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Israel continues to deploy soldiers, tanks, military aircraft and armoured vehicles near the Gaza border in Nahal Oz, Israel on December 12, 2023 [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency]
Germany on Wednesday slammed Israel’s decision to call up 60,000 reservists in Gaza, calling instead for “an immediate and lasting ceasefire,” Anadolu reports.
“We reject the escalation of these military operations. We call on all parties and the international community to end the conflict now through an immediate and lasting ceasefire,” Steffen Meyer, deputy government spokesman, told a press briefing in Berlin.
“We continue to push for this ceasefire with all the means at our disposal and at the same time increase the pressure for the release of all hostages,” he added.
Meyer was referring to Israeli plans to call up 60,000 reservist soldiers to fight in Gaza under an occupation plan, local media reported on Wednesday.
The army’s decision came after Defense Minister Israel Katz approved a plan to occupy Gaza City, Israeli public broadcaster KAN said Wednesday.
The broadcaster said the regular troops operating in the Gaza Strip would also have their tours of duty extended.
According to Israeli army radio, the number of reservists within the army will rise to 130,000 in total in preparation for “a prolonged operation that will last several months” until mid-2026 – belying any chance for a ceasefire.
‘Stop settlement construction’
In related news, the German government again reiterated its opposition to Israel’s plans to construct thousands of new settler units that would effectively split the West Bank into two disconnected parts.
We “strongly reject” the E1 settlement project,” Josef Hinterseher, a deputy foreign ministry spokesperson, told journalists in Berlin.
“As far as we know, the (Israeli) building authority has granted the permit today. The German government’s position is clear: we firmly reject this permit. Settlement construction violates international law and the relevant UN Security Council resolution.”
“It hampers a negotiated two-state solution and an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as demanded by the International Court of Justice,” he added, urging Israel “to stop settlement construction.”
Israeli media reported last week that Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich approved the construction of 3,401 settler units in Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, and 3,515 more in surrounding areas. The project aims to split the West Bank into two parts, severing connections between its northern and southern cities and isolating East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Foreign Ministry denounced the move as part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision for a “Greater Israel,” warning that it would entrench the occupation and eliminate the viability of a Palestinian state.
The international community, including the UN, considers the Israeli settlements illegal under international law. The UN has repeatedly warned that continued settlement expansion threatens the viability of a two-state solution, a framework seen as key to resolving the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In an advisory opinion last July, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory illegal and called for the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
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Israeli soldiers and reservists in Southern Israel on November 13, 2023 [Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images]
Israel’s military has called up reservists in preparation for a possible resumption of its offensive in Gaza if Hamas fails to meet a Saturday deadline to release more Israeli hostages and a nearly month-old ceasefire breaks down, Reuters has reported.
Concern that the ceasefire will collapse is growing as fury mounts in Arab countries over President Donald Trump’s plan for the United States to take over Gaza, displace its Palestinian inhabitants and build an international beach resort.
Under the ceasefire deal in force since 19 January, Hamas agreed to free three more hostages on Saturday. However, the Palestinian resistance movement said this week it was suspending the handover because of what it said were Israeli violations of the ceasefire terms. Trump responded by saying that all hostages must be freed by noon on Saturday or he would “let hell break out”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then warned on Tuesday that his country would resume “intense fighting” if Hamas did not meet the deadline, but he did not say how many hostages should be freed.
Netanyahu added that he had ordered the military to gather forces in and around Gaza, and the military announced it was deploying additional forces to Israel’s south, including mobilising reservists.
The head of Hamas in Gaza, Khalil Al-Hayya, arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for a surprise visit to discuss the fragile ceasefire. A Hamas official told Reuters that mediators Egypt and Qatar had stepped up efforts to end the current impasse.
The standoff threatens to reignite a conflict in which Israel has devastated the Gaza Strip, internally displaced most of its people, caused shortages of food and running water and pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider regional war.
Palestinians in Gaza expressed alarm that the ceasefire might collapse and urged Hamas and Israeli leaders to agree on an extension.
“We had barely started believing that a truce would happen and that a solution was on the way, God willing,” said Lotfy Abu Taha, a resident of Rafah in southern Gaza. “The people are suffering. The people are the victims.”
Israeli officials said government ministers had endorsed Trump’s threat to cancel the ceasefire unless all hostages are released on Saturday. Hamas, meanwhile, said it remained committed to the agreement, but that Israel must fulfil what it agreed to do when it signed the deal. Despite the Trump and Netanyahu threats, the movement has not agreed to release the hostages on Saturday.
Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in Dubai that Trump’s vision for Gaza could lead the Middle East into a new cycle of crises with a “damaging effect on peace and stability.”
Trump has said Palestinians in Gaza could settle in countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Both reject the proposal.
Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit on 27 February to discuss “serious” developments for Palestinians.
In a sign of Arab anger over Trump’s vision of Gaza, two Egyptian security sources said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi would not go to Washington for talks if the agenda included Trump’s plan to displace Palestinians. The date for such a visit has not been announced, and the Egyptian presidency and foreign ministry did not comment.
The Gaza war — described by the International Court of Justice as “plausible genocide” — followed the Hamas-led cross-border incursion on 7 October, 2023, in which at least 1,200 people were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces carrying out the controversial “Hannibal Directive”. An estimated 250 Israelis and Thais were taken into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel began its military offensive against Hamas which has killed at least 48,000 Palestinians in small, densely populated Gaza, according to Gaza health officials. Around 112,000 have been wounded, and 11,000 are missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by the apartheid state.
Hamas has freed 16 Israeli hostages from an initial group of 33 children, women and older men to be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the first stage of the ceasefire deal. It also returned five Thai hostages.
Negotiations on a second phase, which mediators hoped would include agreement on releasing the remaining hostages and a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza, should be under way in Doha but an Israeli team returned home on Monday.
Palestinians fear a repeat of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe), when nearly 800,000 people were driven out by Zionist terrorists when Israel was created in occupied Palestine. Trump has said that Palestinians would lose their legitimate right to return to their homes under his plan for Gaza.
Meanwhile, he wants Saudi Arabia, which wields heavy influence in other Arab and Muslim countries, to normalise ties with Israel. Riyadh has previously said that it will not establish ties with Israel without the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under his first administration in 2017-21, Trump brokered normalisation accords between Israel and some Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates. Asked if the UAE could find common ground with Washington on Gaza, Abu Dhabi’s ambassador to the US, Yousef Al-Otaiba, said the US approach was difficult. “But at the end of the day we’re all in a solution-seeking business, we just don’t know where it’s going to land yet,” he said.
UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday that peace efforts in the region should be on the basis of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, state news agency WAM reported.
Trump’s Gaza plan upended decades of US Middle East policy which called for a Palestinian state co-existing in peace alongside Israel as the solution to one of the world’s most complex and volatile problems.
The Arab League’s Aboul Gheit said that the idea of the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 — in which Arab nations offered Israel normalised relations in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured during the June 1967 war — would be reintroduced.
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UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
