Israel plans to intensify Gaza raids
Israel has put 75,000 IDF reserve members on stand-by after Jerusalem was targeted by a rocket for the first time since 1970.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to intensify Israel’s offensive of the Gaza Strip, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007.
28 Palestinians and three Israelis have died since Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s military chief on Wednesday.
There were further Israeli air strikes on Gaza City early on Saturday.
Hamas’ military leader Ahmed Jabari was killed by an Israeli air strike on Wednesday, and a senior commander was killed on Friday, Hamas officials have confirmed.
Militants and civilians, including at least seven children, have been among the Palestinians killed during the two-day Israeli bombardment, the BBC reports.
Egypt condemns aggression on Gaza
On a brief visit to the Gaza Strip, Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil has committed Egypt to the diplomatic undertaking of securing a ceasefire.
As he visited wounded residents at a Gaza hospital on Friday, Qandil decried Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip and vowed that Egypt would work to stop the aggression and achieve a truce.
Despite an announcement by Israel that it would hold its fire while the Egyptian Prime Minister was in Gaza, fighting continued along the Israel-Gaza border during Qandil’s three-hour visit.
Egypt, now led by a government seen as ideologically close to Hamas, has previously arranged informal truces between Israel and Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip. With a new government, this would be the first of such truces Egypt would broker since the uprising, Al Jazeera reports.
The Hague reaches acquittal for Croat Generals Gotovina and Markac
In 2011 Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were sentenced to 24 years and 18 years respectively over the killing of ethnic Serbs in an offensive to retake Croatia’s Krajina region that took place in the 1990s.
Early Friday, judges ordered their release, and the men arrived in Zagreb later to a hero’s welcome. But their release was condemned in Serbia.
On Friday morning, the presiding judge at the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Theodor Meron, said the court had entered a verdict of acquittal for Gen Gotovina and Gen Markac, both aged 57, reversing lastr year’s conviction of murder, persecution and plunder.
Judges at the time ruled that they were part of a criminal conspiracy led by late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to permanently remove the Serb civilian population from Krajina – a conspiracy Judge Meron has ruled never existed, The BBC reports.
Ikea admits to using forced labor in 1980s
Ikea said political prisoners from the former East Germany provided labor that helped keep its prices so low.
Auditors at Ernst & Young concluded that Ikea knowingly utilized forced labor in the former East Germany to manufacture products during the 1980s. Ikea had commissioned the report in May as a result of accusations that both political and criminal prisoners were involved in making components of Ikea furniture and that some Ikea employees knew about it.
Accusations against Ikea started to appear about a year ago in news media reports in Germany and Sweden. Ikea’s admission has given new impetus to efforts by victims’ groups to receive compensation for work they were forced to perform under the Communist government in East Germany, The New York Times reports.
Tehran ready for expanding uranium enrichment
Iran is set to expand its uranium enrichment in an underground site after installing centrifuges, a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog also said that Iran’s stockpile of its most sensitive nuclear material, which could quickly be used to make atomic arms, had grown and is getting closer to an amount that could be sufficient for a bomb.
The agency report reiterated its inability to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is intended for peaceful activities.
Iran denies working, or ever having worked, on a nuclear weapon and says all its atomic activities are peaceful, Al Jazeera reports.
