Orientul Mijlociu

On November 19, Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government 45 days to develop effective measures to combat the evasion of military service by ultra-Orthodox Jews. Ultra-Orthodox Jews make up 14% of Israel’s population, yet they serve almost exclusively in the army. This practice had been legal for the past 70 years. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled it unfair, but the status quo remained in place for several more years. On November 19 of this year, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government to develop measures to address the issue within six weeks. Following the Hamas terrorist attack and the outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, the debate over the draft of ultra-Orthodox Jews has become one of the country’s major internal conflicts. However, opponents of the draft have their own compelling arguments: the IDF has failed for many years to create suitable conditions for ultra-Orthodox service.

Six years after the collapse of the so-called Islamic State caliphate in March 2019, dramatic leadership changes in Washington, DC and Damascus open a rare window of opportunity to end the continuing, unlawful detentions of some 26,000 foreign ISIS suspects and family members in northeast Syria. The detainees, who come from dozens of countries, are held in camps and prisons. Most of those held in the camps are children, 40 percent of them under age 12.

As Gaza faces one of the most severe post-war humanitarian crises in modern history, a crucial policy debate emerges: will displacement camps emerge to serve as a temporary humanitarian necessity, or become long-term internment sites potentially fuelling future radicalisation and conflict?

It has now been nearly three months since Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) came to power in Syria. After the joy over the end of the Assad era, all eyes are on HTS to see whether they can govern in a highly fragmented Syria and prevent a potential resurgence of the Islamic State (IS). Both the US and European countries have worked together in Global Coalition against Daesh since 2014.

A senior official from Turkey’s ruling party on Tuesday dismissed a request by the commander of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to visit Abdullah Öcalan, the jailed leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, saying the group must first abandon arms and stop posing a security threat to the country.

The comments came from Ömer Çelik, spokesperson for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), after Mazlum Abdi, the top commander of the SDF, said he wanted direct talks with Öcalan on the prison island of İmralı.

Israeli artillery and rocket fire killed 13 Syrians, including children and women, at dawn on Friday in Beit Jinn, a town in the Rif Dimashq countryside.

The assault came after residents surrounded Israeli soldiers who had invaded the village, crossing into it to kidnap Syrian citizens.

Les deux Palestiniens, membres d’un groupe de résistance, ont été abattus après s’être rendus et avoir déclaré qu’ils n’étaient pas armés.

Une vidéo datant du 27 novembre montre des soldats israéliens exécutant deux combattants palestiniens non armés en Cisjordanie occupée, où Tel-Aviv a récemment intensifié ses raids et ses attaques dans le cadre d’une nouvelle opération contre les factions de résistance présentes sur le territoire.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced that one of their positions in the town of Granij (eastern Deir Ezzor countryside in eastern Syria) had been targeted from the western bank of the Euphrates River by what they described as “factions affiliated with the Damascus government” on the evening of Sunday, 23 November.

The muhajirin file, or foreign fighters, has become a thorny issue for the new Syrian state, caught between loyalty to the fighters who formed a “hard core” within Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the external interests of the state over which HTS came to hold sway, and between honoring its commitments to Western and Eastern powers.