التصنيف: estaql

President Nyusi is expected to officially present the energy strategy to the international community during COP28.

Mozambique has approved an ambitious new energy transition plan until 2050, hoping to attract investments of some $80bn to boost renewable energy capacity and increase electricity availability, a senior energy official said on Monday.

President Filipe Nyusi is expected to officially present the energy strategy to international partners and potential donors on December 2 during the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.

Priority plans between next year and 2030 include adding 2,000 megawatts of new hydropower capacity by upgrading existing plants and completing the new Mphanda Nkuwa Hydropower Project, expanding the national electricity grid, and switching to electric vehicles to reduce emissions from the transport sector.

“We are still fine-tuning the document and hope to publicly release it later this week,” Pedro Simao, special adviser to the energy minister, told Reuters news agency on Monday.

The document was approved by Mozambique’s Council of Ministers on November 21.

The Southern African country exported its first liquefied natural gas in November 2022 and is hoping huge gas discoveries, together with its renewable energy potential, will propel economic growth and help lift millions out of poverty.

Ahead of COP28, African countries are gearing up to ask for improved climate financing for renewable energy projects in a continent seen as lagging behind in preparing for a greener future, even though it contributes the least to global emissions.

Comprising about 17 percent of the world’s population, Africa contributes just 4 percent of global carbon emissions at 1.45 billion tonnes. But it has been home to some of the worst droughts and floods of recent times, including Cyclone Freddy, which killed more than 500 people and displaced thousands in Mozambique and Malawi earlier this year.

The masked Qassam Brigades fighter adjusts his AK-47 assault rifle before he slides into a chair in the Gaza office of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Hello, Condoleezza Rice. You have to deal with me now. There is no Abu Mazen [Abbas] any more,” the fighter jokes in an imaginary phone call to the then-United States secretary of state. Around him, fighters with the armed wing of Hamas snap photos of themselves.

The year is 2007, and Hamas has just fought and beaten a faction of Abbas’s Fatah party for control of Gaza.

Fatah lost the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections and was unhappy with the result, attacking the winners, Hamas.

This spelled not only a political fracturing but also a geographical one. The Palestinians split into the occupied West Bank, partially governed by the PA, and Gaza under Hamas.

The situation had remained frozen since then – until now when Palestinians’ political future seems more uncertain than ever.

Israel’s stated objective for its current bombardment and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s surprise attacks on October 7 in southern Israel has been to take out the armed group.

If Israel is successful, the return of the PA to the beleaguered enclave is being touted as a possibility. But will it return? And can it?

Gaza under Hamas

Under Hamas, the Gaza Strip has been besieged, impoverished by Israel and assaulted on five occasions in the past 17 years.

In this latest assault, the Palestinian political future looks very precarious.

Israel said it aims to destroy Hamas entirely and that is why it launched an all-out assault on the Gaza Strip on October 7.

Israeli raids, settler violence and settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank are among the reasons Hamas launched its attacks on October 7, Izzat al-Rasheq, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, said.

“We warned the Israelis and the international community that this relentless pressure will result in an explosion, but they did not listen,” al-Rasheq told Al Jazeera, adding that incursions on Al-Aqsa Mosque, thousands of unjustly detained Palestinians, and the blockade on Gaza all played a role as well.

In a scenario in which Israel succeeds in eliminating Hamas somehow, it has been suggested by the US that the PA take over the beleaguered enclave.

So far, Israel does not agree, but what do the Palestinians think of the PA? Can it return to Gaza? And can Hamas be destroyed?

Collusion vs confrontation

The crux of the divide between the two most dominant players in Palestinian politics is their differing approaches to the Palestinian cause.

While Fatah and the PA, whose current leadership is one and the same, focus on cooperation with Israel, Hamas’s strategy is to confront Israel militarily, said Aboud Hamayel, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Hamayel said, mimicking what he said is the PA’s defeatist tone.

The PA’s support base in the West Bank is based on a transactional relationship with Israel, the analyst said. However, some Fatah factions do take part in the armed struggle in the West Bank, where the movement is more vocal and diverse than the PA, he added.

Fatah still exists in Gaza, where it is now in the opposition. Its supporters there are split between loyalty to Abbas and former Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan, who has been in exile in the United Arab Emirates for 10 years, Hamayel said.

The PA has international recognition and receives funding and tax revenues. In turn, it manages security in its territory, theoretically freeing Israel from dealing with day-to-day Palestinian life, Hamayel said, except when Israel conducts raids and arrests resisting Palestinians.

The post-war question

Fatah does want to achieve unity with Hamas, according to the group’s spokesperson, even though several attempts over the years to do that have failed.

“Through national dialogue, we will reach a consensus on how to govern ourselves, how to lead our cause and present it to the world,” Jamal Nazzal, a Fatah spokesperson and a member of its parliamentary body, the Revolutionary Council, told Al Jazeera.

A unified Palestinian entity is the stated US goal, especially as discussions arise on the fate of Gaza after the war, according to Kenneth Katzman, a senior fellow at the New York-based Soufan Center.

This entity would control both Gaza and the West Bank, accept Israel’s existence and resume Oslo negotiations with Israel, he said, referring to agreements between Israel and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1990s.

“I think the intent is to get back to where the talks left off,” Katzman told Al Jazeera, adding that they would be the precursor to Washington mediating a two-state solution.

Rafe Jabari, a French-Palestinian political science analyst, agreed that a two-state solution should be pursued after the war’s end but said a new agreement should be drawn up to replace the Oslo Accords because Palestinians were coerced to make too many concessions in that process.

Israel will be unwilling to relinquish control of the lands it occupies, he added, and it will not be able to take out Hamas as it says it wants to. “Hamas is a part of Palestinian society. They can’t eliminate Hamas,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that they’re not just a political wing.

Hamas agrees. “They cannot rearrange the Palestinian house to suit themselves. Hamas will remain, and what comes after Hamas will also be Hamas,” said al-Rasheq, adding that Palestinians would not accept “the US or Israel or anyone else” telling them who should govern them.

“The Palestinian people will never accept an entity that enters Gaza on an Israeli tank,” he said.

Because it is impossible to eradicate Hamas, Jabari said, the group will have to be involved in any post-war negotiations.

“All actors should be involved in the resolution of the conflict,” he said, citing past negotiations in which that occurred even when one party was viewed as a “terrorist group”, such as during the French-Algeria peace agreement in 1962 or, more recently, in talks between the US and the Taliban.

A transition period involving an international peacekeeping force in Gaza was mentioned by both Katzman and Jabari as a possible first step before negotiations.

But, Jabari added, these forces have been abject failures in recent conflicts.

The PA’s waning popularity

The PA’s government in the West Bank is seen by many Palestinians as collusion with Israel.

Much of the frustration is with Abbas, who is seen as weak for not managing to advance any peace processes in his nearly two decades in power, Jabari said. He is also seen as not having advocated enough against Israel’s practices from settlement expansions to harassment of Palestinians, he added.

PA security practices in the occupied West Bank have also been criticised as heavy-handed but, Nazzal said, the PA needs to “restore order and protect the law”.

“Movements of the Palestinian security forces or officials or normal individuals sometimes require security coordination with the occupying power,” he said, adding that everything the PA administers in the occupied West Bank “has to be coordinated with Israel”.

Nazzal distanced Fatah from the PA, however, saying it is “a liberation movement that doesn’t have any sort of contact with Israel”.

Despite frustration with the PA, Katzman said Palestinians who are bearing the brunt of the Israeli aggression may be more disgruntled with Hamas’s actions.

“Much of the Gaza population now realises that Hamas is going to keep dragging them into a war with Israel, and they don’t want that,” he said. “So I think they’re willing to overlook the Palestinian Authority’s faults. I think that’s true for Palestinians in the West Bank as well. They don’t want … forever war with Israel.”

However, al-Reshaq said: “Palestinians everywhere support Hamas more. They see Hamas is working to resist the occupation,” he said, adding that global support for Palestinians has surged in the past few weeks.

‘The beginning of the end’?

With mixed support for the PA among Palestinians, what is the likelihood of it returning to govern Gaza?

Nazzal pointed out that, despite Hamas rule, the PA already runs certain elements of life in Gaza, such as the health and education ministries and the banking system.

Meanwhile, the Fatah movement, he added, is opposed to a future in which Hamas is taken out.“We do not agree on the Israeli military objectives in Gaza, nor can we predict what will be the outcome of this terrible assault that Israel has launched against our people,” Nazzal said.

What Fatah knows, however, is that Palestinians should decide who governs them through legislative elections that secure a path for the two-state solution, he added.

“The only thing that nobody has tried is for the Palestinians to live freely in an independent state of their own,” Nazzal said. “Until that happens, we will keep going from one cycle of violence to the next.”

The US is still ramping up its push for the return of the PA in Gaza, though, and the reasons President Joe Biden’s administration has for this strategy is multifold, Hamayel said.

First is to buy time for Israel to finish its military operations by distracting the international community, he said.

It wants to allow its ally to retaliate for Hamas’s October 7 attacks while coaxing it to think about what’s next, the analyst said.

The White House also wants to keep its regional allies on side, especially as Arab states struggle with their citizens not feeling that they are doing enough to end the Israeli assault, according to Hamayel.

However, he concluded, the PA takeover would happen only if Hamas loses, an outcome still too early to predict.

Hamas, meanwhile, sees weakness in Israel’s seemingly directionless attack on civilians.

“The size of the defeat [on October 7] made [Israel] lose its mind and strike out in any direction with no thought,” al-Reshaq said. “It has failed. It failed on the battlefield on October 7 when faced with the Qassam Brigades, and it is failing now because it is unable to achieve any real goals in Gaza.”

In the event that Israel cannot take Hamas out, the fissure between the two Palestinian political groups will deepen, Hamayel predicted.

Hamas would remain standing, a valiant hero for Palestinians for fighting Israel, and the PA would appear weak, shamed for cooperating with Israel over the years, he said.

That would kick off a vicious cycle of a seemingly weak PA inspiring more settler activity in the West Bank, which would erode the group’s control of the territory more and more, he said.

“This could be the beginning of the end of the PA,” Hamayel said.

Athens, Greece – Most of the mourners at the funeral were teenagers.

Christos Michalopoulos’s classmates, friends, and family gathered outside a church near the central Greek city of Thebes to bid farewell to the 17-year-old who died during a police chase on November 11.

Dressed in black, they clung to each other in silence, some in tears.

The air hung with a sense of shock. Several family members appeared lightheaded. Some fainted and had to be held upright or taken away for medical care.

When the bier was carried out of the church, a small crowd chanted his name as though answering his name on a school attendance register: “Christos Michalopoulos! Present!”

Michalopoulos died with a bullet lodged in his clavicle after being pursued by officers, marking the third time in less than three years that a Roma teenager has been killed in incidents involving Greek police.

Since that fateful Saturday, there have been protests, calls for justice and clashes with police across the country.

Michalopoulos’s loved ones say police killed him, a claim that has not been confirmed by the Hellenic Police service.

Amnesty International has called for a “prompt, thorough, transparent and effective investigation into the latest incident as well, including an investigation into a possible discriminatory motive”.

On November 16, an accused police officer who has not been named, gave his initial testimony in Thebes.

Michalopoulos’s loved ones waited outside the court for hours, chanting slogans with the cadence of football slogans that the boy remained among them, as they cursed the police and their lawyer.

“He was a very quiet kid, always smiling, he didn’t bother anyone,” said Chronis Kenzis, 17, a friend and relative of Michalopoulos. “He was crazy for his car, with his music, driving around, with all of this. And he passed away unjustly. Very unjustly.”

Another friend and relative, Panagiotis Chatzidiakos, 18, said he was speechless when he heard Michalopoulos had died. He said he and his friends face regular harassment from the police. He feels wherever he sits, wherever he hangs out, they will bother him.

“The cops are all racist,” Chatzidiakos told Al Jazeera. “And in this period, where they’ve taken three kids, what can I say? We’re afraid to move around.”

Kenzis said the police once stopped him and a friend at a local taverna and carried out a full body search on them.

“All of the neighbours came and saw us,” he said. “And here in Thebes everyone knows us, it travelled mouth to mouth and everyone heard about it.”

As they waited to see how the investigation would proceed, the teenage friends paced back and forth, anxious to see if the accused police officer would be held in custody after his testimony.

“We want justice,” said Chatzidiakos. “And for this not to happen again. We have to do something about this. It won’t just be three murders by cops, there will be others. And not only Roma, but also Pakistanis, Albanians, all of us.”

The accused officer was later released from custody after giving his testimony. He has been temporarily suspended from active police duty.

“All of us who spent time with Christos, these days we’re feeling horrible,” said Chatzidiakos.

The incident

During the car chase, officers pursued the car Michalopoulos was driving on a road outside of Thebes.

Michalopoulos’s brother and two other teenagers were passengers.

The Hellenic Police say the car was driving erratically, at high speed. They signalled it to stop, a warning that they say was ignored. The police report says officers chased the car until it hit a parked car and came to a standstill.

Officers say they then “approached the vehicle to conduct a high-risk check, during which the checked driver was injured after a shooting”.

The circumstances of that shooting are being investigated, the police said in their report.

The lawyer acting for the police officer who was allegedly involved has stated that it appears the teenager attempted to snatch the gun.

In his testimony, the police officer, reportedly said: “I was shouting for him to open the door, so we could check on him, I had taken out my pistol because I didn’t know who was inside the vehicle and if he carried a weapon.

“When I opened the car door, he tried to grab my gun. When I realised his intention, I drew the pistol and then I heard the click, I froze.”

The victim’s brother countered this in an interview with Greek television channel OPEN, claiming the officer hit the window of the car with the gun, pulled Michalopoulos out of the vehicle, kicked him, and then shot him.

A few days after the incident, a CCTV video that was filmed near the scene of the killing was released, in which the exchange between the police and the teenagers can be heard.

In the clip, the car can be seen rushing by with the police four-wheel drive in close pursuit.

The police officer can be heard yelling, “Stop! Stop!”. Then there are muffled knocking sounds, and within seven seconds, gunshots and screams.

Michalopoulos’s brother can be heard shouting, “What did the child do for you to shoot him? What did he do?”.

According to reports in Greek media, the autopsy showed that Michalopoulos was shot at close range, while forensic evidence indicates that none of his DNA was found on the gun.

The lawyer representing the Michalopoulos family has accused the police of tampering with evidence. He alleged that police washed the site of the incident, that police transported and cleaned the vehicle driven by the 17-year-old, and that they wiped the deceased boy’s hands.

At the time of writing, the Hellenic Police had not responded to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

Alleged police killings of Greek Roma teenagers

The Michalopoulos family identifies as belonging to the Roma community, an ethnic minority that is heavily persecuted across Europe.

“We are Greek Gypsies, Greek Roma, we exist in many different cities. But here in Thebes we are all fully integrated,” Apostolis Michalopoulos, Christos’s cousin, told Al Jazeera.

The Panhellenic Confederation of Greek Roma has accused police of discrimination, given the other recent deadly incidents.

“How much more research is needed on dead Roma before we decide as a state and as a society to proactively and courageously face racism and intolerance so that today one more family does not mourn?” the group said.

Referring to two former police-led killings of Roma boys, it added: “A sin (Nikos Sampanis killed in 2021), which became a sin (Kostas Frangoulis killed in 2022) and is becoming a sin again today. Always for Roma.”

Both court cases against the police officers involved are continuing.

Sampanis, an 18-year-old boy, was killed by police on the outskirts of Athens on October 23, 2021, following a car chase. A squad of Greek police officers on motorbikes chased the car he was riding in, in Perama, and fired at least 36 bullets into the vehicle.

Initial police reports contradicted radio communications which were later released, in which officers can be heard saying that “three people inside are Gypsies”.

The Sampanis family has called for an investigation into hate crime charges, and their lawyer has accused the police of attempting to cover up the crime.

Kostas Frangoulis, 16, was shot by police on December 5, 2022, in Thessaloniki after police chased the boy in his car after he allegedly stole gasoline worth 20 euros ($22).

His death led to days of protests in Thessaloniki and across the country.

“There have been three fatal shootings of Romani teenagers in Greece in three years, and while that number is alarming on its own, Roma across Europe are unfortunately very familiar with racist and violent policing,” said Johnathan Lee, an activist and spokesman at the European Roma Rights Centre.

“We see the police as the blunt edge of a larger state instrument that does violence towards Romani people. … It’s not just the ethnic profiling and the harassment; every stage of the process is biased, or working against Romani people throughout the system.”

“I think a lot of people are going to rightfully view the investigation into this killing with a great deal of scepticism.”

Taipei, Taiwan – Closing arguments are due to begin in Hong Kong on Wednesday in the high-profile trial of 16 pro-democracy activists and legislators, more than 1,000 days after they were arrested by national security police.

Ten days have been set aside for prosecutors and defence lawyers to summarise their arguments in the case against the 16, who are among 47 pro-democracy figures arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit subversion in pre-dawn raids in January 2021.

If convicted, they face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The high-profile case has been marked by repeated delays, drawing international criticism, with most of the defendants remanded in custody for nearly three years after being denied bail.

The trial, which was predicted to last 90 days, has dragged on for nearly 10 months as three national security judges – handpicked by the government – wade through thousands of pages of evidence provided by the defence and prosecution.

Hong Kong prosecutors allege that the 47 violated the city’s sweeping national security legislation by organising an unofficial election primary in July 2020 as part of a plot to gain a majority in the semi-democratic legislature and veto the government’s budget bills.

Among the group, 31, including prominent activist Joshua Wong, former legislator Claudia Mo, and legal scholar Benny Tai, have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.

“Delayed justice is injustice and repeated delays or postponement of trials particularly in [national security] cases reflects that the prosecution has not done a good job in managing these cases,” Eric Lai, a research fellow at Georgetown Center for Asian Law, told Al Jazeera.

While the “Hong Kong 47” case is the largest national security case to date, drawn-out proceedings have become a feature of the city’s British-inherited legal system since the imposition of the national security law following anti-government protests in 2019.

Although Hong Kong retained its common law legal system after the city’s return to China in 1997, the national security law weakened or scrapped many common law norms, including the presumption in favour of bail and the right to a jury trial.

The number of people in Hong Kong prisons on remand – those in detention while awaiting trial or sentencing – jumped from 2,044 to 3,304 people between December 2018 and September 2023, according to data collected by the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department.

As a percentage of cases, the share of those in remand grew from 24.98 percent to 37.24 percent over the period.

Much of the backlog stems from some 3,000 prosecutions that followed the 2019 protests, when more than 10,000 people were arrested and charged for offences such as unlawful assembly, possession of an offensive weapon, criminal damage and assaulting a police officer, according to data compiled by the Georgetown Center for Asian Law.

Prosecutions of protest-related cases have typically taken 30 percent longer than other criminal cases, according to an analysis by the Georgetown Centre, with 41.8 percent taking more than a year to complete as of August 2022 – eating up court time and resources.

“The number and proportion of people in [Hong Kong] jails who have not been convicted are both at record highs. There is a known shortage of judges in [Hong Kong] courts, which along with thousands of protest-related cases may have caused backlogs in trials,” David Webb, a former investment banker who maintains a 23-year database on the number of people in custody, told Al Jazeera.

“There is also a tendency to deny bail pending trial in protest-related cases, stemming from a presumption against bail in the National Security Law which has also been applied to non-NSL cases.”

Hong Kong’s courts are facing a growing shortage of judges, with nearly one in four judicial posts currently vacant amid complaints of low pay and a broader brain drain since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Victor Dawes, the chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association, earlier this year warned that proposals by some US lawmakers to sanction judges that hear national security cases could make it even more difficult to recruit talent.

Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee has hinted that “significant national security trials” could one day move to Beijing if sanctions affect court proceedings.

As of August, 264 people have been arrested by national security police and 148 charged under the national security law or the colonial-era offence of sedition, according to research by Lai and others published by ChinaFile.

Of these, 103 have been convicted and 45 are still on trial. None has been acquitted.

Other high-profile delays include the case of Jimmy Lai, the founder of the shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, whose national security trial is due to begin on December 18, a year after it was first scheduled.

Lai, 75, has been detained since December 2020, first in pre-trial detention and then under a five-year sentence for fraud. He could spend the rest of his life in prison if found guilty of national security offences.

The trial of Chung Pui-luen and Patrick Lam, two editors of the now-defunct digital news outlet Stand News, has also faced delays since it began in October 2022.

During the trial, defence lawyers accused the prosecution of improperly submitting some 1,500 pages of undeclared evidence, causing further delays.

The Stand News verdict is not expected until next year as the court considers the impact of a UK Privy Council ruling over a separate sedition case in Trinidad and Tobago, another common law jurisdiction, which found sedition must include “an intention to incite violence or disorder.”

Unlike other delays, the deferral in that case may be a rare glimmer of good news, according to Georgetown’s Lai, as it “shows that the local courts are still eager to respect the whole common law system”.

“It will be a long process but at the same time it also shows the court has to consider the latest development on how the common law courts worldwide consider the offence of sedition,” Lai said.

A truce in the Israel-Hamas war appeared to be extending into a fifth day as the two sides completed their fourth release of captives from Gaza in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails under an original four-day truce deal while mediators said the process would continue.

Qatar, which along with Egypt has facilitated indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, said that there was an agreement to extend by two days the original four-day truce that was to expire on Monday.

“We have an extension … two more days,” Qatar’s Ambassador to the United Nations Alya Ahmed Saif Al-Thani told reporters after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on Monday, saying both sides were to release more people.

“This is a very positive step,” Al-Thani said.

While the Israeli government had yet to officially confirm the truce extension by early on Tuesday morning, Israel’s Army Radio, citing the prime minister’s office, reported that a new list of captives – who are expected to be released later in the day – had been received.

Israel has said it would extend the ceasefire by one day for every 10 additional captives released by Hamas.

Local news website Axios reported the latest list contained the names of 10 Israeli captives. There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office.

Israel on Monday said 11 Israelis had been returned to the country from the Gaza Strip, bringing to 69 the total number of Israeli and foreign captives released by Hamas since Friday under the truce.

The Israel Prison Service said 33 Palestinian prisoners were also released on Monday from Israel’s Ofer prison in the West Bank and from a detention centre in Jerusalem, bringing the total number of Palestinians it has freed since Friday to 150.

The freed Palestinian prisoners were greeted by loud cheers as the Red Cross bus they were travelling in made its way through the streets of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

The original truce agreement also allowed more aid trucks into Gaza, where the civilian population faces shortages of food, fuel, drinking water and medicine.

While describing the extension of the truce as “a glimpse of hope and humanity”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said two more days was not enough time to meet Gaza’s aid needs.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) said in a report on Monday that the four-day pause in hostilities had allowed humanitarian aid groups, particularly Red Crescent workers, to provide assistance to people in desperate need throughout Gaza where 1.8 million people are internally displaced.

More than 14,800 people have been killed in Gaza – including some 10,000 women and children – since Israel launched its attacks on the Palestinian enclave following Hamas’s October 7 raid on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.

Israel’s intense bombing of the densely populated Gaza Strip has also resulted in 46,000 homes destroyed and more than 234,000 damaged –about 60 percent of the entire housing stock in Gaza, the UN said in the report.

Despite the apparent extension of the truce for two additional days, Israel remains committed to crushing Hamas militarily and has warned that its war on Gaza will resume.

Resumption will likely see Israeli forces expand their air, land and sea offensive from the devastated northern Gaza to the south of the enclave where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled seeking refuge.