07/01/2026

WEDNESDAY | JAN 7, 2026

9

Israel to use electronic bracelets in West Bank

CAIRO: Israel killed at least two Palestinians including a girl, and wounded four others including other children, in an airstrike on Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday, officials at the city’s main Nasser Hospital said. The Israeli military said the strike, carried out in an area controlled by Hamas, had targeted a gunman who was planning to attack Israeli troops in southern Gaza. Israel has carried out repeated airstrikes in Gaza since a US-brokered deal took effect in October that halted most fighting. Israel says its strikes are aimed at preventing attacks or destroying militant infrastructure. Gaza’s Health Ministry says 422 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect. Gunmen have killed three Israeli soldiers during the same period. Under the first phase of the deal, brokered by US President Donald Trump, Israel has retained control of 53% of Gaza. Hamas agreed to release living hostages and hand over remains in exchange for the freeing of Palestinians detained by Israel. The final hostage remains still to be handed over belong to an Israeli police officer killed on Oct 7, 2023. Earlier on Monday, a father and son in Gaza were killed when their house collapsed. It had been damaged in an earlier Israeli strike. – Reuters Two dead, four hurt in Gaza airstrike NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres raised concerns on Monday about greater instability in Venezuela after the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, while the United States said it does not plan to occupy the Latin American country. The 15-member Security Council met at UN headquarters in New York just hours before Maduro was due to appear in a Manhattan federal court on drug charges including narco terrorism conspiracy. Maduro has denied any criminal involvement. “I am deeply concerned about the possible intensification of instability in the country, the potential impact on the region, and the precedent it may set for how relations between and among states are conducted,” Guterres said in a statement delivered to the council by UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo. US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told the Security Council the United States carried out “a surgical law enforcement operation facilitated by the US military against two indicted fugitives of American justice”, referring to Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. “As Secretary (of State Marco) Rubio has said, there is no war against Venezuela or its people. We are not occupying a country,” said Waltz, as he laid out the case against Maduro at the Security Council. “We’re not going to allow the Western Hemisphere to be used as a base of operation for our nation’s adversaries,” Waltz said. “You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States, under the control of illegitimate leaders and not benefiting the people of Venezuela.” Venezuela’s UN Ambassador Samuel Moncada called the US operation to capture Maduro“an illegitimate armed attack lacking any legal justification”. Moncada told the council that Venezuelan institutions are functioning normally, constitutional order has been preserved and the state exercises effective control over all of its territory. Guterres said the US operation to capture Maduro in Caracas on Saturday did not respect the rules of international law. The UN Charter states that members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” – Reuters UN chief raises concerns about legality of raid

In response to an AFP query, the army said the measure will be applied to Israelis and Palestinians alike. Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory since 1967, and now more than 500,000 Israelis live there, along with about three million Palestinian residents. The army said removing any monitoring device “constitutes an offence, for which criminal proceedings may be initiated”. Honenu, an Israeli legal aid organisation that assists detainees from right-wing settler communities, slammed the decision and said it would appeal. In a post on X, it quoted one of its lawyers saying it was an “undemocratic move that reminds of the conduct of oppressive regimes”. Administrative restrictive orders bar suspects residing in the West Bank from going to certain areas or communicating with certain people. A more draconian measure, known as administrative detention, allowed Israeli security forces to detain West Bank suspects,

both Israelis and Palestinian, for up to six months without charges. Upon taking office in November 2024, Defence Minister Israel Katz abolished the use of that measure against Israelis, but it is still enforced against Palestinians. Since the start of the war in Gaza on October 2023, violence has also surged in the West Bank. Despite the delicate truce between Israel and Hamas that came into effect in October, the violence has not ceased. Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the territory, according to an AFP tally based on figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry. Almost none of the perpetrators of dozens of attacks carried out by settlers have been held to account by the Israeli authorities. According to official Israeli figures, at least 44 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have also been killed in Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations in the same period in the West Bank. – AFP

o ‘Offence to remove device’

TEL AVIV: The Israeli army said on Monday it was introducing a new technological system to enforce movement restrictions in the occupied West Bank for Israelis and Palestinians. The decision allows security forces “to install a technological monitoring device on individuals subject to an administrative order restricting their movement within the (West Bank)”, the army said in a statement. The system would allow for monitoring of “violations of these restriction orders accordingly”, it said. The measure was adopted after a request by head of the domestic Shin Bet security agency David Zini in response to rising violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel’s Channel 12 reported. The monitoring devices used will be electronic bracelets, according to the report.

Jorge Rodriguez (right) being sworn in as president of the National Assembly for a new term in Caracas on Monday. – REUTERSPIC

Maduro pleads not guilty

NEW YORK: Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in a New York court on Monday, two days after being snatched by US forces from his home in Caracas. Maduro, 63, told a federal judge in Manhattan “I’m innocent. I’m not guilty.” Smiling as he entered the courtroom and wearing an orange shirt with beige trousers, Maduro spoke softly. “I’m president of the Republic of Venezuela and I’m here kidnapped since Jan 3, Saturday,” Maduro told the court, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. “I was captured at my home in Caracas.” Maduro’s wife Cilia Flores also pleaded not guilty. The judge ordered both to remain behind bars and set a new hearing date of March 17. The presidential couple were forcibly taken

over from his equally hardline socialist predecessor Hugo Chavez. Brian Naranjo, a former US diplomat in Venezuela before he was expelled by Maduro in 2018, said that he has “not been so worried about the future of Venezuela, ever.” “There’s a very real possibility that things are going to get much, much worse in Venezuela before they get better,” he said. The deputy head of the US mission to Caracas from 2014 to 2018 pointed at two men who could try and usurp power from Rodriguez: Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and her own brother, Jorge Rodriguez, president of Venezuela’s legislature. “Delcy had better be sleeping with one eye open right now because right behind her are two men who would be more than happy to cut her throat and take control themselves.” – AFP

by US commandos on Saturday in airstrikes on the Venezuelan capital backed by warplanes and a heavy naval deployment. Thousands of people marched through Caracas in support of Maduro as his former deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, was sworn in as interim president. Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado slammed Rodriguez, saying she was “rejected” by the Venezeulan people and calling her “one of the main architects of torture, persecution, corruption, narcotrafficking”. Speaking from an undisclosed location to broadcaster Sean Hannity on Fox News in her first public comments since the weekend, Machado said she plans to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible” after leaving under cover last month to accept her Nobel Peace Prize. Maduro became president in 2013, taking