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Fragile Gaza truce as Italy FM visits Israel

Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini will on Tuesday visit an Israeli town hit by rocket strikes from Gaza and meet Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas as part of a diplomatic push for peace, her ministry said.

Published: 15 July 2014 14:20 CEST
Fragile Gaza truce as Italy FM visits Israel
The majority of people killed in the Gaza offensive have been civilians. Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP

Mogherini "will be in Ramallah this afternoon to meet president Mahmud Abbas and foreign minister Riyad al-Malki", the ministry said in a statement.

It also said Mogherini would travel to Ashdod, a southern port town close to the border with the Gaza Strip, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and visit a home hit by a rocket attack.

A Gaza rocket struck the town earlier on Tuesday, just hours after Israel agreed to abide by an Egyptian truce that was rejected by Hamas.

Israel's Operation Protective Edge, intended to stamp out militant rocket fire, had killed 186 people in Gaza by late Monday – exceeding the toll in the last similar flare-up of violence in 2012. A UN reported issued on Sunday said that 77 percent of those killed were civilians.

SEE ALSO: Kerry seeks Gaza truce from Netanyahu

Mogherini is expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres on Wednesday, as well as visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

A 41-year-old who has only been in government since February, Mogherini is seen as a possible pick for a European Commission post or to be the EU's next foreign policy chief.

SEE ALSO: France ups security after synagogues stormed

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Published: 10 October 2021 09:26 CEST
Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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