Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Saturday that Israel would not agree to any truce with the Hamas movement without the release of an Israeli soldier seized by Palestinian militants in 2006.
“The position of the prime minister is that Israel won’t reach any arrangement on a truce before the release of Gilad Shalit,” Olmert’s office said.
Egypt has been struggling to mediate a lasting truce between the two sides since a massive three-week war in Gaza was halted by separate ceasefires on Jan. 18 that have since been strained by tit-for-tat exchanges of fire.
PHOTO: AP
One of the conditions demanded by Hamas is that all the crossings into the enclave be opened, bringing an end to the Israeli blockade imposed when the group seized Gaza in 2007.
Hamas has demanded that the release of Shalit — captured by three militant groups in a deadly cross-border raid — be negotiated as part of a separate prisoner exchange involving hundreds of people held in Israeli jails.
“There is no relationship between the two files,” Hamas government spokesman Taher al-Nunu said, referring to the truce and Shalit.
He added that the negotiations would continue as certain issues had not yet been resolved.
Egyptian security chief Omar Suleiman has been leading separate negotiations with Israel and Hamas and has said efforts were under way to draw up a list of Palestinian prisoners that might be released in exchange for Shalit.
While Hamas has demanded an end to the blockade, Israel has insisted that will happen only when Hamas releases Shalit.
Earlier on Saturday, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum accused Israel of “backtracking” on the talks by demanding an open-ended agreement and stepping up attacks on the Gaza enclave.
“[Israel] has demanded a long-term, open-ended truce and not an 18-month truce as had been [previously] established,” he said.
The two sides have struggled to reach a formal truce in the wake of the Israeli offensive launched in December that killed some 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis and left vast swathes of the impoverished territory in ruins.
Palestinian militants have fired more than 40 rockets and mortar rounds at southern Israel since the end of the war and the Jewish state has carried out several air strikes targeting suspected militants and smuggling tunnels.
On Saturday, the Israeli army said a longer-range Grad-style rocket fired by Gaza militants had evaded its early warning system and struck the seaside town of Ashdod, 38km north of Gaza.
In a separate incident, a roadside bomb exploded near an Israeli army patrol along the border. No casualties were reported.
The military branch of the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the bomb in a statement and said that the Al-Quds Brigades destroyed an Israeli vehicle, but the army denied the claim.
Meanwhile, a senior Israeli minister from the Kadima party yesterday called for a rotation of power between his centrist party and the right-wing Likud as the two battled for power after tight elections.
“A rotation is the minimum that Kadima can demand so that a stable government sees the light of day,” said Avi Dichter, public security minister in the outgoing government, adding that Kadima would go into opposition if it did not assume power.
Kadima chief “Tzipi Livni has received the preference of public opinion and [Likud head Benjamin] Netanyahu has to admit so. We have to have a fair equilibrium between the two parties,” he said.
Although Kadima received 28 seats in last week’s general election, one more than Likud, Netanyahu is widely assumed to become the next prime minister.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS