10, June 2024
Israel: Netanyahu under increased pressure after war cabinet minister resigns 0
Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz on Sunday announced his resignation amid celebrations for the rescue of four hostages from war-torn Gaza in a raid that Palestinians say killed hundreds.
Gantz’s resignation is the latest sign of sharpening domestic dissent over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the eight-month war, and is the first major political blow to him during the conflict.
It came after Special Forces fought gun battles with Palestinian militants on Saturday in central Gaza’s crowded Nuseirat refugee camp area as they swooped in to free the four captives.
The Israeli military said the extraction team and captives came under heavy gun and grenade fire, which killed one police officer, while Israel’s air force launched strikes that reduced nearby buildings to rubble.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said 274 people were killed and 698 wounded, in what it labelled the “Nuseirat massacre”, figures that could not be independently verified.
Among those were at least 64 children, 57 women and 37 elderly people, the ministry said.
“People were screaming — young and old, women and men,” said Nuseirat resident Muhannad Thabet, 35.
“Everyone wanted to flee the place, but the bombing was intense and anyone who moved was at risk of being killed due to the heavy bombardment and gunfire.”
Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, had been abducted from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war.
Source: France 24
10, June 2024
France: Macron takes huge risk with surprise election 0
President Emmanuel Macron has called snap parliamentary elections later this month in the wake of a big victory for his rival Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the European Parliament vote.
The far-right party is on course to win 32% of the vote, exit polls say, more than twice that of the president’s Renaissance party.
Announcing the dissolution of parliament, he said the two rounds of voting would take place on 30 June and 7 July, a few weeks before the Paris Olympics.
Mr Macron made the dramatic and surprise decision in a televised address from the Élysée Palace an hour after voting closed and exit polls had been declared in France’s EU elections.
His decision came not long after National Rally’s 28-year-old leader, Jordan Bardella, had openly called on the president to call parliamentary elections.
“I have heard your message,” the president told French voters, “and I will not let it go without a response.”
“France needs a clear majority in serenity and harmony,” he said, adding that he could not resign himself to the far-right’s progress “everywhere in the continent”.
Now barely two years into his second term as president, Mr Macron already lacks a majority in the French parliament, and though this European vote in theory has no bearing on national politics, he clearly decided that continuing his mandate without a new popular consultation would place too much of a strain on the system.
The upcoming parliamentary elections also won’t affect Mr Macron’s own job, as they are separate from the presidential elections and his term as president still runs for three more years.
Ms Le Pen, who has twice been defeated by Mr Macron in presidential elections, immediately reacted, saying her party was “ready to exercise power, ready to put an end to mass immigration”.
Calling a snap election is a huge surprise for the country, and a huge risk for President Macron.
He could have reacted differently. He could have just kept going, explaining the far right’s massive victory as a European aberration which would be corrected at more important elections.
He could have trusted to the impending European football championship in Germany and above all the Paris Olympics to keep people’s minds off politics for a couple of months.
That was certainly how the Paris commentariat thought he would take his party’s rout.
But one can only assume the president had seen this coming, and planned his response in advance.
Source: BBC