Deputy Prime Minister Sigrid Kaag will be stepping down from her role in national politics. Kaag will take a new role with the United Nations as the Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, she announced on X. She informed King Willem-Alexander of her request to step down as both deputy prime minister and the minister of finance. "The King granted this resignation, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, in the most honorable manner, while expressing gratitude for the many and important services rendered by the Minister to him and the Kingdom," said the government communications service RVD. Kaag's resignation will take effect from January 8, 2024. "Last summer, I already announced my departure from Dutch politics. This moment is coming sooner than anticipated," she said in a statement. "Peace, security, and justice have always been my driving forces," she said. "I have accepted this special assignment in the hopes of contributing to a better future." She said she was honored to be asked to take her new role by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. The job was created by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2720. Kaag said her time on the third and fourth Cabinets of Mark Rutte have been both "special and challenging," and highlighted several points of pride. "It is good to mention that in a relatively short Cabinet period, much has been done in the field of climate, support for Ukraine, the strengthening of the European and international role of the Netherlands, purchasing power in addition to a renewed commitment to stable public finances and the reform of the European budget rules." She also noted the government's apology for the country's past ties to slavery. Kaag also thanked her Ministry of Finance staff.
In the Netherlands, Kaag's tasks as minister of finance will be handled by Rob Jetten, the current minister for climate and energy. Both Kaag and Jetten are members of political party D66. A new finance minister will be sought to serve on the current caretaker Cabinet.
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The Israeli military has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’ underground tunnel network beneath Gaza, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Israeli officials have refused to comment on the alleged operation, which could endanger the lives of more than 100 hostages and contaminate the strip’s water supply.
Israeli forces began experimenting with flooding the tunnels after transporting powerful pumps into Gaza last month, the newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing US officials. Fully flooding the hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers beneath Gaza is expected to take several weeks, the report claimed. A spokesperson for Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant refused to comment, stating that any military operations involving the tunnels are classified. However, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said last week that flooding the subterranean network was “a good idea, but I won’t comment on its specifics.” . The Israeli military has begun pumping seawater into Hamas’ underground tunnel network beneath Gaza, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Israeli officials have refused to comment on the alleged operation, which could endanger the lives of more than 100 hostages and contaminate the strip’s water supply. Israeli forces began experimenting with flooding the tunnels after transporting powerful pumps into Gaza last month, the newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing US officials. Fully flooding the hundreds of miles of tunnels and bunkers beneath Gaza is expected to take several weeks, the report claimed. A spokesperson for Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant refused to comment, stating that any military operations involving the tunnels are classified. However, Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi said last week that flooding the subterranean network was “a good idea, but I won’t comment on its specifics.” From Israel’s perspective, filling the tunnels with water is preferable to sending troops beneath the ground to face armed militants and booby traps. While Israeli forces control much of Gaza City in the north of the strip and some of Khan Younis in the south, “the problem is Hamas is going underground,” former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told the Wall Street Journal. Even in the areas that Israel has taken, “the subterranean [theater] continues to be the challenge,” retired Israeli colonel Miri Eisin told the newspaper. Israeli forces and Hamas fighters engaged in heavy fighting Monday in and around Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, while battles were ongoing in Gaza City in the north. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said aid distribution in Gaza has largely stopped, except in the Rafah area near the Egyptian border, with the intense fighting and restrictions on access to main roads inhibiting humanitarian operations. The fighting has pushed an estimated 1.9 million people from their homes in Gaza, with many seeking shelter in the south in overcrowded facilities amid warnings of poor sanitary conditions and the threat of an increase in communicable diseases. UNOCHA said tens of thousands of people have arrived in Rafah during the past week. During that same time, Israel has expanded its war against Hamas militants further south, including its operations in Khan Younis, the second-largest city in Gaza. The United States said Sunday that the Israeli military is failing in its announced intention to protect as many Palestinian civilians as possible. “It’s imperative that civilians be protected,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. He said Israel had fallen short in protecting Palestinian civilians as it continues its offensive against Hamas militants. The top U.S. diplomat said, “What we’re not seeing are deconfliction times so [more humanitarian] aid can be brought in” to Gaza and “clarity of demarcation” lines for areas where Israel will not attack so civilians can find safe refuge. The U.N. General Assembly will hold an emergency meeting Tuesday to vote on a draft resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.N., told The Associated Press that it's similar to a Security Council resolution the U.S. vetoed Friday. Israel has vowed to eradicate Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, after Hamas militants invaded southern Israel in a surprise terror attack on Oct. 7 and killed about 1,200 people and captured about 240 hostages. Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is still holding about 140 people. The Hamas-run health ministry says that nearly 18,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in the Israeli air and ground offensive in the last seven weeks. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Sunday described the health situation in Gaza as “catastrophic," adding it will be almost impossible to improve. The 34-member WHO board passed an emergency motion by consensus to secure more medical access in the enclave. "I must be frank with you: these tasks are almost impossible in the current circumstances," Tedros said. Still, he commended countries for finding common ground, saying it was the first time any U.N. motion had been agreed on by consensus since the conflict began. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian politician who heads the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees with 25 teams working in Gaza, said, "Half of Gaza is now starving." He said 350,000 people had infections, including 115,000 with severe respiratory infections. They also are lacking warm clothes, blankets and protection from the rain, he said.
The US has cast the lone dissenting vote against a proposed UN Security Council resolution that would have demanded a humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, amid rising civilian casualties in Gaza.
Thirteen member states voted in favor of the resolution, which was put forward by the United Arab Emirates on Friday in New York. The UK abstained, leaving Washington diplomatically isolated in blocking the measure. “What is the message we are sending Palestinians if we cannot unite behind a call to halt the relentless bombardment of Gaza?” Deputy UAE UN Ambassador Mohamed Abushahab asked members of the council. “Indeed, what is the message we are sending civilians across the world who may find themselves in similar situations?” The US has cast the lone dissenting vote against a proposed UN Security Council resolution that would have demanded a humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war, amid rising civilian casualties in Gaza. Friday’s vote came after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99, a rarely used provision in the UN charter, to warn the Security Council of an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. He said that with the war raging on for two months and counting, the humanitarian support net in Gaza faces a “severe risk of collapse.” More than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed and 1.9 million people have been displaced since the war began in October. Hamas triggered the war by launching surprise attacks against villages in southern Israel on October 7, killing an estimated 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages back to Gaza. US officials have opposed a general ceasefire because it would only help Hamas retain its grip on power in Gaza. A week-long ceasefire late last month enabled the release of 110 Hamas hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinians who had been incarcerated in Israeli jails. It also bought time for aid workers to bring more humanitarian supplies into the besieged Palestinian enclave. The US mission to the UN said in a statement that it opposed the ceasefire resolution because the “rushed” proposal was “divorced from reality” and would “only plant the seeds for the next war.” Washington’s suggestions for revising the resolution were largely ignored, deputy US UN Ambassador Robert Wood said. Among other concerns, he added, the document failed to include language condemning the Hamas attacks. A man hiding in a pit during the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on an outdoor music festival in Israel said he heard someone nearby screaming she was being raped. Elsewhere in the area, a combat paramedic saw the body of a young woman with her legs open, her pants pulled down, and what looked like semen on her lower back. An army reservist who was tasked with identifying those killed by the militants said some of the women were found wearing only bloodied underwear.
Such accounts given to The Associated Press, along with first assessments by an Israeli rights group, show that sexual assault was part of an atrocities-filled rampage by Hamas and other Gaza militants who killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took more than 240 hostages that day.While investigators are still trying to determine the scope of the sexual assaults, Israel's government is accusing the international community, particularly the United Nations, of ignoring the pain of Israeli victims. "I say to the women's rights organizations, to the human rights organizations, you've heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities … where the hell are you?" Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a news conference Tuesday, switching to English to emphasize the point.U.S. President Joe Biden called the reports "appalling" and urged the world to condemn "horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty." Two months after the Hamas attacks on the music festival, farming communities and army posts in southern Israel, police are still struggling to put together the pieces. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, priority was given to identifying bodies, not to preserving evidence. Police say they're combing through 60,000 videos seized from the body cameras of Hamas attackers, from social media and from security cameras as well as 1,000 testimonies to bring the perpetrators to justice. It has been difficult finding rape survivors, with many victims killed by their attackers. The group Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, which has a record of advocating for Palestinian civilians in Gaza suffering under Israel's longtime blockade of the territory, published an initial assessment in November. "What we know for sure is that it was more than just one case and it was widespread, in that this happened in more than one location and more than a handful of times," Hadas Ziv, policy and ethics director for the organization, said Tuesday. "What we don't know and what the police are investigating is whether it was ordered to be done and whether it was systematic." Hamas has rejected allegations that its gunmen committed sexual assault. Israel has readied plans to flood Hamas’s system of tunnels under the Gaza Strip with water pumped from the Mediterranean Sea, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Citing US officials, the report says the Israel Defense Forces last month set up five large water pumps near the al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, which are capable of flooding the subterranean network within weeks by pumping thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels. The officials say Israel alerted the US about the plan last month, but has not yet decided on whether to implement it. According to the report, opinions in Biden administration were mixed, with some officials expressing concern about the Israeli plan while others say they back Israel’s efforts to destroy the tunnels and say there isn’t necessarily any American opposition. Among the concerns cited in the report were potential damage to Gaza’s aquifer and soil, if seawater and hazardous substances in the tunnels seeps into them. “We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” a person familiar with the plan is quoted as saying. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.” A decades-old letter of former Al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden is going viral on TikTok after some users posted it on the video sharing platform and re-shared it on X (formerly Twitter). TikTok has removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica (with over 2 million views) from its search after bin Laden's 2002 'Letter to America' sparked a debate about US support to Israel in its current conflict with Hamas, reported NBC News.
Some social media users suggested that the Al Qaeda founder's document gives an alternative perspective about the US' involvement in conflicts in the Middle East - something that has been criticised by the White House. The issue gained prominence after users started sharing link to The Guardian's transcript of the letter, which was written a year after the September 11, 2001 attacks in which more than 3,000 people were killed. The Guardian removed the 21-year-old letter from its website. In the letter, bin Laden addressed the American people and sought to answer the following questions: "Why are we fighting and opposing you?" and "What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?" The letter includes anti-semitic language, as per NBC News. The letter sparked a debate on social media about the validity and morality of bin Laden's letter, with some expressing sympathy while others condemning or mocking it. People discussing the letter said it caused them to re-evaluate their beliefs around US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also said they are not praising or defending bin Laden's orchestration of the 9/11 attacks. TikTok's critics argued that it was evidence that the app, owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, had been secretly boosting propaganda to a captive audience of American youth. Bin Laden's letter also criticised US support for Israel and accuses the US of aiding the oppression of Palestinian people. The former Al Qaida chief also criticised US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Chechnya and Lebanon, as per The Washington Post. Bin Laden, who was killed in a US special operation in Pakistan in 2011. The White House has criticised the sharing of the message, saying "no one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden". Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is among the politicians who have slammed the letter, calling for social media reform. "When you look at social media, I have long said that we have to ban TikTok. And if you didn't know why, there's another example today," Ms Haley, a 2024 GOP presidential primary candidate, told Fox News. TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said that videos featuring bin Laden's letter violate the platform's guidelines. Post a comment "Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media," he said Israel has launched a "targeted operation" in Gaza's biggest hospital it accuses Hamas of using as a command centre. The hospital is sheltering thousands of sick, displaced Gazans, and the move could intensify international criticism of Israel.
Here are 10 facts on the Israel-Hamas war:
The journalistic cliché that World War III is already underway has often circulated from one publication or another for decades. Indeed, since the beginning of the 21st century, when the US was attacked on 11 September 2001, people have been talking about a clash of civilizations as a new form of global conflict. Then, Washington's declared "war on terror" got bogged down in the Middle East before disappearing from the agenda altogether. Instead, the "good old" rivalry between the major countries was gradually revived, first in the political, propaganda and economic spheres, but with an increasingly pronounced military and force element. This was accompanied by warnings of the risk of a World War III in the classic sense of the last century. Such considerations, however, remained notional. Today, the idea of a "World War III " is fathomable. Nevertheless, a similar situation to World Wars I and II seems inadmissible at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, although some commentators see similar features in the armed conflict in Ukraine. Structurally, however, the state of affairs is very different. The presence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the world's major players and a very complex range of significant and diverse players in international politics rule out (and make highly unlikely) a head-on collision between the major powers or their blocs, as was the case in the last century. However, the changes taking place on the world stage and in the balance of power are so serious that they are "worthy" of a confrontation on the scale of a world war. In the past, such shifts have led to major military clashes. However, now the "world war" that some repeatedly talk about is a chain of large but localized confrontations, each of which in one way or another involves the main players, balances on the verge of spilling over from the original zone, and is indirectly linked to other hotbeds of instability. This sequence of military events began with the Middle East conflicts of the last decade (Yemen and Syria), continued in Ukraine since 2014, then the South Caucasus and now Palestine. It is clearly too early to put an end to this list. End of status quo means world entering long period of turmoilInternational colleagues have already pointed out that in the context of the disappearance of former frameworks and constraints (the very decline of the world order, which now seems to be universally recognized), dormant conflicts and disputes are almost inevitably resurfacing. What has been held back by the pre-existing arrangements is erupting. In principle, everything is quite traditional; it was so before and it will be so after. The ideologization of world politics in the twentieth century meant that the end of that political period was very ideological in itself. The view that humanity has found the optimal political model, which will turn the page on previous confrontations, has triumphed. This is the only way to explain, for example, the belief that the contours of state borders will not change in the 21st century (or only by mutual agreement), because it has been decided and established that way. The historical experience of Europe and other continents in every historical period does not support such an assumption – borders have always changed fundamentally. And shifts in the balance of power and opportunity inevitably give rise to the desire to move territorial boundaries.
Another thing is that the importance of territories is different now than it was in the past. Direct control of certain spaces can now have more costs than benefits, while indirect influence is much more effective. Although it is worth noting that 15-20 years ago, at the height of economic and political globalization, it was often argued that in a fully interconnected 'flat' world, geographical and material proximity no longer mattered. The pandemic was the first and most vivid argument against this approach. The current chain of crises has forced a return to more classical ideas about the role of subordination between the regional and the global. The disappearance of the status quo means that the world has entered a long period of turmoil in which new frameworks have not yet been established (and it is not clear when they will be) and the old ones are no longer working. The formal end of the era of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (Russia has withdrawn from it, the other countries have announced the suspension of their participation) is an example of the dismantling of existing institutions. The unprecedented intensity of the wave of assaults on the UN from all sides is an attack on the main bastion of world order established after 1945. The current "World War III" is likely to endure over a long timeframe and be scattered in terms of locations. But based on its results – and there will be some – a different structure of international organizations will emerge. This is always the case. This does not mean that the UN, for example, will disappear, but there will definitely be a profound correction of the principles on which it operates. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country does not intend to take control of Gaza after the current war with Hamas, but would seek to establish a “credible force” to ensure that the territory no longer presents a threat to the Jewish state.
Speaking to Fox News on Thursday, Netanyahu outlined his government’s plans for post-conflict Gaza, stressing that Israeli forces would not attempt to “displace” local residents in the ongoing ground assault. “What we have to see is Gaza demilitarized, deradicalized and rebuilt. All of that can be achieved,” he said, adding “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza. We don’t seek to occupy Gaza. And we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” However, the prime minister went on to state that Israel would need to establish a “credible force” that could “enter Gaza and kill the killers” at any time, arguing “That’s what will prevent the emergence of another Hamas-like entity.” The interview with Fox came just days after Netanyahu declared that Israel would manage “overall security” in Gaza for an “indefinite period” after the present conflict, appearing to contradict past statements from other senior officials. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant previously said Israeli forces would establish a “new security reality” in the area, but emphasized that the IDF would not be responsible for “day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip.” While Netanyahu clarified that a new “civilian government” would be created for Gazans, he did not specify the role of the IDF in that process or how such a task would be accomplished. Washington has vocally supported Israel’s military action to eliminate Hamas following last month's deadly attack, but US officials have urged their partners not to pursue the “reoccupation” of Gaza. However, when asked who might govern the Palestinian enclave once fighting dies down, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the White House does not “have all the answers to that,” merely insisting it could not be Hamas. Israel first occupied Gaza during the 1967 Six-Day War with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and only withdrew its troops and settlers nearly 40 years later. However, the rise to power of Hamas in the enclave in 2007 prompted a tight blockade over the territory, and the IDF has launched multiple bombing campaigns in the years since. |
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