Israeli President Moshe Katsav will take leave of absence after the announcement that he will be indicted on charges of rape and other sex crimes, parliamentary officials said yesterday.
The announcement falls short of meeting growing calls from politicians and the public that Katsav resign from the largely ceremonial post because of the charges, the most serious ever leveled against an Israeli leader.
"Katsav on Wednesday informed the home committee in a letter that he intended to temporarily suspend himself from office," Knesset spokesman Giora Fordis said.
The opposition Meretz party has already launched a petition to impeach the embattled president who, if convicted of rape, faces a maximum 16 years in prison.
Katsav, a married father of five, was due to address the allegations at a press conference in Jerusalem at 7:00pm, his spokeswoman said.
Attorney General Menahem Mazuz intends to indict the 61-year-old on a slew of charges, including raping a female employee when he was tourism minister, sexual harassment, abuse of power, breach of trust and accepting bribes.
"Resign," thundered a banner headline in the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper.
The unprecedented action against an Israeli head of state comes amid a spate of corruption allegations against top-level politicians, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Katsav, the Jewish state's first head of state from a right-wing party, has denied the charges and vowed to fight to clear his name. He has steadfastly refused to step down during the months of investigation against him, saying he was the victim of a witch-hunt.
A final decision on the indictment, largely a formality, will be made after a hearing where Katsav will be allowed to present his case. A date has not yet been set.
But the Israeli media, politicians and the public were nearly unanimous in their opinion that the Iranian-born president should step down.
"I am convinced that resignation is the appropriate thing to do at this time," said Foreign Minister and Acting Justice Minister Tzipi Livni.
"From a legal standpoint, Moshe Katsav the individual is indeed presumed innocent," Livni said in a statement. "However, in this case, given the type of accusations, their severity and the timing of the decision, it is more appropriate for him to conduct his fight [to prove] his innocence from outside the president's residence."
Livni was herself appointed Acting Justice Minister in November, after Haim Ramon suspended himself from the post following charges of sexual harassment.
Katsav is due to be indicted with raping a woman employee at the tourism ministry where he held the top post in the late 1990s. He will face separate charges of sexually harassing three other women staff at the presidential residence in Jerusalem, as well as numerous other charges, including graft, abuse of power, breach of trust and obstructing investigations into his activities.
"He should resign as he has no right to leave us in this situation," said Meretz leader Yossi Beilin. "As a society, we have the right to tell him that he is no longer our president and that his portrait can no longer be hung in schools."
Guidon Saar of Katsav's Likud party said: "The president must resign. Period. If not, the ball will be in Knesset's court, which should fire him."
To impeach the president -- unprecedented in Israel -- 90 lawmakers in the 120-member Knesset have to approve the measure.
A poll published in Yediot showed that a staggering 79 percent of Israelis had little or no confidence in Katsav, who was elected by MPs in 2000 in a shock win over Nobel peace laureate and former premier Shimon Peres.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of