Taiwan’s representative offices in Israel and Jordan would remain open despite an escalating conflict in the region, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
The ministry made the remark in response to questions about whether the offices would remain open after the US Department of State and German Federal Foreign Office asked some of their diplomats and family members to leave Lebanon following Israeli strikes that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday.
Taiwan’s office in Jordan is responsible for affairs related to Lebanon.
Photo: Reuters
“Due to the increased volatility following airstrikes within Beirut and the volatile and unpredictable security situation throughout Lebanon, the US Embassy urges US citizens to depart Lebanon while commercial options still remain available,” the State Department said on Saturday.
On the same day, the German Federal Foreign Office announced that it had further raised the crisis level for Germany’s representatives in Beirut, Ramallah and Tel Aviv due to the escalation in the Middle East.
Family members of employees at the German offices in the area should leave the service location and travel to a safe place in the region or return to Germany, it said.
Hezbollah on Saturday confirmed Nasrallah’s death after Israeli Defense Forces said he was killed in airstrikes on Dahieh, a suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
The Lebanese political organization Hezbollah, an ally of Iran and the Palestinian group Hamas, has been trading cross-border fire with the Israeli military since Israel’s assault on Gaza began in October last year, following a Hamas attack that same month.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs previously said that 266 Taiwanese citizens were in Israel as of late last month.
It also reiterated its advice to Taiwanese not to travel to Lebanon or Israel for safety reasons.
In an emergency, Taiwanese citizens in Israel should call its Tel Aviv office at +972-544-275-204, while those who need emergency assistance while in Lebanon should call Taiwan’s office in Jordan at +962-79-5552605, the ministry said.
The ministry has issued the highest-level red alert for Lebanon and the second-highest orange alert for Israel.
The ministry uses a four-tiered travel advisory system to represent safety and security risks.
The lowest level, gray, signifies that caution should be exercised, while yellow suggests travel should be reconsidered. Orange indicates that unnecessary travel should be avoided and red urges nationals not to travel to a destination.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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