Israel’s Justice minister vowed to help Ethiopia’s Jews immigrate to Israel as soon as possible during a rare visit to Ethiopia.

Ayelet Shaked visited the synagogue in Addis Ababa on Sunday.

“These programs that will eventually reunite Ethiopian Jews with their families in Israel are not generally easy,” said Shaked to the group gathered in the synagogue.

“But I will try everything within my power to work with relevant offices to make this happen in the shortest time possible,” she said.

Shaked, on what is reported to be her first official visit to Africa, said she came to find out more about the situation of Ethiopia’s estimated 8,000 remaining Jews.

Members of the Ethiopian Jews who attended the meeting told her that they want to move to Israel, where many family members moved years ago. They said they want “aliyah,” the Hebrew term for the immigration of Jews in other parts of the world to Israel.

“We know aliyah for Jews that are descendants in other countries happened so swiftly that sometimes even their dogs were also included as they moved to Israel. Are we less important than these dogs?” asked Meles Sidisto, the community head of Ethiopia’s Jews in Addis Ababa.

In an emotional speech, Sidisto reaffirmed that members of Ethiopia’s Jewish population plan to stage a mass hunger strike should Israel fail to reunite them with their families soon.

“We are unhappy here. We have had enough here. If our situation is not resolved in a very short time, we will hold a momentous mass hunger strike that will help us present our voice to Israel and the world,” he said.

The Ethiopian Jews met with Shaked in the small hall decorated with Israeli flags and scriptures. Some said they have been separated for decades from close family members who moved to Israel.

Seeking reunification with loved ones

Tigabu Worku, one of the synagogue’s most active members, read a letter to Shaked in which he complained that he has been separated from his family for years.

“I have been torn from my younger sisters Leah and Sarah for 18 years,” said Tigabu. “Eighteen years I have missed them. Eighteen years I have waited to see their faces that I no longer remember.”

Ethiopia’s Falashmuras are believed to be descendants of one of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel. Ethiopia’s Jewish people mainly live in the Amhara and Tigray provinces.

Thousands of Falashmuras moved to Israel following the Law of Return in April 1975 and most of those who remain in Ethiopia have been separated for well over a decade from family members who moved to Israel.

About 140,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel today, a small minority in a country of over 8 million. Their assimilation hasn’t been smooth, with many arriving without a modern education and then falling into unemployment and poverty.

Although many of those remaining in Ethiopia are practicing Jews, Israel doesn’t consider them Jewish, meaning they are not automatically eligible to immigrate under its “law of return,” which grants automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. Instead, the government must OK their arrival.

Ethiopian community members have been permitted to immigrate over the last two decades in limited bursts that have left hundreds of families torn apart.

The Israeli government did not approve the funding for the movement of the Ethiopians in its new budget but said a special ministerial committee would to discuss the issue. A date for that meeting had not been announced.

 
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International chemical weapons inspectors face a dilemma.

They’ve been supplied by rebels with the coordinates of the burial site of dozens of victims of the alleged deadly gas attack that prompted earlier this month retaliatory U.S.-led airstrikes on Syria.

But to gain access to take samples from corpses, they’ll need permission from Syrian and Russian officials, who they fear will obstruct them.

More than 40 victims of the suspected chemical attack on the Syrian town of of Douma on the outskirts of the capital of Damascus were buried in unmarked graves by insurgents, political activist Zaher ak-Sakat, a rebel commander and former Syrian general, told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph.

They hoped international inspectors would be able to access the site to collect samples from the hair, skin and clothing of the dead, possible crucial evidence to support claims the Syrian government mounted a gas attack.

“They were buried just as they were found. It will be easy to get samples from the hair and clothes and eventually prove what was used,” he said.

The United States, France and Britain remain convinced Douma was the subject of a chemical attack on April 7, basing their claims on open-source information and their own intelligence, which they said suggests chlorine and possibly a nerve agent, maybe sarin, were used.

The Syrian government and Russia deny any chemical attack took place, saying it was fabricated or staged by the rebels and the White Helmets, volunteer first responders who work in insurgent-held territory.

Samples being collected

On Saturday, a team of inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons entered Douma after being forced to wait for almost a week in the Syrian capital either for permission to start their work that will include sample collection, taking survivor statements and gathering video documentary evidence, or to gain clearance from U.N. security officials.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said the delay amounted to “obstructionism” by the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad aimed at undermining the caliber of the probe.

The OPCW said its team visited one of the two sites reportedly bombed. Collected samples are to be sent initially to a laboratory at The Hague, and then analyzed by other labs, the agency said. Other information and “materials” have also been collected by the inspectors, it said.

“The OPCW will evaluate the situation and consider future steps, including another possible visit to Douma,” the watchdog agency said.

Important traces of toxic chemicals would likely still be present in the environment and from victims’ remains, said Alastair Hay, an environmental toxicologist at Britain’s University of Leeds.

“Nerve agents like sarin can be present in the environment for many weeks after use, and particularly if you look near the site where a weapon has exploded,” he said. “Autopsy samples, if available, will provide invaluable evidence, and nerve agents can be found in many organs,” Hay told the AFP news agency.

But evidence of chlorine gas fades fast, toxicologists say.

Claims, counter claims

Rebels and activists accuse the Syrian government and Russians, who sent military police to Douma after the rebels agreed to withdraw after April 7, of removing forensic evidence of chemical weapons. The Douma attack has been the subject of a swirl of conflicting claims and counterclaims and rival theories, mostly fought out on the internet. The Kremlin has accused Britain of ordering rebels to stage an attack.

“With any war crime in Syria receiving significant media coverage, there has been a concerted effort by pro-Kremlin and pro-Assad individuals and media outlets to spread claims attacking the Syrian Civil Defense (White Helmets), a major source of information and footage on war crimes in the conflict. These attacks generally fall into two categories: claiming that the White Helmets are al-Qaida or ISIS (or even sometimes both), and claiming that the White Helmets fake images of war crimes for gullible Western audiences and media outlets,” said Elliot Higgins, a freelance investigative journalist.

Higgins’ geo-tagging tracking of the trajectory of missiles fired in a 2013 chemical attack was seen widely as important open-source evidence undermining Syrian government denials.

The Syrian government denies having ever used chemical weapons during the seven-year-long conflict. But U.N. and OPCW experts have blamed the government for four deadly gas attacks, including one on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun a year ago, involving the sarin nerve agent that left more than 80 people dead.

Since April 7, Russian and Syrian state-run television outlets have broadcast reports casting doubt on the Douma attack. Their reports have included testimony from local doctors and residents, and in one case a child, who said the whole incident was staged. But Douma residents have told Western reporters that testimonies were coerced.
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More than a dozen Turkish opposition lawmakers switched parties Sunday in a show of solidarity as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rivals scramble to challenge him in a surprise snap election that could solidify his rule.

A year ago, Erdogan narrowly won a referendum to change Turkey’s form of government to an executive presidency, abolishing the office of the prime minister and giving the president more powers. The change will take effect after the next elections.

The snap elections, called for June, caught Turkey off guard and come as the opposition is in disarray as it struggles to put forward candidates and campaign plans. The elections were initially supposed to take place in November 2019.

Officials from the pro-secular Republican People’s Party, or CHP, said 15 of its lawmakers would join the Iyi Party. The CHP, which is the main opposition party, said the decision was borne out of “democratic disposition.”

The center-right Iyi Party, established last fall, has been facing eligibility issues before the June 24 presidential and parliamentary elections, including not having enough seats in parliament.

The Iyi Party, which means “Good Party,” now has 20 lawmakers in parliament, enough to form a political group, satisfying an eligibility requirement. It wasn’t immediately clear if they would be asked to fulfill other requirements, including establishing organizations in half of Turkey’s provinces and completing its general congress, all to be completed six months before voting day.

But the party said it had already fulfilled those requirements as well.

That timing has posed a challenge after Erdogan agreed Wednesday to hold the elections more than a year ahead of schedule.

Iyi Party founder Meral Aksener, a former interior minister, is considered a serious contender against Erdogan and has announced her candidacy. She defected from Turkey’s main nationalist party allied with Erdogan, whose leader Devlet Bahceli called for the early elections.

Aksener, 61, can run for the presidency even without her party, if she can get 100,000 signatures from the public.

Turkey’s electoral board has yet to announce the presidential candidates and parties eligible to run.

 
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Saudi Arabian security forces said they shot down a recreational drone in the capital Saturday after online videos showing gunfire in a neighborhood where royal palaces are located sparked fears of possible political unrest.

The Riyadh police spokesman, quoted by the official Saudi News Agency (SPA), said a security screening point noticed the flying of a small unauthorized recreational drone at 7:50 p.m. local time (1650 GMT), leading security forces to deal with it according to their orders and instructions.

There were no casualties, and King Salman was not at his palace at the time, a senior Saudi official told Reuters.

“The king was at his farm in Diriya,” the official said, naming another area of the capital.

Amateur footage circulating earlier on social media showed loud gunfire that lasted for at least 30 seconds, leading to speculation online about a possible coup attempt in the world’s top oil exporter and questions about the whereabouts of the king and crown prince.

One video showed two police cars parked in the middle of a dark street. Reuters was unable to independently verify the videos’ authenticity.

Asked about the footage, the official said the drone had been shot down, and added that the government would introduce regulations for the use of recreational drones.

​Radical change recently

Saudi Arabia has witnessed a series of radical political changes over the past year under the king’s son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has spearheaded reforms to transform the economy, open the country culturally, and impose a more tolerant form of Islam in the deeply conservative kingdom.

The 32-year-old leader ousted his older cousin as crown prince last summer in a palace coup and then jailed dozens of top businessmen and senior royals, including billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and National Guard head Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, in an anti-corruption sweep.

Most of the detainees have been released after reaching settlements with the government.

Space for criticism has also narrowed in recent months following the arrests of prominent clerics and activists in an apparent bid to silence dissent.

Speculation of a backlash

Those moves have helped Prince Mohammed consolidate his position in a country where power had been shared among senior princes for decades and religious figures exercised significant influence on policy.

But they have also fuelled speculation about a possible backlash against the crown prince, who remains popular with Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning youth population.

Prince Mohammed returned earlier this month from a foreign tour that included the United States where he sought investments and support to curb Iranian influence in the region.

Riyadh and Tehran are locked in a decades-long struggle for supremacy that is being waged in several countries, including Yemen.

Iran-aligned Houthi fighters there have occasionally dispatched drones across Saudi Arabia’s southern border, but there was no apparent connection between that conflict and Saturday’s incident in Riyadh.
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Gaza’s ruling Hamas militant group said Saturday that a man who was gunned down in Malaysia was an important member of the organization, raising suspicions that Israel was behind the brazen killing.

Hamas said Palestinian engineer Fadi al-Batsh was a “loyal” member and a “scientist of Palestine’s youth scholars.” It gave no further details on his scientific accomplishments but said he had made “important contributions” and participated in international forums in the field of energy.

Hamas stopped short of blaming Israel, saying only that he had been “assassinated by the hand of treachery.” But relatives of al-Batsh said they believe Israel targeted him.

Malaysian police say the 36-year-old al-Batsh was gunned down early Saturday by two assailants who shot at least eight bullets from a motorbike as he was heading to a mosque for dawn prayers in Kuala Lampur. It said closed-circuit television showed him targeted by assassins who had waited for him for almost 20 minutes.

Malaysia’s deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said the government was looking into the possibility of the involvement of “foreign agents” in his killing. He told local media that initial investigations showed the assailants were “white men” driving a powerful BMW 1100cc motorbike.

Besides his Hamas affiliation, al-Batsh was a cousin of Khaled al-Batsh, a senior official in the Islamic Jihad militant group, who accused the Israeli Mossad spy agency of the assassination, without providing evidence.

The Israeli government had no comment. But Israel has a long history of suspected targeting of wanted Palestinian militants in daring overseas operations around the globe and has been linked to other assassinations as well, though it has never acknowledged them.

Al-Batsh specialized in electrical and electronic engineering and worked at a Malaysian university. He had lived there with his family for the past eight years and was an imam at a local mosque.

He received his Ph.D degree from the University of Malaya in 2015 and was a senior lecturer at the British Malaysian Institute. His official biography said his research interests included power converters, power quality and renewable energy.

However, Israeli media reported that he was also deeply involved in the Hamas drone development project.

Israel and Hamas are bitter foes who have fought three wars since 2008. Tensions have risen in recent weeks with a series of mass protests along the Gaza border in which 32 Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli troops since late March.

Hamas says the protests are aimed at breaking a crippling border blockade that was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant group overran Gaza in 2007, a year after winning Palestinian parliament elections. It says it also aims to assert the right of refugees to return to their former homes in Israel.

Israel accuses Hamas, which is sworn to Israel’s destruction and has carried out dozens of deadly suicide bombings against it, of cynically exploiting Gaza civilians for its political aims by staging the protests and trying to carry out attacks under their cover.

Israel has used lethal force against unarmed protesters, but it says it is only targeting instigators who are trying to damage the border fence with explosives, firebombs and other means. However, the United Nations, the European Union and rights groups have questioned Israel’s use of force when soldiers’ lives are not in danger and the U.N. and E.U. have called for investigations.

Protests are aiming to culminate in a large border march on May 15, the 70th anniversary of Israel founding. The date is mourned by Palestinians as their “nakba,”or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands were uprooted in the 1948 Mideast war over Israel’s creation.
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