million dinars, adding that public insurance companies and hospitals were delaying paying their bills by up to a year.
Tunisia’s Health Ministry and Central Pharmacy did not respond to requests for comment.
MEDICINE EXCHANGE
From the roof of his Tunis house, retired soldier Nabil Boukhili has opened an unofficial medicine exchange for his neighborhood in coordination with local doctors. “We have dozens of people coming here daily to get medication,” he said.
He sources medicine from people traveling overseas as well as leftover pills from people who have finished their own treatment, dispensing it free of charge to people who can show a prescription.
While Reuters was interviewing Boukhili, a woman arrived needing medicine for a thyroid problem. “I’ve been without this medicine for over a week,” said Najia Guadri, adding that she felt unable to function without it.
Sitting at his parents’ home in Tunis, Abdessalem Maraouni described how a lack of medicated eye drops has left him at risk of blindness and unable to go outside, forcing him to abandon his law studies at the university.
“This country can no longer provide even a box of medicine,” he lamented, sitting in the modest family home decorated with posters of his favorite football club but unable to see objects more than a few meters away.
The 25 year-old has not been able to find the medicine, or an alternative, for six months and has had to seek supplies from people traveling abroad, paying far more than he would from Tunisian pharmacies and rationing his use.
Maraouni’s father Kamal wept as he described how the state’s inability to import medicines had hit his son’s prospects.
“We don’t ask the state for money or grand places to live. We only ask for medicine. Is that too much?” he said.
After 22 years in a coma, Israeli woman critically wounded in 2001 Jerusalem suicide bombing dies
- Woman was 31 at the time and was dining with her 3-year-old daughter when the blast occurred
JERUSALEM: An Israeli woman critically wounded in a 2001 suicide bombing at a Jerusalem restaurant has died, an Israeli hospital said Thursday. Her death marks the sixteenth fatality from that attack.
Hana Nachenberg was 31 at the time and was dining with her 3-year-old daughter when the blast occurred, Israeli media reported. She was in a coma for nearly 22 years until she died on Wednesday, reports said. Her daughter was not hurt in the attack.
On Aug. 9, 2001, a Palestinian bomber walked into a Jerusalem pizzeria and blew himself up. The attack remains one of the most infamous in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it came at a time of surging violence between the sides during the second Palestinian intifada or uprising.
Aftershocks of the attack, which wounded dozens, still make news today. The family of an Israeli-American girl killed in the attack is waging a campaign to press Jordan, a close American ally, to send a woman convicted of aiding the attacker to the United States for trial.
Ahlam Tamimi was convicted of choosing the target and guiding the bomber there and was sentenced by Israel to 16 life sentences. Israel released her in a 2011 prisoner swap with the Hamas militant group and she was sent to Jordan, where she lives freely and has been a familiar face in the media.
The US has charged Tamimi with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against Americans. Her name was added to the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists.
Blinken says US considering actions against Sudan leaders
- Blinken did not spell out what actions Washington could take or whether it would personally target the heads of the army and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces
- He said the US would remain engaged and stopped short of blaming one side for violating the truce, after the army announced its withdrawal on Wednesday
OSLO: Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Thursday that the United States could take action against rival Sudanese leaders after the collapse of a US-brokered truce.
The United States is “looking at steps that we can take to make clear our views on any leaders who are moving Sudan in the wrong direction, including by perpetuating the violence and by violating cease-fires that they’ve actually committed to,” Blinken told reporters.
Blinken did not spell out what actions Washington could take or whether it would personally target the heads of the army and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces or take a broader approach.
Blinken, who was in Oslo for NATO talks, said the United States would remain engaged and stopped short of blaming one side for violating the truce, after the army announced its withdrawal on Wednesday.
Blinken acknowledged wide violations of a series of cease-fires brokered by the United States and Saudi Arabia between the army and the Rapid Support Forces.
“We did see the provision of humanitarian assistance going forward. But it has been incredibly imperfect and incredibly fragile,” Blinken said.
“Now we’re seeing actions — again, by both sides — in clear violation of the commitments they made,” he said.
A number of US lawmakers and activists have criticized President Joe Biden’s administration for not taking earlier action, including sanctions, against army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
US diplomats have argued that it was more useful to preserve relationships to negotiate between them.
18 dead in attack on Khartoum market after army abandons talks
- Khartoum and other parts of the country gripped by warfare between the army and the paramilitary forces
- The army on Wednesday blasted RSF bases in Khartoum after pulling out of the talks
KHARTOUM: Shelling and aerial bombardments killed 18 civilians at a market in the capital of Sudan where fighting showed no signs of abating Thursday after the army abandoned truce talks.
For more than six weeks, Khartoum and other parts of the country have been gripped by bloody warfare between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The army on Wednesday blasted RSF bases in Khartoum after pulling out of the talks in the Saudi city of Jeddah, accusing its rival of violating a cease-fire that was meant to allow aid deliveries.
“Eighteen civilians were killed and 106 wounded” by army artillery fire and aerial bombardments Wednesday on a market in southern Khartoum, a committee of human rights lawyers said.
The toll was confirmed by a neighborhood group that organizes aid, which said the situation was “catastrophic” and appealed for help from doctors and for blood donations.
The United States said Thursday there had been “serious violations of the cease-fire by both sides” and warned it would only be ready to mediate between the warring parties when they get “serious.”
“Once the forces make clear by their actions that they are serious about complying with the cease-fire, the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are prepared to resume facilitation of the suspended discussions to find a negotiated solution to this conflict,” a State Department spokesperson said.
In both north and south Khartoum on Wednesday, troops loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan attacked key bases of the RSF led by commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, residents said.
One witness said there was “heavy artillery fire from army camps” in the capital’s north.
Another reported “artillery blasts on the RSF camp in Al-Salha” in southern Khartoum — the largest paramilitary base and arsenal in the city.
The attacks came two days after US and Saudi mediators said the two sides had agreed to extend by five days the initial week-long humanitarian truce.
Mediators admitted the truce had been “imperfectly observed,” but said the extension would “permit further humanitarian efforts.”
The army walked out “because the rebels have never implemented a single one of the provisions of a short-term cease-fire which required their withdrawal from hospitals and residential buildings,” a Sudanese government official said.
Despite repeated pledges from both sides, fighting has flared this week both in greater Khartoum and in the western region of Darfur.
“The army is ready to fight until victory,” Burhan declared during a visit to troops in the capital.
The RSF said they would “exercise their right to defend themselves” and accused the army of violating the truce.
Since fighting erupted on April 15, more than 1,800 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.
The UN says 1.2 million people have been internally displaced and more than 425,000 have fled abroad.
Yaqout Abderrahim escaped Khartoum for Port Sudan, where she has been waiting 15 days for a rare seat on a flight out.
“We want to leave at any price because our houses are destroyed and we no longer have any means to raise our children,” she said.
More than half the population — 25 million people — are now in need of aid and protection, the UN says.
Entire districts of Khartoum no longer have running water, electricity is only available for a few hours a week, and three quarters of hospitals in combat zones are not functioning.
Hundreds have been killed in Darfur, on Sudan’s western border with Chad, the United Nations said.
Darfur has never recovered from the years-long war that began in 2003 when a rebel uprising led strongman Omar Al-Bashir to unleash the Janjaweed militia, from which the RSF are descended.
Experts say Burhan is facing increasing pressure from his own Islamist supporters and remnants of the Bashir regime, with whom he had built a symbiotic relationship in order to gain power.
Turkiye’s Erdogan faces struggle to meet Syrian refugee promise
- Turkiye hosts 3.4 million Syrian refugees
- Erdogan wants to send a million back as resentment grows
ANKARA: President Tayyip Erdogan played up his plans to repatriate a million Syrian refugees as he rode a wave of nationalism to his third decade in power, but he could struggle to make good on the promise as conflict lingers on in neighboring Syria.
Erdogan, long seen as an ally by Syrian opponents of President Bashar Assad, emphasised refugee repatriation during bitter campaigning for Sunday’s run-off against Kemal Kilicidaroglu, who took an even tougher stance on the issue.
The focus on refugee return ahead of the election caused alarm among the 3.4 million Syrians living in Turkiye, where resentment toward them is growing.
Many of the refugees came from parts of Syria that remain under Assad’s control and say they can never return to their towns and villages while he remains in power.
Under Erdogan’s plans, they would not have to. With Qatari help, he says Turkiye has been building new housing in rebel-held northwest Syria — a region where Ankara has troops on the ground whose presence has deterred Syrian government attacks.
The plans imply a redoubling of Turkiye’s commitment to the rebel-held area where it has been building influence for years, even as Assad demands a timetable for the withdrawal of Turkish troops as a condition for progress toward rebuilding ties.
With Turkish voters increasingly resentful of the refugees — Turkiye hosts more than any other country – Erdogan’s plans put the issue at the heart of his Syria policy, alongside concerns about Syrian Kurdish groups that have carved out enclaves at the border and are deemed a national security threat by Turkiye.
Erdogan has said he aims to ensure the return of one million refugees within a year to the opposition-held areas. His interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, last week attended the inauguration of a housing project meant to accommodate returning Syrians in the Syrian town of Jarablus.
“It is our duty to fulfil our citizens’expectations about this issue through ways and means that befit our country,” Erdogan said in his victory speech on Sunday, adding that nearly 600,000 Syrians had already returned voluntarily to safe areas.
But for many Syrians in Turkiye, the prospect is unappealing.
“I would like to go back to Syria but not to Jarablus ... I would like to go back home, to Latakia,” said a Syrian who gave his name as Ahmed, a 28-year-old student at Ankara University, referring to a government-held region on the Mediterranean.
“I would like to go back, but if Assad stays, I can’t due to security concerns.”
Controlled by an array of armed groups, much of the northwest also suffers from lawlessness.
“Conditions in northern Syria remain so bad and unstable that large-scale return will be difficult to arrange, despite all these reports about Turkiye and Qatar building housing and infrastructure,” said Aron Lund, a Syria expert with Century International, a think tank.
“It seems like a drop in the ocean and the overall economic situation keeps deteriorating.”
Driven partly by its goal of securing refugee returns, Turkiye has changed diplomatic course on Syria, following other regional governments by reopening channels to Assad, who Erdogan once called a “butcher”.
But the rapprochement is moving more slowly than the thaw between Assad and his former Arab foes, reflecting Turkiye’s much deeper role in a country where Russia, Iran and the United States also have forces on the ground.
Analysts think Ankara will not agree easily to Assad’s demand for a withdrawal timetable, noting that any sign of Turkish forces leaving would prompt more Syrians to try to flee for Turkiye, fearing a return of Assad’s rule to the northwest.
“Turkiye is highly unlikely to compromise on troop withdrawal, which likely means hundreds of thousands of refugees heading their way if and when they leave Idlib,” said Dareen Khalifa of International Crisis Group, a think-tank.
Many Syrians in Turkiye were relieved at Kilicidaroglu’s defeat. During his campaign, he said he would discuss plans for refugee returns with Assad after reinstating relations, and that returns would be completed in two years but would not be forced.
He sharpened his tone after trailing Erdogan in the first round, vowing to send all migrants back to their countries.
Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser, said on Monday that Turkiye wanted a safe, dignified and voluntary return.
International refugee law stipulates that all returns must be voluntary.
“We’re making plans to secure the return of one or 1.5 million Syrians in the first place,” Kalin told a local broadcaster.
Samir Alabdullah of the Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies in Istanbul, a non-profit research institution, said he did not expect much to change now the election battle is over.
“Syrians are relieved after Erdogan’s victory ... There is nothing wrong with voluntary return. We do not expect policy change on migration,” he said.
