In Ramallah, German top diplomat warns Israel not to annex West Bank
Wadephul also strongly condemned the increasing violence by Jewish settlers against the Palestinian population.
After a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, the conservative politician emphasized, "We support the right of the Palestinians to have their own state at the end of a political process."
Wadephul said that Germany is ready to actively support the reconstruction process after the end of the Gaza war. For this, he said, a renewal of the democratic legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority is necessary.
However, the authority must not be financially starved. Wadephul called on the Israeli government to transfer withheld tax revenues, which rightfully belong to the Palestinians, to the authority.
The Palestinian extremist organization Hamas should not play a political role in a future Palestinian state, he added.
Germany will not recognize annexations
The source of concerns about annexation are statements by Israeli politicians and a recently passed resolution by the parliament. In it, the right-wing religious government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is urged to extend the "sovereignty" of the state of Israel to all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
"We clearly reject any annexation fantasies, whether for Gaza or the West Bank, which are also brought forward by parts of the Israeli government," Wadephul said. "They would not be recognized by Germany."
Condemnation of Israeli settler violence in West Bank
Wadephul sharply condemned violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, as he visited the village of Taybeh earlier in the day.
"Such acts are crimes, they are terror and they finally need to be prosecuted," Wadephul said, adding his visit to the West Bank community was "a sign of solidarity with all people suffering under settler violence."
Taybeh has been repeatedly attacked by Israeli settlers over the past few months, amid a surge in violence directed at Palestinian communities in the occupied territories since the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
"As an occupying power and a constitutional state, Israel must enforce security and order and prosecute offences," said Wadephul.
"It must protect the Palestinian population from these offenders," he urged, adding that Berlin is in favour of imposing further sanctions on violent settlers at EU level.
The situation in the West Bank has significantly worsened since the start of the Gaza war. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 960 Palestinians have been killed there in Israeli military operations, armed clashes and attacks by extremists.
Germany pledges another €5 million in Gaza aid
Germany is set to provide another €5 million ($5.7 million) in aid for the civilian population in the Gaza Strip, Wadephul said at the start of the second day of his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories on Friday.
Wadephul said the money would go to the UN's World Food Programme to be used primarily for "bakeries and soup kitchens to provide the people of Gaza with bread and hot meals in the medium term."
Berlin also plans to fund a field hospital run by the Order of Malta to provide urgently needed basic health care in Gaza City, the minister added.
Foreign minister calls for close cooperation with UN
Wadephul called on the Israeli government to quickly resume close cooperation with the United Nations and its organizations on the ground to improve the distribution of humanitarian aid in the embattled Gaza Strip.
UN staff had "clearly shown that they are able to provide sufficient supplies to all people in Gaza if they are allowed to do so and if they can work in safety," he said.
According to the German Foreign Office, German humanitarian aid for the Palestinian Territories has totalled more than €330 million since the start of the fighting in Gaza in October 2023.
More than 95% of the money is used for the population in the Gaza Strip, it said. Most recently, aid was increased by up to nearly €31 million in May.
German military planes begin air drop over Gaza
German military aircraft have begun dropping aid over the Gaza Strip, the Defence Ministry said on Friday, as Berlin joins international efforts to relieve the dire humanitarian situation there.
The transport aircraft dropped 34 pallets containing almost 14 metric tons of food and medical supplies, the ministry said.
The air drops come amid outrage over the deteriorating conditions in Gaza, which the United Nations has warned is on the brink of famine.
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New York Post
36 minutes ago
- New York Post
Accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is a luxury belief— and utterly divorced from reality when there's a real one happening in Ukraine
Accusing Israel of trying to annihilate the Palestinian people is a luxury belief. Liberals should call out Hamas and Russia instead of carping about Netanyahu and Zelensky. Which do you care more about — victory, or your own moral superiority? Which do you prefer — defeating our foes, or your own home comforts? There are wars raging today. Two democracies — imperfect, no doubt, but free societies by comparison with their foes — are battling two allied tyrannies. Defeat for Israel and Ukraine would mean obliteration, extinction. For the US and the UK, and indeed for the EU, the destruction of Israel and Ukraine would be more than inconveniences. Such outcomes would significantly worsen the West's strategic position and strengthen that of the axis of authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. And yet our support for these two democracies is at best equivocal and at worst hypocritical. Twenty-two months after the slaughter of the innocents by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, murderous appendages of the Islamic Republic of Iran, western liberals join the Iranians and the apologists for Hamas by sanctimoniously and erroneously accusing Israel of genocide. To add insult to injury, the governments of France, Britain and Canada announce their intention — unconditional in the French case — to recognise a Palestinian state when the UN general assembly convenes in September. Not content with passing this judgment on the government of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, they then turn their pious scrutiny to that of President Volodymyr Zelensky, accusing him of being insufficiently tough on corruption — even while western companies continue to profit from their commerce with the vastly more corrupt fascist regime of President Putin, and while the continued flow of western arms to Ukraine depends on internecine wrangles between government departments in Washington. These sentiments can be summed up together under one heading: the new defeatism. They are the moral posturing of politicians and publicists more concerned with flaunting their own confused ethics than with helping the democracies to beat the authoritarians. The phrase 'luxury beliefs' was coined by the brilliant young psychologist Rob Henderson to sum up the more preposterous ideas that progressives can afford to hold — 'Defund the police!' 'Open borders!' 'Men can become women!' — because they are largely sheltered from the consequences when such ideas are put into practice. Accusing Israel of genocide and recognising a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of western foreign policy, elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality. Let us begin with the fallacious claim that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza — a claim long made by Iran and its proxies but now echoed on an almost daily basis by left-wing politicians, as well as a growing number of right-wing populists, and amplified by liberal media from the BBC to the New York Times. This claim is fast becoming consensus. In December 2024, Amnesty International published a report claiming that Israel 'has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians' in Gaza. That is also the view of Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza. And the South African government has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The worse the images from Gaza, the more people join the chorus, including now some reputable writers. The Israeli scholar of genocide Shmuel Lederman; Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; the British scholar Martin Shaw; the Australian scholar A Dirk Moses; Raz Segal, programme director of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, New Jersey; the historians Amos Goldberg and Daniel Blatman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last week Omer Bartov, an eminent historian of the Holocaust who teaches at Brown University, published a representative essay in the New York Times with the title: 'I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know it When I See it.' He argues that the Israeli government's goal is 'to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the territory through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.' His 'inescapable conclusion' is that 'Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people'. Well, as the author of War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (2006), I am qualified to disagree. The war in Gaza is brutal — a kind of siege that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas went on its rampage of murder, rape and kidnapping. One can criticise the way Israel has waged this war. One can note the impossibility of simultaneously rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas. One can lament the extreme difficulty of defeating an enemy that lurks in tunnels, habitually uses civilians for cover and steals much of the aid sent into Gaza. But one cannot call this nasty war genocide. Genocide is a word dating back to 1944, when it was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish refugee from Nazism, whose family was all but obliterated in the Holocaust (49 of his relatives died, including his parents; only his brother and his brother's wife and children survived). In her 2002 book, A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power movingly described this haunted man's single-handed campaign to turn his made-up word into a foundation of postwar international law. In 1948 it seemed that Lemkin had triumphed when the UN general assembly unanimously passed the 'Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,' though it was not adopted by the US until 1985. Lemkin's original definition of genocide was: a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity […] Article II of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to mean 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such': (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. One may claim that the Israel Defence Forces are doing at least three of these things. But is it the IDF's intention 'to destroy, in whole or in part' the Palestinians as a people? John Spencer, professor of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York, has been to Gaza four times, embedded with the IDF. He has interviewed the prime minister, the defence minister, the chief of staff, the Southern Command leadership, and dozens of officers and soldiers on the front lines. In his words: 'Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent … [Their orders] focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible … [Indeed] Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or cancelled because children were nearby.' Moreover, contrary to the propaganda that the IDF is wilfully inflicting starvation and famine on Gaza, 'Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime.' Omer Bartov is a first-class historian. His book, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (2001), is a searing work. He of all people should understand the fundamental difference between the IDF and Hitler's murderous legions. Now, if it is genocide you want to see, I recommend you pay a visit to the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. There I can easily demonstrate that the Russian government intends to eradicate a distinct Ukrainian identity. That has been explicit since Putin published his essay 'On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians' in 2021. And all five methods of genocide are being deployed against the Ukrainian people, including 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'. To be precise: in March of this year, the Ukrainian government was able to verify that 19,456 Ukrainian children had been taken from occupied Ukraine to Russia since the beginning of the war. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab puts the number closer to 35,000. According to the Institute for the Study of War, 'Russia is using at least 43 children's camps throughout Russia to house deported children, at least 32 of which are explicitly 're-education' facilities.' Evidence from Russian sources shows that many of these children are being put up for adoption, a process that strips them of their Ukrainian names and birthplaces. For teenage Ukrainian boys, forced Russification can lead to near-immediate conscription to fight in the Russian army against their fellow Ukrainians. The Israeli government does not intend to kill Palestinian civilians. The Russian government does intend to kill Ukrainian civilians. In recent months, there has been an unprecedented level of missile and drone attacks on civilian targets all over Ukraine. According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU), June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in three years, with 232 people killed and 1,343 injured. Russia launched ten times as many missile and loitering munitions attacks against Ukraine as in June last year. In all, 6,754 civilians were killed or injured in the first half of 2025, a 54 per cent rise from the corresponding period in 2024. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, HRMMU has documented the deaths of at least 13,580 civilians, including 716 children. I wish those people (including at least one well-known British historian) who spend a significant part of each day posting and reposting clickbait about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza could spare a thought for the real genocide that is going on in eastern Europe right now. But Friday's Guardian captured the twisted priorities of the liberal conscience. The lead: 'The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza.' Well down the running order (below 'Justin Timberlake reveals Lyme disease diagnosis'): 'Zelenskyy calls for 'regime change' in Russia after attack on Kyiv kills 16' and 'Kyiv protesters celebrate as parliament votes to restore anti-corruption bodies' power'. That's right: Ukraine is a democracy. Voters can take to the streets and force a change of government policy. The same is true of Israel, where protests against Netanyahu occur in Jerusalem more frequently than air raid warnings. But what about Gaza? Beginning in March, brave Gazans dared to protest against Hamas's reign of murder and theft. The difference is that these protests were met with violence and intimidation — and they changed nothing. This is what makes French, British and Canadian talk of recognising a Palestinian state such a perfect example of a luxury belief. For nothing remotely resembling a Palestinian state exists today. Nor is one likely to exist at any point in the foreseeable future. Thirty years ago, under the Oslo Accords, Israel agreed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation on the beginnings of Palestinian self-government — 'a separate Palestinian entity short of a state', in the words of the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One of his successors, Ehud Barak, went even further at Camp David in 2000. But then PLO leader Yasser Arafat walked away from the table. Have the Palestinians strengthened the case for statehood in the subsequent years? No. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is an oxymoron; Palestinians despise it, and it has no authority. Hamas continues to enjoy significant support in both Gaza and (some polls suggest even more) the West Bank. True, satisfaction with Hamas in Gaza was down from 64 per cent a year ago to 43 per cent in May, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, but that was still higher than satisfaction with their rivals Fatah or the PA. Asked if they supported or opposed the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, 64 per cent of Gazans said they were opposed. Yet the true nature of Hamas was laid bare on October 7, 2023, which should be regarded — and is regarded by most Israelis I know — as an event disqualifying the Palestinians from self-government, not entitling them to it. Nine out of ten Palestinians simply deny the October 7 atrocities took place. A defining feature of with luxuries is that they are expensive. The same is true of luxury beliefs. The belief that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza, like the belief that a Palestinian state can be wished into existence by western leaders, is a Hermès handbag of an idea. It is on a par with the belief that peace can somehow be brokered between Ukraine and Russia without the application of meaningful economic and military pressure on Moscow, an idea that is more of a Patek Philippe watch. Expend energy on such luxury beliefs and you will not notice the help you are giving the axis of authoritarians to bring about the defeat of the West. Nor will you notice the help they are giving you — through the social media channels they know so well how to manipulate — to be the useful idiot you are.
Miami Herald
38 minutes ago
- Miami Herald
Gaza starvation: Like that meme, we're all trying to find out who did this
As it turns out, humans, even Palestinians, need food to live. But before we discuss such a lofty dispensation 21 months into a near-total blockade of humanitarian aid, a brief bit of levity: For my money, the best sketch comedy show out isn't 'Saturday Night Live,' but former 'SNL' writer Tim Robinson's 'I Think You Should Leave.' Robinson specializes in constructing surrealist, cringe-inducing social nightmares, then extracting side-splitting comedy with an extremely committed performance with a flawless, unforgettable one-liner. One of the show's most memorable sketches, 'Hot Dog Car,' starts with a mysterious hot dog-shaped car crashing into a clothing store. The whodunit is solved within seconds as Robinson emerges with a series of excessive and absurd denials that the car is not his — all while wearing a hot dog costume. 'Now, we're all trying to find the guy who did this,' he claims, rejecting his obvious culpability while clumsily portraying himself as someone zealous to find the real culprit. Epitomizing the Shakespearean embarrassment of a man who 'doth protest too much,' nobody at the store is convinced. Anyway, fun's over. Back to the genocide. Roughly 2.1 million people remain in Gaza, and according to the UN World Food Programme, a third of those have gone multiple days in a row without food. Doctors Without Borders says 100,000 women and children are suffering severe acute malnutrition. Gazans do not have food for the same reason they do not have medicine; for the same reason they do not have homes or hospitals or schools or mosques or churches. It's the same reason they do not have electricity or fuel (which means they do not have water), the same reason they don't have journalists on the ground able to tell you what happened to these things they used to have. While I appreciate those who have acknowledged that no children should have their ribcages poking through their skin — an ideological spectrum that stretches from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump — this reality was obvious to many millions of Americans who took to the streets and student halls in protest months and years ago. As Jewish Currents writer David Klion notes, a larger consensus around the atrocities of the war would have been far more useful then than now. The Biden administration dismissed lawmakers who called for an immediate ceasefire as 'repugnant' and 'disgraceful.' Those who protested the governments responsible for restricting the safe passage of food — including the Palestinians watching their people go hungry and the Jews who bore witness — were collectively characterized as antisemites. As the bombs fell and the food dwindled, then-President Joe Biden insisted Israel 'wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection.' Some who begrudgingly admit that Gazans are starving lay the blame primarily at the feet of Hamas militants who provoked Israel's ongoing siege when they killed about 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 hostages. If only Hamas would simply release the hostages, then everyone else (including the hostages) would have food, the argument goes. Even assuming most spoken and implied false premises about the nature of this conflict were correct — such as the charge that Hamas won't agree to ceasefire proposals or that Israel does not itself have thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charges — it operates under the fundamental logic of collective punishment, a notion that civilians should suffer for the choices made by their government. Consider the implications anywhere else. If you happen to read this on or in our print edition, chances are high that your governor pardoned a white supremacist murderer and agreed to build literal concentration camps. Vile acts of discrimination and tacit support for terrorism at best. Systemic stripping of human rights at worst. All escalations towards lethal violence we all decry. I personally would not like to be punished in any regard for the decisions of any elected official, even one as charming as Greg Abbott. Palestinians deserve that, too. There is no lone culprit or solitary super villain. But since November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court, a judicial body representing 125 countries on charges of, among others, 'starvation as a method of warfare.' None of those accusations stopped a bipartisan group of senators, some of whom mourned the fatally malnourished on social media, from meeting with Bibi and, naturally, posing for the 'gram. Our valiant detectives are assuredly, to quote Hot Dog Guy, 'trying to find the guy who did this.' I wish them well on their chase.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
OPEC+ agrees big output hike to finish unwinding round of cuts
(Bloomberg) — OPEC+ agreed on another bumper oil production increase for September, completing its current tranche of supply revival one year early as the group moves to reclaim its share of global crude markets. The World's Data Center Capital Has Residents Surrounded An Abandoned Art-Deco Landmark in Buffalo Awaits Revival We Should All Be Biking Along the Beach Seeking Relief From Heat and Smog, Cities Follow the Wind NYC Mayor Adams Gives Bally's Bronx Casino Plan a Second Chance Saudi Arabia and its partners agreed on a video conference to add about 548,000 barrels a day next month, delegates said. This completes the reversal of a 2.2 million-barrel cutback made by eight members in 2023, and also includes an extra allowance being phased by the United Arab Emirates. Another layer of about 1.66-million barrels of halted output will be reviewed by the end of December, one of the delegates said. The latest hike caps a dramatic shift from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its partners from defending prices to opening the taps, which has helped put a lid on oil and gasoline futures in the face of geopolitical tensions and strong seasonal demand, offering some relief for drivers and a win for US President Donald Trump. The accelerated increases have helped fuel expectations for a global supply surplus later in the year. Sunday's decision, confirming an agreement in principle first reported on Saturday by Bloomberg, also comes as President Trump intensifies diplomatic pressure on OPEC+ co-leader Russia. Trump has threatened Moscow with secondary tariffs on its oil customers unless there is a swift ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. A disruption to Russian flows would threaten to drive up crude prices and run counter to Trump's repeated call for cheaper oil, as he pushes the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates. Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak made a rare visit to Riyadh on Thursday to discuss 'cooperation between the countries' with Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. The two countries have jointly led OPEC+ since its creation almost a decade ago. How Podcast-Obsessed Tech Investors Made a New Media Industry Everyone Loves to Hate Wind Power. Scotland Found a Way to Make It Pay Off Russia Builds a New Web Around Kremlin's Handpicked Super App Cage-Free Eggs Are Booming in the US, Despite Cost and Trump's Efforts What's Really Behind Those Rosy GDP Numbers? ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
