Algeria’s UNSC resolution calls on Israel to halt Rafah offensive immediately: Report
The Reuters news agency said the draft text demands a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, the release of all captives held by Hamas and essentially orders Israel to cease its military operations in Rafah.
The text uses the strongest UNSC language and says it “decides that Israel, the occupying Power, shall immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in Rafah”, Reuters reports.
Diplomats told Reuters the security council could vote on the draft resolution within days.
A UNSC resolution needs at least nine votes in favour and no vetoes by permanent member – the US, the United Kingdom, France, Russia or China – to pass.
The US has already shielded Israel by vetoing three draft council resolutions on the war in Gaza.
Israel sends revised ceasefire proposal, but it ‘will not deliver the goods’: Report
No progress has been made on the stalled ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas but Israeli officials have sent mediating countries a revised document outlining their stance in the last 24 hours, the Haaretz newspaper reports.
Citing an anonymous senior official, Haaretz said that the new proposal offers some flexibility on Israel’s demands, including the number of captives to be released in the first phase of the deal and the length of the initial ceasefire.
But the Israeli proposal “will not deliver the goods”, the anonymous source said, as it does not meet Hamas’s demands of an end to the fighting and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
“There won’t be a deal as long as Israel is refusing to stop the fighting. All reports of an ‘Israeli flexibility’ don’t point to any real progress or possibility of returning hostages home,” he said.
Report Mossad chief threatened then-ICC prosecutor ‘deeply disturbing’: Law expert
Toby Cadman, an international law specialist, said there must be “consequences” following reports that the International Criminal Court’s then-Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was threatened over a war crimes investigation involving Israel.
Cadman was commenting on The Guardian newspaper report that Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, had allegedly attempted to pressure Bensouda to abandon her 2021 investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Cadman said it was commendable that the ICC prosecutor “did not bow to that pressure”.
“When we look at the substance of what has come out of The Guardian investigation… that is, of course, direct interference with an independent investigation. There has to be consequences for that,” Cadman told Al Jazeera.
“We rely on these institutions to be able to operate independent of political pressure and these kind of direct threats to the senior most official from the prosecuting side is deeply, deeply disturbing,” he said.
The Guardian reported that Bensouda had briefed a small group of senior ICC officials about Cohen’s attempts to persuade her and that she was concerned about the “persistent and threatening nature of his behaviour”.
Fatou Bensouda at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the Netherlands, in May 2021
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