الكاتب: kafej

Government to introduce legislation by February against Palestinian group, supports Israel’s right to ‘its own security’.

The Swiss government has announced it will introduce legislation by the end of February to explicitly ban “Hamas activities or support” for the Palestinian group.

The Federal Council, the executive branch, said on Wednesday that it has decided to draft a law to ban the Palestinian group “considering this to be the most appropriate response to the situation that has prevailed in the Middle East since October 7”.

“The act will provide the federal authorities with the necessary tools to counter any Hamas activities or support for the organisation in Switzerland.”

On October 7, Palestinian fighters from the Gaza Strip, which has been run by Hamas since 2007, launched an attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to the Israeli government.

Hamas and other Palestinian factions also took an estimated 240 Israelis and foreigners into the Gaza Strip as captives.

Since then, Israel has launched a massive air and ground offensive on the beleaguered Strip, killing at least 14,319 people, including more than 5,000 children, local health authorities say.

Early on Wednesday, Israel and Hamas agreed on a Qatar-mediated deal for a four-day truce in Gaza and the release of 50 captives held in the enclave for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody, with negotiations ongoing on the timing.

The seven-member council is formed by ministers from the four largest parties, and lawmakers in parliament are likely to swing strongly behind the draft legislation, given the positions of the major parties.

The hard-right Swiss People’s Party, the biggest in the country, has been strongly pushing for a ban.

On Wednesday, the government called for respect for international humanitarian law and particularly the protection of civilians. It voiced “deep sorrow for the thousands of civilians who have lost their lives in Israel and across the occupied Palestinian territories” and condemned the Hamas attack on October 7 “in the strongest possible terms”.

The statement made no mention of Israel’s actions in Gaza but recognised “Israel’s right to ensure its own defence and security”.

“In view of the dramatic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, the Federal Council stresses the need to ensure unimpeded humanitarian access. Humanitarian pauses are necessary for this purpose,” the statement added.

Bern reiterated the need to restore the prospect of a political framework in the region based on a two-state solution.

“This approach is the only viable path towards ensuring that both the Palestinian and Israeli populations can coexist peacefully, securely and with dignity,” it said.

On October 11, the Federal Department for Foreign Affairs (FDFA) suspended millions of dollars in funding to six Palestinian and five Israeli civil society organisations with ongoing international cooperation partnerships with the Swiss government.

The 11 partner NGOs were subject to “in-depth verification of their compliance with the FDFA’s code of conduct and the anti-discrimination clause in their contracts”. As a result, three of the NGOs saw their contract with the government terminated.

Knife-edge election set to shake up Dutch politics after Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s record 13-year stint in power.

Voting is under way in the Netherlands in closely contested national elections in which a far-right party is among three serious contenders.

The vote is the climax of a campaign focused on issues including climate change and immigration. A poll published on the eve of Wednesday’s elections showed the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) and anti-Islam figure Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party (PVV) tied for the lead, followed closely by a joing Labour Party and Green Left ticket.

Restricting immigration – the issue that triggered the collapse of Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government – has been a key issue in the campaign.

“It’s been enough now. The Netherlands can’t take it anymore. We have to think about our own people first now. Borders closed. Zero asylum seekers,” Wilders said in a television debate.

Voting was taking place in polling stations including the Anne Frank and Van Gogh museums in Amsterdam, clubs, train stations and even a petting zoo.

“For me, this is a bit of a different election because anyone can win. In the end it came down to two candidates. I tossed a coin and chose one,” Vincent Spijker, a 54-year-old quality control manager, told the Agence France-Presse news agency after casting his vote.

The election will bring the Netherlands its first new prime minister in 13 years after Rutte concludes his tenure as the country’s longest-serving leader.

A poll on Tuesday showed Wilders’s party slightly ahead of Rutte’s VVD and a centre-left bloc made up of the Labour Party and Green Left, led by Labour leader Frans Timmermans.

Running to replace Rutte from his VVD is Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgoz, a Turkish immigrant who has embraced a restrictive approach to immigration but sought to differentiate herself from Wilders and is hoping to become the country’s first female prime minister.

“Maybe she can blow a new wind,” 67-year-old Maria Tolman, who voted VVD, told the Reuters news agency.

With the Netherlands a founding member of the European Union, fellow EU leaders will be scrutinising the outcome as parties on the right have suggested they would seek exemptions from the bloc’s rules on agriculture and immigration.

A self-proclaimed fan of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Wilders is explicitly anti-EU, urging the Netherlands to take back control of its borders, to significantly reduce its payments to the union and block the entrance of any new members.

He has also repeatedly said the Netherlands should stop providing arms to Ukraine, saying it needs the weapons to be able to defend itself. However, none of the parties he could potentially form a government with shares these ideas.

Still, a strong showing for Wilders could potentially lead the Netherlands to a hard-right coalition with a strong anti-immigration line.

“I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow and we have Wilders as a prime minister. That’s a nightmare,” Amsterdam resident Arie van der Neut told Reuters after he cast his ballot for the pro-European, centre-left Volt party.

India has traditionally been a supporter of Palestinian rights, so it was a surprise when, amid Israel’s deadly air strikes, India abstained from a vote on the United Nations resolution calling for a ceasefire.

Early in his premiership, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi established warm relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has been a strong ally in what appears to be a repositioning of India’s traditional stance.

What is behind this shift? Why is Modi building such strong ties with Netanyahu?

On UpFront this week, Professor Nitasha Kaul of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster talks with Marc Lamont Hill about the politics behind India’s new ties with Israel.

In the early hours of November 22, Qatar formally announced that an agreement had been reached for an Israeli-Palestinian exchange of captives. The available details suggest it largely reflects the proposal offered by Hamas several weeks ago that was initially rejected by Israel.

Тhe announcement was made just a week after Israeli tanks and soldiers stormed into the al-Shifa Hospital compound in Gaza City, causing international outrage. Israel had claimed that there was a Hamas command centre there and repeatedly vowed to destroy it. As it happened, the only facility to be found within the compound was a hospital.

The United States fully supported Israel’s violation of al-Shifa’s sanctity and even claimed it had independent intelligence about a Palestinian Pentagon beneath it but produced no evidence in support of this assertion.

At the time, this led to speculation that these events may have been the product of an informal US-Israeli agreement: The Biden administration would support Israel’s seizure of al-Shifa and would cover for this war crime politically and diplomatically with lies of its own, thus allowing an Israeli military with few achievements since October 7 to have its “Iwo Jima moment” atop “Mount Shifa”.

But once it would become clear that there was nothing of military significance within the premises, the US would proceed to finalise a deal with Hamas and Israel would have to agree to its implementation.

It does indeed appear to be the case that in exchange for US support for Israel’s systematic destruction of the health sector in the Gaza Strip, a deal with Hamas has been reached.

The agreement is significant in several respects. Perhaps most importantly, the US and Israel, which repeatedly vowed to eradicate Hamas, are now negotiating with the Palestinian movement and reaching agreements with it. Qatari-Egyptian mediation, while indispensable, is ultimately a formality. The US and Israel are not negotiating with Egypt and Qatar but with Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and architect of the October 7 attacks.

The tenor of Israeli press reports in recent days has been that Hamas is desperate for a respite, however brief and at almost any price, from the ferocious Israeli onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

Yet the available reports about the deal suggest otherwise: Israel has committed to releasing three times as many imprisoned women and children as the Palestinians; no Israeli soldiers are included in the exchange; significantly more humanitarian supplies, including fuel, will reach the Gaza Strip; the exchange of captives will be implemented during a continuous four-day truce rather than one in which the slaughter is paused for a brief period each day; and Israeli jets and drones will be prohibited from using the airspace over the Gaza Strip for several hours each day.

This is quite close to the deal initially offered by Hamas several weeks ago, and it appears the bulk of its demands have been conceded by Israel and the US. If the adage that negotiations reflect reality on the ground rather than overturning it applies, Hamas – in contrast to the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, which has been Israel’s main target – seems far from desperate. Instead, it appears sufficiently confident to stick to its priorities until these are accepted by the US and Israel.

Pursuant to the agreement, Hamas has also forced the US and Israel to consent to the supply of large amounts of essential humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. In other words, Hamas has in one fell swoop achieved exponentially more on the humanitarian front than the much-vaunted US diplomacy to secure humanitarian relief for Gaza’s Palestinian civilians during the past month.

This confirms that the entire US effort was in essence a circus – a diversionary charade to enable Israel to continue with its mass killings and transform the Gaza Strip into a wasteland and a killing field.

It bears repeating that Hamas has forced the US and Israel to allow significant quantities of food, water, medicine and fuel to reach the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. Yet Hamas is the anointed terrorist organisation in this equation while Israel is the light unto nations with the world’s most moral army and the US – the world’s greatest democracy dedicated to spreading freedom and human rights to the rest of the planet.

What happens next is difficult to assess. According to reports, only Israeli and dual nationals are to be released, presumably to help the Israeli leadership swallow this very bitter pill and to allay Israeli concerns that the release of foreign nationals would be privileged in negotiations with Hamas. Yet by insisting on this formula, Israel has ensured that further negotiations to release foreign citizens would continue, potentially leading to an extension of the truce.

At the same time, it is difficult to believe that the Israeli leadership can accept a temporary truce that metamorphoses into an indefinite one. It is clearly in the Israeli premier’s personal and political interest to keep this conflict going while the security establishment is also desperate to wipe away the stain of October 7. Other members of Israel’s governing coalition partners see this war as a golden opportunity to unleash the apocalypse and want it to escalate further rather than wind down.

Although the Gaza Strip has been substantially destroyed, Hamas has yet to be significantly degraded, and the Israeli army has yet to kill more Hamas commanders than United Nations staff.

If Israel is confident it can once again flout US policy without consequences, it will. This could take the form of sabotaging the truce or resuming hostilities to ensure it is not extended. Farther afield, the Israeli-Lebanese front also seems to be rapidly heating up.

So further escalation is likely, but it is also possible that the implementation of this deal could cause Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to collapse under a combination of public pressure and internal conflicts among leaders who mutually detest and distrust each other.

The US leadership is also a question mark. With respect to the impact of this crisis on US interests in the region and beyond and particularly the question of regional escalation, US President Joe Biden appears not to care, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appears not to know while CIA Director William Burns and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin look mortified. Which faction gains the upper hand remains an open question.

The one conclusion that can already be drawn is that the various “day after” scenarios produced by the Washington echo chamber can be safely discarded because they uniformly require the eradication of Hamas and not negotiated agreements with it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The UK government intends to intervene in the sale over worries the takeover could influence the newspaper’s operations.

The UK government has said it intends to review the proposed sale of the Telegraph Media Group to an Abu Dhabi-backed investment fund on public interest grounds.

The fund, RedBird IMI, announced on Monday that it was set to take control of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph sister newspapers and The Spectator magazine.

British Media Secretary Lucy Frazer expressed concerns in a letter to Redbird IMI, made public on Wednesday, about the potential for it to influence the operations of The Telegraph. She indicated her ministry wrote on Wednesday to various parties involved in the proposed deal “to inform them that I am ‘minded to’ issue a public interest intervention notice”.

This was motivated by “concerns I have that there may be public interest considerations… [that] warrant further investigation”, she said in a written statement to lawmakers.

Zucker said on Wednesday that RedBird IMI was fully committed to maintaining the existing editorial team of The Telegraph and The Spectator magazine.

The joint venture between US firm RedBird Capital and Abu Dhabi’s International Media Investments said it has agreed loans of around 1.2 billion pounds ($1.5bn) to take control of the parent company of the right-leaning titles.

The Telegraph group has been controlled by twin brothers Frederick and David Barclay for nearly two decades but has been put up for sale over unpaid debts.

Lender Bank of Scotland announced in June that it had appointed a receiver for its Bermuda-based holding company due to “debts being in default and with no sign they would be repaid”.

In its announcement, RedBird IMI said a 600-million pound ($748m) “package of loans” will fully repay the debts owed, allowing the media group to be taken out of receivership.

The joint venture added it also intends to exercise an option to convert a further “similar” sized loan – secured against The Telegraph and The Spectator titles – into equity.

RedBird Capital, run by former CNN president Jeff Zucker, would then run the publications “alone”, with IMI being “a passive investor only”, according to the fund.

But the plans have sparked concern among some lawmakers in the ruling Conservative party, which has long enjoyed a close ideological relationship with The Telegraph titles.

A small group of Tory MPs has urged the government to investigate the planned takeover, querying the wisdom of allowing sovereign wealth funds from overseas to buy national newspapers, the Financial Times reported.

In her statement, Frazer said the deal could be probed on public interest grounds specified in the Enterprise Act 2002, including the need for “accurate presentation of news” and “free expression of opinion” in newspapers.

“It is important to note that I have not taken a final decision on intervention at this stage,” she added, noting those involved had been invited to make “further representations” by 15:00 GMT on Thursday.