Gaza truce plan doubts
DOUBTS were growing yesterday about a plan for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal outlined by US President Joe Biden as heavy fighting raged for a third day since his White House address.
Biden on Friday presented what he labelled an Israeli three-phase plan that would end the bloody conflict, free all hostages and lead to the reconstruction of the devastated Palestinian territory without Hamas in power.
However, Netanyahu’s office stressed on Saturday that Israel would push on with the war sparked by the October 7 attack by Palestinian militants on southern Israel until all of its “goals are achieved”, including the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.
Israeli media have questioned to what extent Biden’s speech and some crucial details were co-ordinated with Netanyahu’s team, including how long any truce would hold and how many captives would be freed when.
Mediators the US, Qatar and Egypt later said they called “on both Hamas and Israel to finalise the agreement embodying the principles outlined by President Joe Biden”.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Sunday that “we have every expectation that if Hamas agrees to the proposal ... that Israel would say yes”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken commended Israel on the plan in a phone call with war cabinet member Benny Gantz and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the State Department said. But for now, the bombardments and combat showed no sign of easing in the Gaza war soon entering its ninth month that has devastated the Palestinian territory of 2.4 million people.
Yesterday the Israeli military said that over the past day its forces had struck “over 50 targets in the Gaza Strip”. Gaza hospitals yesterday reported at least 19 people killed in overnight strikes.
Heavy fighting has raged especially in Gaza’s far-southern Rafah area near the Egyptian border, where most civilians have now been displaced once more, according to UN agencies.
NIGERIA’S main labour unions yesterday shut down the national grid and disrupted airline operations across the country as they began an indefinite strike over the government’s failure to agree on a new minimum wage.
This strike is the fourth embarked upon by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), two of the country’s biggest unions, since President Bola Tinubu took office last year.
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) said union members
Air strikes and artillery shelling were reported in Rafah, mainly in the Tal al-sultan area, as well as in Gaza City, witnesses said. Gaza’s European hospital said 10 people were killed and several wounded in an Israeli air strike on a house near the main southern city of Khan Yunis. And six people were reported killed in a strike on a family home in the central Bureij refugee camp.
About 55% of all structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, damaged or possibly damaged since war erupted in the Palestinian territory eight months ago, according to preliminary satellite analysis by the UN.
The analysis showed more than 137 000 buildings affected, UNOSAT, the UN satellite analysis agency, said.
Netanyahu – a hawkish veteran leading a fragile coalition government often described as the most right-wing in Israel’s history – is under intense domestic pressure from two sides.
Relatives and supporters of hostages have staged mass protests demanding that he strike a truce deal, but the premier’s far-right coalition allies are threatening to bring down the government if he does.
According to Biden, Israel’s threestage offer would begin with a six-week drove away operators at the country’s power control rooms and shut down at least six substations, which eventually shut the national grid.
Nigerian airline Ibom Air said it was suspending flights until further notice due to the strike, while another, United Nigeria, said airports across the country have been shut down and that striking workers had permitted none of its flights to operate.
Electricity and aviation unions said yesterday that they had directed their workers to withdraw their services in phase that would see Israeli forces withdraw from all populated areas of Gaza and an initial hostage-prisoner exchange. Both sides would then negotiate for a lasting ceasefire, with the truce to continue as long as talks are ongoing, Biden said, adding it was “time for this war to end”.
Netanyahu took issue with Biden’s presentation, insisting that according to the “exact outline proposed by Israel” the transition from one stage to the next was “conditional” and crafted to allow it to maintain its war aims.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, leaders of extreme-right parties, warned they would leave the government if it endorsed the truce proposal. But opposition leader Yair Lapid, a centrist former premier, said the government “cannot ignore Biden’s important speech” and vowed to back Netanyahu if his far-right coalition partners quit.
Gallant, who has criticised Netanyahu over the lack of a post-war plan for Gaza, said Israel was “assessing a governing alternative” to Hamas to rule the territory after the war ends.
UN and other aid agencies have warned for months of the looming risk of famine in the besieged territory. compliance with the indefinite strike.
Since taking office Tinubu has embarked on Nigeria’s boldest reforms, which has fuelled a rise in inflation to an almost 30-year high and worsened a cost-of-living crisis in Africa’s most populous nation. He has been under pressure from unions to offer relief to households and small businesses after scrapping subsidies on petrol, which kept fuel cheap but cost the government $10 billion last year.
Unions declared an indefinite strike on Friday after talks for a new minimum
Israel’s seizure last month of the Rafah crossing has further slowed sporadic aid deliveries for Gaza’s people and effectively closed its main exit point on the Egyptian border.
Cairo refuses to co-ordinate with Israel humanitarian deliveries through Rafah, but has agreed to send some aid via Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing.
Meanwhile, Lebanese official media said Israeli strikes on a car and a motorcycle in the country’s south killed two people yesterday, with cross-border clashes intensifying in recent days. The Iran-backed Hezbollah group, a Hamas ally, has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israel since the Palestinian militant group’s October 7 attack.
Israel has previously targeted Hezbollah fighters as well as allied Palestinian and Lebanese militants in cars and on motorcycles.
The violence came as Iran’s acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, was visiting Lebanon, where he was expected to meet Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Iran supports a number of armed groups in the region including the Shia Muslim movement Hezbollah and Palestinian factions including Hamas.
On Sunday, Hezbollah said its fighters had bombarded two army positions in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights after deadly Israeli strikes on south Lebanon killed two shepherds.
Meanwhile, displaced Gazans had to use empty plastic bottles yesterday to try to remove sewage from their tents after a pipeline burst in the main southern city of Khan Yunis.
Residents removed sodden carpets from their tents as they began the long process of getting rid of the dirty water, while children waded through a river of sewage that cut through a main road. The spill has made it almost impossible to live in the city, where piles of debris and massive concrete slabs from bombed-out buildings line the streets, residents said.
Khan Yunis has become a hub for displaced people, many of whom have been forced to flee many times during the conflict. About 1.7 million people are now sheltering in Khan Yunis and in central areas of the Gaza Strip, the UN said. wage meant to cushion the impact of reforms collapsed. They said the strike would last until a new minimum wage was in place.
The TCN said it was making effort to recover and stabilise the national grid, but unions were obstructing grid recovery nationwide.
Unions also demanded a reversal of an electricity tariff hike effected last month for better-off consumers who use the most power, as the government tries to wean the economy off subsidies.
AMANDA Knox said yesterday that she would be back in court in Italy this week for a slander case linked to her conviction and later acquittal for the murder of her British roommate.
Knox, from Seattle, was 20 when she was arrested alongside her then Italian boyfriend and a Congolese bar owner over the brutal killing of 21-year-old exchange student Meredith Kercher in their shared apartment in Perugia.
Knox, now 36, spent four years in an Italian prison for the murder before being freed on appeal, convicted again and then finally exonerated in 2015.
In 2011, she was sentenced to three years already served for falsely implicating bar owner Patrick Lumumba in the murder. But Italy’s highest court quashed the slander conviction last October and ordered a new trial in Florence – with the next hearing and potentially the verdict due tomorrow.
“On June 5, I will walk into the very same courtroom where I was reconvicted of a crime I didn’t commit, this time to defend myself yet again,” Knox wrote on X, referring to the second time she was found guilty of murder. “I hope to clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck!”
Knox had pointed the finger at Lumumba during police questioning in which she claimed she was yelled at, slapped and threatened.
Her claims prompted a separate charge in Italy of slandering police, of which she was cleared in 2016.
Then in 2019, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Knox had not been provided with adequate legal representation or a professional interpreter during her interrogation. It said her treatment “compromised the fairness of the proceedings as a whole”.
Last October’s court decision cited the European ruling when it ordered a retrial.
Kercher had been found half-naked and stabbed 47 times. Police also found signs of sexual assault. Lumumba, the bar owner, spent more than a week in jail after being implicated by Knox, before being cleared of any involvement in the crime.
An Ivorian drifter, Rudy Guede, who was linked to the murder scene by DNA evidence, was sentenced in 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault, his sentence later cut to 16 years. He was released early in November 2021. The case attracted global media interest, with Knox at the centre. She was initially sentenced in 2009 to 26 years in jail, but was freed on appeal in 2011, when she returned to the US. She was convicted again in her absence in 2014.
Finally in 2015, Italy’s top court quashed her conviction and that of her Italian former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Knox returned to Italy five years ago to appear on a discussion panel entitled “Trial by Media” in the northern city of Modena.