��������Ƶ

WASHINGTON: The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on an Israeli settler group it accused of helping perpetrate violence in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians.
The Amana settler group “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement and maintains ties to various persons previously sanctioned by the US government and its partners for perpetrating violence in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The sanctions also target a subsidiary of Amana called Binyanei Bar Amana, described by Treasury as a company that builds and sell homes in Israeli settlements and settler outposts.
The sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets. The United Kingdom and Canada have also imposed sanctions on Amana.
Israel has settled the West Bank since capturing it during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say the settlements have undermined the prospects for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Israel views the West Bank as the biblical Judea and Samaria, and the settlers cite biblical ties to the land.
Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began over a year ago.
Most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position disputed by Israel which sees the territory as a security bulwark. In 2019, the then-Trump administration abandoned the long-held US position that the settlements are illegal before it was restored by President Joe Biden.
Last week, nearly 90 US lawmakers urged Biden to impose sanctions on members of members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.

GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities,” providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organization in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency’s roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza “may have been involved” in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.
Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA’s advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organization’s “darkest moment.”
“The clock is ticking fast,” he told the commission, according to a transcript.
Describing Gaza as “an unrelenting dystopian horror,” he warned that “what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”
Anton Leis, head of Spain’s international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was “simply no alternative to UNRWA,” which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
“It is the only organization that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza,” he said.
Lazzarini agreed, saying that “If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary health care.
Lazzarini warned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza,” he said, adding that it would not be possible to coordinate the deconfliction with Israeli authorities to ensure aid convoys can move safely.
“The environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
The UNRWA chief has charged that Israel’s main objective in its attacks on the agency is to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.
“We have to be clear, even if UNRWA today would cease its operation, the statue of refugee would remain,” he said.
Without the agency, he said, the responsibility for providing services to the Palestinian refugees “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel.”
If no one steps in to fill the void, he said, it “will create a vacuum ... (and) sow the seeds for more extremism, more hate in the future.”
He called on the international community to go beyond statements of condemnation and put far more pressure on Israel.
“We feel alone.”