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      How Israel’s Conflicts Could Escalate

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      Since Iran’s large missile and drone attack on Israel last weekend, Israel’s allies have warned its leaders to avoid responding in a way that could provoke a regional war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to rebuff those warnings on Wednesday, saying the country would “do everything necessary to defend itself.”Here is a look at where Israel has been drawn into conflicts, some of which could escalate quickly:IranLast Saturday, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel. The attack itself caused little damage, as almost all the missiles and drones were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, supported by the United States, France, Britain and Jordan. But it took a clandestine war between the two nations that has gone on for decades to a different level.Iranians on Monday expressing support for their government’s missile and drone attack on Israel over the weekend.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesTehran was responding to a strike on April 1 in which seven officers overseeing Iran’s operations in the Middle East died in an attack on the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria. Iran said Israeli warplanes had conducted the strike and vowed to retaliate for what it considered an unusually brazen attack.Iranian officials have signaled in recent months that they want to avoid a war with Israel. Officials in Israel and the United States have said that Israel miscalculated with its embassy strike, thinking that Iran would not react strongly. That strike, they said, effectively broke the unwritten rules of engagement in the long confrontation between the two sides. Israel has signaled that it will respond, and Iranian leaders have warned that if it does so, Iran will react forcefully, with deadlier weapons than in the last strike.LebanonInstead of attacking Israel directly, Iran typically goes after it through groups in the region that it supports, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, its most powerful proxy. On Wednesday, Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a cross-border drone and missile attack in northern Israel that the Israeli military said had injured 14 soldiers, six of them severely.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qatar Says It Is Reviewing Its Mediator Role as Israel-Hamas Talks Stall

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      Qatar’s prime minister has said that his government is reviewing its role as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas after criticism by U.S. and Israeli officials, who have urged it to exert more pressure on the Palestinian armed group to reach a deal.“We have seen insults against our mediation, and its exploitation for the sake of narrow political interests,” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, the Qatari premier, said at a news conference this week. “This has caused Qatar to comprehensively review that role.”In late March, a flurry of shuttle diplomacy involving Israel, Hamas and mediators including the United States had raised hopes for a new cease-fire deal in the war in Gaza. But those efforts appear to have reached a dead end for now, according to Israeli and Hamas officials.It was not immediately clear that the Qatari prime minister’s comments would mean any change in the country’s role. Qatari mediators have remained in contact with Israeli representatives and have not changed their approach in recent days, said an Israeli official familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations.Qatar, a small Persian Gulf nation, has carved out an influential position as a mediator that can shuttle between Western countries and armed groups like Hamas and the Taliban. It hosts much of Hamas’s political leadership and has helped broker cease-fires during previous escalations in Gaza, including last November.Since the war broke out in October, Qatari mediators, alongside officials from Egypt and the United States, have sought to broker a deal for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of hostages held there. Over 100 hostages were released in a weeklong truce that began in late November.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Venice Biennale, Israel’s Show Is Halted, but Protests Go On

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      The country’s exhibition was already closed after its artist refused to exhibit her work until there was a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza. But that didn’t calm the discontent.The Israel pavilion at the Venice Biennale is closed this year, since its creative team decided not to exhibit work until there was a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza, but it was nonetheless the site of a large demonstration on Wednesday that drew more than 100 protesters.“Viva, viva Palestina!” the protesters chanted as they marched through the gardens where much of the Biennale takes place. The protest was organized by a mix of artists involved in the Biennale and activists not affiliated with the event. “We gather as arts workers to refuse silence,” one demonstrator shouted to a crowd of onlookers.Tensions surfaced in February, when activist groups began calling on the Biennale to ban Israel from the event over its conduct of the war in Gaza. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks in Israel, in which Israeli officials said about 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage, and Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which the authorities there say has killed more than 33,000 people, protests have rippled through the art world.The Biennale’s organizers and Italy’s government affirmed Israel’s right to participate this year, but when the media preview began on Tuesday, visitors to the pavilion found the doors locked. Ruth Patir, the artist chosen to represent Israel at the Biennale, had refused to open her exhibition, posting a sign on the window that the pavilion would remain shut until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”But Patir’s action was not enough to calm the discontent among many artists at the event, which opens to the public on Saturday. During the preview week, attendance is restricted to art world figures, including artists, curators, gallerists and critics.“I think it is the right place to make a protest,” said Maj Hasager, the rector of the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden, who watched the protest. “We need to lay out the different positions, and there is no Palestine pavilion,” she added.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      UN Report Describes Abuse and Dire Conditions in Israeli Detention

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      Gazans released from Israeli detention described graphic scenes of physical abuse in testimonies gathered by United Nations workers, according to a report released on Tuesday by UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.Palestinian detainees described being made to sit on their knees for hours on end with their hands tied while blindfolded, being deprived of food and water and being urinated on, among other humiliations, the report said. Others described being badly beaten with metal bars or the butts of guns and boots, according to the report, or forced into cages and attacked by dogs.The New York Times has not interviewed the witnesses who spoke to UNRWA aid workers and could not independently verify their accounts. None of the witnesses were quoted by name. Still, some of the testimonies in the report matched accounts provided to The Times by more than a dozen freed detainees and their relatives in January, who spoke of beatings and harsh interrogations.Israeli forces have arrested thousands of Gazans during their six-month campaign against Hamas, the Palestinian armed group. The Israeli military says it arrests those suspected of involvement in Hamas and other groups, but women, children and older people have also been detained, according to the UNRWA report.The Israeli military and the Israeli prime minister’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the report. But asked about similar accusations of abuse in the past, Israeli officials have said that detainees are held according to the law and that their basic rights are respected.UNRWA staff gathered testimonies from more than 100 released Gazans arriving at the Kerem Shalom crossing over several months. Palestinian medics would occasionally rush freed prisoners who were injured or ill directly to area hospitals, the report said, adding that they sometimes bore “signs of trauma and ill-treatment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Weighs Response to Iran’s Attack as Allies Push for Restraint

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      Israel’s war cabinet on Monday met to weigh possible responses to Iran’s missile and drone attack over the weekend, as the United States, Britain and other allies strongly urged Israel to show restraint and sought to de-escalate tensions between the two regional powers.Some far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government called for a swift and forceful retaliation in response to Iran.An Israeli official briefed on the cabinet discussions, speaking anonymously in order to talk about security matters, said several options were being considered, ranging from diplomacy to an imminent strike, but gave no further details. There was no immediate public statement by the ministers, or by the Israeli prime minister.“We are weighing our steps,” Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff, told Israeli soldiers on Monday in televised remarks during a visit to an Israeli air base. “The launching of so many missiles, cruise missiles and drones toward Israeli territory will be responded to.”Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.While the United States, Britain and France strongly condemned Iran’s assault and stepped in to help thwart it on Saturday, their calls for restraint highlighted the pressure Israel was facing to avoid a more direct confrontation with Iran.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      David Cameron: the Boy’s Own robot made of ham was nearly out-Foxed

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      How much have you really engaged with David Cameron, since he became foreign secretary in November? I always get a discombobulating strobe effect, all the alternative futures that could have been: the not-Brexit, the not-Boris Johnson, the not-austerity and social fracturing, if it hadn’t been for this rosy-face Duff Cooper in 21st-century fancy dress, and the incomprehensible number of people who didn’t take one look at that face and run a mile. So I find him quite hard to look at.As he does the American media rounds, talking Ukraine and Gaza to wingnuts (Fox News) and sensible centrists (CNN), the look he’s going for is somewhat changed. You know what they say about America, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening period of civilisation (no offence, Fox News!)Cameron went from floppy young man in a hurry to elder statesman without the intervening period of regular, middle-aged statesman; did he ever really govern? Was he ever really real? Well, he must have been. Because all that stuff happened.He was fresh from meeting Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, which he couldn’t say much about because it was a private meeting – the US anchors of every channel nodded delightedly when he said that. I think it sounds saucy yet quaint when a posh person says it, but he said this much to This Morning on CNN: “The point I’m making is …” (ah, memories … Cameron saying, “Let me be clear on this point that I am making,” piping busy words, the catchphrase of a man who’s never once wondered whether he’s interesting) “is that I think profoundly in Britain’s interest, but also to America’s interests, that Trump doesn’t get to win in Ukraine.”We can come to why not if you really think it’s necessary, but what a profoundly weird thing to say. Get to win what? The US election? Because, if he doesn’t win that, it’s hard to see how he wins anything in Ukraine. But if he does win the US election, then he, rather than the British foreign secretary, does sadly “get to” decide what their interests are.Trump, you’ll remember, wants the Ukrainians to cede Crimea and the Donbas border regions to Vladimir Putin in return for no longer getting shot at. Cameron is probably right, it “wouldn’t just be bad for our European security, our adversaries around the world, whether it’s Iran or China or whoever, would draw lessons that we don’t stand by our allies”. And, OK, this next bit is a little flabby, but odds on, there will be “risk of further aggression and further danger in our world”.Yet I worry that Cameron really thinks this is what geopolitics are – a nice, rule-based game where you might get the odd leader who huffs and puffs, but all the other players, nice chaps, will step in and say, as one: “No, you don’t get to do that.”His language is pure Boy’s Own adventure – “the bravery of the Ukrainians”, “Europe and America sticking together and standing up against bullies”. Sure, he’s not swimming in very complicated waters (Trump, for comparison, said that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want to Nato countries who do not spend enough on defence”), but you don’t, from Cameron, get the deep sense of security that settles upon one while listening to a sensible adult, with a full complement of faculties, rooted in reality.He was introduced as “Britain’s top diplomat”, which made him sound kind of cute, like he’d won his title in a Britain’s Got Diplomats quizshow. I’m not sure they take us tremendously seriously, as a nation. Conceivably, because of all that stuff that happened.Fox News went a different way, as they say, with a question you’d call dumb, except that’s what they want you to think, so you’re playing into their hands, except what are you going to do, not call it dumb? It remains dumb. What did Cameron think about London, our London, where “streets are taken over by pro-Hamas folks” and the “Jewish community is describing a country that’s become almost unrecognisable, in terms of the toleration of this”.Cameron’s face is famously hard to read. Caitlin Moran once said he looked like a robot made of ham. But this must surely have ruffled him on the inside: this is what half his party says, round the clock.This is the means by which they threaten the right to protest, and the tactic they use to deflect any serious consideration of the situation in Gaza; that it can’t be a massacre because Hamas and any right-thinking person disputing that slaughter must love Hamas, and that British Jews are terrified of their own country, because the streets are lined with Hamas-lovers. Everyone knows that’s not true but, for as long as it’s useful, that’s what a lot of Conservatives will claim to think.Did it give the foreign secretary, who himself mourns the bloodshed, a second’s pause, to be confronted with this live on air? Did it make him think how far the Tory party had moved, how obliterated the one-nation lot, his lot, were? Did he stop and wonder about his part in all that?Really hard to say – see robots, ham – but he deflected it quite well, stressing all the freedoms, stressing the rule of law, stressing that Benjamin Netanyahu ought to observe laws, too, particularly with regards to civilians.“The Brits and the Americans didn’t provide aid to Germans, in World War Two,” the anchor replied.Britain’s top diplomat didn’t dignify that. More

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      Germany Rebuffs Claim Its Arms Sales to Israel Abet Genocide in Gaza

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      Germany argued against the accusation brought by Nicaragua at the International Court of Justice, but Germans are questioning their country’s unwavering support for Israel.Germany on Tuesday defended itself against accusations that its arms sales to Israel were abetting genocide in Gaza, arguing at the International Court of Justice that most of the equipment it has supplied since Oct. 7 was nonlethal and that it has also been one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.The case at the U.N. court in The Hague pits Germany, whose support for Israel is considered an inviolable part of the country’s atonement for the Holocaust, against Nicaragua, which brought the allegations to the court and is a longstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause.Debate over Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been muted in Germany, whose leadership calls support for Israel a “Staatsräson,” a national reason for existence, and where people have historically been reluctant to question that support publicly. But the mounting death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza have led some German officials to ask whether that unwavering backing has gone too far.Lawyers for Germany said Tuesday that the allegations brought by Nicaragua had “no basis in fact or law” and rested on an assessment of military conduct by Israel, which is not a party to the case. Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, an official at Germany’s Foreign Ministry and lead counsel in the case, told the 15-judge bench that Nicaragua had “rushed this case to court on the basis of the flimsiest evidence.”On Monday, Nicaragua argued that Germany was facilitating the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by providing Israel with military and financial aid, and it asked for emergency measures ordering the German government to halt its support. The court is expected to decide within weeks whether to order emergency measures.Some German news media said it was absurd that Germany should have to answer to accusations from Nicaragua, whose authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega, has jailed critics or forced them into exile, and has been accused in a United Nations report of crimes against humanity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Active Fighting Subsides in Gaza, but the War Is Not Over, Officials Say

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      Israeli troops have left southern Gaza, and some Palestinians returned to the area, where there was a sense of horror at the scope of destruction.The Israeli military’s departure from southern Gaza over the weekend has left the devastated territory in a state of suspense as active fighting there receded on Monday to its lowest ebb since a brief truce with Hamas in November.But even as some observers hoped Israel’s withdrawal from the area might portend a new cease-fire, both Hamas and Israeli officials suggested the war was not yet over.Analysts said the withdrawal of Israeli troops suggested only that the war had entered a new phase, one in which Israel would continue to mount small-scale operations across Gaza to prevent Hamas’s resurgence. That strategy, they said, could occupy a middle ground between reaching a lasting truce with Hamas and ordering a major ground assault into Rafah, Hamas’s last stronghold in southern Gaza where more than one million Palestinians have taken refuge.In a statement on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that while Israel was still pursuing a deal to secure the release of its hostages in Gaza, it was also seeking “total victory over Hamas.”“This victory requires entering Rafah and eliminating the terrorist battalions there,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “This will happen; there is a date.” He did not specify the date.By withdrawing now without having fulfilled its stated mission of eliminating Hamas and without empowering an alternative Palestinian leadership, Israel has left behind a power vacuum in Gaza, in which Hamas could regroup and re-emerge as a military force across much of the territory. More