Israel, others mark Holocaust Remembrance Day
A somber siren wailed across the country for two minutes of silence at 10 a.m. Thursday. Cars stopped along the highway and people paused in their daily errands as they stood in silence.
Yom Hashoah, the day Israel observes as a memorial for the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its allies in the Holocaust, is one of the most solemn dates on the country’s calendar.
Official observances began after sundown on Wednesday with a ceremony at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At the ceremony, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon as “the main lesson of the Holocaust.”
“On this Holocaust Day, I promise: The military pressure on Hamas will continue. We will destroy all its capabilities. We will return all our hostages. We will defeat Hamas, and we will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog is in Poland for the annual March of the Living in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He was joined by the Polish president, some 80 Holocaust survivors, 10 survivors of Hamas captivity in Gaza, and thousands of Israeli youth and others.
Every year young Israelis, many with their national flag around their shoulders, are among those making the March of the Living to remember the victims of the Holocaust. It is part of a larger educational effort to instill in them an appreciation for Israel, a haven for Jews after the genocide in Europe during World War II.
The march’s traditional 2-mile route leads from Auschwitz’s infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (works sets you free) gate to Birkenau, a site with the ruins of crematoria where Jews and others were murdered.
Polish President Andrzej Duda and Herzog spoke to reporters ahead of the march, describing their presence as part of an effort to stand against antisemitism.
The Nazi German forces ran the camp in occupied Poland during World War II. They killed some 1.1 people there, the vast majority of them Jews from across Europe, but also Poles, Roma and others.
The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945. The 80th anniversary was marked at the site earlier this year.
Elsewhere, the mayor of Amsterdam apologized for the role the Dutch capital played in the persecution of its Jewish citizens during World War II, saying the government at the time “let its Jewish residents down terribly.”
Speaking at an event marking Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mayor Femke Halsema said that civil servants in Amsterdam played an active role in the murder of some thousands of Jewish citizens of the city.
Of the estimated 80,000 Jews who lived in Amsterdam at the outbreak of World War II, only some 20,000 survived. Among those deported was teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family. Only her father, Otto, survived.
“The Amsterdam government, when it came down to it, was not heroic, not determined and not merciful. And it let its Jewish residents down terribly,” Halsema said.
“On behalf of the city government, I offer my apologies for this,” she added. Halsema spoke at Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater which operated as a collection point for Jews who were deported to extermination camps.
She recalled how the municipality helped with the registration of Jewish citizens and the drawing up of cards where Jews lived.
“Services were prepared to help enact one after the other anti-Jewish measure,” she said. “Step by step, the municipal machine became part of the machinery of evil.”
War rages on
In the Gaza Strip, the Israel-Hamas war continued.
Visiting Israeli forces deployed in southern Gaza, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said, “If we do not see progress in the return of the hostages, we will expand our activity into a more intense and significant operation.”
The military chief of staff’s statement Thursday said Hamas is “responsible for starting this war” and for the “dire situation of the population in Gaza.”
Hamas has said it will only release the remaining 59 captives, 24 of whom are believed to be alive, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners, a lasting ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal. Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas.
Since Israel resumed the war in March, its forces have taken over more than half of Gaza and heavy airstrikes have killed nearly 2,000 people.
The Israeli military admitted responsibility for killing a U.N. staffer from Romania last month. The military initially denied it was responsible for the March 19 strike on a U.N. guesthouse in Gaza, which also wounded five other U.N. employees. Afterward, the U.N. concluded that an Israeli tank had struck the compound and said it had informed the military a day earlier that the location was a U.N facility.
Releasing its initial findings on Wednesday, the military said one of its tanks targeted the building “due to assessed enemy presence” and that the structure “was not identified by the forces as a U.N. facility” at the time. The attack prompted the United Nations to reduce its presence in the Gaza Strip, citing safety concerns.
Palestinians, meanwhile, created a role for a vice president and possible successor to aging leader Mahmoud Abbas, who runs the West Bank.
The Palestine Liberation Organization’s decision Thursday came as Abbas seeks greater relevance and a role in postwar planning for the Gaza Strip after having been largely sidelined by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
The expectation is that whoever holds that role would be the front-runner to succeed Abbas — though it’s unclear when or exactly how it would be filled. Abbas is to choose his vice president from among the other 15 members of the PLO’s executive committee.
The PLO is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people and oversees the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited autonomy in less than half of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Abbas has led both entities for two decades.
Hamas, which won the last national elections in 2006, is not in the PLO. Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas’ forces in 2007, and reconciliation attempts between the rivals have repeatedly failed.
In the Netherlands, appeals judges at the International Criminal Court on Thursday ordered a pretrial panel to reconsider an Israeli appeal against the court’s jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank.
The decision comes amid ongoing litigation into Israel’s assertion that the court did not have the legal authority to issue arrest warrants in November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
The warrants allege that Netanyahu and Gallant are responsible for crimes against humanity in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Israel, which is not a member of the court and rejects its jurisdiction, strongly refutes the allegations.
Judges at The Hague-based court dismissed a request from Israel to suspend the warrants.
But in a legal victory for Israel, appeals judges said in their written decision that the pretrial panel “committed an error of law by failing to sufficiently address Israel’s argument that it was entitled to make a jurisdictional challenge” under the court’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute.