Tunisia presidential candidate Zammel sentenced to 12 years in prison

Tunisia presidential candidate Zammel sentenced to 12 years in prison
Ayachi Zammel, head of the opposition Azimoun party, has been jailed since last month on charges of falsifying voter signatures on his candidacy paperwork. (Reuters)
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Updated 01 October 2024
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Tunisia presidential candidate Zammel sentenced to 12 years in prison

Tunisia presidential candidate Zammel sentenced to 12 years in prison
  • It was the third prison sentence imposed on Ayachi Zammel in two weeks
  • Zammel, head of the opposition Azimoun party, has been jailed since last month

TUNIS: A Tunisian court sentenced presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel to 12 years in prison on Tuesday, amid growing opposition anger against President Kais Saied, whose critics accuse him of using the judiciary to sideline his opponents.

It was the third prison sentence imposed on Zammel in two weeks, just five days before the presidential election in which he is one of just two candidates permitted to stand against Saied. Three other high profile opposition figures were barred.

Abdessattar Massoudi, Zammel’s lawyer, said that Zammel was sentenced to 12 years in prison by Tunis court on charges of document falsification. Massoudi described the verdict as “unfair and a farce.”

Zammel, head of the opposition Azimoun party, has been jailed since last month on charges of falsifying voter signatures on his candidacy paperwork, accusations he described as manufactured by Saied’s government. He has been allowed to continue to stand in the election while jailed.

Political tensions in the North African country have risen ahead of the Oct. 6 election since an electoral commission named by Saied disqualified three other prominent candidates last month, amid protests by opposition and civil society groups.

Tunisia was the only Arab country to emerge with a peaceful democracy from the 2011 “Arab Spring” protests against autocratic rulers across the Middle East and North Africa.

But since being elected in 2019, Saied has gradually amassed greater powers, arguing that he needs them to combat a corrupt elite. He dissolved the elected parliament and began ruling by decree in 2021, a move the opposition described as a coup.

The electoral commission has rejected a ruling by Tunisia’s administrative court to reinstate the barred candidates for the upcoming election. Lawmakers loyal to Saied then approved a law stripping the administrative court of authority over election disputes.

The opposition and civil society groups called for a mass protest on Friday against what they describe as Saied’s authoritarian rule, and said they would continue escalation and demonstrations.


Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget

Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget
Updated 3 sec ago
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Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget

Israel cabinet approves 2025 wartime budget
JERUSALEM: Israel’s cabinet on Friday approved a 2025 national budget, a wartime financial package that far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said supported the country’s ongoing wars and encouraged economic growth.
For more than a year, Israel has been locked in a war with Hamas in Gaza, and since September it has been fighting the Lebanese group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“The main objective of the 2025 budget is to maintain the security of the state and achieve victory on all fronts, while safeguarding the resilience of the Israeli economy,” Smotrich said.
The budget, totalling about 607.4 billion shekels ($162 billion), includes a nine billion shekel package to support reserve soldiers.
It will now move to the Knesset, or parliament, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition holds a majority, making approval likely.
Netanyahu welcomed the cabinet’s approval of the budget, saying Smotrich had put together “an important, difficult but necessary budget in a year of war.”
Additional allocations would be made for the defense ministry, as the military fights the two wars, as well as Iran and the groups it backs.
“This budget will help and support the needs of the war so that it will lead to a victory that will allow the strong Israeli economy to grow and prosper for many years,” Smotrich said.
The budget projects a fiscal deficit of about 4.3 percent.
But former prime minister and key opposition leader Yair Lapid criticized the budget, saying it would “increase the expenditure of every family in Israel by 20,000 shekels per year.”

UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza

UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza
Updated 01 November 2024
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UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza

UK urged to evacuate hospitalized children from Gaza
  • British charity Project Pure Hope: ‘We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions’
  • Kamal Aswan Hospital has just 2 doctors to look after more than 150 patients

LONDON: A British charity has urged the UK government to evacuate 21 critically ill children currently in a hospital in northern Gaza, Sky News reported.

The Kamal Adwan Hospital is besieged by Israeli forces and was recently raided by troops, who detained staff and left the facility with only two doctors to care for more than 150 patients.

It was also targeted by an Israeli airstrike on Thursday. Its supplies are reportedly running low and many of its facilities are no longer operational.

Project Pure Hope has called on the UK to facilitate the evacuation of vulnerable children trapped inside.

“We are witnessing a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions,” it said in a statement. “With each passing hour, the children’s chance of survival diminishes without advanced medical intervention — intervention that cannot be provided under the hospital’s current, catastrophic conditions.”

The charity said it has sufficient money to fund an evacuation of 21 children in critical condition at the hospital.

It added that it held a meeting with UK Foreign Office staff this week to discuss its plans, but so far the government has not agreed to take in patients.

“While other countries ... have opened their doors to these paediatric cases, the UK remains a notable outlier, having yet to implement any such programme,” the charity said.

The US, Switzerland, Italy Ireland and the UAE have taken in hospitalized children from Gaza since the start of the conflict over a year ago.

Fears for the safety of people in the area around the hospital have grown in recent weeks amid an uptick in Israeli military activity and Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid to reach displaced civilians.

Charities have warned of famine and disease, and aid workers struggle to move around Gaza, especially to the scene of military strikes to help civilian casualties.

Project Pure Hope’s concerns about the fate of patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital have been echoed by medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, which said it is “deeply concerned” by the situation after one of its staff members was detained by Israeli forces.

Israel claims that Hamas has been using the hospital, located in the Jabaliya refugee camp, as a base, and that it has found weapons stored at the facility. The hospital denies the allegation.


WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care

WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care
Updated 01 November 2024
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WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care

WHO ‘deeply concerned’ about ‘rising attacks’ on Lebanon health care
  • ‘… We are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target’

GENEVA: The World Health Organization said Friday it is deeply concerned about Israeli attacks hitting health care workers and facilities in Lebanon, in its war against Hezbollah.
“We are really, really concerned, deeply concerned, about the rising attacks on health workers and the facilities in Lebanon, and we are again and again and again emphasizing that health care is not a target; health workers are not a target,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told a media briefing in Geneva.


Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes

Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes
Updated 01 November 2024
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Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes

Lebanese ‘orphaned of their land’ as Israel blows up homes
  • Aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill
  • Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month

BEIRUT: The news came by video. Law professor Ali Mourad discovered that Israel had dynamited his family’s south Lebanon home only after footage of the operation was sent to his phone.
“A friend from the village sent me the video, telling me to make sure my dad doesn’t see it,” Mourad, 43, said.
“But when he got the news, he stayed strong.”
The aerial footage shows simultaneous explosions rock a cluster of buildings on a lush hill.
Mourad’s home in Aitroun village, less than a kilometer from the border, is seen crumpling in a cloud of grey dust.
His father, an 83-year-old paediatrician, had his medical practice in the building. He had lived there with his family since shortly after Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon ended in 2000.
The family fled the region again after the Israel-Hezbollah war erupted on September 23 after a year of cross-border fire that began with the Gaza war.
South Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold, has since been pummeled by Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah says it is battling Israeli forces at close range in border villages after a ground invasion began last month.
For the first 20 years of his life, Mourad could not step foot in Aitroun because of the Israeli occupation.
He wants his two children to have “a connection to their land,” but fears the war could upend any remaining ties.
“I fear my children will be orphaned of their land, as I was in the past,” he said.
“Returning is my right, a duty in my ancestors’ memory, and for the future of my children.”
According to Lebanon’s official National News Agency, Israeli troops dynamited buildings in at least seven border villages last month.
Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast footage appearing to show one of its presenters blow up a building while embedded with soldiers in the village of Aita Al-Shaab.
On October 26, the NNA said Israel “blew up and destroyed houses... in the village of Odaisseh.”
That day, Israel’s military said 400 tons of explosives detonated in a Hezbollah tunnel, which it said was more than 1.5 kilometers (around a mile) long.
It is in Odaisseh that Lubnan Baalbaki fears he may have lost the mausoleum where his mother and father, the late painter Abdel-Hamid Baalbaki, are buried.
Their tomb is in the garden of their home, which was levelled in the blasts.
Baalbaki, 43, bought satellite images to keep an eye on the house which had been designed by his father, in polished white stone and clay tiles.
But videos circulating online later showed it had been blown up.
Lubnan has not yet found out whether the mausoleum was also damaged, adding that this was his “greatest fear.”
It would be like his parents “dying for a second time,” he said.
His Odaisseh home had a 2,000-book library and around 20 original artworks, including paintings by his father, he said.
His father had spent his life savings from his job as a university professor to build the home.
The family had preserved “his desk, his palettes, his brushes, just as he left them before he died,” Baalbaki said.
A painting he had been working on was still on an easel.
Losing the house filled him with “so much sadness” because “it was a project we’d grown up with since childhood that greatly influenced us, pushing us to embrace art and the love of beauty.”
Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission has said “the ongoing destruction campaign carried out by the Israeli army in southern Lebanon is a war crime.”
Between October 2023 and October 2024, locations “were wantonly and systematically destroyed in at least eight Lebanese villages,” it said, basing its findings on satellite images and videos shared on social media by Israeli soldiers.
Israel’s military used “air strikes, bulldozers, and manually controlled explosions” to level entire neighborhoods — homes, schools, mosques, churches, shrines, and archaeological sites, the commission said.
Lebanese rights group Legal Agenda said blasts in Mhaibib “destroyed the bulk” of the hilltop village, “including at least 92 buildings of civilian homes and facilities.”
“You can’t blow up an entire village because you have a military target,” said Hussein Chaabane, an investigative journalist with the group.
International law “prohibits attacking civilian objects,” he said.
Should civilian objects be targeted, “the principle of proportionality should be respected, and here it is being violated.”


Lebanon PM says expanded strikes suggest Israel’s ‘rejection’ of ceasefire

Lebanon PM says expanded strikes suggest Israel’s ‘rejection’ of ceasefire
Updated 01 November 2024
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Lebanon PM says expanded strikes suggest Israel’s ‘rejection’ of ceasefire

Lebanon PM says expanded strikes suggest Israel’s ‘rejection’ of ceasefire
  • Mikati said in a statement after overnight raids hit Beirut’s southern suburbs
  • US asked Lebanon to declare unilateral ceasefire with Israel, two sources say

Beirut: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Friday criticized Israel’s “expansion” of its attacks on his country, saying they indicated a rejection of efforts to broker a truce after more than a month of war.
“The Israeli enemy’s renewed expansion of the scope of its aggression on Lebanese regions, its repeated threats to the population to evacuate entire cities and villages, and its renewed targeting of the southern suburbs of Beirut with destructive raids are all indicators that confirm the Israeli enemy’s rejection of all efforts being made to secure a ceasefire,” Mikati said.
Mikati’s statement came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met visiting US officials to discuss a possible deal to end the war in Lebanon.
The Lebanese premier added that Israel’s diplomatic behavior suggested it was rejecting a ceasefire.

US asked Lebanon to declare unilateral ceasefire with Israel

The office of Lebanese caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati on Friday denied that the US had asked Lebanon to declare a unilateral ceasefire, after two sources told Reuters that a US envoy had made the request to inject momentum into stalled talks on a deal to end hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel.
In a statement to Reuters, Mikati’s office said the government’s stance was clear on seeking a ceasefire from both sides and the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last round of conflict between the two foes in 2006
“Israeli statements and diplomatic signals that Lebanon received confirm Israel’s stubbornness in rejecting the proposed solutions and insisting on the approach of killing and destruction,” Mikati said in a statement.
Since fighting in Lebanon escalated on September 23, the war has killed at least 1,829 people in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of health ministry figures.
On Wednesday, Mikati said US envoy Amos Hochstein had signalled during a phone call that a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war was possible before US elections are held on November 5.
The same day, Hezbollah’s new leader said the group would agree to a ceasefire with Israel under acceptable terms, but added that a viable deal has yet to be presented.
During talks on Thursday, Israeli leader Netanyahu told US envoys Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk that any Lebanon deal must guarantee Israel’s longer-term security.