Israeli authorities have put an extremist Jewish settler into detention for five months without charges or trial to head off violence aimed at stopping Israel's Gaza Strip pullout, and a newspaper reported yesterday that dozens more suspected militants could be arrested.
Israeli frequently uses the practice, known as administrative detention, against Palestinians it considers as a security threat, but it rarely employs it against Jews. But with Jewish extremists planning to resist the summer pullout, the army and politicians have discussed using the detentions to contain expected violence.
On Sunday, police arrested Neria Ofan, a 34-year-old West Bank settler, at an army roadblock, and said they plan to hold him until the end of September. Officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said Ofan was suspected of "involvement in terror."
Ofan's wife, Naomi, told Israel Army Radio the detention was part of a campaign to muzzle opponents.
The Haaretz newspaper reported that Israeli army officers want to place dozens of Jewish extremists under administrative detention. Sharon aide Ilan Cohen told Army Radio there would not be "wholesale administrative detentions, on the contrary," but did not explain further.
Ofan, who has been questioned by police in the past though never charged, advocates Jewish control of a disputed Jerusalem holy site, known to Jews as Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif. Extremist Jews have threatened to storm the shrine in the summer to divert police and soldiers from Gaza to Jerusalem, and thereby stop the pullout.
Israeli police prepared for possible clashes between Jews and Muslims yesterday at the holy site, a flashpoint for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. A small group of Jewish extremists, Revava, had initially said its supporters would attempt to enter the shrine at the start of each month on the Jewish calendar.
A handful of demonstrators showed up the shrine a month ago, and were kept out by police. Access to Israelis has been restricted since Israel captured east Jerusalem and its holy sites in the 1967 Mideast war.
Yesterday, which marks the start of the month of Iyar on the Jewish calendar, no demonstrators showed up. However, police severely restricted access to Muslims, in order to prevent possible friction.
Police clashed briefly yesterday morning with 200 Palestinians who had gathered nearby to protest the restrictions. The Palestinians threw stones and bottles at police, who responded with stun grenades. Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres, meanwhile, warned that destroying Jewish settlers' homes in Gaza could jeopardize the planned Israeli pullout from the area this summer.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS