Sin categoría
Kamala Harris, after meeting with Netanyahu: it’s time to end the war in Gaza
The vice president of the United States and future Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, claimed after meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that it was time to end the Gaza war with a ceasefire and hostage release agreement.
“I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu that it’s time for the agreement to be closed. So to all those who have been asking for a ceasefire and long for peace, I see and hear them. Let’s make the agreement to get a ceasefire and end the war,” Harris told the press at the end of the meeting.
Harris had previously photographed herself with Netanyahu, but appeared alone, with a message that departed slightly from the line of the president, Joe Biden, with greater empathy for the suffering of the Palestinians.
“I explained it to the prime minister, my great concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of too many innocent civilians,” the vice president said.
“What has happened in Gaza in the last nine months, those images of dead children and desperate people fleeing, some for the second, third or fourth time… We can’t look the other way in the face of these tragedies, we can’t afford to be insensitive to the suffering, Harris said.
Of course, he also had words of solidarity with the Israeli hostages in the hands of Hamas, and in particular those who also have American nationality, whom he cited one by one by name.
In what seemed like an appeal to American voters, he asked to make an effort to understand that the Gaza conflict is not binary (good and bad) and that we must “understand the complexity and nuances of the history of the region,” and therefore called for “condemning anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and all kinds of hate crime.”
Harris has been openly critical of the way Israel conducts the offensive on the Gaza Strip, which has already left more than 39,000 dead, and was the first voice of the US Administration to call for an immediate ceasefire.
The meeting with Netanyahu generated high expectations because Harris has practically assured the nomination of the Democratic Party after the president, Joe Biden, resigned from running for re-election, and could give clues about the relationship he would have with Israel if he won the November elections.
Harris, who within her functions has that of presiding over the Senate, was the great absentee in the speech that Netanyahu gave on Wednesday before the United States Congress, where he defended to maintain his war against Hamas until the “final victory.”
The vice president issued a statement to condemn the burning of an American flag and the slogans in favor of Hamas that occurred yesterday during a pro-Palestinian demonstration against Netanyahu’s presence in Washington.
Before meeting with Harris, the Israeli Prime Minister met with Biden in the Oval Office of the White House and then both leaders met with relatives of hostages who remain kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza.
Biden’s main objective is to pressure Netanyahu to close within the next few weeks an agreement with Hamas that allows a truce in Gaza and the release of the hostages.
Biden and Netanyahu have not seen each other since the US president traveled to Israel as a show of solidarity after the attack perpetrated by the Palestinian Islamist group on October 7 that left 1,200 dead and triggered the Israeli offensive on the enclave.
Despite being Israel’s largest supplier of weapons, the United States Government has been critical of Israeli bombings on densely populated areas, attacks on hospitals and restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid.
International
Electoral abstention, the route to which the majority opposition in Venezuela clung again
The majority opposition of Venezuela resumed the route of abstention by deciding not to participate in the regional and legislative elections of last May 25, as it did 20 years ago, when it withdrew from the contest to elect deputies, although this time in a scenario in which it questions the legitimacy of President Nicolás Maduro.
“When the adversary withdraws from the field, from the field, one advances and takes the ground and exercises it,” Maduro said after the votes a week ago, in which only a group of opponents participated who ignored the guideline of the anti-Chavista majority, sheltered by the Democratic Unitary Platform (PUD), headed by María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia.
Maduro brought up what happened in 2005, when, he said, the opposition called for “total abstention.”
“And well,” added the Chavista leader, “they gave us the National Assembly (AN, Parliament) and the National Assembly 2005-2010 was the most fruitful there was.”
20 years ago, Chavismo took the 167 seats of Parliament before the complete withdrawal of the main opposition parties, which expressed distrust in the voting system.
This time, the PUD refused to attend these elections by denouncing fraud in the presidential elections of July last year, in which the National Electoral Council (CNE) proclaimed the victory of the president, of which the disaggregated results have not yet been disseminated. The anti-chavismo insists that the winner was its candidate, González Urrutia.
Machado and González Urrutia see the abstention of May 25 as an “act of dignity”.
The former deputy considered the abstention as a fourth “victory” of the opposition, after the 2023 primaries, of which she described as “crushing” the election of González Urrutia as – she said – “president” in 2024 and of the so-called ‘Operation Guacamaya’, in allusion to the departure from the country this month of five anti-Chavistas who were refugees, since March last year, in the residence of the Argentine Embassy in Caracas.
Despite the majority call, an opposition group detached itself from the PUD and ran in the May 25 votes, in which it achieved 11 deputies to Parliament compared to 253 of 285 with which the ruling party remained.
In this regard, the political scientist and deputy director of the Gumilla Center, Piero Trepiccione, told EFE that the 2005-2025 scenarios are “very different.”
“At that time, the forces that politically supported those in power in Venezuela had a lot of popular support, they controlled Venezuelan public opinion, they had superior support, even 60%, the polarization environment was much greater, more tense, harder,” he described.
In his opinion, the country was in the process of consolidating the “hyper-leadership” of then-President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) and the opposition “was trying to understand that dynamic, those new power dynamics that emerged in the country from 1999, with the electoral victory of Hugo Chávez”.
“Of course,” said this expert, “that it was a decision that (with) time proved to be a mistake, because it was effectively not possible to obtain a minimum participation that would have been important at that time and that would have served as a tribune for the necessary institutional counterweights.”
And that wasn’t the only time. Anti-Chavism also withdrew from the 2018 presidential elections and the 2020 parliamentary elections, with which the ruling party regained the majority of the House after having lost it in 2015.
For the five-year period 2026-2031, Chavismo ensured, in addition to the parliamentary majority, 23 of 24 governors in the country.
Trepiccione considers that the majority anti-Chavism has, in terms of leadership, a “great reference” in the figure of Machado, but “it has again fallen into a rather serious process of fragmentation and dispersion.”
Therefore, he believes that a process of reorganization, restructuring and reunion is necessary “in terms of recovering positioning in the territory” and taking advantage of “those great expectations that there are in the country”.
“If the opposition manages to articulate forces, realign itself with that desire for change, give political directionality to that desire for change; without a doubt, it can quickly become an important counterweight in the political process that is being lived in the country,” he added.
The political scientist clarifies that the discussion must go beyond an election. “Here the issue is how to unify a strategy, how to build a joint strategy and how not to fall into the provocation of fragmentation,” he reflected.
Sin categoría
Pope Francis donated Popemobile transformed into mobile clinic for Gaza’s children
Before his death, Pope Francis donated one of his popemobiles to be converted into a mobile medical unit for children in Gaza, officials confirmed on Monday.
The Jerusalem and Sweden branches of Caritas, the Vatican’s charitable federation, released photos of the repurposed vehicle on Monday. However, there is no set date yet for when it will be operational. The donation was announced the same day Israel approved plans to take over the Gaza Strip and remain in the Palestinian territory for an unspecified period.
“When the humanitarian corridor to Gaza reopens, it will be ready to provide primary medical care to children in Gaza,” Caritas Jerusalem said in a statement.
The mobile clinic will be outfitted with diagnostic, examination, and treatment supplies, including testing equipment, suture kits, syringes and needles, oxygen supplies, vaccines, and a medical-grade refrigerator, according to Caritas.
International
India asks to identify Pakistani citizens in the country to ensure their departure before Sunday
The Indian government asked regional executives on Friday to identify all Pakistani citizens in their territories to ensure that they leave India once the deadline granted by the authorities to leave expires on April 27.
This measure was transmitted today to the heads of government of the different Indian states by the Minister of the Interior, Amit Shah, according to official sources cited by several media in the country.
Pakistani citizens must leave the country before April 27, following the order issued yesterday by the Indian Government, in which it indicated that all visas issued to nationals of the neighboring country will be revoked from that moment on.
He only made an exception with medical visa holders, to whom he granted until April 29 to leave India.
The order has increased transit at the only land crossing between India and Pakistan, known as the Attari-Wagah border, to where Pakistani citizens have traveled today to leave the country.
The suspension of visas is part of a series of measures ordered last Wednesday by New Delhi, in response to the terrorist attack perpetrated the day earlier in Indian-run Kashmir, in which 26 people died.
The Indian government said it had indications that the attackers had the support of Pakistan, which New Delhi accuses of sponsoring the insurgency in Kashmir, which has caused a serious diplomatic crisis between the two nations.
In response to India’s measures, Pakistan suspended some visas for Indians and closed its side of the border – in reciprocity with New Delhi. It also closed its airspace to Indian airlines and announced the suspension of all bilateral agreements with India.
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