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LONDON: Britain, Australia and Canada have called on Israel’s government to reverse a decision to approve new settlement units in the West Bank, saying they are “deeply concerned” by an ongoing cycle of violence.
This week, Israel approved over 5,700 new settlement units in the West Bank and earlier this month instituted changes to the settlement approval process which facilitate swifter approval of construction.
“The continued expansion of settlements is an obstacle to peace and negatively impacts efforts to achieve a negotiated two-state solution. We call on the Government of Israel to reverse these decisions,” the foreign ministers of Britain, Australia and Canada said in a joint statement.
Violence has been surging in the West Bank, including deadly clashes in Jenin, a fatal shooting by Palestinians near a Jewish settlement, attacks on Palestinian villages by rampaging settlers, and rare use of Israeli air power against militants.
JERUSALEM: Iran’s state-run Nour News said on Friday Israel’s report that it had foiled an attack in Cyprus by capturing an Iranian agent was an effort to cover up its own domestic crisis.
Israel said on Thursday its Mossad intelligence service carried out an operation in Iran to capture the suspected leader of an Iranian plot to attack Israeli businesspeople in Cyprus.
“The Zionist regime, which is (facing a) deterioration of its domestic situation, has narrated a failed operation from a year ago in Iran where all its agents were arrested in an upside-down manner,” said Nour News which is close to Iran’s top national security body.
Mossad announced on Thursday that its agents inside Iran seized the head of an alleged Iranian hit squad that planned to kill Israeli businesspeople in Cyprus.
Israel considers Iran its greatest enemy, citing Tehran’s calls for Israel’s destruction and support for hostile groups. It also accuses Iran of trying to develop a nuclear bomb — a claim that Iran denies.
The Mossad, which rarely speaks to the media, said the man had given investigators a detailed “confession.” It said the information was relayed to authorities in Cyprus, where security services dismantled the cell.
“We will reach whoever foments terrorism against Jews and Israelis around the world, including on Iranian soil,” said the Mossad statement, quoting an unnamed senior agency official.
Israel routinely strikes Iranian targets in neighboring Syria and is believed to be behind a string of attacks on Iranian nuclear experts and facilities inside Iran over the years. Five years ago, Israel unveiled a vast collection of documents about Iran’s nuclear program that it said the Mossad had stolen from a warehouse in Iran.
On Thursday, Israel released footage of a man it identified as the head of the Iranian cell, Yusef Shahabazi Abbasalilu, saying on camera that he received his orders from Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps.
He further said he scoped out the target and took photos of the target’s home in Cyprus but fled the Mediterranean island nation and returned to Iran after being alerted that police were looking for him.
It was not clear if the man spoke under duress.
“In the wake of the information that he gave to investigators, the cell was dismantled in an operation by the Cypriot security services,” the Mossad statement said.
Cypriot authorities would not comment when repeatedly queried by The Associated Press, saying only that “they don’t discuss matters of national security.”
Israel has long claimed that Iran is plotting to attack Israeli targets around the world and urged citizens to be careful when traveling abroad.
An Azeri man is on trial in Cyprus, a close Israeli ally, on suspicion that he planned to carry out the contract killings of Israelis living in Cyprus.
AMMAN: The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has held its fifth student parliament workshop in Amman, exploring topics such as human rights, democratic practices, leadership, communications, and advocacy.
The four-day event was attended by students from all of UNRWA’s operational areas, including the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It allowed them to get to know each other, exchange experiences, and discuss future work plans.
Dr. Julia Dicum, UNRWA’s education director, welcomed participants and commended them for their important role in establishing a culture of human rights, democracy, respect, and tolerance, as well as articulating the students’ interests, successes, and concerns.
Leen Sharqawi, a student parliamentarian at UNRWA, spoke about her intervention at the organization’s pledging conference earlier in the month in New York.
Jessica Pfleiderer, program officer at the US Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, addressed participants online, expressing the bureau’s delight at the students’ successes.
The students spoke about life skills and well-being activities and agreed on action plans to guide the schedule over the coming year.
Leni Stenseth, UNRWA’s deputy commissioner-general, encouraged the students to campaign, represent others, and promote change.
She said: “Thank you for taking the role to represent your fellow students, improve your leadership skills and help the community. UNRWA is proud of you.”
UNRWA began implementing student parliaments in its schools in 2001 as part of its human rights education program. School parliaments serve an important role in schools and in the community by promoting a culture of respect and tolerance.
The Human Rights, Conflict Resolution, and Tolerance program in UNRWA schools is a gift of the US government.
QAMISHLI: The world breathed a collective sigh of relief in March 2019 when Daesh, the extremist group that had brought terror to vast swathes of the region since 2014, was finally defeated in its last territorial holdout of Baghouz, eastern Syria.
The battle for Daesh’s final enclave marked the end of the group’s so-called caliphate, which at its peak occupied an area spanning Syria and Iraq the size of Great Britain.
However, it was soon clear to those who had led the costly ground operation against Daesh — the Syrian Democratic Forces — that the fight was far from over.
Thousands of foreign Daesh fighters and their families were captured during the final battle at Baghouz and transported to prisons in territories administered by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, beyond Syrian government control.
For years, these Daesh fighters remained in a state of legal limbo. Their foreign status, and the fact the AANES is itself considered a non-state actor, made it difficult to determine precisely what to do with them.
On June 10, AANES officials announced they would pursue their own legal avenues of justice by establishing a tribunal to try up to 3,000 foreign Daesh-linked individuals held in their custody before a court of law.
“As a result of the increasing danger and growth of (Daesh) in the region, the presence of these detainees for long periods without trial constitutes a burden and a danger to the region and the world,” Khaled Ibrahim, a lawyer and member of the administrative body of the AANES Foreign Relations Department, told Arab News.
For years, the official policy of the AANES was to pursue the repatriation of Daesh-linked individuals to their countries of origin. However, several of these countries have been reluctant to take back their citizens, citing national security concerns.
In fact, the number of repatriations is falling. Last year, 13 countries repatriated 515 foreign nationals from northeast Syria. In the first six months of 2023, about 105 women and children have been repatriated.
According to the Rojava Information Center, a local conflict monitor, some 2,774 foreign Daesh suspects have been repatriated since 2019 — a drop in the ocean given the roughly 13,000 foreign men, women and children still in northeast Syria’s prisons and camps.
Despite years of warnings from the AANES about the Daesh threat, the terrorist group demonstrated just how great a threat it still poses by staging a massive uprising in Gweiran prison in northeast Syria’s Hasakah.
In January 2022, a series of car bombs were detonated at the prison gates while Daesh sleepers outside the prison walls opened fire on guards.
After more than a week of the heaviest fighting the city had seen since its liberation from Daesh in 2015, some 159 members of the SDF, four civilians, and at least 345 prisoners had been killed. Scores of inmates escaped.
“In our prisons, we are holding thousands of the most brutal Daesh fighters. We cannot keep them anymore. It creates a security problem for our region,” Bedran Chiya Kurd, co-chair of the AANES Foreign Relations Department, told a press conference on June 15.
In 2022 alone, Kurd said the SDF and the Global Coalition had carried out 113 anti-terror operations, which resulted in the arrest of 260 Daesh-linked individuals in northeast Syria.
According to the SDF media center, in May this year, the SDF carried out 12 unilateral anti-Daesh operations, four operations in partnership with the Global Coalition and Iraqi Kurdistan-based Counter-Terrorism Group, which resulted in the death of one suspected terrorist and the capture of 21.
“This is evidence that Daesh is trying to revive itself, grow stronger and resume its activities. If we don’t prevent it, it will only be a matter of time before they become active again and threaten the entire region,” Kurd said.
The planned tribunals are not merely designed to punish Daesh combatants, nor to reduce their chances of escaping and rejoining the battlefield.
“It’s important for the rights of victims, for the rights of our people who suffered, and for the rights of those who paid a heavy price,” Kurd said.
“We gave more than 13,000 martyrs in this fight, and have thousands of veterans who were injured and disabled. It’s important to seek justice for these people.”
However, Kurd added, the pursuit of justice would not interfere with the desire of the AANES to adhere to international standards.
“It’s been almost five years that these people have been held in detention. Holding people without trial is not legal and does not comply with international standards,” he said.
Although the trials would be “very transparent and fair,” Kurd said many of the details were still yet to be determined. There is no set date for the process to begin and, due to security concerns, the location of the trials will not be published.
Although lawyers representing the detainees will be allowed to travel to northeast Syria to defend their clients, the logistics behind this process are yet to be explained. It was also unclear whether detainees without their own lawyer would be provided one by the AANES.
Furthermore, it is unclear whether foreign women, who did not serve in combat roles, will be tried. Given that women and children make up two-thirds of the foreign Daesh detainees, their exclusion from the process would significantly reduce the number of individuals on trial.
In a statement issued soon after the June 10 announcement, the AANES did not state outright that they would prosecute women, instead considering them “victims.”
However, in the June 15 press conference, Kurd said that some women might be tried if there was sufficient evidence to suggest they had committed crimes.
It was made clear, however, that the death penalty would be off the table, as the punishment is illegal under the AANES Social Contract, which acts as its constitution.
The AANES already has an anti-terror court system, which had tried about 8,000 Syrian nationals, Sipan Ahmed (whose name was changed for security reasons), a prosecutor at the People’s Defense Court of Qamishli, told the Rojava Information Center in a 2021 interview.
While there are currently no details on precisely what punishments are likely to be handed down during the upcoming trials, Ahmed said AANES law 20-2014 set out sentences for particular crimes — 15 to 20 years for rape, 10 to 20 years for human trafficking and 15 years to life for murder.
Punishments for Daesh membership currently range from one year for low-level roles in the group’s activities to life sentences for being among its leadership or handing out execution orders.
The status of both the detainees and the AANES itself, therefore, posed a litany of legal challenges, Themis Tzimas, a lawyer and international law expert, told Arab News.
“The autonomous administration is neither a state, nor internationally recognized. It constitutes a de facto, illegally, semi-seceded part of a sovereign state. It possesses no legal authority justifying the conduct of a trial on its de facto controlled territory and by its authority,” Tzimas said.
However, due to the lack of formal diplomatic relations between the AANES and the Syrian government, Kurd said there was currently no mechanism in place to hand foreign detainees over to Damascus.
And while Tzimas believes an international, ad hoc tribunal could be a solution to the various legal quandaries brought up by such a trial, Kurd said the AANES had not received any offers of assistance from either foreign states or international legal bodies.
Contrary to popular belief, a non-state actor independently trying foreign nationals in this way is not unprecedented in the history of international law. Trials carried out by the unrecognized Russian-backed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are one such example.
Katerina Asimakopoulou, a legal expert with a master’s in public international law, told Arab News that other such cases might give precedent to the AANES courts, and that its unofficial status might not be the roadblock it first appeared.
Asimakopoulou referenced a 2017 case in which a Swedish court convicted a former Syrian rebel fighter for violations of international law after a video surfaced showing him taking part in the execution of Syrian regime soldiers.
The defendant, Omar Haisan Sakhanh, attempted to use the defense that those Syrian soldiers had been tried and sentenced by a court set up by the opposition Free Syrian Army.
While the court eventually convicted Sakhanh, it also accepted that the FSA, a non-state actor, was allowed to establish its own courts.
Other non-state armed groups, including the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador, have all carried out trials under their own court systems, according to Asimakopoulou.
She added that in 2018, the French government declared it had no interest in trying French Daesh members in its own courts, preferring instead that they be tried by the AANES.
“It’s a very ambiguous matter, actually,” she told Arab News. “According to a state-centric view, yes, there is no legal authority for non-state armed groups to establish courts.
“However, international practice and jurisprudence has shown that, once such a court is indeed established, its decisions will be judged depending on whether they provided the so-called fundamental guarantees of a fair trial.”
BEIRUT: Lebanon abstained from voting on a UN resolution to establish an independent institution focused on learning the fate of around 130,000 missing or forcibly disappeared persons during the civil war in Syria.
The resolution was adopted by the UN General Assembly on Thursday evening, with 83 votes in favor out of 193, 11 against and 62 abstentions, including some Arab states.
Many Lebanese condemned their country’s decision as a number of their countrymen and women remain missing, with some presumed to have been detained in Syrian jails, despite the end of the Lebanese Civil War and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005.
Nizar Saghieh, a Lebanese lawyer and human rights activist, told Arab News: “The (Lebanese Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared) following up the file of the missing and disappeared persons is an independent commission, and therefore it can deal with the independent institution that the UN General Assembly decided to establish, in order to reveal the fate of the Lebanese who have disappeared in Syria directly.”
He added: “It is not important now whether Lebanon votes in favor or against the decision, as it became a binding UN resolution.
“The Lebanese state cannot prevent the national commission from communicating with the independent UN institution. The independence of the Lebanese national commission was a requirement, so no one would prohibit it from doing what should be done to follow up the file.”
The Lebanese Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared said it held “caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and the Cabinet, including Foreign Minister Bou Habib, accountable for Lebanon’s abstention from voting in favor of the missing and forcibly detained Lebanese and Syrians in Syrian prisons.”
The commission’s statistics indicate that there are currently 622 missing and forcibly detained Lebanese people, including a number of Lebanese soldiers. The commission demands that their fate be made known and that the remains of the dead be returned to their families.
It also called on the minister of foreign affairs “to resign immediately and apologize to the families of the missing and forcibly disappeared in Bashar Assad’s prisons, and from all the Lebanese prisons.”
The Foreign Ministry said that the decision “was taken after consultations with caretaker Premier Najib Mikati and in accordance with the semi-Arab consensus to refrain from voting, as Lebanon doesn’t want to politicize this case.”
It added: “Lebanon remains committed to resolving this issue, along with the issue of the Syrian refugees, through dialogue and understanding between Lebanon, Syria and the concerned Arab and international parties.”
The ministry reiterated “Lebanon’s respect and adherence to the implementation of all legitimate international resolutions, including numerous resolutions that have not been implemented.”
Families of the missing and disappeared in Lebanon and Syria have been carrying out street protests for decades since the civil war erupted.
Mothers hold pictures of their sons, husbands or brothers and set up tents in front of the UN, demanding to know their fate.
All efforts made by Syria to close the file have failed. The regime does not acknowledge the presence of the missing and disappeared in its prisons.
Former detainee Ali Abou Dehen, head of Lebanese Political Detainees in Syrian Prisons, said the UN resolution is “a political document imposed by great and powerful forces in the UN to pressure Syria.”
Abou Dehen said he was not surprised by the state’s decision, as it “has never inquired about the 622 missing people in Syrian prisons.”
He added: “You have the disappeared and the missing, and then you have hundreds of people who died under torture and were buried in mass graves.”
Ashraf Rifi, the former Lebanese minister of justice, described Beirut’s abstention as “a moral and national setback, a cowardly crime and a way to avoid responsibility.”
He said: “The Syrian regime committed abduction and torture crimes in Lebanon and Syria.”
Parliamentarian Georges Okais said: “As much as we are ashamed of the Lebanese state’s decision to abstain from voting in favor of this resolution, we are very happy that the UN resolution was adopted by the majority of the member states.”
Okais added: “The world will discover the scope of tragedies inflicted by the Syrian regime for decades upon the Syrian and Lebanese peoples. What the Lebanese and I want from the Lebanese National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared is to communicate with the international committee and ask it to include the fate of the Lebanese who have disappeared in Syrian prisons within its jurisdiction.”
Reformist MP Ibrahim Mneimneh said: “We cannot consider the foreign minister’s decision part of the active foreign policy based on national interest, as it constitutes a violation of the constitution introduction and Lebanon’s international obligations, including the UN Convention against Torture.
“This opposes Lebanon’s historical role and places us among countries that support punishment and lawless states. The decision doesn’t take into account Lebanon’s interest, especially the case of Samir Kassab, a Lebanese journalist who disappeared in Syria during the Syrian (Civil War), in addition to the disappeared Lebanese in Syrian prisons, as this commission might contribute to revealing their fate.”
DUBAI: French Foreign Trade Minister Olivier Becht said France and the UAE share a vision of accelerating the transition to green energy to combat the dangers of climate change, Emirates News Agency reported on Friday.
Becht said the two countries are collaborating on low-carbon energy solutions and expressed confidence in the UAE’s ability to host COP28 in November.
The rest of the world also believes in the UAE’s leadership in combating climate change, he added.
“The environmental challenges we face motivate us to be more courageous and committed in our actions to accelerate the energy transition,” Becht said.
“That is why the UAE and France have many joint projects in various fields, including hydrogen and nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, to produce clean energy that is the future of the sector.”
The UAE and France have strong ties, the minister said, adding that he expects to visit the UAE shortly to discuss ways to strengthen and expand economic cooperation between the two countries.