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Hamas’ deputy chief in the Gaza Strip has given Israel a two-month window in order to implement the conditions of the cease-fire reached earlier this week between the sides. Otherwise, Khalil al-Hayya warned that Gaza-based terrorists were prepared to enter “a confrontational campaign, even if it will lead to the bombing of Tel Aviv.”
According to al-Hayya’s statement, the truce deal simply reinforces understandings agreed to in previous negotiations, including matters related to electricity, water and granting permits to Gazans to allow them to work in Israel.
It comes after Jerusalem on Tuesday green-lighted the complete reopening of the Kerem Shalom border crossing, thereby enabling fuel trucks to enter the Palestinian enclave. Israel had shuttered the passageway — although authorities still permitted the transfer into Gaza of food and humanitarian aid — in response to weeks of terrorist attacks, including the launching of hundreds of balloon-borne incendiary devices into the Jewish state.
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The rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have reportedly put the brakes on a US effort to mediate normalization agreements between Israel and additional Arab countries in the wake of the historic deal with the United Arab Emirates. According to reports, Manama is hesitant to move forward without the backing of Riyadh, which has conditioned forging official relations with Jerusalem on the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The positions of both nations were conveyed during separate meetings on Tuesday with senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, the chief architect of President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan. Nevertheless, Kushner, who a day earlier headed a delegation of US and Israeli officials to Abu Dhabi, expressed confidence that another country would, in fact, follow the UAE’s lead within months.
Meanwhile, a senior Emirati Foreign Ministry official claimed that his government had received “assurances” from Washington that Israel would not advance plans to annex swaths of the West Bank.
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An Israeli soldier and a police officer on Wednesday morning were lightly injured in a suspected car-ramming attack at the Tapuah Junction in the West Bank. According to reports, the assailant slammed his vehicle into the victims and was then shot after running toward security forces armed with a knife.
In response, Defense Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz asserted: “We will not allow terror to raise its head and we will fight the perpetrators and those who send them.”
The incident occurred exactly one week after a Palestinian stabbed to death Shai Ohayon in the Israeli city of Petah Tikva.
The Polish government has after a three-month delay agreed to accept the appointment of a new German ambassador, Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven, whose father between 1944 and April 1945 prepared the daily military briefing in Adolf Hitler’s bunker . The diplomatic standoff was, perhaps not coincidentally, resolved on the 81st anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, which many mark as the beginning of World War II.
01.09.2020 r. – Polska.
Do Polski przybywa dziś ambasador Niemiec Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven – syn nazisty i adiutanta Hitlera.
Zdjęcie – marzec 1945 r. pic.twitter.com/Xwf0IMMYF6
— Historia Fotografią Pisana (@Jan34733995) September 1, 2020
Jürgen Hardt, a foreign policy spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s parliamentary bloc called the postponement “incomprehensible,” while still welcoming the development. For his part, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek stressed that Berlin must take into account “a special kind of sensitivity” resulting from Nazi crimes that constitute “a great unhealed wound in the minds” of many Poles.
Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven was born more than 11 years after the Holocaust. He previously served as Germany’s ambassador to the Czech Republic and became NATO’s first intelligence chief in 2016.
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French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is republishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that made the publication the target of a deadly January 2015 terrorist attack in Paris. The move coincides with the beginning of the trial of 14 people accused of helping the two Islamist attackers carry out their shooting rampage.
Twelve people were killed in the assault, which days later was followed by a second attack that killed five people at the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in the French capital.
The front cover of the latest edition features the 12 original caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in a Danish newspaper prior to their reprinting by Charlie Hebdo.
In its editorial, the magazine explained that, “To reproduce these cartoons in the week the trial over the January 2015 terrorist attacks opens seemed essential to us.”
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