5 apr 2019
Palestinian Presidential spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeineh slammed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks regarding the Gaza Strip as revealing the magnitude of the conspiracy of the so-called “Deal of the Century,” on Thursday.
Abu Rudeineh said in a statement that Netanyahu’s remarks saying “one option is turning Gaza over to another country” and that he talked to many Arab leaders, however, none of them agreed to the proposition, “indicates the magnitude of the conspiracy of the deal of the century, which, if implemented, will be as much a conspiracy against the Arab countries as it is against Palestine.”
He noted, “President Mahmoud Abbas has constantly warned against this, hence his refusal to relinquish Jerusalem, which is the cornerstone that will safeguard the Palestinian and Arab national interests.”
Abu Rudeineh went on to call on the Hamas movement “to fully fathom what is being planned for it to be part of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century,’ which would result in the Judaization of Jerusalem, the liquidation of the Palestinian identity and relinquishing freedom and independence.”
He reaffirmed Abbas’s and the Palestinian leadership’s position that there will not be a state in Gaza nor a state without Gaza, and no state without East Jerusalem.
Abu Rudeineh stressed that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) will continue to protect the national constants until the flag of Palestine is raised in East Jerusalem and its holy places, and achieving freedom and independence based on United Nations resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.
Abu Rudeineh said in a statement that Netanyahu’s remarks saying “one option is turning Gaza over to another country” and that he talked to many Arab leaders, however, none of them agreed to the proposition, “indicates the magnitude of the conspiracy of the deal of the century, which, if implemented, will be as much a conspiracy against the Arab countries as it is against Palestine.”
He noted, “President Mahmoud Abbas has constantly warned against this, hence his refusal to relinquish Jerusalem, which is the cornerstone that will safeguard the Palestinian and Arab national interests.”
Abu Rudeineh went on to call on the Hamas movement “to fully fathom what is being planned for it to be part of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century,’ which would result in the Judaization of Jerusalem, the liquidation of the Palestinian identity and relinquishing freedom and independence.”
He reaffirmed Abbas’s and the Palestinian leadership’s position that there will not be a state in Gaza nor a state without Gaza, and no state without East Jerusalem.
Abu Rudeineh stressed that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) will continue to protect the national constants until the flag of Palestine is raised in East Jerusalem and its holy places, and achieving freedom and independence based on United Nations resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.
The United States President Donald Trump is most likely to reveal his Middle East peace plan, known as the “Deal of the Century,” on the 71st anniversary of Nakba, on Thursday.
According to Al-Khaleej Online news outlet, the US administration told Arab and Gulf officials that the peace plan would be revealed on May 15th on “Nakba day,” when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba or “catastrophe,” when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes when the state of Israel was created.
On Nakba day, Israel also celebrates its Independence Day.
The news outlet also cited unnamed sources saying that the US administration informed senior Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, and Jordanian officials about the date of the announcement.
Sources mentioned that the US administration already completed the plan and secured the funds needed to implement its economic policies.
Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and son-in-law of the United States President Donald Trump, previously said the US administration would to present the plan following the Israeli legislative election on April 9th.
Kushner stated that both the Israelis and the Palestinians would have to make compromises.
Following the alleged reveal of the “Deal of the Century,” mass protests across the occupied West Bank are expected to take place.
It is noteworthy that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been boycotting the US administration since December 2017 when US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and then moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018.
Following recent tensions and the US Trump administration's undeniable support for Israel has prompted the Palestinians to cut communication with the US and declared it unfit to be a mediator during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
According to Al-Khaleej Online news outlet, the US administration told Arab and Gulf officials that the peace plan would be revealed on May 15th on “Nakba day,” when Palestinians commemorate the Nakba or “catastrophe,” when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes when the state of Israel was created.
On Nakba day, Israel also celebrates its Independence Day.
The news outlet also cited unnamed sources saying that the US administration informed senior Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, and Jordanian officials about the date of the announcement.
Sources mentioned that the US administration already completed the plan and secured the funds needed to implement its economic policies.
Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and son-in-law of the United States President Donald Trump, previously said the US administration would to present the plan following the Israeli legislative election on April 9th.
Kushner stated that both the Israelis and the Palestinians would have to make compromises.
Following the alleged reveal of the “Deal of the Century,” mass protests across the occupied West Bank are expected to take place.
It is noteworthy that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been boycotting the US administration since December 2017 when US President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and then moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018.
Following recent tensions and the US Trump administration's undeniable support for Israel has prompted the Palestinians to cut communication with the US and declared it unfit to be a mediator during the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
4 apr 2019
|
Commercial deals tracked by arms monitor prove the US is far more involved in the Yemen war than suspected
The United States has struck at least $68.2bn worth of deals for firearms, bombs, weapons systems, and military training with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since the start of their war in Yemen – billions more than previously reported – according to data collected by an American think tank. That colossal sum includes, for the first time, both commercial and governmental arms deals and indicates that US involvement in the disastrous war may be greater than suspected. In fact, the weapons expenditure could have funded the United Nations’s 2019 humanitarian appeal for Yemen – which totalled $4bn – 17 times over. According to the data collected by arms trade watchdog Security Assistance Monitor (SAM) and reported here for the first time, American companies have made deals worth at least $14bn with the Emiratis and Saudis since March 2015, when the coalition intervened in the conflict. Government sales tend to be for major systems, like combat aircraft, tanks, bombs, and ships, some of which are more likely than others to be used in Yemen – partly because it can take years to finalise such deals, which frequently grab headlines. But it’s the smaller weapons like firearms and bombs sold in commercial sales that experts say are disproportionately likely to be used in the conflict and inflict significant damage. |
William Hartung, director of the arms and security project at the Center for International Policy, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC, which houses SAM, said the commercial data shows the US footprint in Yemen is "dramatically understated” because commercial sales are “so rarely discussed, compared to big glitzy deals like the fighter planes”.
SAM’s estimate was all but confirmed by a US state department official, speaking on background, who said the overall value of American weapons deals to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since March 2015 totalled about $67.4bn.
New details about the arms deals come amid a continued push in the US Congress to end Washington’s involvement in the war in Yemen, which has displaced millions and led to widespread disease and malnutrition.
In February, the Senate passed a bill to withdraw US military support for the coalition and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted 247-175 in favour of the resolution on Thursday. US President Donald Trump has threatened to veto the effort, however.
“President Trump is going to have to decide if we are going to continue to aid the Saudi military in killing thousands of civilians and blocking humanitarian aid to Yemen," Senator Chris Murphy, one of three lawmakers behind the bipartisan bill, told Middle East Eye.
Some of the deals were struck just days after US-made weapons were shown to have been used by the Saudi-led coalition in air strikes that killed civilians, including school children on a field trip, guests attending a wedding, and an entire family, excluding a five-year-old girl, at their Sanaa home.
“It's hard to imagine a more dramatic example of the negative consequences of US arms sales,” Hartung said.
“They're supporting regimes that are murdering civilians and causing a humanitarian catastrophe… This is a stain on the United States.”
The weapons in the deals range from missile defence systems to grenade launchers to firearms, but most were offered in deals by US arms manufacturers to the Saudi and Emirati governments.
And that’s why, until now, the total figures used by journalists and researchers for approved US deals have been deceptively low: unlike government deals, data on commercial deals is difficult to obtain, with bare-bone details only made public long after Congress is notified, sometimes even 18 months later, said Christina Arabia, the director of SAM, which collected the data used in this story and is the only organisation which tracks both types of sales.
Without US weapons, experts say the coalition fighting in Yemen – which is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the UAE – would be largely unable to wage its war. As of 2017, three out of every five weapons imported by the coalition was US-made, according [pdf] to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Some of those weapons have been used in more than 100 coalition air strikes and cluster bomb attacks which have killed civilians or targeted hospitals and villages since March 2015, NGOs and media outlets have reported.
The Saudi-led coalition is responsible for 4,764 reported civilian deaths since 2016, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Yet deals over the past four years have continued largely unabated. “Most deals to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or anywhere else, basically sail through Congress without a discouraging word, much less a vote,” said Hartung.
Tracking nightmare
The main reason the total worth of US arms deals to the Saudi-led coalition has been publicly undervalued, said Arabia, is the convoluted and opaque way commercial deals are tracked and reported.
The US government publishes details about arms deals concluded with other governments – through the “Foreign Military Sales” programme – whenever the administration gives its approval. But tracking deals between commercial US arms manufacturers and foreign governments – ‘Direct Commercial Sales’ – is tricky.
Some deals are listed as going to multiple countries, hiding the true recipients of the weapons or any dollar amount. Other agreements don’t give specific weapon types, only rough categories like "firearms and ammunition".
There are also thresholds, which mean certain, lower-value deals aren’t disclosed to Congress – any firearms deal under $1m, for example – and some deals are only listed at a threshold amount when they are worth far more.
The US state department recently listed an arms export deal to Saudi Arabia – for work related to the Patriot air defence system – as being worth “$50 million or more”. SAM data shows it was in fact worth over $195.5m.
The result of this murky reporting? The public is left in the dark about where, how many and to whom US arms are sold, said Arabia.
“There’s some information about the type of weapon in one committee report,” she said. “Then another committee report will say the country name, and then I have to contact another committee to get the dollar amount of the sale.”
Sometimes, Arabia said, she only gets figures because she has built relationships with specific committee staffers. She says that since the US midterm elections in November, when the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, she has been unable to get her usual flow of information.
However, bit by bit, Arabia has pieced together a database of commercial deals to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Combining figures from both the government and commercial deals she has tracked, Arabia’s totals show that the US has agreed on over $54.1bn in weapons and training with the Saudis and more than $14bn with the UAE since the coalition’s intervention in the war.
Their figures only date back to 2015, making it impossible to know how many weapons the US sold commercially to the coalition pre-war. The commercial and government sales programmes both began in 1976.
While the state department attests to the accuracy of her numbers, Arabia suspects she may still be billions of dollars too low.
Attacks followed by deals
It is now clear, using SAM’s data, that the US has approved arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE just days after the coalition were shown to have used US bombs to kill civilians in Yemen and also after the brutal killing of Washington Post and Middle East Eye columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Most recently, on 6 December, two months after Khashoggi was dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the Trump administration approved a commercial deal for more than $195.5m in upgrades to Saudi Arabia’s Patriot missile defence system.
The Saudis have used a Patriot system to defend against Houthi rocket attacks.
Deals made soon after coalition attacks using US weapons include:
Similar Saudi-led coalition attacks and US weapons agreements happened throughout 2015 and 2016, when former US President Barack Obama was still in the White House.
The Saudis and Emiratis led a coalition of Arab countries into the Yemeni civil war in March 2015 to quell a Houthi uprising. The Saudis say the Houthis are a proxy for Iran, while analysts say the UAE seems to be attempting to crush opposition groups and gain territory in Yemen, particularly along the Red Sea.
Just before Obama left office, his administration, which authorised $117bn in arms deals [pdf] to the Saudis in eight years, halted the sale of precision-guided munitions due to human rights concerns over attacks carried out by the Saudi-led coalition.
But in May 2017, while in Saudi Arabia on his first overseas visit as president, Trump announced he would overturn [pdf] that suspension.
As a result of the ongoing conflict, Yemen – already one of the poorest countries in the Middle East – has “all but ceased to exist”, according to the UN [pdf], which said the country is now facing “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time”.
Unofficial channels
But while US government and commercial arms deals to countries in the Saudi-led coalition total tens of billions of dollars, many US-made weapons also make their way into the hands of warring parties in Yemen through unofficial channels.
An arms dealer in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled north offered to sell an M4 rifle to an ARIJ journalist posing as a buyer earlier this year for $4,500.
The journalist – who asked to remain anonymous because of safety concerns – said it is common to see US firearms and grenades in Yemeni weapons markets, and that they can be found in both the north and the south.
When Houthi fighters attack coalition positions, they often take their weapons, he said. There’s also a black market, where a network of traders buy and sell arms.
“It's so normal to find American weapons in Yemen,” said Nadwa al-Dawsari, Yemen country director for the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a Washington, DC-based NGO.
In fact, the presence of US-made arms across the country is “not a surprise to any Yemeni”.
That’s in part due to the fact that the US backed former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in the so-called war on terror after 9/11, al-Dawsari said. A former US ambassador to Yemen said in 2018 that the US had spent more than $115m equipping Saleh's forces between 2002 and 2009.
In 2015, the Pentagon also lost track of $500m worth of firearms, aircraft, and other military hardware in Yemen.
Now, the Saudi-led coalition appears to be diverting American-made armoured vehicles to local militias, a violation of arms agreements, an ARIJ report published last year found.
The documentary showed that the Abu Al-Abbas Brigades – a Salafi group in Taiz backed by the Emiratis, whose leader is now on a US terror list – received three US-made Oshkosh M-ATV armoured vehicles in November 2015.
The South Yemen flag was also seen flying on another such vehicle – the BAE Caiman MRAP –which is typically used by Yemeni militias backed by the UAE. Abu Dhabi claims to have trained about 25,000 Yemeni soldiers.
Endless involvement
Beyond the weapons, training and technical help, the full extent of American involvement in Yemen – in the war and in counter-terrorism – is impossible to measure.
The US has provided the coalition with intelligence support and military advice, according to a Congressional Research Service report [pdf]. And while Washington previously helped Saudi aircraft with mid-air refuelling, the US defence department said it stopped that programme in November.
But amid ongoing pressure to end all assistance to the Saudi-led coalition, the Trump administration has insisted Yemenis would be worse off – and the civilian casualty count much higher – without its involvement in the war.
They also argue that the threat of Iran justifies continued US arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition.
“If you truly care about Yemeni lives,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a recent press briefing, “you’d support the Saudi-led effort to prevent Yemen from turning into a puppet state of the corrupt, brutish Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Senior Trump administration officials have also insisted that they are making sure the weapons are not being used to commit human rights violations.
“We will not provide arms where we believe they will be used to conduct a gross violation of human rights,” said Tina Kaidanow, who worked on arms sales for the US state department, at a conference last year.
A state department official speaking on background said US defence sales to the Gulf are part of a commitment to regional stability, and that civilian deaths would likely increase were it not for US pressure on the Saudis.
Yet the defence department said it does not track coalition planes, their targets, or the success of their missions post-refuelling.
This has been contested, with a former state department adviser who worked with the coalition until 2017 telling the New York Times that American officers had access to a database detailing every air strike.
"On the issue of the air strikes, the Pentagon has been lying about how much they know,” Hartung said.
At the same time, a new arms transfer policy under Trump, encouraging arms dealers to be more proactive and easing restrictions on manufactures, aims to increase US competitiveness in the global arms market and create more jobs.
“Under this administration there will be no more active advocate for US sales than the US government itself,'' said Kaidanow.
Meanwhile, future arms deals to the Saudi-led coalition are increasingly likely to be done commercially, as pressure mounts on the US to end its role in the war, Arabia said.
The most recent $195.5m deal with Saudi Arabia for work related to the Patriot air defence system, she added, “probably would have been halted in Congress” if it had been a government deal.
Raytheon declined to answer questions about human rights considerations and any responsibility it may bear for civilian deaths in Yemen. “I don't think we're going to have anything for you on that," a spokesperson said in a phone call.
Lockheed Martin did not respond to several requests for comment to the same questions.
‘A tacit alliance’
The sheer amount of weapons and training the US provides to the coalition means that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily reliant on the US for their war effort in Yemen. This is especially true of the Saudis.
“It would take decades,” wrote [pdf] Hartung in a recent report, “for the kingdom to wean itself from dependence on US equipment, training and support.”
Over two-thirds of the entire Saudi combat-ready fleet comes from the US, according to the same report [pdf].
In November 2015, the US made $1.29bn in deals for bombs, warheads, and laser-guidance tail kits because Saudi supplies were “depleted”.
The US also supplies the lion’s share [pdf] of weapons used by the UAE and has trained thousands of their soldiers. According to Hartung, 78 of the UAE’s 138 fighter planes come from the US.
Hartung said he believes a withdrawal of all channels of military support to Saudi Arabia and the UAE “would cripple their ability to wage war in Yemen [and] particularly the indiscriminate air war”.
Instead, Hartung accused the administration of “putting [a] stamp of approval on what these countries are doing” in Yemen, where now about 24 million people need humanitarian assistance, thousands have died of war-related malnutrition, and over 67,000 civilians and fighters have been killed.
“It is essentially a tacit alliance,” he said.
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.
SAM’s estimate was all but confirmed by a US state department official, speaking on background, who said the overall value of American weapons deals to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen since March 2015 totalled about $67.4bn.
New details about the arms deals come amid a continued push in the US Congress to end Washington’s involvement in the war in Yemen, which has displaced millions and led to widespread disease and malnutrition.
In February, the Senate passed a bill to withdraw US military support for the coalition and the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted 247-175 in favour of the resolution on Thursday. US President Donald Trump has threatened to veto the effort, however.
“President Trump is going to have to decide if we are going to continue to aid the Saudi military in killing thousands of civilians and blocking humanitarian aid to Yemen," Senator Chris Murphy, one of three lawmakers behind the bipartisan bill, told Middle East Eye.
Some of the deals were struck just days after US-made weapons were shown to have been used by the Saudi-led coalition in air strikes that killed civilians, including school children on a field trip, guests attending a wedding, and an entire family, excluding a five-year-old girl, at their Sanaa home.
“It's hard to imagine a more dramatic example of the negative consequences of US arms sales,” Hartung said.
“They're supporting regimes that are murdering civilians and causing a humanitarian catastrophe… This is a stain on the United States.”
The weapons in the deals range from missile defence systems to grenade launchers to firearms, but most were offered in deals by US arms manufacturers to the Saudi and Emirati governments.
And that’s why, until now, the total figures used by journalists and researchers for approved US deals have been deceptively low: unlike government deals, data on commercial deals is difficult to obtain, with bare-bone details only made public long after Congress is notified, sometimes even 18 months later, said Christina Arabia, the director of SAM, which collected the data used in this story and is the only organisation which tracks both types of sales.
Without US weapons, experts say the coalition fighting in Yemen – which is led by Saudi Arabia and includes the UAE – would be largely unable to wage its war. As of 2017, three out of every five weapons imported by the coalition was US-made, according [pdf] to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Some of those weapons have been used in more than 100 coalition air strikes and cluster bomb attacks which have killed civilians or targeted hospitals and villages since March 2015, NGOs and media outlets have reported.
The Saudi-led coalition is responsible for 4,764 reported civilian deaths since 2016, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).
Yet deals over the past four years have continued largely unabated. “Most deals to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or anywhere else, basically sail through Congress without a discouraging word, much less a vote,” said Hartung.
Tracking nightmare
The main reason the total worth of US arms deals to the Saudi-led coalition has been publicly undervalued, said Arabia, is the convoluted and opaque way commercial deals are tracked and reported.
The US government publishes details about arms deals concluded with other governments – through the “Foreign Military Sales” programme – whenever the administration gives its approval. But tracking deals between commercial US arms manufacturers and foreign governments – ‘Direct Commercial Sales’ – is tricky.
Some deals are listed as going to multiple countries, hiding the true recipients of the weapons or any dollar amount. Other agreements don’t give specific weapon types, only rough categories like "firearms and ammunition".
There are also thresholds, which mean certain, lower-value deals aren’t disclosed to Congress – any firearms deal under $1m, for example – and some deals are only listed at a threshold amount when they are worth far more.
The US state department recently listed an arms export deal to Saudi Arabia – for work related to the Patriot air defence system – as being worth “$50 million or more”. SAM data shows it was in fact worth over $195.5m.
The result of this murky reporting? The public is left in the dark about where, how many and to whom US arms are sold, said Arabia.
“There’s some information about the type of weapon in one committee report,” she said. “Then another committee report will say the country name, and then I have to contact another committee to get the dollar amount of the sale.”
Sometimes, Arabia said, she only gets figures because she has built relationships with specific committee staffers. She says that since the US midterm elections in November, when the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, she has been unable to get her usual flow of information.
However, bit by bit, Arabia has pieced together a database of commercial deals to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Combining figures from both the government and commercial deals she has tracked, Arabia’s totals show that the US has agreed on over $54.1bn in weapons and training with the Saudis and more than $14bn with the UAE since the coalition’s intervention in the war.
Their figures only date back to 2015, making it impossible to know how many weapons the US sold commercially to the coalition pre-war. The commercial and government sales programmes both began in 1976.
While the state department attests to the accuracy of her numbers, Arabia suspects she may still be billions of dollars too low.
Attacks followed by deals
It is now clear, using SAM’s data, that the US has approved arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE just days after the coalition were shown to have used US bombs to kill civilians in Yemen and also after the brutal killing of Washington Post and Middle East Eye columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Most recently, on 6 December, two months after Khashoggi was dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the Trump administration approved a commercial deal for more than $195.5m in upgrades to Saudi Arabia’s Patriot missile defence system.
The Saudis have used a Patriot system to defend against Houthi rocket attacks.
Deals made soon after coalition attacks using US weapons include:
- On 9 August 2018, a coalition bomb hit a school bus in northern Yemen carrying boys on a field trip. It killed 54 people, including 44 children. A week later, Congress was notified of a commercial deal with the UAE worth $344.8m for spare parts for a Patriot missile defence system.
- CNN reported on 17 August that the bomb used in the school bus attack was manufactured by US firm Lockheed Martin, the biggest arms maker in the world. Three day’s after CNN’s report aired, the Donald Trump administration made a deal with the UAE for $10.4m in rifle parts.
- Saudi-led coalition pilots bombed a wedding northwest of the Yemeni capital Sanaa on 22 April 2018, reportedly killing 33 people, including the bride. Days later, Bellingcat proved that US firm Raytheon had made part of a bomb found at the scene of the attack. The Trump administration approved a commercial deal with the Saudis on 21 June for $2.1m in rifles and grenade launchers.
- On 25 August 2017, a laser-guided bomb hit a residential area in Sanaa and killed a couple and five of their six children. A photo of five-year-old Buthaina – the only family member who survived – taken soon after the attack went viral. In it, swollen and bruised, she pulls her eyelids apart to see. Amnesty International proved a month later that a chunk of a bomb found amid the ruins was made by Raytheon. Weeks later, on 6 October, the US authorised a deal to send a THAAD missile defence system worth $15bn to Riyadh.
Similar Saudi-led coalition attacks and US weapons agreements happened throughout 2015 and 2016, when former US President Barack Obama was still in the White House.
The Saudis and Emiratis led a coalition of Arab countries into the Yemeni civil war in March 2015 to quell a Houthi uprising. The Saudis say the Houthis are a proxy for Iran, while analysts say the UAE seems to be attempting to crush opposition groups and gain territory in Yemen, particularly along the Red Sea.
Just before Obama left office, his administration, which authorised $117bn in arms deals [pdf] to the Saudis in eight years, halted the sale of precision-guided munitions due to human rights concerns over attacks carried out by the Saudi-led coalition.
But in May 2017, while in Saudi Arabia on his first overseas visit as president, Trump announced he would overturn [pdf] that suspension.
As a result of the ongoing conflict, Yemen – already one of the poorest countries in the Middle East – has “all but ceased to exist”, according to the UN [pdf], which said the country is now facing “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time”.
Unofficial channels
But while US government and commercial arms deals to countries in the Saudi-led coalition total tens of billions of dollars, many US-made weapons also make their way into the hands of warring parties in Yemen through unofficial channels.
An arms dealer in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled north offered to sell an M4 rifle to an ARIJ journalist posing as a buyer earlier this year for $4,500.
The journalist – who asked to remain anonymous because of safety concerns – said it is common to see US firearms and grenades in Yemeni weapons markets, and that they can be found in both the north and the south.
When Houthi fighters attack coalition positions, they often take their weapons, he said. There’s also a black market, where a network of traders buy and sell arms.
“It's so normal to find American weapons in Yemen,” said Nadwa al-Dawsari, Yemen country director for the Center for Civilians in Conflict, a Washington, DC-based NGO.
In fact, the presence of US-made arms across the country is “not a surprise to any Yemeni”.
That’s in part due to the fact that the US backed former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh in the so-called war on terror after 9/11, al-Dawsari said. A former US ambassador to Yemen said in 2018 that the US had spent more than $115m equipping Saleh's forces between 2002 and 2009.
In 2015, the Pentagon also lost track of $500m worth of firearms, aircraft, and other military hardware in Yemen.
Now, the Saudi-led coalition appears to be diverting American-made armoured vehicles to local militias, a violation of arms agreements, an ARIJ report published last year found.
The documentary showed that the Abu Al-Abbas Brigades – a Salafi group in Taiz backed by the Emiratis, whose leader is now on a US terror list – received three US-made Oshkosh M-ATV armoured vehicles in November 2015.
The South Yemen flag was also seen flying on another such vehicle – the BAE Caiman MRAP –which is typically used by Yemeni militias backed by the UAE. Abu Dhabi claims to have trained about 25,000 Yemeni soldiers.
Endless involvement
Beyond the weapons, training and technical help, the full extent of American involvement in Yemen – in the war and in counter-terrorism – is impossible to measure.
The US has provided the coalition with intelligence support and military advice, according to a Congressional Research Service report [pdf]. And while Washington previously helped Saudi aircraft with mid-air refuelling, the US defence department said it stopped that programme in November.
But amid ongoing pressure to end all assistance to the Saudi-led coalition, the Trump administration has insisted Yemenis would be worse off – and the civilian casualty count much higher – without its involvement in the war.
They also argue that the threat of Iran justifies continued US arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition.
“If you truly care about Yemeni lives,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a recent press briefing, “you’d support the Saudi-led effort to prevent Yemen from turning into a puppet state of the corrupt, brutish Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Senior Trump administration officials have also insisted that they are making sure the weapons are not being used to commit human rights violations.
“We will not provide arms where we believe they will be used to conduct a gross violation of human rights,” said Tina Kaidanow, who worked on arms sales for the US state department, at a conference last year.
A state department official speaking on background said US defence sales to the Gulf are part of a commitment to regional stability, and that civilian deaths would likely increase were it not for US pressure on the Saudis.
Yet the defence department said it does not track coalition planes, their targets, or the success of their missions post-refuelling.
This has been contested, with a former state department adviser who worked with the coalition until 2017 telling the New York Times that American officers had access to a database detailing every air strike.
"On the issue of the air strikes, the Pentagon has been lying about how much they know,” Hartung said.
At the same time, a new arms transfer policy under Trump, encouraging arms dealers to be more proactive and easing restrictions on manufactures, aims to increase US competitiveness in the global arms market and create more jobs.
“Under this administration there will be no more active advocate for US sales than the US government itself,'' said Kaidanow.
Meanwhile, future arms deals to the Saudi-led coalition are increasingly likely to be done commercially, as pressure mounts on the US to end its role in the war, Arabia said.
The most recent $195.5m deal with Saudi Arabia for work related to the Patriot air defence system, she added, “probably would have been halted in Congress” if it had been a government deal.
Raytheon declined to answer questions about human rights considerations and any responsibility it may bear for civilian deaths in Yemen. “I don't think we're going to have anything for you on that," a spokesperson said in a phone call.
Lockheed Martin did not respond to several requests for comment to the same questions.
‘A tacit alliance’
The sheer amount of weapons and training the US provides to the coalition means that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily reliant on the US for their war effort in Yemen. This is especially true of the Saudis.
“It would take decades,” wrote [pdf] Hartung in a recent report, “for the kingdom to wean itself from dependence on US equipment, training and support.”
Over two-thirds of the entire Saudi combat-ready fleet comes from the US, according to the same report [pdf].
In November 2015, the US made $1.29bn in deals for bombs, warheads, and laser-guidance tail kits because Saudi supplies were “depleted”.
The US also supplies the lion’s share [pdf] of weapons used by the UAE and has trained thousands of their soldiers. According to Hartung, 78 of the UAE’s 138 fighter planes come from the US.
Hartung said he believes a withdrawal of all channels of military support to Saudi Arabia and the UAE “would cripple their ability to wage war in Yemen [and] particularly the indiscriminate air war”.
Instead, Hartung accused the administration of “putting [a] stamp of approval on what these countries are doing” in Yemen, where now about 24 million people need humanitarian assistance, thousands have died of war-related malnutrition, and over 67,000 civilians and fighters have been killed.
“It is essentially a tacit alliance,” he said.
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.
2 apr 2019
By Jonathan Cook
The 350,000 Palestinian inhabitants of occupied East Jerusalem are caught between a rock and hard place, as Israel works ever harder to remove them from the holy city in which they were born, analysts and residents warn.
That process, they say, has only accelerated in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem, effectively endorsing the city as Israel’s exclusive capital.
“Israel wants Palestinians in Jerusalem to understand that they are trapped, that they are being strangled, in the hope they will conclude that life is better outside the city,” said Amneh Badran, a politics professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds university.
Since Israel seized the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967 and then illegally annexed it in 1981, it has intentionally left the status of its Palestinian population unresolved.
Israeli officials have made Palestinians there “permanent residents,” though, in practice, their residency is easily revoked. According to Israel’s own figures, more than 14,500 Palestinians have been expelled from the city of their birth since 1967, often compelling their families to join them in exile.
Further, Israel finished its concrete wall slicing through East Jerusalem three years ago, cutting some 140,000 Palestinian residents off from the rest of the city.
A raft of well-documented policies – including house demolitions, a chronic shortage of classrooms, lack of public services, municipal underfunding, land seizures, home evictions by Jewish settlers, denial of family unification, and police and settler violence – have intensified over the years.
At the same time, Israel has denied the Palestinian Authority, a supposed government-in-waiting in the West Bank, any role in East Jerusalem, leaving the city’s Palestinians even more isolated and weak.
All of these factors are designed to pressure Palestinians to leave, usually to areas outside the wall or to nearby West Bank cities like Ramallah or Bethlehem.
“In Jerusalem, Israel’s overriding aim is at its most transparent: to take control of the land but without its Palestinian inhabitants,” said Daoud Alg’ol, a researcher on Jerusalem.
Like others, Mr Alg’ol noted that Israel had stepped up its ‘Judaization’ policies in Jerusalem since the US relocated its embassy. “Israel is working more quickly, more confidently and more intensively because it believes Trump has given his blessing,” he said.
Demographic concerns dominated Israel’s thinking from the moment it occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and subordinated it to the control of Jewish officials in West Jerusalem – in what Israel termed its newly “united capital”.
City boundaries were expanded eastwards to attach additional Palestinian lands to Jerusalem and then fill in the empty spaces with a ring of large Jewish settlements, said Aviv Tartasky, a researcher with Ir Amim, an organization that campaigns for equal rights in Jerusalem.
The goal, he added, was to shore up a permanent three-quarters Jewish majority – to ensure Palestinians could not stake a claim to the city and to allay Israeli fears that one day the Palestinians might gain control of the municipality through elections.
Israel has nonetheless faced a shrinking Jewish majority because of higher Palestinian birth rates. Today, Palestinians comprise about 40 per cent of the total population of this artificially enlarged Jerusalem.
Israel has therefore been aggressively pursuing a twin-pronged approach, according to analysts.
On one side, wide-ranging discriminatory policies – that harm Palestinians and favor Jewish settlers – have been designed to erode Palestinians’ connection to Jerusalem, encouraging them to leave. And, on the other, revocation of residency rights and the gradual redrawing of municipal boundaries have forcibly placed Palestinians outside the city – in what some experts term a “silent transfer” or administrative ethnic cleansing.
Israel’s efforts to disconnect Palestinians from Jerusalem are most visibly expressed in the change of Arabic script on road signs. The city’s Arabic name, Al Quds (the Holy), has been gradually replaced by the Israeli name, Urshalim, transliterated into Arabic.
The lack of services and municipal funding and high unemployment mean that three-quarters of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line. That compares to only 15 per cent for Israeli Jews nationally.
Despite these abysmal figures, the municipality has provided four social services offices in the city for Palestinians, compared to 19 for Israeli Jews.
Only half of Palestinian residents are provided with access to the water grid. There are similar deficiencies in postal services, road infrastructure, pavements and cultural centers.
Meanwhile, human rights groups have noted that East Jerusalem lacks at least 2,000 classrooms for Palestinian children, and that the condition of 43 per cent of existing rooms is inadequate. A third of pupils fail to complete basic schooling.
But the biggest pressure on Palestinian residents has been inflicted through grossly discriminatory planning rules, said Mr Tartasky.
In the areas outside the wall, Palestinians have been abandoned by the municipality – and receive no services or policing at all.
Israel’s long-term aim, said Mr Tartasky, had been exposed in a leak of private comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015. He had proposed revoking the residency of the 140,000 Palestinians outside the wall.
“At the moment, the government is discussing putting these residents under the responsibility of the army,” Mr Tartasky said.
That would make them equivalent to Palestinians living in Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank and sever their last connections to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, on the inner side of the wall, Palestinian neighborhoods have been tightly constrained, with much of the land declared either “scenic areas” or national parks, in which construction is illegal, or reserved for Jewish settlements. The inevitable result has been extreme overcrowding.
In addition, Israel has denied most Palestinian neighborhoods’ masterplans, making it all but impossible to get building permits.
“The advantage for Israel is that planning regulations don’t look brutal – in fact, they can be presented as simple law enforcement,” said Mr Tartasky. “But if you have no place to live in Jerusalem, in the end you’ll have to move out of the city.”
An estimated 20,000 houses – about 40 per cent of the city’s Palestinian housing stock – are illegal and under threat of demolition. More than 800 homes, some housing several families, have been razed since 2004.
As well as the large purpose-built Jewish settlements located on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, several thousand extremist settlers have taken over properties inside Palestinian neighborhoods, often with the backing of the Israeli courts.
Mr Tartasky noted that Israel has been accelerating legal efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes over the past year, with close to 200 families in and around the Old City currently facing court battles.
When settlers move in following such evictions, Ms Badran said, the character of the Palestinian neighborhoods rapidly changes.
“The settlers arrive, and then so do the police, the army, private security guards and municipal inspectors. The settlers have a machine behind them whose role is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Palestinians. The message is: ‘You either accept your subjugation or leave’.”
In Silwan, where settler groups have established a touristic archaeological park in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian community just outside the Old City walls, life has been especially tough.
Mr Alg’ol, who lives in Silwan, noted that fortified settler compounds had been established throughout the area, many dozens more Palestinian families were facing evictions, excavations were taking place under Palestinian homes, closed-circuit TV watched residents 24 hours a day, and the security services were a constant presence. Many hundreds of children had been arrested in recent years, usually accused of stone throwing.
Israel’s newest move is the announcement of a cable car to bring tourists from West Jerusalem through Palestinian neighborhoods like Silwan to the holy sites of the Old City.
Mr Tartasky said touristic initiatives had become another planning weapon against Palestinians. “These projects, from the cable car to a series of promenades, are ways to connect one settlement to the next, bisecting Palestinian space. They strengthen the settlements and break apart Palestinian neighborhoods.”
Mr Alg’ol’s family was one of many in Silwan that had been told their lands were being confiscated for the cable car and a new police station.
“They want to turn our community into an archaeological Disneyland,” he said. “And we are in the way. They plan to keep going until we are all removed.”
- Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth-based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
The 350,000 Palestinian inhabitants of occupied East Jerusalem are caught between a rock and hard place, as Israel works ever harder to remove them from the holy city in which they were born, analysts and residents warn.
That process, they say, has only accelerated in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to relocate the American embassy to Jerusalem, effectively endorsing the city as Israel’s exclusive capital.
“Israel wants Palestinians in Jerusalem to understand that they are trapped, that they are being strangled, in the hope they will conclude that life is better outside the city,” said Amneh Badran, a politics professor at Jerusalem’s Al Quds university.
Since Israel seized the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1967 and then illegally annexed it in 1981, it has intentionally left the status of its Palestinian population unresolved.
Israeli officials have made Palestinians there “permanent residents,” though, in practice, their residency is easily revoked. According to Israel’s own figures, more than 14,500 Palestinians have been expelled from the city of their birth since 1967, often compelling their families to join them in exile.
Further, Israel finished its concrete wall slicing through East Jerusalem three years ago, cutting some 140,000 Palestinian residents off from the rest of the city.
A raft of well-documented policies – including house demolitions, a chronic shortage of classrooms, lack of public services, municipal underfunding, land seizures, home evictions by Jewish settlers, denial of family unification, and police and settler violence – have intensified over the years.
At the same time, Israel has denied the Palestinian Authority, a supposed government-in-waiting in the West Bank, any role in East Jerusalem, leaving the city’s Palestinians even more isolated and weak.
All of these factors are designed to pressure Palestinians to leave, usually to areas outside the wall or to nearby West Bank cities like Ramallah or Bethlehem.
“In Jerusalem, Israel’s overriding aim is at its most transparent: to take control of the land but without its Palestinian inhabitants,” said Daoud Alg’ol, a researcher on Jerusalem.
Like others, Mr Alg’ol noted that Israel had stepped up its ‘Judaization’ policies in Jerusalem since the US relocated its embassy. “Israel is working more quickly, more confidently and more intensively because it believes Trump has given his blessing,” he said.
Demographic concerns dominated Israel’s thinking from the moment it occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and subordinated it to the control of Jewish officials in West Jerusalem – in what Israel termed its newly “united capital”.
City boundaries were expanded eastwards to attach additional Palestinian lands to Jerusalem and then fill in the empty spaces with a ring of large Jewish settlements, said Aviv Tartasky, a researcher with Ir Amim, an organization that campaigns for equal rights in Jerusalem.
The goal, he added, was to shore up a permanent three-quarters Jewish majority – to ensure Palestinians could not stake a claim to the city and to allay Israeli fears that one day the Palestinians might gain control of the municipality through elections.
Israel has nonetheless faced a shrinking Jewish majority because of higher Palestinian birth rates. Today, Palestinians comprise about 40 per cent of the total population of this artificially enlarged Jerusalem.
Israel has therefore been aggressively pursuing a twin-pronged approach, according to analysts.
On one side, wide-ranging discriminatory policies – that harm Palestinians and favor Jewish settlers – have been designed to erode Palestinians’ connection to Jerusalem, encouraging them to leave. And, on the other, revocation of residency rights and the gradual redrawing of municipal boundaries have forcibly placed Palestinians outside the city – in what some experts term a “silent transfer” or administrative ethnic cleansing.
Israel’s efforts to disconnect Palestinians from Jerusalem are most visibly expressed in the change of Arabic script on road signs. The city’s Arabic name, Al Quds (the Holy), has been gradually replaced by the Israeli name, Urshalim, transliterated into Arabic.
The lack of services and municipal funding and high unemployment mean that three-quarters of Palestinians in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line. That compares to only 15 per cent for Israeli Jews nationally.
Despite these abysmal figures, the municipality has provided four social services offices in the city for Palestinians, compared to 19 for Israeli Jews.
Only half of Palestinian residents are provided with access to the water grid. There are similar deficiencies in postal services, road infrastructure, pavements and cultural centers.
Meanwhile, human rights groups have noted that East Jerusalem lacks at least 2,000 classrooms for Palestinian children, and that the condition of 43 per cent of existing rooms is inadequate. A third of pupils fail to complete basic schooling.
But the biggest pressure on Palestinian residents has been inflicted through grossly discriminatory planning rules, said Mr Tartasky.
In the areas outside the wall, Palestinians have been abandoned by the municipality – and receive no services or policing at all.
Israel’s long-term aim, said Mr Tartasky, had been exposed in a leak of private comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015. He had proposed revoking the residency of the 140,000 Palestinians outside the wall.
“At the moment, the government is discussing putting these residents under the responsibility of the army,” Mr Tartasky said.
That would make them equivalent to Palestinians living in Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank and sever their last connections to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, on the inner side of the wall, Palestinian neighborhoods have been tightly constrained, with much of the land declared either “scenic areas” or national parks, in which construction is illegal, or reserved for Jewish settlements. The inevitable result has been extreme overcrowding.
In addition, Israel has denied most Palestinian neighborhoods’ masterplans, making it all but impossible to get building permits.
“The advantage for Israel is that planning regulations don’t look brutal – in fact, they can be presented as simple law enforcement,” said Mr Tartasky. “But if you have no place to live in Jerusalem, in the end you’ll have to move out of the city.”
An estimated 20,000 houses – about 40 per cent of the city’s Palestinian housing stock – are illegal and under threat of demolition. More than 800 homes, some housing several families, have been razed since 2004.
As well as the large purpose-built Jewish settlements located on Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, several thousand extremist settlers have taken over properties inside Palestinian neighborhoods, often with the backing of the Israeli courts.
Mr Tartasky noted that Israel has been accelerating legal efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes over the past year, with close to 200 families in and around the Old City currently facing court battles.
When settlers move in following such evictions, Ms Badran said, the character of the Palestinian neighborhoods rapidly changes.
“The settlers arrive, and then so do the police, the army, private security guards and municipal inspectors. The settlers have a machine behind them whose role is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Palestinians. The message is: ‘You either accept your subjugation or leave’.”
In Silwan, where settler groups have established a touristic archaeological park in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian community just outside the Old City walls, life has been especially tough.
Mr Alg’ol, who lives in Silwan, noted that fortified settler compounds had been established throughout the area, many dozens more Palestinian families were facing evictions, excavations were taking place under Palestinian homes, closed-circuit TV watched residents 24 hours a day, and the security services were a constant presence. Many hundreds of children had been arrested in recent years, usually accused of stone throwing.
Israel’s newest move is the announcement of a cable car to bring tourists from West Jerusalem through Palestinian neighborhoods like Silwan to the holy sites of the Old City.
Mr Tartasky said touristic initiatives had become another planning weapon against Palestinians. “These projects, from the cable car to a series of promenades, are ways to connect one settlement to the next, bisecting Palestinian space. They strengthen the settlements and break apart Palestinian neighborhoods.”
Mr Alg’ol’s family was one of many in Silwan that had been told their lands were being confiscated for the cable car and a new police station.
“They want to turn our community into an archaeological Disneyland,” he said. “And we are in the way. They plan to keep going until we are all removed.”
- Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth-based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
27 mar 2019
|
Syria's ambassador to the United Nations has lashed out at US President Donald Trump's recognition of “Israeli sovereignty” over the occupied Golan Heights, describing the move as part of a “criminal project” aimed at prolonging chaos and destruction in the region.
Bashar Jaafari made the remarks at a Wednesday UN Security Council meeting on the situation of Syria in the wake of Trump’s Monday decision to recognize “Israeli sovereignty” over the Syrian territories of Golan Heights. “This is a criminal project or plan for which the US government and its allies have used all tools at their disposal,” Jaafari said, adding that the plan is aimed at guaranteeing chaos and destruction in the region, and dividing the people of the region on religious and ethnic basis in order to “build a new reality”. “From the first day of this terrorist war led by governments of certain known countries, we said that the main goal of this war was to ensure Israeli occupation of Arab territories and to ensure that the occupation can go on forever on the basis of the plan put forward by the United States,” he said. The US president’s recent decision on the occupied Golan Heights “shows just how correct we were at the time,” the Syrian envoy added. Trump signed a decree recognizing Israeli “sovereignty” over the occupied Golan at the start of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington on Monday. |
Since then, the US has become the subject of a new round of furor by world countries over Trump’s controversial decision.
Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Russia, and the European Union were quick to reject Trump’s move, which is in obvious contravention of international law.
In a declaration issued on Wednesday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini's office announced that the bloc "does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights.”
Security Council rejects Trump’s decision
The Wednesday meeting of the Security Council turned into another stage for the isolation of the US, as other countries on the council opposed Trump’s move on the occupied Golan Heights.
British UN Ambassador Karen Pierce told the council that the US decision was in contravention of that 1981 resolution, which declared "null and void and without international legal effect” the Israeli annexation of Golan in 1981.
Russia's Deputy UN Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said Washington had violated UN resolutions and warned it could fuel instability in the Middle East.
North Korea also issued a statement backing "the struggle of the Syrian government and people for taking back the occupied Golan Heights."
The European members of the council - France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and Poland - had earlier on Tuesday raised concerns about "broader consequences of recognizing illegal annexation and also about the broader regional consequences."
Back on Thursday, Trump tweeted that it was time to back Israeli “sovereignty” over the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War.
"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" the US president wrote on Twitter.
In 1967, Israel waged a full-scale war against Arab territories during which it occupied a large swathe of Syria’s Golan and annexed it four years later, a move never recognized by the international community.
Syria has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying the territory must be completely restored to its control.
Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Russia, and the European Union were quick to reject Trump’s move, which is in obvious contravention of international law.
In a declaration issued on Wednesday, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini's office announced that the bloc "does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights.”
Security Council rejects Trump’s decision
The Wednesday meeting of the Security Council turned into another stage for the isolation of the US, as other countries on the council opposed Trump’s move on the occupied Golan Heights.
British UN Ambassador Karen Pierce told the council that the US decision was in contravention of that 1981 resolution, which declared "null and void and without international legal effect” the Israeli annexation of Golan in 1981.
Russia's Deputy UN Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov said Washington had violated UN resolutions and warned it could fuel instability in the Middle East.
North Korea also issued a statement backing "the struggle of the Syrian government and people for taking back the occupied Golan Heights."
The European members of the council - France, Britain, Germany, Belgium and Poland - had earlier on Tuesday raised concerns about "broader consequences of recognizing illegal annexation and also about the broader regional consequences."
Back on Thursday, Trump tweeted that it was time to back Israeli “sovereignty” over the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Six-Day War.
"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" the US president wrote on Twitter.
In 1967, Israel waged a full-scale war against Arab territories during which it occupied a large swathe of Syria’s Golan and annexed it four years later, a move never recognized by the international community.
Syria has repeatedly reaffirmed its sovereignty over the Golan Heights, saying the territory must be completely restored to its control.
26 mar 2019
US president Donald Trump on Monday evening signed a decree recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, seized from Syria in 1967, in a move that received widespread international condemnation.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an election next month, was by Trump's side as he signed the proclamation at the White House.
Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, in a move that is not recognized by the international community.
"Today, I am taking historic action to promote Israel's ability to defend itself and really to have a very powerful, very strong national security, which they're entitled to have," Trump told a news conference before signing the measure.
Syria denounced Trump's decision as "a blatant attack on its sovereignty” and vowed to recover the area "through all available means.”
The Hamas Movement, for its part, deplored the US decision on the Syrian Golan Heights as “a gross alignment with Israel against the Arab rights” and said that such move vindicated further that “the administration of Trump has become a threat to international peace and security.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an election next month, was by Trump's side as he signed the proclamation at the White House.
Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, in a move that is not recognized by the international community.
"Today, I am taking historic action to promote Israel's ability to defend itself and really to have a very powerful, very strong national security, which they're entitled to have," Trump told a news conference before signing the measure.
Syria denounced Trump's decision as "a blatant attack on its sovereignty” and vowed to recover the area "through all available means.”
The Hamas Movement, for its part, deplored the US decision on the Syrian Golan Heights as “a gross alignment with Israel against the Arab rights” and said that such move vindicated further that “the administration of Trump has become a threat to international peace and security.”
22 mar 2019
The Hamas Movement has voiced its rejection of the US administration’s intent to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, describing such decision as “another assault on the Arab nation.”
In a press release, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that US president Donald Trump’s stated intent to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Israeli occupied Golan Heights “is reprehensible and violates international laws and resolutions.”
In another statement, Hamas described such US decision as persistence in assaulting the Arab rights and a gross bias in favor of Israel.
In a press release, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said that US president Donald Trump’s stated intent to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Israeli occupied Golan Heights “is reprehensible and violates international laws and resolutions.”
In another statement, Hamas described such US decision as persistence in assaulting the Arab rights and a gross bias in favor of Israel.
21 mar 2019
L-R: Lindsey Graham, Benjamin Netanyahu and David Friedman
Tweet from president comes as Pompeo and Netanyahu prepared to give joint address in Jerusalem; also follows series of hints that the decision was imminent, such as changing status of plateau in annual human rights report
It is time for the US to "fully recognize" Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, US President Donald Trump said Thursday in a Twitter message that confirmed a shift in American foreign policy hinted at for several weeks.
"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s (s)overeignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" Trump posted, as his secretary of state Mike Pompeo prepared to deliver a joint address from Jerusalem with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The tweet came less than a day after Israeli and American officials said they expected an announcement on the issue as soon as next week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not yet been made public.
Netanyahu thanked the US president for his decision to "boldly recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," on his official Twitter page
Netanyahu also said that the Golan was a buffer to keep Israel's enemies at bay, in particular Iran.
“You could imagine what would have happened if Israel were not in the Golan,” he said. “You would have Iran on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.”
While Pompeo avoided the issue of sovereignty over the Golan during his visit to Israel on Wednesday, he lauded the White House’s warm ties with the Jewish state and promised to step up pressure on Iran, giving a public boost to Netanyahu at the height of a tight re-election campaign.
A change in the US view of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, along with the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, was also hinted at last week when the State Department changed its usual description of the plateau from "Israeli-occupied" to "Israeli-controlled" in an annual global human rights report.
A separate section of the report on the West Bank and Gaza Strip also did not refer to those territories as being "occupied" or under "occupation."
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham earlier this month also vowed to push for the US to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
The South Carolina politican made his pledge during a tour of the frontier with Netanyahu and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
“The Golan is not disputed. It is in the hands of Israel and will always remain in the hands of Israel,” Graham said from a cliff overlooking Syria, where Syrian flags could be seen fluttering in the distance on buildings damaged in the country’s civil war.
“My goal is to try to explain this to the administration,” he said.
Tweet from president comes as Pompeo and Netanyahu prepared to give joint address in Jerusalem; also follows series of hints that the decision was imminent, such as changing status of plateau in annual human rights report
It is time for the US to "fully recognize" Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, US President Donald Trump said Thursday in a Twitter message that confirmed a shift in American foreign policy hinted at for several weeks.
"After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s (s)overeignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!" Trump posted, as his secretary of state Mike Pompeo prepared to deliver a joint address from Jerusalem with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The tweet came less than a day after Israeli and American officials said they expected an announcement on the issue as soon as next week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not yet been made public.
Netanyahu thanked the US president for his decision to "boldly recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights," on his official Twitter page
Netanyahu also said that the Golan was a buffer to keep Israel's enemies at bay, in particular Iran.
“You could imagine what would have happened if Israel were not in the Golan,” he said. “You would have Iran on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.”
While Pompeo avoided the issue of sovereignty over the Golan during his visit to Israel on Wednesday, he lauded the White House’s warm ties with the Jewish state and promised to step up pressure on Iran, giving a public boost to Netanyahu at the height of a tight re-election campaign.
A change in the US view of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, along with the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, was also hinted at last week when the State Department changed its usual description of the plateau from "Israeli-occupied" to "Israeli-controlled" in an annual global human rights report.
A separate section of the report on the West Bank and Gaza Strip also did not refer to those territories as being "occupied" or under "occupation."
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham earlier this month also vowed to push for the US to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
The South Carolina politican made his pledge during a tour of the frontier with Netanyahu and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
“The Golan is not disputed. It is in the hands of Israel and will always remain in the hands of Israel,” Graham said from a cliff overlooking Syria, where Syrian flags could be seen fluttering in the distance on buildings damaged in the country’s civil war.
“My goal is to try to explain this to the administration,” he said.
17 mar 2019
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Malki, today, criticized attempts by the United States administration to bully and intimidate the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) and obstruct justice.
“Today, the Secretary of State of the United States, acting on a threat delivered in September by US National Security Adviser John Bolton, stated that it will bar entry to International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel,” Malki said in a statement.
“The State of Palestine deplores the renewed outrageous attempts of bullying, intimidation, coercion and obstruction of justice. The ICC was established under a rules-based international order to ensure accountability for the most serious of crimes.
As a result of its independence and integrity, no amount of punitive measures against the Court, its officials and those cooperating with it could impede the course of justice for victims,” he added, according to WAFA.
“The State of Palestine remains undeterred in its commitment to uphold and defend the principles and values enshrined in the Rome Statute and to preserve its integrity.
“The State of Palestine reaffirms its support for the Court and stands united with its fellow States Parties in its resolve to fight impunity, and ensure that the ICC is able to fulfill its mandate in service of justice.”
“Today, the Secretary of State of the United States, acting on a threat delivered in September by US National Security Adviser John Bolton, stated that it will bar entry to International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel,” Malki said in a statement.
“The State of Palestine deplores the renewed outrageous attempts of bullying, intimidation, coercion and obstruction of justice. The ICC was established under a rules-based international order to ensure accountability for the most serious of crimes.
As a result of its independence and integrity, no amount of punitive measures against the Court, its officials and those cooperating with it could impede the course of justice for victims,” he added, according to WAFA.
“The State of Palestine remains undeterred in its commitment to uphold and defend the principles and values enshrined in the Rome Statute and to preserve its integrity.
“The State of Palestine reaffirms its support for the Court and stands united with its fellow States Parties in its resolve to fight impunity, and ensure that the ICC is able to fulfill its mandate in service of justice.”