America
Blinken urges Israel to take steps to avoid civilian casualties as Gaza death toll soars.
Secretary of State of the United States Antony Blinken urged Israel on Friday to take action to safeguard people in Gaza as Israeli troops continued to attack the Palestinian territory and the number of citizens dying increased.
After surrounding Gaza City to eradicate the Islamist organization that rules the tiny, heavily populated region, the Israeli military announced that its soldiers were engaging in close-quarters battles with Hamas terrorists in the destroyed streets.
During the night, Israeli forces also bombarded Gaza from the air, sea, and land as concern over shortages, failing healthcare systems and the now-over 9,000 civilian deaths worldwide increased.
Blinken was making his second trip to the area in less than a month to assist Israel, a close friend, in responding to the Hamas militant onslaught on southern Israeli villages on October 7, which claimed the lives of almost 1,400 people and started the conflict.
Blinken reaffirmed that Israel has the right to “do everything possible” to make sure that an assault of this nature never occurs before meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
However, he stated: “It is very important when it comes to the protection of civilians who are caught in the crossfire of Hamas’s making that everything be done to protect them and to bring assistance to those who so desperately need it, who are not in any way responsible for what happened on October 7.”
Although the conflict is now on its 28th day, Washington has rejected pleas from the Arab world and several other countries for a complete truce. Instead, Washington wants more brief, localized pauses in the fighting to enable humanitarian assistance into Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas.
In Gaza, thousands of people have fled their homes to avoid the constant bombing; buildings have been destroyed; and food, gasoline, water, and medication are running low.
Aid organizations have issued warnings that the longest-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict is entering its deadliest episode in decades and that a humanitarian disaster is developing.
Before meeting with members of Israel’s emergency cabinet, which was established in the wake of the Hamas attack, Blinken also had a nearly hour-long conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Gaza health officials, since Israel began its onslaught on the 2.3 million-person enclave in retribution for Hamas’s assault in southern Israel, at least 9,227 people—many of them women and children—have died.
According to Israel, the worst day in the organization’s 75-year existence saw 1,400 deaths, primarily among civilians, and more than 240 captives taken by the Iran-backed Hamas.
ENDANGERED
According to the Israeli military, when its forces and tanks moved into Gaza, they came across explosives and booby traps. Hamas gunmen were using a vast network of underground tunnels to carry out hit-and-run attacks.
Mustafa Dalul, a Hamas leader who was allegedly in charge of overseeing warfare in Gaza, was among the terrorists killed as Israeli warplanes, artillery, and navy bombarded Hamas sites throughout the night. Hamas did not immediately provide confirmation.
The traditional Hamas stronghold in Gaza City was encircled, said military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
“The soldiers are advancing in battles, during which they are destroying terror infrastructure above and below ground and eliminating terrorists,” he stated in a briefing.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, another spokesperson, stated that they were engaged in a convoluted urban conflict. “It’s very, very close-quarter combat between our troops and Hamas operatives.”
Israel claims that the attack has cost it 23 troops.
Hamas and its affiliate Islamic Jihad claimed that its militants engaged in furious urban warfare around collapsed houses and piles of rubble, detonating bombs against advancing troops, dropping grenades from drones, and firing mortars and anti-tank rockets.
A local journalist for the official Palestine TV and at least nine members of his immediate family were murdered in their home after an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, according to family members and health authorities.
One of the few Arab nations with diplomatic links to Israel, the United Arab Emirates, declared on Friday that it was working “relentlessly” for a rapid ceasefire and issued a warning about the possibility of regional spillover and additional escalation.
Israel has refused these requests, claiming that it targets Hamas fighters, who it believes are hiding among Gaza’s civilian buildings and population.
On Saturday in Amman, Blinken is scheduled to meet with Ayman Safadi, the foreign minister of Jordan. In a statement, Safadi demanded that Israel halt its attack on Gaza, claiming that by bombing people and enforcing a siege, Israel was committing war crimes.
BRICKING
Under an agreement mediated by Qatar, the Rafah gate between Gaza and Egypt was scheduled to reopen for limited evacuations on Friday. The purpose of the accord was to allow some foreign passport holders, their families, and a few injured Gazans to leave the enclave.
Seven hundred foreign nationals departed for Egypt via Rafah during the two preceding days, according to border officials. Numerous Palestinians with severe injuries were also scheduled to cross.
Additionally, Israel returned some 7,000 Palestinian laborers who had been employed in Israel and the West Bank before October 7 to Gaza via the southern Kerem Shalom border. Employees said Israeli officials had imprisoned and mistreated them.
In addition, Hagari said that Israel was “extremely ready” along its northern border with Lebanon, where terrorists supported by Iran were waging war to deflect attention away from the Gaza conflict.
The UN human rights office deemed the situation in the occupied West Bank “alarming” on Friday. It noted that Israeli authorities were increasingly using military tools and methods in their efforts to enforce the law.
It stated that 124 Israeli soldiers and 8 Israeli settlers murdered at least 132 Palestinians, including 41 children, in the West Bank. There were also two Israeli troops slain.
The Palestinians confined to Gaza City hoped for an early peace.
One person replied, “Does the world wait for Israel to massacre hundreds of thousands of people who refuse to leave their homes, who have no guilt but don’t want to leave their country?”
On Thursday, China said that the Biden administration’s intention to restrict the amount of Chinese content in batteries eligible for significant tax incentives for electric vehicles beginning next year violates international trade rules and will cause disruptions in global supply chains.
According to the proposals, investors in the supply chain for electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States will be ineligible for tax credits if they utilize more than a trace quantity of crucial materials from China or other nations that are considered to be a “Foreign Entity of Concern” (FEOC).
According to He Yadong, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Commerce, “targeting Chinese enterprises by excluding their products from the scope of a subsidy is a typical example of a policy that is not market-oriented.”
“Many World Trade Organization members, including China, have expressed concern about the discriminatory policy of the U.S., which violates the WTO’s basic principles,” said the representative.
As a result of China’s preeminent position in the global battery supply chain, policymakers in the United States and Europe have taken action in response to concerns that low-cost electric vehicles manufactured in China will flood their respective markets.
The European Commission is currently conducting investigations to determine whether Chinese businesses receive improper state subsidies.
Two laws have already been approved in Washington that expressly exclude investors from being able to profit from a $6 billion allocation of tax credits for batteries and essential minerals, as well as subsidies of $7,500 for every new energy vehicle manufactured, should they use FEOCs in their supply chains. These laws make it clear that investors are not eligible to get these benefits.
Specifically, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are included in this category. The regulations will go into force in 2024 for batteries that have been built and in 2025 for materials that are considered important.
The administration of Vice President Joe Biden of the United States of America is also recommending strict guidelines, one of which is a threshold of 25% ownership, to determine whether a corporation is under the control of an FEOC.
“By establishing ‘glass barriers’, the U.S. is doing more harm than good to the development of EV technologies and the industry more broadly,” he stated, pointing out that the proposals would “seriously disrupt international trade and investment” .
It is estimated that China is responsible for roughly two-thirds of the world’s lithium processing capacity and seventy-five percent of the world’s cobalt capacity. Both of these elements are utilized in the production of batteries.
Analysts, on the other hand, have questioned whether the hyperbole that the United States and the European Union are using on the possible hazards is warranted by China’s role in global battery supply chains.
“There is a great deal of exaggeration surrounding this. Dan Marks, a research fellow for energy security at the Royal United Services think tank, stated that he is uncertain whether the actions that the European Union or the United States are contemplating are proportionate to the magnitude of the risk.
It is more accurate to argue that the strategies being implemented in Europe and the United States are, in fact, industrial strategies. Simply put, they are concerned with having industries that are competitive and able to endure.
After receiving warnings from Democrats and some Republicans that the United States of America was in danger of becoming an autocracy if he were to win the election in 2024, Donald Trump stated on Tuesday that he will not become a dictator until “on day one” if he is elected president of the United States of America again.
To disprove the assertion that he would misuse authority to get vengeance on his adversaries if he were to be re-elected to the White House, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was questioned twice during a town hall meeting broadcast on television in Iowa.
No, no, no. In response to a question on whether or not he would become a “dictator” if he were to win the election in November, Trump stated, “Aside from day one.”
Trump stated that he would utilize his presidential powers to block the southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling on the “day one” that he was referring to.
Trump, who is running for a second term in the White House and is expected to face Democratic Vice President Joe Biden in a rematch election, has repeatedly pledged to exact “retribution” on his political adversaries if he can regain power.
In campaign speeches and television appearances this year, he stated that his targets include Vice President Joe Biden, prosecutors who have charged him with scores of felonies, the Department of Justice, and the federal bureaucracy.
One of the most prominent candidates for the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump, was appearing at a Fox News event in Davenport, Iowa, in front of a welcoming audience. Davenport is the state in which the Republican Party’s nomination process will begin on January 15.
Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the campaign manager for Joe Biden, issued a statement as soon as the event ended. She stated, “Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he is re-elected, and tonight he said that he will be a dictator on day one.” Americans must believe him.
Donald Trump, who served as President of the United States from 2017 to 2021, has refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden defeated him in the election of 2020.
Since then, Trump has been spreading false accusations that the election in 2020 was stolen from him. This conspiracy was the driving force for the violent uprising that took place on January 6, 2021, in the United States Capitol, which Trump loyalists spearheaded. The lies that Trump told throughout the election are also a central tenet of his present campaign for the White House.
During a televised discussion that will take place on Wednesday at the University of Alabama at 7 p.m. Central Standard Time (0100 GMT), Trump’s opponents for the nomination, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, will be there.
The event will be skipped by Trump, just as he has done for the three Republican debates before it.
Biden has frequently expressed his concern that Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy and that a second term for Trump might bring in an era of authoritarianism in the United States that is unprecedented and perhaps deadly.
In comments with the media this week, former United States Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who is a vocal opponent of President Trump and who co-chaired the congressional investigation into the attack on the Capitol, stated that a Trump dictatorship is a “very real threat” if he is re-elected. Cheney is a member of the Republican candidate for president.
During his trip to Israel, Elon Musk, who had been criticized for an anti-Jewish remark on his social networking platform X, was presented with a symbolic dog tag by the father of an Israeli who had been held captive by Hamas in Gaza. Musk committed the dog tag until all of the pages were released.
“Our hearts are hostage in Gaza,” read the metal tag that Musk got from Malki Shem-Tov, the father of Omer Shem-Tov, who is now being held as a hostage. The office of Israeli President Isaac Herzog released the footage of Musk’s visit on Monday.
The bracelet was wrapped around Musk’s neck. In the latter hours of Monday, he posted a message on X that said, “I will wear it every day until your loved ones are released.”
The dog tags, which are widely distributed across Israel, are a reminder of the cross-border death spree that Hamas carried out on October 7, during which 240 individuals were hauled back to Gaza.
On November 15, Musk expressed his agreement with a post that made a false allegation that Jewish people were inciting hatred against white people. He stated that the poster who mentioned the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was using “the actual truth” in their statement.
Immediately after the post, significant corporations in the United States, such as Walt Disney (DIS.N), Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD.O), and Comcast (CMCSA.O), the parent company of NBCUniversal, decided to cease their ads on X, which was once known as Twitter.
An “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans” was what the White House of the United States of America referred to as Musk’s actions.
Musk has indicated that he is opposed to antisemitism and anything that “promotes hate and conflict.” He has also stated that X would not promote hate speech.
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