CAIRO: Libya’s foreign minister on Monday was sacked and fled the country, a day after Israel revealed that its chief diplomat met with her last week — news that prompted scattered street protests in the chaos-stricken North African nation.
Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who heads one of Libya’s rival governments, said he referred her for an investigation over the meeting, which was the first ever between top diplomats of Libya and Israel. Dbeibah did not clarify on what grounds Mangoush would be investigated. However, it is illegal to normalize ties with Israel under a 1957 law in Libya, which has long been hostile toward Israel.
Mangoush fled to Turkiye following the Israeli announcement of the meeting, according to a Libyan Foreign Ministry official.
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Mangoush met in Rome last week. It was a small breakthrough for Israel’s government, whose hard-line policies toward the Palestinians have led to a cooling of its burgeoning ties with the Arab world.
Cohen said they discussed the importance of preserving the heritage of Libya’s former Jewish community, including renovating synagogues and cemeteries. The talks also touched on possible Israeli assistance for humanitarian issues, agriculture and water management, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Libyan Foreign Ministry tried to play down the meeting, calling it “unprepared and an unofficial meeting during a meeting with Italy’s foreign minister.” It said in a statement that Mangoush’s encounter with Cohen didn’t include “any talks, agreements or consultations.”
Dbeibah’s decision to sack Mangoush suggested that he was not aware of the meeting. However, two senior Libyan government officials told The Associated Press the prime minister knew about the talks between his foreign minister and the Israeli chief diplomat.
One of the officials said Dbeibah gave the green light for the meeting last month when he was on a visit to Rome. The prime minister’s office arranged the encounter in coordination with Mangoush, he said.
The second official said the meeting lasted for about two hours and Mangoush briefed the prime minister directly after her return to the capital, Tripoli. The official said the meeting crowned US-brokered efforts to have Libya join a series of Arab countries establishing diplomatic ties with Israel.
The official said normalization of relations between Libya and Israel was first discussed in a meeting between Dbeibah, and CIA Director William Burns, who visited the Libyan capital in January.
The Libyan premier gave initial approval for joining the US-brokered Abraham Accords, but he was concerned about public backlash in a country known for its past support for the Palestinian cause, the official said.
The official, meanwhile, said Mangoush, who was surprised by the Israeli announcement, quickly fled the Libyan capital on a private flight to Istanbul.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity for their safety.
Jalel Harchaoui, an associate fellow specializing in Libya at the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, said Dbeibah has sought to please foreign governments as he has come under growing pressure from the UN and other countries over the political stalemate in his nation.
Harchaoui said the Libyan prime minister’s decision to sack his foreign minister “undoubtedly” aimed at calming public anger.
In New York, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric wouldn’t comment on the matter, calling it an internal issue, but said: “We are concerned about the safety of the foreign minister. There are reports that she’s been threatened and she had to flee the country. Her safety is paramount.”
A day after proudly announcing what it called a “historic” meeting, Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday put out a statement saying that neither Cohen nor the ministry was responsible for “leaking” the news.
An Israeli official said the ministry was forced to go public Sunday after an Israeli news site planned to publish a report on the meeting. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the behind-the-scenes diplomacy, said that Israel informed the Libyans about the leak and said that both countries had previously agreed they would announce the meeting at an unspecified time.
Libya was plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. The oil-rich country has been split between the Western-backed government in Tripoli and a rival administration in the country’s east. Each side has been backed by armed groups and foreign governments. Qaddafi was hostile to Israel and a staunch supporter of the Palestinians, including radical militant groups.
Sunday’s announcement of the meeting prompted scattered protests in Tripoli and other towns in western Libya. Protesters stormed the foreign ministry headquarters to condemn the meeting, while others attacked and burned a residence for the prime minister in Tripoli, according to local reports.
In the town of Zawiya protesters burned the Israeli flag, while others held the Palestinian flag. There were also protests in the city of Misrata, a stronghold for Dbeibah, according to footage circulated on social media and verified by The Associated Press.
Khalid Al-Mishri, a politician who was the chair of the State Council, a Tripoli-based legislative body, condemned the meeting and called for the dismissal of Dbeibah’s government, which is close to the US and the West.
“This government has crossed all prohibited lines and must be brought down,” he wrote on the Twitter.
The House of Representatives of Libya’s rival government in the east also slammed the meeting as a “legal and moral crime.” It convened an emergency session Monday in the eastern city of Benghazi, and called for the country’s public prosecutor to probe Dbeibah’s government communications with Isreal.
In Israel, Yair Lapid, a former foreign minister and prime minister, criticized Cohen for going public with the sensitive meeting.
“Countries of the world this morning are looking at the irresponsible leak of the meeting of the Israeli and Libyan foreign minister and asking themselves: is it possible to manage foreign relations with this country? Is it possible to trust this country?” Lapid said in a statement.
Libya’s foreign minister sacked, flees country after meeting with Israel’s chief diplomat
https://arab.news/2fbve
Libya’s foreign minister sacked, flees country after meeting with Israel’s chief diplomat
- Libya does not recognize Israel and supports the establishment of a Palestinian state
- Mangoush fled to Turkiye following the Israeli announcement of the meeting
ICC prosecutor says Israel not ‘akin’ to Hamas
- Karim Khan: ‘Are powerful states sincere when they say there’s a body of law or is this rules-based system all a nonsense, simply a tool of NATO and a post-colonial world, with no real intention of ap
LONDON: International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan justified his decision to request arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister in an interview with a British newspaper published on Sunday.
Khan said on Monday that he was seeking warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as top Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Mohamed Deif, on suspicions of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
His announcement sparked the ire of Israel and its allies the United States and United Kingdom, all of which criticized Khan for putting together Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, and Israel, which has carried out a relentless military campaign in Gaza since then.
“It’s a precarious moment internationally and if we don’t hold on to the law, we have nothing to cling onto,” Khan, who rarely speaks publicly, told the Sunday Times newspaper.
He added that countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia were watching closely as to whether global institutions would seek to uphold international law.
“Are powerful states sincere when they say there’s a body of law or is this rules-based system all a nonsense, simply a tool of NATO and a post-colonial world, with no real intention of applying law equally?” Khan asked.
The warrants, if granted by the ICC judges, would mean that any of the 124 ICC member states would technically be obliged to arrest Netanyahu and the others if they traveled there.
However the court has no mechanism to enforce its orders.
Netanyahu rejected “with disgust ... the comparison between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas,” and US President Joe Biden also stressed that “there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.”
“I am not saying that Israel with its democracy and its supreme court is akin to Hamas, of course not,” Khan added in his interview.
“I couldn’t be clearer, Israel has every right to protect its population and to get the hostages back. But nobody has a license to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity. The means define us.”
He cited a number of allegations against Israel, including “the fact that water was turned off... that people queuing for food [were] targeted, that people from aid agencies have been killed.”
“This is not how war is supposed to be waged,” said Khan.
“If this is what compliance with international humanitarian law looks like, then the Geneva Conventions serve no purpose.”
The Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 121 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,984 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Yemen’s Houthis freed over 100 war prisoners, the Red Cross says
- The unilateral release comes more than a year after Yemen’s warring sides freed more than 800 prisoners in a major exchange in the country in April last year
CAIRO: The Iranian-backed Houthis rebels in Yemen on Sunday released more than 100 war prisoners linked to the country’s long-running conflict, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.
The unilateral release came more than a year after Yemen’s warring sides freed more than 800 prisoners in a major exchange in the country in April last year.
The release of 113 prisoners took place Sunday morning in the Houthi-held capital of Sanaa, the Red Cross said in a statement, adding that the released detainees were among those the ICRC visited and assisted regularly in their detention in the Yemeni capital.
“We hope this paves the way for further releases, bringing comfort to families eagerly anticipating reunification with their loved ones,” said Daphnee Maret, the ICRC’s head of delegation in Yemen.
One of the released detainees with health issues was transferred in an ambulance to his hometown inside Yemen, the ICRC said without elaborating.
The release was delayed by a day because of apparent logistical reasons, said Abdul-Qader Al-Murtaza, a Houthi official in charge of prisoner exchange talks.
Thousands of people are still believed to be held as prisoners of war since the conflict erupted in 2014, with others missing. The Red Cross viewed Sunday’s releases as a “positive step” to revive prisoner exchange negotiations.
“We are ready to play our role as a neutral intermediary in facilitating the release, transfer, and repatriation of detainees,” it said.
Yemen was plunged into a devastating conflict when the Houthis descended from their northern stronghold and seized Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, forcing the government into exile.
More than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, have died in one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.
Ahead of another donor conference for Syria, humanitarian workers fear more aid cuts
- Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have been pulled into poverty, and struggle with accessing food and health care as the economy deteriorates across the country’s front lines
- id organizations are making their annual pitches to donors ahead of a fundraising conference in Brussels for Syria on Monday
BEIRUT: Living in a tent in rebel-held northwestern Syria, Rudaina Al-Salim and her family struggle to find enough water for drinking and other basic needs such as cooking and washing. Their encampment north of the city of Idlib hasn’t seen any aid in six months.
“We used to get food aid, hygiene items,” said the mother of four. “Now we haven’t had much in a while.”
Al-Salim’s story is similar to that of many in this region of Syria, where most of the 5.1 million people have been internally displaced — sometimes more than once — in the country’s civil war, now in its 14th year, and rely on aid to survive.
UN agencies and international humanitarian organizations have for years struggled with shrinking budgets, further worsened by the coronavirus pandemic and conflicts elsewhere. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan, and more recently Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip are the focus of the world’s attention.
Syria’s war, which has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of of 23 million, has long remained largely frozen and so are also efforts to find a viable political solution to end it. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have been pulled into poverty, and struggle with accessing food and health care as the economy deteriorates across the country’s front lines.
Along with the deepening poverty, there is growing hostility in neighboring countries that host Syrian refugees and that struggle with crises of their own.
Aid organizations are now making their annual pitches to donors ahead of a fundraising conference in Brussels for Syria on Monday. But humanitarian workers believe that pledges will likely fall short and that further aid cuts would follow.
“We have moved from assisting 5.5 million a year to about 1.5 million people in Syria,” Carl Skau, the UN World Food Program’s deputy executive director, told The Associated Press. He spoke during a recent visit to Lebanon, which hosts almost 780,000 registered Syrian refugees — and hundreds of thousands of others who are undocumented.
“When I look across the world, this is the (aid) program that has shrunk the most in the shortest period for time,” Skau said.
Just 6 percent of the United Nations’ appeal for aid to Syria in 2024 has so far been secured ahead of Monday’s annual fundraising conference organized by the European Union, said David Carden, UN deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria.
For the northwestern region of Syria, that means the UN is only able to feed 600,000 out of the 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, meaning they lack access to sufficient food. The UN says some 12.9 million Syrians are food insecure across the country.
The UN hopes the Brussels conference can raise more than $4 billion in “lifesaving aid” to support almost two-thirds of the 16.7 million Syrians in need, both within the war-torn country and in neighboring countries, particularly Turkiye, Lebanon and Jordan.
At last year’s conference, donors pledged $10.3 billion — about $6 billion in grants and the rest in loans — just months after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Turkiye and much of northern Syria, killing over 59,000 people, including 6,000 in Syria.
For northwestern Syria, an enclave under rebel control, aid “is literally a matter of life and death” this year, Carden told the AP during a recent visit to Idlib province. Without funding, 160 health facilities there would close by end of June, he said.
The International Rescue Committee’s head for Syria, Tanya Evans, said needs are “at their highest ever,” with increasing numbers of Syrians turning to child labor and taking on debt to pay for food and basics.
In Lebanon, where nearly 90 percent of Syrian refugees live in poverty, they also face flagging aid and increasing resentment from the Lebanese, struggling with their own country’s economic crisis since 2019. Disgruntled officials have accused the refugees of surging crime and competition in the job market.
Lebanon’s bickering political parties have united in a call for a crackdown on undocumented Syrian migrants and demand refugees return to so-called “safe zones” in Syria.
UN agencies, human rights groups and Western governments say there are no such areas.
Um Omar, a Syrian refugee from Homs, works in a grocery store in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli — an impoverished community that once warmly welcomed Syrian refugees.
For her work, she gets to bring home every day a bundle of bread and some vegetables to feed her family of five. They live rent-free in a tent on a plot of land that belongs to the grocery store’s owners.
“I have to leave the kids early in the morning without breakfast so I can work,” she said, asking to be identified only by her nickname, Arabic for “Omar’s mother.” She fears reprisals because of heightened hostilities against Syrians.
The shrinking UN aid they receive does not pay the bills. Her husband, who shares her fears for their safety, used to work as a day laborer but has rarely left their home in weeks.
She says deportation to Syria, where President Bashar Assad’s government is firmly entrenched, would spell doom for her family.
“If my husband was returned to Syria, he’ll either go to jail or (face) forced conscription,” she explains.
Still, many in Lebanon tell her family, “you took our livelihoods,” Um Omar said. There are also those who tell them they should leave, she added, so that the Lebanese “will finally catch a break.”
Sirens sound in Tel Aviv for the first time in months as Hamas says it fired rockets from Gaza
- Hamas armed wing says fired ‘large rocket barrage’ at Tel Aviv
- Aid trucks begin entering Gaza through Kerem Shalom crossing
CAIRO/TEL AVIV: Rocket sirens blared Sunday in Israel’s commercial hub of Tel Aviv for the first time in months, with at least three blasts reported across central Israel, AFP correspondents said.
The Israeli military said sirens had been activated over central Israel as fighting raged in Gaza, including in the far-southern city of Rafah.
The armed wing of Palestinian militant group Hamas said it had launched a “large rocket barrage” on Tel Aviv.
The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades said in a post on Telegram that they had targeted Tel Aviv “with a large rocket barrage in response to the Zionist massacres against civilians.”
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the latest barrage.
Earlier on Sunday, aid trucks entered Gaza from southern Israel through a new agreement to bypass the Rafah crossing with Egypt after Israeli forces seized the Palestinian side of it earlier this month. But was unclear if humanitarian groups would be able to access the aid because of ongoing fighting in the area.
A total of “200 trucks” had moved from the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, which has been shut since early May when Israel seized the Palestinian side of the terminal, to the Kerem Shalom crossing, some 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to the south.
Egypt has refused to coordinate aid through Rafah as long as Israeli troops control the Palestinian side.
But on Friday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi agreed in a call with his US counterpart Joe Biden to allow aid through Kerem Shalom, the other entry point into southern Gaza, the White House said.
Al-Qahera News did not specify how many trucks had made their way through inspection into besieged Gaza, but said “four fuel trucks” had already crossed and were heading to hospitals.
All aid from Egypt is inspected by Israeli authorities and distributed via the United Nations.
The remainder of the 200 trucks were “expected to cross into Gaza today,” Khaled Zayed, head of the Egyptian Red Crescent in Al-Arish — where the bulk of aid arrives — said.
Hamas says it captured Israeli soldiers in Gaza
- Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman: ‘Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside a tunnel’
- The Israeli military, in a statement, denied the claim of Hamas’ armed wing
CAIRO: A spokesman for Hamas’ armed wing said on Sunday its fighters had captured Israeli soldiers during fighting in Jabalia in northern Gaza on Saturday, though the Israeli military denied the claim.
The Hamas armed wing spokesman did not say how many soldiers had been abducted and showed no proof of the claim.
“Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside a tunnel ... The fighters withdrew after they left all members of the force dead, wounded, and captured,” Abu Ubaida, the spokesman for Al Qassam Brigades, said in a recorded message broadcast by Al Jazeera early on Sunday.
The Israeli military on Sunday denied the claim by Hamas’ armed wing.
“The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) clarifies that there is no incident in which a soldier was abducted,” the military said in a statement.
Hamas released a video that appeared to show a bloodied person being dragged along the ground in a tunnel and photos of military fatigue and rifle. Reuters could not independently verify the identity of the person shown in the video nor his or her condition.
The comments by Abu Ubaida came hours after prospects for a resumption of mediated Gaza ceasefire talks grew on Saturday.
An official with knowledge of the matter said a decision had been taken to resume the talks next week after the chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency met the head of the CIA and the prime minister of Qatar.
The source, who declined to be identified by name or nationality, said it had been decided that “in the coming week negotiations will open based on new proposals led by the mediators, Egypt and Qatar and with active US involvement.”
A Hamas official later denied Israeli media reports the talks would resume in Cairo on Tuesday, telling Reuters: “There is no date.”
After more than seven months of war in Gaza, the mediators have struggled to secure a breakthrough, with Israel seeking the release of hostages held by Hamas and Hamas seeking an end to the war and a release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Nearly 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive, Gaza’s health ministry says. Israel began the operation in response to Hamas-led militants attacking southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
