Teenager dies during ultra-Orthodox protest against conscription in Jerusalem
A teenage boy has fallen to his death during a mass ultra-Orthodox Jewish rally against military conscription in Jerusalem, which had shut down the main entrance to the city.
Packed crowds of mostly men clogged the roads around the Route 1 highway leading into Jerusalem. Israeli media estimated that about 200,000 people flocked to the rally.
Photos showed some had climbed atop roofs of buildings, a petrol station and onto cranes. The Israeli ambulance service said a 15-year-old fell to his death, and police said they had opened an investigation into the incident.
The debate over mandatory military service, and those who are exempt from it, has long caused tensions within Israel’s deeply divided society and has placed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under increasing political strain over the past year.
While ultra-Orthodox seminary students have long been exempt from mandatory military service, many Israelis fume at what they see as an unfair burden carried by the mainstream who serve.
That frustration only intensified during wars over the past two years that exacted the highest Israeli military death toll in decades as fighting stretched from the Gaza Strip to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Calls for Israel’s UN envoy to retract attack against UN expert
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations is facing growing calls to retract and apologise for recent ad hominem attacks against Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Speaking at the UN earlier this week, Danny Danon called Albanese – who has been a prominent voice denouncing Israel’s war on Gaza as a genocide – a “witch”.
“I call on Israel to retract and apologise for this sexist and hateful attack” against Albanese, another UN special rapporteur, Ben Saul, wrote in a social media post. “Such language is completely unacceptable in international diplomacy.”
UN chief Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric was also asked yesterday about the Israeli envoy’s comments, which he described as “shocking to say the least”.
“We have always felt that special rapporteurs are an important part of the international human rights mechanism,” Dujarric said. “They are UN officials when they do their work and they need to be respected when they do their work – whether it’s legally or verbally.”
