Category: 2. World

A feud has broken between the Israeli government and the military over the cost and impact of a planned camp for Palestinians in southern Gaza, as politicians criticised the former prime minister Ehud Olmert for warning that the project would create a “concentration camp” if it goes ahead.

The “humanitarian city” project has become a sticking point in ceasefire talks with Hamas. Israel wants to keep troops stationed across significant parts of Gaza, including the ruins of Rafah city in the south, where the defence minister, Israel Katz, says the camp will be built.

Hamas is pushing for a more comprehensive withdrawal. Husam Badran, a senior member of the group, said the camp plans were a “deliberatively obstructive demand” that would complicate talks, the New York Times reported.

“This would be an isolated city that resembles a ghetto,” he said in a message to the paper. “This is utterly unacceptable and no Palestinian would agree to this.”

Katz revealed last week that he had ordered the army to draw up plans for a camp. It is envisaged that Palestinians would be crammed into an area between the Egyptian border and the Israeli military’s “Morag corridor”, which cuts across the strip.

Katz said initially 600,000 people would move there, and eventually Gaza’s entire population. Those inside would only be allowed to leave for another country, he told Israeli journalists at a briefing.

The plan was unveiled while the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was in Washington DC for an official visit, but it was understood to have his backing. The plan caused immediate alarm among Israel’s allies, including the UK, and domestically.

Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, has been the most high-profile domestic critic of the project. He said that if Palestinians were forced to move to the camp, it would constitute ethnic cleansing.

His comments evoking comparisons with Nazi-era Germany were fiercely attacked inside Israel. The heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, in effect called for Olmert to be jailed over the comments, with a barely veiled reference to time he served for corruption offences after leaving office.

“[Olmert] already knows prison very well,” Eliyahu said. “There is no other way to shut him down from the hatred and antisemitism he spreads around the world.”

The military has also opposed the project, even as it has followed orders to draw up plans to implement it. In a security cabinet meeting on Sunday night, tensions broke out into the open as the IDF chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, clashed with Netanyahu, Israeli media reported.

Zamir reportedly said the project would divert funds and other resources from the military, sapping its ability to fight and undermining efforts to rescue hostages. His office had previously argued that moving and “concentrating” civilians was not a goal of the war, in response to a legal petition brought by reservists concerned they would face illegal orders to commit war crimes.

Netanyahu reportedly lashed out at Zamir, saying the plans he had presented – which estimated several months of construction work, and perhaps up to a year – were “too expensive and too slow”, Israel’s Channel 12 reported, citing official sources.

“I asked for a realistic plan,” the prime minister reportedly said, demanding that a cheaper, faster timeline for construction be delivered by Tuesday.

Finance ministry officials raised other practical objections to the “humanitarian city” plan, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported. They said an estimated 15bn shekels (£3.3bn) annual cost would be a huge drain on the state’s budget. That cost would probably fall on the Israeli taxpayer, taking money away from schools, hospitals and welfare, the paper added.

Senior Israeli officials estimate that constructing a proposed “humanitarian city” in the Rafah area would cost between $2.7bn and $4bn, Ynet reported. They added that if the plan proceeds, Israel would initially bear nearly the entire cost.

The row came as Israeli strikes across Gaza killed at least 31 people, according to local hospitals. Twelve people were killed by strikes in southern Gaza, including three who were waiting at an aid distribution point, according to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, which received the bodies.

Shifa hospital in Gaza City received 12 bodies, including three children and two women, after a series of strikes in the north, according to the hospital’s director, Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia. Al-Awda hospital reported seven killed and 11 wounded in strikes in central Gaza.

UN agencies, including those providing food and health care, reiterated a warning made at the weekend that without adequate fuel they would probably be forced to stop their operations entirely.

In a joint statement, they said hospitals were already going dark and ambulances could no longer move. Transport, water production, sanitation and telecommunications would shut down and bakeries and community kitchens could not operate without fuel, they said.

The 27-member bloc says Washington’s latest threats against its exports are ‘absolutely unacceptable’.

The European Union has promised to take countermeasures against the United States if the administration of US President Donald Trump introduces 30 percent tariffs on imports from the bloc next month.

After ministers met in Brussels on Monday to discuss the tariff threat Trump issued over the weekend, the EU’s trade representative Maros Sefcovic said such a move by Washington would be “absolutely unacceptable”.

Sefcovic said the 27-nation bloc, which is the US’s largest business partner, wanted to reach an agreement through negotiations.

“I’m absolutely 100 percent sure that a negotiated solution is much better than the tension which we might have after August 1,” he told reporters in Belgium, adding that “we must be prepared for all outcomes”.

Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the foreign minister of Denmark, which currently holds the presidency of the EU, reinforced the same message.

“The EU remains ready to react and that includes robust and proportionate countermeasures if required and there was a strong feeling in the room of unity,” he said.

As part of its preparations, Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani confirmed that the EU had drawn up plans to target US goods worth $24.5bn.

Trump’s latest trade war escalation has alarmed European politicians and businesses operating in Europe.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said such high US duties would “hit the German export industry to the core”.

Meanwhile, the American Chamber of Commerce to the European Union, a group that represents major US companies in the EU, said Trump’s plan could “generate damaging ripple effects across all sectors of the EU and US economies”.

Amid the uncertainty, European stocks fell on Monday, with car and alcohol stocks among those worst affected.

Speaking from the Oval Office of the White House on Monday, Trump said he was still willing to talk with trade partners, including the EU, as he looked to boost the US economy and revitalise domestic manufacturing.

After targeting dozens of countries with so-called “reciprocal tariffs” in April, the US president paused them for 90 days to negotiate individual agreements.

As well as targeting the EU last week, Trump also threatened to bring 25 percent tariffs against Japan and South Korea, 30 percent tariffs against Mexico, and 35 percent tariffs against Canada.

AFTER HIS first post-election call with Vladimir Putin in February, Donald Trump gushed about the “great benefits” of a rapprochement with Russia and seemed to relish the prospect of visiting the Kremlin. On July 14th he lost patience, announcing that America would resume supplies of Patriot air-defence missiles and other weapons, and threatening secondary tariffs of 100% on countries doing business with Russia if there was no peace deal within 50 days. “We’re very unhappy with Russia,” Mr Trump declared.

Any reaction from the bloc, by design, will always be the lowest common denominator — a weakness the Trump administration is acutely aware of and keen to use to its advantage. That’s leading the EU executive to seek alternative avenues, such as engaging more closely with other G7 countries, to fend off the impact of the tariffs. 

‘No taboo’ on retaliation

Over the weekend, the EU executive, which coordinates trade on behalf of the EU’s 27 member countries, delayed by two weeks the implementation of a first package of countermeasures targeting €21 billion in U.S. exports. That pause will now expire by Aug. 6.

Not to give the impression it’s only folding to Trump, the European Commission is also keen to show it can fight. 

So at the same time, it is about to present its second raft of retaliatory tariffs on €72 billion of U.S. exports for formal endorsement by EU countries. This falls short of the €95 billion initially targeted, following intense horse-trading between capitals to shield sensitive sectors from Trump’s reprisals. 

“There’s no taboo on Europe’s ability to respond. The moment you restrict yourself, you prevent a certain number of responses, you’re not in a favorable balance of power,” said French Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin. 

“And that’s perhaps where we need to change our methods,” he added. 

India’s foreign minister said removing “restrictive trade measures and roadblocks” is essential to improving ties between New Delhi and Beijing, in a veiled reference to China’s export controls on rare earths.

“Measures towards normalizing our people–to–people exchanges can certainly foster mutually-beneficial cooperation,” India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing on Monday. “It is also essential in this context that restrictive trade measures and roadblocks are avoided,” he added, according to a statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi.

India’s aviation regulator has ordered the country’s airlines to inspect fuel control switches in Boeing aeroplanes, after their reported involvement in a fatal Air India crash that killed 260 people in June.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said the order comes follows Indian and international airlines already starting to carry out their own checks.

It comes after the US Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday that the fuel control switches in Boeing aeroplanes are safe.

The safety of the switches has become a key point of concern after a preliminary report on the disaster found fuel to the engines of the plane involved cut off moments after take-off.

The disaster involving London-bound Flight 171, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, was one of the worst aviation incidents globally in almost a decade.

Since the publication of the preliminary report on Saturday a number of different stakeholders, both in India and internationally have taken action and issued statements in response to it.

In its order, India’s aviation regulator has asked for checks to be carried out by 21 July, noting that “strict adherence to the timeline is essential to ensure continued airworthiness and safety of operations”.

The checks being requested are in line with a 2018 advisory by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the US’s aviation authority, which was referenced in the preliminary report.

The 2018 advisory urged – but did not mandate – operators of Boeing models to inspect the locking feature of the fuel cut-off switches to ensure they could not be moved by accident.

Air India had not carried out those inspections because they were not mandatory, the AAIB said in its preliminary investigation.

The DGCA has now ordered airlines to carry out the checks and report back.

In its response to the report, the FAA said the 2018 advisory was “was based on reports that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged” – but added that it does not believe this makes the planes unsafe.

Separately on Monday, a group representing Indian airline pilots defended the flight’s crew.

The Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association said staff on board had “acted in line with their training and responsibilities under challenging conditions and the pilots shouldn’t be vilified based on conjecture”.

The preliminary report, published by the India Aircraft Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) on Saturday, said the switches on Flight 171 controlling fuel flow to the jet’s engines had been moved from “run” to the “cut-off” position, hampering the thrust of the plane.

In recovered cockpit voice recordings, the report said one of the pilots can be heard asking “why did you cut off?” – to which the other pilot replied he “did not do so”.

The preliminary report states its role is “not to apportion blame or liability”.

Also on Monday, the Reuters news agency reported that South Korea was waiting to order all airlines in the country which operate Boeing jets to examine fuel switches.