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Sanctions on far-right Israeli ministers good but more needed: HRW
Daniela Gavshon, Australia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), has welcomed the country’s decision this week to impose sanctions on far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
But Gavshon said “further measures are urgently needed”.
“Israeli authorities continue to use starvation as a method of war, flouting three rounds of provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.
“Australia should sanction additional Israeli officials implicated in grave abuses and ban trade with illegal West Bank settlements,” she said. She also called on the Australian government to use “its leverage to prevent further mass atrocities and hold those responsible accountable”.
Hamas accuses Israel’s Smotrich of implementing ‘fascist policies of annexation’
The Palestinian group has released a statement, calling Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s decision to seize land east of Ramallah, near the illegal settlement outpost of Malachei HaShalom, “a practical implementation of his colonial plans” in the occupied West Bank.
The website of the Arutz Sheva news outlet, also known as the Israeli National News, reported today that the seizure of 800 dunams of land near Malachei HaShalom was approved as part of an initiative led by Smotrich.
Hamas said this move requires “the activation of all forms of popular resistance” in response, as well as “a comprehensive confrontation with the occupation”.
“We call on the international community to shoulder its responsibilities regarding the settlement invasion, organised colonial expansion, and ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people,” it said.
Unarmed Palestinian brothers killed in Israeli raid on West Bank’s Nablus
A Palestinian man in a red cap walks down the narrow alleyway in Nablus’s old city towards a group of Israeli soldiers, clearly unarmed.
He attempts to talk to the soldiers, who had flooded into the occupied West Bank city in the early hours of Tuesday as part of Israel’s latest military raid – believed to be the largest carried out in Nablus in two years.
The soldiers immediately kick and shove the man – 40-year-old Nidal Umairah – before his brother walks over, attempting to intervene. Gunfire follows, and soon the two brothers are lying dead.
Nidal and his brother 35-year-old brother Khaled were the latest victims of Israel in the West Bank, after they were killed late on Tuesday. It is unclear which brother had initially been detained, but witnesses were adamant that the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers was an unnecessary escalation that led to the deaths of yet more Palestinians.
Ghassan Hamdan, the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Nablus, was at the scene of the killings.
“There were at least 12 soldiers and they all fired their automatic machine guns at once,” said Hamdan. After the two men fell to the ground [medics] asked the soldiers if we could treat their wounds. They answered by firing at all of us.”
“We all took cover behind the walls of the old city,” he told Al Jazeera.
Hamza Abu Hajar, a paramedic at the scene, said that the Umairah brother who had initially approached the Israeli soldiers had been trying to go to his house to move his family out and away from the Israeli raid.
“They lifted his shirt up to prove he was unarmed,” Abu Hajar said. “They then started shooting at him, and at us as well.”
The Israeli army said it acted in self-defence after one of the Umairah brothers tried to seize a weapon from a soldier. It said that four soldiers had been injured in the incident.
