
US mission warns of threats to Jewish, Israeli communities in UAE
On July 31, Israel's National Security Headquarters upgraded its travel warning for Israelis in the Gulf country, saying: "terrorist organizations are operating with increased intensity these days in efforts to harm Israel".
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Times
8 hours ago
- Times
Trump dropped ceasefire demand ‘because so much progress was made'
President Trump dropped his demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine because so much progress had been achieved in negotiations with Russia, his special envoy Steve Witkoff has claimed. Trump had insisted before his meeting with President Putin in Alaska that he would walk out if Russia did not agree to a ceasefire, and he faced widespread criticism in the United States over the weekend for apparently backing down from this demand. In a series of posts on social media on Sunday, the president said he 'had a great meeting in Alaska' and complained that 'if I got Russia to give up Moscow as part of the Deal, the Fake News and their PARTNER, the Radical Left Democrats, would say I made a terrible mistake'. Witkoff, who was present at the meeting, claimed that the lack of a ceasefire deal showed how much progress had been made during the negotiations.


Sky News
8 hours ago
- Sky News
'Not in our name': Israelis protest against Gaza war - but Netanyahu seems unmoved
The coordinates came through last minute. The instruction was to get there fast. People organising demonstrations, blocking motorways and major intersections, did not want police getting wind of their plans. The one we found ourselves at, near the town of Lod, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, felt a bit like a flash-mob protest, done and dusted in less than half an hour. The protestors had set fire to tyres, which blazed across the motorway, filling the sky with thick black smoke. They waved the Israeli flag and other yellow flags to show solidarity with the remaining hostages still in Gaza, whose photos they carried - their faces and names seared on the collective consciousness now - a collective trauma. "We want the war to end, we want our hostages back, we want our soldiers back safe home, and we want the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end", one of the protestors told me. "We do not want to have these crimes made in our name." And then she was gone, off to the next location as the group vanished in a matter of minutes, leaving police to put out the fire. This was a day of stoppage, a nationwide strike - a change of tactics by the hostage families to up the ante with the government in their calls to stop the war, make a deal and bring the hostages home. Benjamin Netanyahu was unmoved. "Those who are calling for an end to the war today without defeating Hamas are not only hardening Hamas's stance and delaying the release of our hostages, they are also ensuring that the horrors of October 7 will recur again and again", he said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting. Netanyahu 'broke contract' with us Ahead of the day of strike action, we spoke to a former Air Force reservist who quit in April in protest over Netanyahu's decision to break the ceasefire. "I felt he hadn't broken the contract with Hamas, he'd broken the contract with us - with the people, releasing the hostages, stopping the war. That was my breaking point." He wanted to be anonymous, identifying himself by the call sign 'F'. He had done three tours since the war began, mostly spent with eyes on Gaza - coordinating air strikes to support ground operations and ensuring the Air Force gets the target right. 2:55 'This is eternal war' "It's very complicated, very demanding and very hectic. The main problem is to see that you follow the rules and there are lots of rules - safety rules, international law rules, military doctrine rules. "And to see that there are no mistakes because you can check all the rules, you can make everything perfect, if there's a mistake, it bypasses everything you did and the bomb would fall on someone you didn't want it to fall on." I ask him how he feels about the huge death toll in Gaza. "Look, the uninvolved death toll is tough. It's tough personally, it's tough emotionally, it's tough professionally. It shouldn't happen. "When you conduct a war at this scale, it will happen. It will happen because of mistakes, because of the chaos of war." 1:05 He is softly spoken, considered and thoughtful, but says he's prepared to take part in the more radical protest actions, such as blocking motorways and starting fires, to try and get the message through. "Hamas is probably the weakest enemy we have had since 1948," he says. "In '48, in the liberation of Israel, we fought seven armies, much better equipped, better ordered than us, and the war took less time. "We stopped the war with Iran after 12 days. They are much more dangerous than Hamas. We stopped a war with Hezbollah in a couple of months, and they are still a much bigger threat than Hamas.


The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
Ex-Israeli intelligence chief said 50 Palestinians must die for every 7 October victim
The Israeli general who headed military intelligence on 7 October 2023 has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day and 'it does not matter now if they are children', in recordings broadcast by Israel's Channel 12 TV station. Aharon Haliva said the toll in Gaza, which he put at more than 50,000 dead, was 'necessary' as a 'message to future generations' of Palestinians. 'They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price,' he added, referring to the mass expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands after the creation of Israel in 1948. Nakba means catastrophe in Arabic. Much of Israel's leadership and media has used genocidal rhetoric about Palestinians since Hamas's 7 October attacks, including describing them as 'human animals', saying there are 'no innocents' in Gaza and calling for Gaza's total destruction and its ethnic cleansing. However, Haliva's description of a campaign of mass killing including children was an unusually direct description of collective punishment of civilians, which is illegal under international law. Haliva, who stepped down from his position in April 2024, also appeared to endorse the casualty figures compiled by health authorities in Gaza, which Israeli officials regularly attack as propaganda. They have proved reliable in past conflicts. Channel 12 said the undated conversations were recorded 'in recent months'. The Gaza health ministry's toll for those killed by Israeli attacks passed 50,000 in March and has recently climbed above 60,000. Israel's most recent published data on the war put the number of militants killed at about 20,000, so Haliva would have been aware that even by his country's own count most of the Palestinians killed were civilians. 'The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,' he said in the broadcast comments. 'For everything that happened on October 7th, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn't matter now if they are children.' About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led cross-border attacks, the majority of them civilians, and 250 were taken hostage to Gaza. Channel 12 did not clarify how it had obtained the recordings or who Haliva was speaking with. Israel's Haaretz newspaper described the recordings as a format that allowed the retired officer to 'give an interview … without actually being interviewed'. Haliva's comments about mass killings of Palestinian civilians did not make headlines in other mainstream Israeli outlets. They focused instead on his criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and warnings of systemic failures in security and intelligence. That coverage highlighted the vast gulf between how the war is perceived and discussed inside Israel's borders and beyond them. Among Israelis, Haliva is widely seen as a centrist critic of the current government and its far-right ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, as the general himself noted in the broadcast comments. He quoted an internal critic at the intelligence directorate telling him it was 'lucky' that many of those killed and kidnapped on 7 October 2023 were leftwing Israelis linked to peace movements. 'He told me: 'If this had happened to us, the right, you wouldn't have gone to war like this,'' Haliva said. 'That's what people believe here.' Quique Kierszenbaum contributed to this report