Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men protest an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that requires the state to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students to the military, in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, June 30, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Israeli military announced on July 16 it would begin sending draft notices to Jewish ultra-Orthodox men on Sunday.

That follows a landmark Supreme Court order for young religious men to begin enlisting for military services. Under long-standing political arrangements, ultra-Orthodox men had been exempt from the draft, which is compulsory for most Jewish men.

The system created widespread resentment among the general public in Israel, especially after more than nine months of war against Hamas militants in Gaza. The court ruled that the system of exemptions was discriminatory.

Also read: Could Israel’s SC ruling ending draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Israelis topple Netanyahu’s government?

The announcement could rattle Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which relies on the support of ultra-Orthodox parties that opposed any changes to the system. It also could lead to unrest.

Past attempts to enlist ultra-Orthodox men have triggered mass protests in ultra-Orthodox communities. On Monday, a vehicle carrying two military officers was attacked and blocked in an ultra-Orthodox city.

The army statement said it would begin sending “initial summons orders” to ultra-Orthodox men as part of its programme “to promote the integration of members of the ultra-Orthodox community into its ranks.”

The summons is the beginning of a months-long recruitment process. The army did not say when it expects ultra-Orthodox men to begin serving or how many men it hopes to recruit.

JERUSALEM:

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students to the conscript military, a decree likely to send shockwaves through Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.

Netanyahu’s coalition relies for its survival on two ultra-Orthodox parties that regard longstanding conscription exemptions as key to keeping their constituents in religious seminaries and away from a melting-pot military that might test their conservative customs.

The ultra-Orthodox conscription waiver has become especially charged as Israel’s armed forces, made up mostly of teenage conscripts and older civilians mobilised for reserve duty, are overstretched by a multi-front war, in Gaza and Lebanon.

“At the height of a difficult war, the burden of inequality is more than ever acute,” the court’s unanimous ruling said.

Most Israelis are bound by law to serve in the military, whereas ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students have been largely exempt for decades.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Patients lying shackled and blindfolded on more than a dozen beds inside a white tent in the desert. Surgeries performed without adequate painkillers. Doctors who remain anonymous.

These are some of the conditions at Israel’s only hospital dedicated to treating Palestinians detained by the military in the Gaza Strip, three people who have worked there told The Associated Press, confirming similar accounts from human rights groups.

While Israel says it detains only suspected militants, many patients have turned out to be non-combatants taken during raids, held without trial and eventually returned to war-torn Gaza.

Eight months into the Israel-Hamas war, accusations of inhumane treatment at the Sde Teiman military field hospital are on the rise, and the Israeli government is under growing pressure to shut it down. Rights groups and other critics say what began as a temporary place to hold and treat militants after Oct. 7 has morphed into a harsh detention center with too little accountability.

The military denies the allegations of inhumane treatment and says all detainees needing medical attention receive it.

The hospital is near the city of Beersheba in southern Israel. It opened beside a detention center on a military base after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel because some civilian hospitals refused to treat wounded militants. Of the three workers interviewed by AP, two spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared government retribution and public rebuke.

“We are condemned by the left because we are not fulfilling ethical issues,” said Dr. Yoel Donchin, an anesthesiologist who has worked at Sde Teiman hospital since its earliest days and still works there. “We are condemned from the right because they think we are criminals for treating terrorists.”

The military this week said it formed a committee to investigate detention center conditions, but it was unclear if that included the hospital. Next week Israel’s highest court is set to hear arguments from human rights groups seeking to shut it down.

Israel has not granted journalists or the International Committee of the Red Cross access to the Sde Teiman facilities.

Israel has detained some 4,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, according to official figures, though roughly 1,500 were released after the military determined they were not affiliated with Hamas. Israeli human rights groups say the majority of detainees have at some point passed through Sde Teiman, the country’s largest detention center.

Doctors there say they have treated many who appeared to be non-combatants.

“Now we have patients that are not so young, sick patients with diabetes and high blood pressure,” said Donchin, the anesthesiologist.

A soldier who worked at the hospital recounted an elderly man who underwent surgery on his leg without pain medication. “He was screaming and shaking,” said the soldier.

Between medical treatments, the soldier said patients were housed in the detention center, where they were exposed to squalid conditions and their wounds often developed infections. There was a separate area where older people slept on thin mattresses under floodlights, and a putrid smell hung in the air, he said.

The military said in a statement that all detainees are “reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity.” It said they receive check-ups upon arrival and are transferred to the hospital when they require more serious treatment.

A medical worker who saw patients at the facility in the winter recounted teaching hospital workers how to wash wounds.

Donchin, who largely defended the facility against allegations of mistreatment but was critical of some of its practices, said most patients are diapered and not allowed to use the bathroom, shackled around their arms and legs and blindfolded.

“Their eyes are covered all the time. I don’t know what the security reason for this is,” he said.

The military disputed the accounts provided to AP, saying patients were handcuffed “in cases where the security risk requires it” and removed when they caused injury. Patients are rarely diapered, it said.

Dr. Michael Barilan, a professor at the Tel Aviv University Medical School who said he has spoken with over 15 hospital staff, disputed accounts of medical negligence. He said doctors are doing their best under difficult circumstances, and that the blindfolds originated out of a “fear (patients) would retaliate against those taking care of them.”

Days after Oct. 7, roughly 100 Israelis clashed with police outside one of the country’s main hospitals in response to false rumors it was treating a militant.

In the aftermath, some hospitals refused to treat detainees, fearful that doing so could endanger staff and disrupt operations. They were already overwhelmed by people wounded during the Hamas attack and expecting casualties to rise from an impending ground invasion.

As Israel pulled in scores of wounded Palestinians to Sde Teiman, it became clear the facility’s infirmary was not large enough, according to Barilan. An adjacent field hospital was built from scratch.

Israel’s Health Ministry laid out plans for the hospital in a December memo obtained by AP.

It said patients would be treated while handcuffed and blindfolded. Doctors, drafted into service by the military, would be kept anonymous to protect their “safety, lives and well-being.” The ministry referred all questions to the military when reached for comment.

Still, an April report from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, drawing on interviews with hospital workers, said doctors at the facility faced “ethical, professional and even emotional distress.” Barilan said turnover has been high.

Patients with more complicated injuries have been transferred from the field hospital to civilian hospitals, but it has been done covertly to avoid arousing the public’s attention, Barilan said. And the process is fraught: The medical worker who spoke with AP said one detainee with a gunshot wound was discharged prematurely from a civilian hospital to Sde Teiman within hours of being treated, endangering his life.

The field hospital is overseen by military and health officials, but Donchin said parts of its operations are managed by KLP, a private logistics and security company whose website says it specializes in “high-risk environments.” The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Because it’s not under the same command as the military’s medical corps, the field hospital is not subject to Israel’s Patients Rights Act, according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

A group from the Israeli Medical Association visited the hospital earlier this year but kept its findings private. The association did not respond to requests for comment.

The military told AP that 36 people from Gaza have died in Israel’s detention centers since Oct. 7, some of them because of illnesses or wounds sustained in the war. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has alleged that some died from medical negligence.

Khaled Hammouda, a surgeon from Gaza, spent 22 days at one of Israel’s detention centers. He does not know where he was taken because he was blindfolded while he was transported. But he said he recognized a picture of Sde Teiman and said he saw at least one detainee, a prominent Gaza doctor who is believed to have been there.

Hammouda recalled asking a soldier if a pale 18-year-old who appeared to be suffering from internal bleeding could be taken to a doctor. The soldier took the teenager away, gave him intravenous fluids for a few hours, and then returned him.

“I told them, ‘He could die,'” Hammouda said. “‘They told me this is the limit.’”

People inspect the rubble of a house where a Hezbollah member and his family were killed in Israeli bombardment.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah said on March 12 it launched more than 100 rockets at Israeli military positions in retaliation for a strike on the country’s east that killed one person the day before.

Hamas ally Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged near-daily cross-border fire since the Gaza war erupted in October, but several Israeli strikes have recently hit Hezbollah positions further north, raising fears of a full-blown conflict.

“Hezbollah launched “more than a hundred katyusha rockets” on Tuesday morning at two military bases in the occupied Golan Heights,” the group said in a statement. This was “in response to the Israeli attacks on our people, villages and cities, most recently near the city of Baalbek and the killing of a citizen”, it added.

On Monday, Israeli air strikes near Lebanon’s eastern city of Baalbek killed one person, in the second raid on the Hezbollah stronghold since cross-border hostilities began. The Israeli military confirmed its jets had hit two sites belonging to “Hezbollah’s aerial forces” in retaliation for strikes on the occupied Golan Heights over several days.

On February 26, Israeli strikes targeted Baalbek, some 100 km (60 miles) from the border, killing two Hezbollah members. Earlier on Tuesday, Hezbollah said its chief Hassan Nasrallah met with Khalil al-Hayya, a leading member of Hamas’s political bureau.

They discussed ceasefire talks for the Gaza war, as well as attacks by Hamas’s regional allies to support its war efforts, the Hezbollah statement said. Nasrallah is due to give a televised speech on Wednesday. Hezbollah has repeatedly said it will only stop its attacks on Israel with a ceasefire in Gaza.

But Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant recently said any truce in Gaza would not change Israel’s goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, by force or diplomacy.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, at least 317 people, mainly Hezbollah fighters but also 54 civilians, have been killed in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally. In Israel, at least 10 soldiers and seven civilians have been killed in the cross-border hostilities.

Though Hamas is no match for the technological sophistication of the Israeli army, the group has one very unusual asset: a vast network of secret subterranean tunnels.

Since Israel began to grasp the full extent of the labyrinth in 2014, it has spent over $1 billion developing an underground barrier along its 60-kilometer border with the Gaza Strip, and hundreds of millions of dollars more on a system to detect the construction of new tunnels – measures it has dubbed the ‘Iron Wall’ and ‘Iron Spade.’

These defenses were meant to make its territory unimpregnable. But in at least one case, the hidden passageways were used to abet the cross-border attacks which last week killed 1,200 people, supplementing incursions by air, land and sea.

Now, as Israel signals an imminent ground invasion of Gaza, the same network is complicating its military retaliation – not least because Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union, says it’s holding Israeli hostages in subterranean rooms.

“Think of the Gaza Strip as one layer for civilians and then another layer for Hamas,” said Jonathan Conricus, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces. “We are trying to get to that second layer that Hamas has built.”

Targeting the underground maze will not be easy. Past attempts have been hampered by the fact that no one but Hamas knows their full extent.

In 2021, Israel said it had destroyed 100 kilometers of tunnels underneath Gaza. But Hamas insisted it had a network of 500 kilometers, of which only 5% was hit.

In a bid to gain the edge over its foe, Israel in 2014 decided to invest in a sophisticated tunnel-detection system developed by Israeli firms Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the two contractors who also jointly worked on the missile defense system known as Iron Dome.

But the sensors aren’t foolproof as they can’t detect tunnels that turn and get confused by intersections, according to research by the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Studies.

“Despite advancing technological countermeasures, tunneling remains a very effective way for one side to literally undermine another’s dominance of the surface,” said Scott Savitz, a military expert at the Rand Corporation. The opposing side “never knows whether tunnels exist, how many there are, or where they are. They only know the ones that they found.”

Hamas for years has made use of the tunnels under the densely-populated Gaza to conceal weapons, command facilities and fighters.

Over time, the passageways have become more sophisticated with ventilation shafts and electricity.

Some reach a depth of 35 meters and can even be equipped with railroad tracks and communication rooms, according to experts. The entrance to them often lies in residential buildings or other public facilities.

At first, the subterranean network was intended mainly to smuggle goods and weapons from Egypt into the narrow strip of land that Israel withdrew from in 2005.

But militants also used it for cross-border raids, including the operation in 2006 in which they kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, then aged 19, killing two other Israeli soldiers. Shalit was released five years later in return for Israel freeing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Israel staged a ground offensive in Gaza in 2014 in a bid to get rid of the underground labyrinth, which Hamas militants had used to ambush Israeli forces during the 50-day war.

Egypt also clamped down starting about a decade ago through a coordinated campaign to destroy the tunnels, including by flooding them.

Using robots to explore the tunnel complex can reduce risks. But, Savitz warned, due to confined spaces, booby traps and other defenses, and defenders’ greater knowledge of the underground environment, Israeli troops who try to enter them will be at a “a severe disadvantage.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Jerusalem:

The Israeli military said Saturday that the bodies of some hostages kidnapped by Hamas group had been found during operations inside Gaza this week.

“We have found and located some bodies in the perimeter in the Gaza Strip of Israelis that were abducted,” a military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, told a briefing.

Israel says that at least 120 people were abducted when Hamas fighters launched attacks inside Israel on October 7 that left at least 1,300 dead.

The Israeli military has since staged “localised” raids inside Gaza to back an air onslaught on the territory that the Hamas government says has left at least 2,215 dead.

Peter Lerner said the bodies of hostages were found on these “small, close-perimeter raids into the Gaza Strip”.

The Israeli military has carried out air raids on thousands of Hamas targets in Gaza, the spokesman said.

“They include quality targets such as drone facilities, they include naval facilities, they include command and control facilities, they include all of the rocket facilities,” Peter Lerner said.

“Our assessment suggests that at this time Hamas are in a state of disarray, they have no idea what the situation is above ground, they have escaped into the tunnels.”

Government officials also indicated that more time would be given for civilians to leave the north of the territory ahead of an expected full-scale ground offensive.

Lerner did not say there is a deadline to leave north Gaza, but told the briefing: “We have extended once again because we realised that there is a huge amount of people that need to get out. We are continuing to encourage the population in the north of the Gaza Strip and Gaza City to go south and get out of harm’s way.”

Foreign ministry spokesman Lior Haiat told the briefing that Israel is not demanding that Palestinians leave Gaza but just to get out of the north.

“We gave them (civilians) the time to do so and we will continue to give civilians time to leave the places that we think Hamas is using for its terrorist infrastructure,” Haiat said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shake hands with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in Amman, Jordan, on October 13, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived, on October 13, at the Israeli city of Tel Aviv to meet with senior government leaders and see firsthand some of the U.S. weapons and security assistance that Washington rapidly delivered to Israel in the first week of its war with the militant Hamas group.

Mr. Austin is the second high-level U.S. official to visit Israel in two days. His quick trip from Brussels, where he was attending a NATO Defence Ministers meeting, comes a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the region on October 12.

Mr. Blinken is continuing the frantic Mideast diplomacy, seeking to avert an expanded regional conflict. Mr. Austin is expected to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, and the Israeli War Cabinet.

His arrival comes as Israel’s military directed hundreds of thousands of residents in Gaza City to evacuate “for their own safety and protection,” ahead of a feared Israeli ground offensive. Gaza’s Hamas rulers responded by calling on Palestinians to “remain steadfast in your homes and to stand firm” against Israel.

Defence officials travelling with Mr. Austin said he wants to underscore America’s unwavering support for the people of Israel and that the United States is committed to making sure the country has what it needs to defend itself.

A senior defence official said the U.S. has already given Israel small diameter bombs as well as interceptor missiles for its Iron Dome system and more will be delivered. Other munitions are expected to arrive on October 13.

Mr. Austin has spoken nearly daily with Gallant, and directed the rapid shift of the U.S. ships, intelligence support and other assets to Israel and the region.

Within hours after the brutal Hamas attack across the border into Israel, the U.S. moved warships and aircraft to the region.

The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier strike group is already in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and a second carrier was departing on Friday from Virginia, also heading to the region.

Mr. Austin declined to say if the U.S. is doing surveillance flights in the region, but the U.S. is providing intelligence and other planning assistance to the Israelis, including advice on the hostage situation.

A day after visiting Israel to offer the Joe Biden administration’s diplomatic support in person, Mr. Blinken was in Jordan on Friday and held talks with Jordanian King Abdullah II. They did not speak to reporters after the meeting.

Antony Blinken then went on to a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has a home in Amman, the Jordanian capital.

In the meeting with the king, Mr. Blinken discussed Hamas’ attack last Saturday and efforts to release all hostages the militants seized, as well as efforts to “prevent the conflict from widening,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Mr. Blinken “underscored that Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination and discussed ways to address the humanitarian needs of civilians in Gaza while Israel conducts legitimate security operations to defend itself from terrorism.” The monarch rules over a country with a large Palestinian population and has a vested interest in their status while Abbas runs the Palestinian Authority that controls the West Bank.

According to a palace statement, Abdullah stressed the need to open humanitarian corridors for medical aid and relief into Gaza while protecting civilians and working to end the escalation of the conflict.

He appealed against hindering the work of international agencies and warned against any attempts to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza and elsewhere, or to cause their internal displacement.

Earlier on Friday, Israel’s military had told some one million Palestinians living in Gaza to evacuate the north, according to the United Nations — an unprecedented order for almost half the population of the sealed-off territory ahead an expected ground invasion by Israel against the ruling Hamas.

The King also urged for the protection of innocent civilians on all sides, in line with shared human values, international law, and international humanitarian law.

Later Friday, Mr. Blinken is to fly to Doha for meetings with Qatari officials who have close contacts with the Hamas leadership and have been exploring an exchange of Palestinian prisoners in Israel for the release of dozens of Israelis and foreigners taken hostage by Hamas during the unprecedented incursion of the militants into southern Israel last weekend.

Antony Blinken will make a brief stop in Bahrain and end the day in Saudi Arabia, a key player in the Arab world that has been considering normalising ties with Israel, a U.S.-mediated process that is now on hold. He will also travel to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt over the weekend.