https://arab.news/cmrgn
TEL AVIV, Israel: Israel’s anti-government protest movement gained new momentum on Saturday night as tens of thousands of people spilled into the streets of cities across the country to oppose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plan to overhaul the judicial system.
The grassroots movement has staged protests for over six months since Netanyahu’s government unveiled the overhaul plan. But in recent weeks, the protests had shown signs of weakening.
Plans by the government to push forward with the overhaul next week in parliament, coupled with the firing of Tel Aviv’s police chief, who was accused of being too sympathetic to the protesters, appeared to breathe new life into Saturday’s demonstrations.
Some 150,000 people thronged central Tel Aviv, with large rallies in Jerusalem and other major cities. Late Saturday, dozens of people attempted to block Tel Aviv’s main highway, but they were quickly cleared away by police. Scuffles broke out, and police sprayed a water cannon at the crowd.
Netanyahu’s allies have proposed a series of changes to the Israeli legal system aimed at weakening what they say are the excessive powers of unelected judges. The proposed changes include giving Netanyahu’s allies control over the appointment of judges and the power to overturn court decisions they do not support.
His opponents say the plan will destroy the country’s fragile system of checks and balances and concentrate power in the hands of Netanyahu and his allies. They also say that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest because he is on trial for corruption charges. Wide swaths of Israeli society, including reserve military officers, business leaders, LGBT and other minority groups, have joined the protests.
A legislative committee chaired by a Netanyahu ally last week approved a bill that would prevent Israel’s courts from scrutinizing the “reasonableness” of decisions made by elected officials. The legislature could hold a preliminary vote on the bill as early as Monday.
The “reasonability standard” was used by the Supreme Court earlier this year to strike down the appointment of a Netanyahu ally as interior minister because of a past conviction for bribery and a 2021 plea deal for tax evasion. Critics say removing that standard would allow the government to pass arbitrary decisions and grant it too much power.
Protesters also condemned the ouster of Tel Aviv’s police chief, Ami Eshed, who said this week he was forced to resign because of political pressure to act violently toward protesters. Eshed regularly clashed with the hard-line national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has demanded that police take a tougher stance against months of anti-government protests.
Saturday’s protest is the latest in a series of demonstrations which, since January, have seen thousands of Israelis take to the streets.
Netanyahu put the overhaul on hold in March after mass protests erupted in opposition, but announced last month that the plan would move forward. The protests have blocked roads, disrupted the country’s main airport and thronged major cities.
AL-MUKALLA: Two Yemeni demining workers have been killed while attempting to disarm stacked landmines laid by the Iran-backed Houthis in the northern province of Saada.
Casualties monitoring group, the Yemeni Landmine Records, said the workers were operating as part of a team in the government-controlled Al-Bouqa area when two anti-tank mines placed on top of each other exploded as they tried to defuse them.
The group claimed the Houthis intentionally sought to kill deminers by clustering landmines in one location, planting devices that could not be detected by conventional means, and laying explosives fitted with motion detectors.
Yemeni authorities and the Saudi-funded Masam demining program estimate that the Houthis have planted more than 1 million landmines and improvised explosive devices in the country over the past decade, making Yemen the most mined region of the world since World War II.
At least eight civilians have been killed by landmine explosions in Taiz and Hodeidah this month, according to the monitoring group.
Hamza Ahmed, 14, was killed while tampering with an IED disguised as a drinks can in the Al-Jahmelia neighborhood of Taiz, close to his home.
And in a separate incident, 13-year-old Arfat Abdu Ghalebm died after a mortar shell he was playing with exploded while he was tending sheep in the Taiz countryside.
A monitoring group spokesperson said: “We urge parents to educate their children and warn them against touching suspicious objects in order to save their children’s lives.”
Ousama Al-Gosaibi, managing director of the Masam project, accused the international community and UN groups of not doing enough to tackle the Houthis over the issue.
He told Yemen Shabab TV that 33 Masam deminers had been killed and 52 injured in landmine blasts since 2018 and that project teams had defused 405,818 landlines, unexploded ordnances, and IEDs spread over 47,485,089 square meters of Yemeni soil in the last five years.
“Unfortunately, there is a disgraceful and irresponsible silence on the part of the international community regarding the crimes against humanity committed by the Houthi militia, which violates the rights of civilians by using mines indiscriminately,” Al-Gosaibi said.
Although hostilities in Yemen have significantly decreased since a UN-brokered truce took effect in April last year, the Houthis have continued to plant more sophisticated landmines, including in areas cleared by the Saudi project.
“Unfortunately, mine placement persists. In fact, there are numerous areas that Masam’s teams had previously cleared, but which have since been re-mined in greater numbers and with more hazardous techniques.
“Tricks and techniques used by the Houthis in the production of mines and explosive devices are constantly evolving, and the Houthis are constantly striving to improve their mines and explosive devices and equip them with new technologies,” he added.
Al-Gosaibi said that 18 of Taiz province’s 23 districts contained Houthi landmines, making Taiz the most extensively mined province in Yemen after Hodeidah in the west.
BEIRUT: Maronite Patriarch Bechara Al-Rahi has accused Lebanese officials of “causing problems and then seeking to solve them in a way that violates the constitution,” in a sermon on Sunday
In his address, Al-Rahi expessed regret over “what the majority of officials are doing by destroying the political work without any conscientious deterrent or consideration for the internal and external public opinion.”
His remarks came as concerns grew that the Lebanese central bank might be left leaderless amid a deep financial crisis.
The fate of the Banque Du Liban’s governance is unclear, as the term of Riad Salameh, the current governor, ends later this month.
Many Lebanese hold central bank gov. Riad Salameh responsible for the financial collapse, alongside the ruling elite.
The Cabinet cannot appoint a successor amid the country’s current presidential vacuum, which has been ongoing for nine months.
The central bank’s vice governors have threatened to quit if no successor is appointed, despite Lebanon’s code of money and credit stipulating that the first deputy governor should assume the main role in the event that a governor cannot be appointed by the president.
In the past few days, many ideas on how to resolve the issue have been proposed, including the Cabinet being allowed to appoint a new governor.
Christian parties, however, have rejected such a solution, saying it could prompt a new political-sectarian conflict by showing that the country can be managed without a president, with practical management left to the speaker and prime minister.
One political analyst told Arab News that a void in the central bank’s governance would lead to chaos.
“The political forces don’t have the luxury to pull strings amid the expiration of the governor’s term at the end of July,” said the analyst.
“Manipulating this critical position will lead to dramatic impacts that will directly affect the life of the Lebanese, their institutions and banks, and might steer foreign countries and banks away from dealing with Lebanon financially.
“This will raise questions regarding Lebanon’s position in the global financial system,” the analyst added.
MP Ghassan Hasbani — a member of the parliamentary finance and budget committee — said that the vice governors’ threat to resign and not carry out their duties was a dereliction of duty.
“They are obliged to follow up their work and they have a personal responsibility that’s subject to legal prosecution, which might lead to imprisonment,” he said.
Hasbani, who is a Lebanese Forces deputy, said that “amid the absence of a president, the caretaker Cabinet should not violate the constitution by appointing a new successor to Salameh.”
He said his party was looking into the possibility of filing an appeal before the Shura Council in case the Cabinet sought to appoint a new governor.
Hezbollah avoided discussing the matter of the central bank’s governance publicly, but central council member Sheikh Nabil Kaouk warned: “Lebanon is going through a critical and exceptional situation that requires responsible and courageous decisions to rescue the country, stop the collapse and alleviate the suffering of the people.”
Kaouk added: “This can only be achieved through dialogue, agreement and convergence of ideas.
“However, refusing to hold a dialogue means that they are insisting on disrupting the country, aggravating the situation, and wasting time and opportunities. This is what led the country to a state of stagnation.”
Al-Rahi’s remarks on Sunday pre-empted any attempts by the Cabinet to appoint a new governor.
He accused it of turning “the non-legislative parliament into a legislative body — although it has been a mere electoral body since the beginning of the presidential vacuum,” adding that the Cabinet had granted itself “presidential powers to carry out presidential appointments.”
He added: “You are creating a constitutional conflict that is adding to the ongoing political division … The one and only necessity, and the key to solving all your problems, is to elect a president.
“If you don’t do it, you are committing the crime of treason against the state and the people, knowing that treason is the mother of all crimes.”
In remarks directed at MPs, Al-Rahi said: “You have two respectful Maronite candidates. So go to the parliament and elect one of them in conformity with the constitution. If none of the two were elected … you can then discuss with each other and find a third candidate.”
He urged MPs to “stop wasting time while the institutions are collapsing one by one pending outside inspiration.”
Parliament has already held 12 sessions that failed to elect a new president amid the political rift between Hezbollah’s bloc — the majority of which is represented by the Shiite MPs — and the opposition, which includes MPs from the Christian bloc, reformists and independents.
During the last electoral session held in June, the competition was between Hezbollah’s candidate Sleiman Frangieh — head of the Marada Movement — and former Minister Jihad Azour, the opposition’s candidate.
DUBAI: The UAE took part in the 2023 edition of Tan Tan Moussem in southwest Morocco, an annual festival of nomadic peoples of the Sahara that gathers a number of tribes from around the country, Emirates News Agency reported.
The festival includes a range of cultural mediums such as musical performances, popular chanting, games and poetry contests.
A pavilion organized by the Abu Dhabi Cultural Programmes and Heritage Festivals Committee will represent the UAE during the six-day festival.
UAE Ambassador to Morocco Al-Asri Saeed Ahmed Al-Dhaheri told WAM that the pavillion promotes cultural bonds between the two countries.
The ambassador said that UAE-Morocco ties are longstanding, growing, and backed by the countries’ leaderships and their desire to continue boosting cooperation in all fields.
He also noted that the UAE’s ongoing interest in participating in the annual festival stems from its pride in its national identity and the richness of the desert culture which expresses folklore in numerous forms.
AMMAN: Jordanian Senate President Faisal Fayez met Algerian Ambassador to Jordan Abdulkarim Behha on Sunday to discuss cooperation in the parliamentary and economic fields, Jordan News Agency reported.
Fayez stressed the importance of Jordanian-Algerian relations and encouraged the removal of any barriers to bilateral investment and trade.
Behha conveyed his country’s pride in the advanced stage of Algerian-Jordanian relations. He emphasized the importance of strengthening and deepening ties in order to benefit both countries and their peoples.
CAIRO/AMMAN: The US Central Command said on Sunday it conducted a drone strike on July 7 that killed a Daesh leader in Eastern Syria.
It used the same MQ-9 drones in the attack that had “earlier in the day been harassed by Russian aircraft in an encounter that had lasted almost two hours,” it said in a statement.
“US Central Command conducted a strike in Syria that resulted in the death of Usamah Al-MuHajjir, an ISIS leader in eastern Syria,” it said without giving any more details on Al-MuHajjir.
Washington has in the last year stepped up raids and operations against suspected Daesh operatives in Syria, killing and arresting various of its leaders who had taken shelter in areas under Turkiye-backed rebel control after the group lost its last territory in Syria in 2019.
The US-led campaign which killed former Daesh head Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who had declared himself the “caliph of all Muslims,” has since targeted its surviving leaders, many of whom are thought to have planned attacks abroad.
US military commanders say Daesh remains a significant threat within the region, however, though its capabilities have been degraded and its ability to re-establish its network weakened.
The extremist organization controlled one-third of Iraq and Syria at its peak in 2014. Though it was beaten back in both countries, its militants continue to wage insurgent attacks.