clataffairs

The United Nation's top human rights body will launch an international investigation into potential "war crimes" committed during an 11- day conflict between Israel and militant group Hamas in Gaza.  The resolution calls for the creation of a "Commission of Inquiry" to report on rights violations in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. The commission will also investigate "underlying root causes" for recurring tensions in the region. China and Russia supported the resolution while some Western and African countries voted against it. UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights is a department of the Secretariat of the United Nations. It works to promote and protect human rights that are guaranteed under international law and stipulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.  The office was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 December 1993 in the wake of the 1...

A ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas has come into effect.  The ceasefire was brokered by Egypt. This was after the U.S. pressed Israel to wind down the offensive. The ceasefire began early on 21st May, bringing to an end 11 days of bombardment in which more than 240 people have died, most of them in Gaza.  Both Israel and Hamas have claimed victory in the conflict.  COST OF THE RECENT CONFLICT Gaza’s housing ministry said that 16,800 housing units had been damaged.  Residents were estimated to be getting 3-4 hours of power versus 12 hours before the hostilities.  The Hamas media office estimated the bombardments had caused $40 million in damage to factories.  The United Nations and aid groups said Palestinians now had limited or no access to water facilities. ANALYSIS OF THE CLASH AND CEASEFIRE The last major fighting between Israel and Hamas ...

INDIA-ISRAEL RELATIONS In 1948, India was the only non-Arab-state among 13 countries that voted against the UN partition plan of Palestine in the General Assembly that led to the creation of Israel. India had given recognition of Israel in 1950 but without full diplomatic ties. PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s reasoning for the decision to recognise Israel was that it was “an established fact”, and that not doing so would create rancour between two UN members. The opening of an Indian embassy in Tel Aviv in January 1992 marked an end to four decades of giving Israel the cold shoulder.  For two-and-a-half decades from 1992, the India-Israel relationship continued to grow, mostly through defence deals, and in sectors such as science and technology and agriculture. In 2000, L K Advani became the first Indian minister to visit Israel. It was during NDA-2 that the government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to take full ownership of the relationship with Israel.  In 2016, India abst...

India’s permanent representative to the United Nations, T S Tirumurti, made a carefully crafted statement at the UN Security Council “open debate” on the escalating Israel-Palestine violence. He strived to maintain balance between India’s historic ties with Palestine and its blossoming relations with Israel. BALANCING The statement, the first India has made on the issue, appears to implicitly hold Israel responsible for triggering the current cycle of violence by locating its beginnings in East Jerusalem, referring to the clashes in the Al-­Aqsa compound and East Jerusalem’s neighborhood, rather than from Gaza.  This means, India doesn’t see Hamas’s rocket firing on May 10 as the trigger of the conflict. The request that both sides refrain from “attempts to unilaterally change the existing status quo including in East Jerusalem and its neighbourhoods” seems to be a message to Is...

The Iron Dome aerial defence system intercepted a Hamas Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that crossed from Gaza into Israel.  IRON DOME Iron Dome is a multi-­mission system capable of intercepting rockets, artillery, mortars and Precision Guided Munitions like very short range air defence (V­SHO-RAD) systems as well as aircraft, helicopters and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) over short ranges of up to 70 km.  It is an all-weather system and can engage multiple targets simultaneously and be deployed over land and sea. Iron Dome is manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defence Systems. It has been in service with Israeli Air Force since...

The irony in the ongoing conflict is that Hamas, whose founding members were encouraged by Israel in the 1970s and 80s against Yasser Arafat’s secular national movement, has turned out to be Israel’s biggest rival in the Palestinian territories. HAMAS Hamas was established after the first intifada broke out in 1987, as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.  Intifada was the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  The first intifada lasted from 1987 to 1993, and the second began in 2000. As strife between Israel and Palestine continued to soar as the latter resorted to the First Intifada, or uprising, in December 1987, Hamas as an organisation led by Sunni-Islamic fundamentalists, began to take shape.  Hamas could gain immediate and immense popularity within the protesting Palestinians because it was ...

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing violent struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. Various attempts have been made to resolve the conflict as part of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It has been referred to as the world's "most intractable conflict", with the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip reaching 54 years.  PRE-1948 ERA The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the birth of major nationalist movements among the Jews and among the Arabs. After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I, the British took control of the area known as Palestine. The land was inhabited by a Jewish minority and Arab majority. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine and this gave rise to tensions. The Jews...

ISRAEL-UAE PEACE DEAL In 2020, the President of the USA announced that Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had agreed to establish full diplomatic ties as part of a deal to halt the annexation of occupied land sought by the Palestinians for their future state.  The agreement was called the ‘Abraham Accord’. Under the deal, Israel agreed to suspend its plans to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank. By the deal, the UAE became the first Gulf Arab state to do so and only the third Arab nation to have active diplomatic ties with Israel. Egypt had made a peace deal with Israel in 1979, followed by Jordan in 1994. Mauritania had recognized Israel in 1999, but later ended relations in 2009 over the Israel’s war in Gaza at the time. TRUMP PEACE PLAN Name : Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.  This was a proposal by the Trump administration for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The plan recognized Israel's rig...

Conflict has been escalating between Israel and Palestine.  Israeli armed forces stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Haramesh-Sharif in Jerusalem, ahead of a march by Zionist nationalists commemorating Israel’s capture of the eastern half of the city in 1967.  More than 300 Palestinians were injured in the raid.  EVENTS Tensions have been building up since the start of Ramzan in mid-April when Israeli police set up barricades at the Damascus Gate outside the occupied Old City, pre venting Palestinians from gathering there.  As clashes erupted, the police removed the barricades, but tensions were already high.  The threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah escalated the crisis further in the last week of Ramzan. The Israeli authorities had given permission to the Jerusalem Day march, traditionally taken out by far-right Zionists through the Arab Quarter of the Old City.  Ahead of the march on May 10 (...