Israel is unhappy with a harsh UN report on its war in Gaza and is lobbying to soften the document that was due to be submitted to the Security Council yesterday, Israeli media said.
The report says the Israeli military intentionally fired at UN facilities and civilians hiding in them during the massive offensive in December and January on Hamas in Gaza, media reports said.
“Although the report does not accuse Israel of committing war crimes and does not include a recommendation for legal proceedings ... [Israel] views it as a one-sided and even hostile document, as it fails to mention the Hamas terror directed ceaselessly at the civilian population in Israel,” the Ynet news Web site said.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon received a copy of the report several days ago and eventually softened some of the wording in the three-page document, Ynet wrote.
But Israeli officials are worried that the current wording is still too critical towards the Jewish state, the mass-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper said.
“Officials who saw the report said its authors completely ignored the information that Israel passed on to the UN after Operation Cast Lead,” it said.
The newspaper quoted a member of the US delegation at the UN as saying that the report was “unprecedented in its gravity towards Israel, and Israel will have to lick the wounds of the report for many years, if the current wording is accepted as is.”
The report, authored by a special committee headed by the former head of the Amnesty International rights group Ian Martin, contains several serious charges against Israeli forces.
“Israel deliberately fired at UN institutions even though it knew it was forbidden. The report accuses Israel of disproportionate fire and excessive use of force. The report also states that Israel shot at Palestinian civilians unnecessarily and excessively,” Yediot said.
“It should be noted that the report is worded one-sidedly and includes numerous and grave charges against Israel. On the other hand, the report almost entirely ignores Hamas and the rocket fire at Israeli communities,” it said.
The report marks the latest criticism of Israel over the 22-day war in Gaza that it launched against the Hamas-run territory on Dec. 27 in response to ongoing rocket fire.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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
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