Hundreds of Jewish settlers are engaged in violence against Palestinians and Israeli soldiers who get in their way, Israel’s top general in the occupied West Bank said in remarks published yesterday.
“In the past, only a few dozen individuals took part in such activity but today that number has grown into the hundreds. That’s a very significant change,” Israeli Major-General Gadi Shamni said in an interview with Haaretz newspaper.
“These hundreds are engaged in conspiratorial actions against Palestinians and the security forces. It’s a very grave phenomenon,” he said, accusing settler leaders and rabbis, whom he did not name, of encouraging vigilante violence.
Shamni’s comments echoed the findings of a recent UN report that recorded 222 incidents of settler violence in the West Bank in the first half of this compared with 291 in all of last year.
“The majority of people here act normally. We’re talking about a hard core of a few hundred activists among some 300,000 Jews who live beyond the Green Line,” Shamni said, referring to the frontier between Israel and the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israeli police say detectives were questioning Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for the eighth time over allegations that he accepted cash from a Jewish-American businessman and claimed false travel expenses before he became premier in 2006.
Olmert denies wrongdoing.
Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said officers arrived at Olmert’s official Jerusalem residence at 10am yesterday and were scheduled to question him for about two hours.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
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