Day: July 5, 2024

Negotiations to reach a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war will resume next week after the head of the Israeli intelligence agency returned from talks in Doha, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Friday.

His office noted gaps still exist between both sides, though, regarding an agreement for a cease-fire and a hostage release.

Mossad Director David Barnea held meetings with Qatari mediators, and Israel said it would resume negotiations as Hamas updated its cease-fire proposal.

A Hamas spokesperson said Friday that amendments it proposed to the U.S. plan for a Gaza cease-fire got a “positive response” from mediators, though they said the Israeli position is not clear.

The White House said Friday that U.S. President Joe Biden likely will meet with Netanyahu when he is in Washington this month.

The cease-fire talks come as Palestinian authorities said seven Palestinians were killed in the West Bank city of Jenin after an Israeli raid that its military said was carrying out “counterterrorism activity.”

Israeli soldiers “encircled a building where terrorists have barricaded themselves in,” and the military noted that an airstrike “struck several armed terrorists” nearby.

Israeli forces and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah traded attacks along the border Thursday, the latest of months of exchanges that have raised fears the war in Gaza will spread to a wider regional conflict.

Hezbollah said it fired more than 200 rockets at Israeli bases in an attack that also included the use of explosive drones. The Iranian-backed group said it was acting in response to Israel’s killing of one of its commanders Wednesday.

The Hezbollah attack prompted air raid sirens across northern Israel. The Israeli military said it intercepted many of the projectiles and carried out fresh airstrikes against launch positions in Lebanon.

Israeli media reported Thursday that Netanyahu spoke with Biden, who has tried to orchestrate a truce for months. Netanyahu told Biden of his decision to send a delegation to continue negotiations for the release of the hostages, according to media reports.

“The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal,” the White House said in a statement.

The mediators — Qatar, Egypt and the United States — have worked for months to reach a deal that would free the hostages and cease hostilities. The ideas that Hamas delivered this week involve the three-phase deal Biden put on the table in late May.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has expressed concern over Israel’s latest evacuation order for large parts of the Khan Younis and Rafah governorates, encompassing about a third of the Gaza Strip and affecting up to 250,000 civilians.

“What we saw in the last two days, since Monday afternoon when the evacuation order was issued, we have seen a constant flow of people moving out,” said Andrea De Domenico, the head of the U.N. office for humanitarian affairs in the Palestinian territories.

He told reporters in a video briefing from Jerusalem Wednesday that U.N. aid agencies and their partners are having to reset their operations following Israel’s evacuation order.

Israel has repeatedly told Palestinians to leave certain parts of Gaza, usually ahead of military offensives, in a move Israel says is meant to protect civilians from the war. The evacuations, along with the fighting, have meant people have had to flee multiple times in search of safety.

De Domenico said the U.N. estimates that 9 out of every 10 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced at least once, and some up to 10 times, since the war started between Israel and Hamas in October.

He said most people on the move this week have headed toward the coastal area, where Israel has established a so-called safe zone. De Domenico said the area is overcrowded and overwhelmed, with little clean water, few toilets and limited basic services.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza erupted when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on October 7, staging a terror attack that killed about 1,200 people and seized more than 250 hostages, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 38,000 people and injured more than 87,000 others, according to the health ministry in Gaza, and it has left the densely built-up coastal enclave in ruins.

VOA’s U.N. correspondent Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.

YERVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Hungary has dropped its veto on the European Union’s first-ever military assistance to Armenia, EU diplomatic sources told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Thursday.

After months of deliberations, the 27-nation bloc moved early this year to approve 10 million euros (about $11 million) worth of “non-lethal” aid from its European Peace Facility, a special fund designed to boost EU partners’ defense capacity.

The money was due to be spent over the next two-and-a-half years on creating a field hospital and auxiliary facilities for a battalion-size Armenian army unit. Its allocation requires the unanimous backing of all EU member states.

It emerged in April that Hungary is blocking the decision and demanding that similar aid also be allocated to Azerbaijan. The sources said Budapest, which took over the EU’s rotating presidency on July 1, subsequently agreed to drop the veto as part of a compromise deal with other European countries. Under that deal, the EU will finance de-mining activities in Azerbaijan from another source.

The sources who did not want to be identified added that the EU foreign ministers are now expected to give the final green light to the military aid to Armenia at their next meeting slated for July 22.

In early April, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev warned Western powers against “arming Armenia,” including through the European Peace Facility. Aliyev has long maintained a warm rapport with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Unlike other EU member states, Hungary has openly supported Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Hungarian Foreign Ministry reaffirmed that support three days after the outbreak of the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani war in Karabakh.

Armenia’s former leadership froze diplomatic relations with the central European nation in 2012 after Orban’s government extradited to Azerbaijan an Azerbaijani army officer who hacked to death a sleeping Armenian colleague in Budapest in 2004. The officer, Ramil Safarov, was pardoned, rewarded and promoted by Aliyev on his return to Azerbaijan.

The current Armenian government decided to restore the diplomatic ties in 2022 even though Hungary never apologized for Safarov’s release and continued to support Azerbaijan. Last September, Budapest reportedly vetoed a statement by the EU member states condemning the Azerbaijani military offensive that displaced Nagorno-Karabakh’s entire population and restored Baku’s control over the region.

One month later, Armenian leaders received Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in Yerevan. Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturian visited Budapest in February this year. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan did the same in May.

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In a rare move, the Council of Europe’s anti-torture committee issued a public statement slamming Azerbaijan for what it called Baku’s refusal to cooperate with the committee.

The Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), in its statement, said that it had made genuine attempts to engage Azerbaijan, to no avail.

According to an article of the Convention, “If the Party fails to co-operate or refuses to improve the situation in the light of the Committee’s recommendations, the Committee may decide, after the Party has had an opportunity to make known its views, by a majority of two-thirds of its members to make a public statement on the matter.”

“The reason behind this exceptional decision to make a public statement is the outright refusal of the Azerbaijani authorities to cooperate with the CPT. The Committee made genuine attempts to engage in a constructive dialogue with the Azerbaijani authorities to address matters that lie at the heart of the CPT’s raison d’être,” said the statement.

“The CPT has detailed in its visit reports that it continues to receive allegations of severe acts of ill-treatment and even of torture by police officers. Yet, no action has been taken by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan to implement the Committee’s long-standing recommendations to end such practices,” the statement explained.

“Further, the Committee received no responses to the letters from its President to promote dialogue through holding high-level talks in Baku or even following the notification of a visit to the Azerbaijani authorities. This represents a fundamental and unprecedented breach of the Convention,” the CPT emphasized.

“Given the seriousness of the issues at stake, relating to ill-treatment and even torture by law enforcement officials of detained persons, the CPT has also decided to publish the report on the 2022 ad hoc visit to Azerbaijan as an annex to the public statement.”

The CPT expressed hope that Baku’s lack of cooperation will not lead “to a permanent rupture in relations with the Azerbaijani authorities.”

“It is especially unfortunate that this decision has been taken in the present situation of relations between Azerbaijan and the Council of Europe created following the biased decision by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe not to ratify the credentials of the Azerbaijani delegation to PACE in January 2024,” said the Azerbaijani foreign ministry, referring to an earlier decision to essentially expel Azerbaijan from the European body.

“We reject the criticisms in the public statement, which are leveled at some state institutions, holding them responsible rather than engaging in constructive cooperation,” Baku said.

“Azerbaijan is making great progress not only in the protection of persons deprived of their liberty but also in bringing relevant practices up to commonly accepted standards,” official Baku claimed.

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The Supreme Council of Radio and Television of Turkey has revoked the license of Açık Radyo, saying the radio station used the phrase”Armenian Genocide” on the air on April 24.

The Council had decided to fine the radio station and suspend its broadcasting for using the term “Armenian Genocide.” It then canceled the station’s license when Açık Radyo did not comply with the suspension order.

The council, consisting of nine members and dominated by representatives of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), decided to close the radio station because it did not stop broadcasting the program, which, according to the council, violated the article “inciting hatred and hostility towards society or inciting hatred among the population, regardless of race, language, religion, gender, class, or sect.”

With this decision the future of the almost 30-year-old radio station, which first went on the air in 1995, is jeopardized since it was being operated mainly through the effort of volunteers.

The more democratic and open-minded intelligentsia of Turkey is worried, but not surprised, since the list of non-government media punished by the Supreme Council is long.

Since its very first day on air, Açık Radyo has been defending fundamental human rights and freedoms, promoting multicultural life, relations between cultures and identities. The weekly Agos newspaper has been featured on the radio for several years. To date, the radio station has produced more than 1,200 programs covering politics, socio-economic news, culture and segments focusing on the environment. Radio officials said during the 30 years, some 1,300 volunteers helped to keep the Açık Radyo on the air.

The staff and management of the radio station will try to protect their rights by all legal means and oppose repression against freedom of the press.

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