Israel strikes Syrian army positions near Aleppo: monitor

JERUSALEM: Israel’s opposition leader accused the government on Monday of resisting a state probe into the events surrounding Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, after an inconclusive, court-ordered cabinet meeting about a potential inquiry.
The Hamas attack, which triggered more than 15 months of war in the Gaza Strip, was the deadliest in Israeli history. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused accepting responsibility for failures, and his government has suggested that any probe should wait until after the fighting is over.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid, speaking in parliament, said that “the government did everything yesterday to bury this commission,” referring to a cabinet meeting late Sunday which ended with no decision on a formal inquiry.
Lapid said that an investigation was needed so that a similar attack “won’t happen again.”
He also accused Netanyahu of having ignored intelligence warnings before of the cross-border attack, and pursuing a policy to “strengthen Hamas” over several years prior to it.
The Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 73 remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Following appeals from relatives of victims and hostages as well as NGOs, Israel’s supreme court on December 11 demanded the government meet within 60 days to discuss the creation of an inquiry commission.
The government met on the subject on Sunday and took no decision.
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday defended the government’s position and said that “in the middle of a war, it is not the right time to investigate.”
A fragile truce since last month has largely halted Israel’s military operations in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, whose health ministry says the war has killed at least 48,208 people in the territory.
Smotrich said that while he was “in favor of investigating” the October 7 attack, he “does not trust” the judiciary — a frequent target of criticism from Netanyahu’s government — with the responsibility.
According to Israeli law, if the government decides to set up a state commission of inquiry, it must inform the president of the Supreme Court, who is then responsible for appointing its members.
Since the 1960s, more than a dozen such commissions have been formed in Israel, notably after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, a 1982 massacre in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon by Israeli-backed militias, and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
More recently, state commission was launched into a deadly 2021 stampede in which 45 people lost their lives during a Jewish pilgrimage in Israel’s north.
A bill to form a state commission of inquiry into October 7 was rejected by a majority of lawmakers on January 22.

THE HAGUE: Judges at the International Criminal Court have officially asked Italy on Monday to explain why the country released a Libyan man suspected of torture, murder and rape rather than sending him to The Hague.
Italian police arrested Ossama Anjiem, also known as Ossama Al-Masri, last month but rather than extraditing him to the Netherlands, where the ICC is based, sent him back to Libya aboard an Italian military aircraft.
“The matter of state’s non-compliance with a request of cooperation for arrest and surrender by the court is before the competent chamber,” the court’s spokesperson Fadi El-Abdallah said in a statement.
Addressing parliament last week, Italian Justice Minister Carlo Nordio defended the decision to send Al-Masri home, claiming the ICC had issued a contradictory and flawed arrest warrant. The court, he said, “realized that an immense mess was made,” he told lawmakers.
Al-Masri was arrested in Turin on the ICC warrant on Jan. 19, the day after he arrived in the country from Germany to watch a soccer match. The Italian government has said Rome’s court of appeals ordered him released on Jan. 21 because of a technical problem in the way that the ICC warrant was transmitted, having initially bypassed the Italian justice ministry.
The ICC said it does not comment on national judicial proceedings.
Al-Masri’s arrest had posed a dilemma for Italy because it has close ties to the internationally recognized government in Tripoli as well as energy interests in the country.
According to the arrest warrant, Al-Masri heads the Tripoli branch of the Reform and Rehabilitation Institution, a notorious network of detention centers run by the government-backed Special Defense Force, which acts as a military police unit combating high-profile crimes including kidnappings, murders as well as illegal migration.
Like many other militias in western Libya, the SDF has been implicated in atrocities in the civil war that followed the overthrow and killing of the Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
Additionally, any trial in The Hague of Al-Masri could bring unwanted attention to Italy’s migration policies and its support of the Libyan coast guard, which it has financed to prevent migrants from leaving.
In October, the court unsealed arrest warrants for six men allegedly linked to a brutal Libyan militia blamed for multiple killings and other crimes in a strategically important western town where mass graves were discovered in 2020.