RIYADH: Dr. Abdullah Al-Rabeeah, general supervisor of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSrelief), met the Swedish special envoy for Yemen, Peter Semneby, at the headquarters of KSrelief in Riyadh on Sunday.
During the meeting, Al-Rabeeah reviewed the 590 projects that the Kingdom has implemented through KSrelief in Yemen so far.
They discussed matters of common interest related to humanitarian and relief affairs in Yemen, and the efforts made to alleviate the suffering of the Yemeni people.
Semneby praised the pioneering role provided by the Kingdom through KSrelief in support of countries in need, and the special attention given to the Yemeni people.
Meanwhile, KSrelief distributed more than 27 tons of food baskets to displaced families in Yemen’s Marib governorate, benefiting 1,554 individuals. The center also continued distributing Ramadan food baskets to Syrian and Palestinian refugees and Lebanese families in Lebanon.
Saudi aid agency chief meets Swedish envoy for Yemen
https://arab.news/jy5j3
Saudi aid agency chief meets Swedish envoy for Yemen
- KSrelief distributed more than 27 tons of food baskets to displaced families in Yemen’s Marib governorate, benefiting 1,554 individuals
Board of Deputies of British Jews member resigns over stance on Gaza
- Daniel Grossman, 21, said the UK’s largest Jewish body ‘failed to act morally’ over Israel’s war
- Grossman among 36 elected members to sign letter to the BoD demanding it respect ‘Jewish values’ and ‘speak out’ about the war
LONDON: A member of the UK’s Board of Deputies of British Jews, the largest official Jewish organization in the country, has resigned over its position on Gaza.
Daniel Grossman, 21, is among 36 elected members of the BoD who signed an open letter last month saying “Jewish values compel us to stand up and to speak out” about Israel’s war on the Palestinian territory, adding: “Israel’s soul is being ripped out.”
Grossman, a student at Bristol University, subsequently left the organization, and said that the BoD had “failed to act morally and failed to represent the increasing diversity of opinion within the British Jewish community” on the issue, adding it was trying to “stifle dissent.”
He told The Guardian: “It’s very simple. They (the BoD) are refusing to explicitly and publicly condemn Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza and to criticize the (Israeli) government for abandoning the hostages, who have been in captivity for far too long.
“Increasing numbers of people are recognizing that Israel’s actions in Gaza cannot be justified as purely self-defense. They seemingly want to declare a perpetual war against Palestinian civilians with the goal of ethnically cleansing them from the Gaza Strip.”
Following the publication of the letter, the BoD, which has 300 elected representatives, began disciplinary proceedings against the 36 signatories. An investigation into their conduct is expected to conclude in the coming weeks.
Grossman, who said that he grew up in a normal Jewish community in the UK, described the months since the attack on southern Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, as “a journey for me,” adding it had become “increasingly clear that the way the Israeli government is acting is not acceptable by any measure.”
Following his resignation from the BoD, he told the Guardian: “More people were sympathetic than I expected, and it has genuinely astonished me. Lots of these people may not feel able to speak out themselves, they might find it difficult with friends or family. But people have reached out to me.
“A huge shift is happening. The diversity of opinion in the Jewish community is becoming increasingly clear,” he said.
“My 89-year-old grandmother, who was a refugee during the Holocaust, said I had done the right thing and she is proud of me for speaking up.”
A BoD spokesperson told The Guardian: “Daniel’s term as a deputy was due to end in a few weeks with him having been replaced by another representative from the Union of Jewish Students. We wish him well with his future endeavours.”
WFP says ‘hordes of hungry people’ broke into Gaza warehouse
“Gaza needs an immediate scale-up of food assistance. This is the only way to reassure people that they will not starve,” WFP said in a statement.
Merz says Germany will ‘do everything’ to prevent Nord Stream restart
- “We will continue to increase the pressure on Russia,” Merz said
- “We will do everything in this context to ensure that Nord Stream 2 cannot be put back into operation“
BERLIN: Germany will “do everything” to make sure the damaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia will not resume deliveries of natural gas to Europe, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday.
“We will continue to increase the pressure on Russia,” Merz said at a press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin.
“We will do everything in this context to ensure that Nord Stream 2 cannot be put back into operation.”
The Nord Stream 2 gas link connecting Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea was damaged in September 2022 by huge underwater explosions, said to be an act of sabotage.
The explosions destroyed one of the two pipes of Nord Stream 2 and both branches of its controversial sister pipeline, Nord Stream 1.
While Nord Stream 2 never went into operation, Nord Stream 1 for years shipped cheap Russian gas to Europe via Germany.
Critics have argued the existence of the pipeline left Germany and the rest of Europe overly reliant on fossil fuel deliveries from Moscow.
German and British media have recently reported that Washington and Moscow had discussed the idea of reviving the Nord Stream 2 project during talks on ending the war in Ukraine.
Senior political figures in Merz’s own party had also expressed tentative support for restarting gas deliveries via the pipeline from Russia before the chancellor definitively ruled out the possibility.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said earlier this month the bloc was working on a new set of sanctions that would include measures against Nord Stream 1 and 2, pre-empting a restart.
Explaining the measures, EU spokeswoman Paula Pinho said, “the idea is to dissuade any interest, and notably interest from investors, in pursuing any activity on Nord Stream, also in the future.”
Why Western nations are threatening ‘concrete actions’ against Israel for its Gaza offensive
- Israel’s latest operation and weeks-long aid blockade have sparked unprecedented calls for sanctions from key Western allies
- Spain has called for a freeze on arms deliveries to Israel, the UK has sanctioned West Bank settlers, and the EU is reviewing its relations
LONDON: On Friday, pediatrician Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, one of a dwindling number of doctors still working in Gaza, left home as usual for another distressing shift in the war-battered Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis.
As she cared for babies and children who had been wounded in air attacks over the previous days, a missile struck her home, killing nine of her own ten children.
Their father, also a doctor, was badly injured in the attack. The couple’s only surviving child, an 11-year-old boy, was brought to his mother’s hospital, where his life was saved on the operating table.
That same day, more than 50 people, including many young members of a single family, were killed in Jabalia in the north of Gaza.
The poet and author Mosab Abu Toha, who earlier this month won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of essays in The New Yorker magazine, portraying the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza,” happened to be near the scene.
His harrowing photograph of a dead girl, perhaps only two years old, with most of her head missing, has been viewed tens of thousands of times on X. The eyes of the medic tenderly carrying her body from the rubble of her home told their own story.
Incidents such as these, and the wider humanitarian emergency resulting from renewed violence and a weeks-long aid embargo, appear to have pushed many in the international community to consider the imposition of sanctions on Israel.
Last week, the EU, Israel’s biggest trading partner, announced it was reviewing the EU-Israel Association Agreement, in particular Article 2, which states that the relationship “shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles.”
Also last week, the UK, France and Canada issued a joint statement condemning the situations in Gaza and the West Bank, denouncing “the level of human suffering in Gaza” as “intolerable.”
Warning that Israel was risking “breaching international humanitarian law,” it added: “We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government pursues these egregious actions.”
Then came the unprecedented threat: “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.”
In response to these calls for “concrete actions,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a blistering attack on the leaders of the UK, France and Canada, saying that they had “effectively said they want Hamas to remain in power.”
He also accused them of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers.”
Israel began military operations in Gaza in retaliation for the unprecedented Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, which resulted in some 1,200 deaths, the majority of them civilians, and about 250 people being taken hostage.
Eighteen months on, at least 54,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed in Gaza, according to local health officials, while all but a handful of the hostages have been released or killed in the crossfire.
On Monday, at a summit in Madrid of European and Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, Spain’s foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares called for an arms embargo on Israel and sanctions against individuals “who want to ruin the two-state solution forever.”
Speaking before the meeting, Albares said that humanitarian aid must enter Gaza “massively, without conditions and without limits, and not controlled by Israel,” describing the Strip as humanity’s “open wound.”
“Silence in these moments is complicity in this massacre,” he added.
Saudi Arabia has long called on the US and other Western nations to freeze arms shipments to Israel in response to its restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into the embattled enclave.
Also on Monday, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges in the UK signed an open letter expressing “our deep concern over the worsening catastrophe in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
They urged the British government to meet its “fundamental international legal obligations … to take all reasonable steps within (its) power to prevent and punish genocide (and) to ensure respect for international humanitarian law.”
Israel’s attacks “are quite clearly and blatantly in disregard of international law, and are just becoming unacceptable,” Guy Goodwin-Gill, emeritus professor of international refugee law at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told Arab News.
What happens next, he said, “depends to a certain extent upon the willingness of other states to come to the party.”
The US seems unlikely to single out Israeli leaders for sanctions and would almost certainly veto any proposed action by the UN Security Council.
“But I think the UK could impose financial and immigration sanctions, not only on Israeli ministers and officials suspected of involvement in the unlawful conduct but, in my personal view, it should consider imposing visas on all Israelis,” Goodwin-Gill said.
“Given the extent of conscription in the country, all Israelis have been potentially involved in the actions of the military on the ground — the tank commanders, the soldiers, and the air force pilots in particular.
“I think they should be subject to a visa requirement, subject to inquiries about what they were doing during the war.”
The Israeli government’s standard response to any criticism is to accuse its critics of antisemitism. The signatories nevertheless decided to speak out.
“I think there was an apprehension about being labeled antisemitic,” Goodwin-Gill said.
“But I think that is disappearing with the continuing violations of international humanitarian law that are going on and on, and in the face of evident desire on the part of some in the Israeli government to bring about the destruction of Gaza, the destruction of the aim of a two-state solution, and the end of the prospect of any self-determination for Palestinians.”
In addition to the events in Gaza, “the extent to which settlers are invading the West Bank and assaulting Palestinians, not only with the passive support of the Israel Defense Forces, but also being armed by them, is beginning to put people on notice that the label of ‘antisemitism’ is not going to stick this time.”
It isn’t just the UK’s legal community that is breaking cover to openly criticize Israel’s actions. On Wednesday, 380 writers, musicians and organizations signed a letter accusing the Israeli government of genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
“The government of Israel has renewed its assault on Gaza with unrestrained brutality,” the letter read.
“Public statements by Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir openly express genocidal intentions. The use of the words ‘genocide’ or ‘acts of genocide’ to describe what is happening in Gaza is no longer debated by international legal experts or human rights organizations.”
On May 7, a statement signed by more than 30 UN human rights special rapporteurs and independent experts condemned what is happening in Gaza as “one of the most ostentatious and merciless manifestations of the desecration of human life and dignity.”
They added: “While states debate terminology — is it or is it not genocide? — Israel continues its relentless destruction of life in Gaza, through attacks by land, air and sea, displacing and massacring the surviving population with impunity.
“No one is spared — not the children, persons with disabilities, nursing mothers, journalists, health professionals, aid workers, or hostages. Since breaking the ceasefire, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians, many daily — peaking on March 18, 2025, with 600 casualties in 24 hours, 400 of whom were children.”
The signatories of Wednesday’s letter wrote: “We refuse to be a public of bystander-approvers. This is not only about our common humanity and all human rights; this is about our moral fitness as the writers of our time, which diminishes with every day we refuse to speak out and denounce this crime.”
The British government has not yet spelled out what “concrete actions” it might take against the Israeli government.
So far it has imposed sanctions only on several settler leaders, accused of “engaging in, facilitating, inciting or providing support for activity which amounts to a serious abuse of the right of individuals not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” and who have “threatened and perpetrated acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals in the West Bank.”
Several organizations “involved in facilitating, inciting, promoting and providing logistical and financial support for the establishment of illegal outposts and forced displacement of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” have also been sanctioned.
In all cases the named individuals and organizations have been subjected to “asset freeze, director disqualification sanction, and travel bans.”
In reality, said Michael O’Kane, senior partner at UK law firm Peters & Peters and co-founder of legal guidance website Global Sanctions, it is “very unlikely” that any of those sanctioned so far actually have any assets in the UK, and “that is true of the vast majority of people who are sanctioned by the UK government.
“If you take Russia as an example, there are over 2,000 people on the sanctions list, and I suspect only a very small percentage of them have any assets in the UK.”
Such sanctioning is, however, more than merely tokenistic.
“This is what’s called ‘signaling,’” O’Kane told Arab News. “The government is saying: ‘By sanctioning you, we are signaling to you and to the wider world that we consider your conduct to be unacceptable, a breach of international norms.’”
However, there have been increasing calls for targeted financial sanctions to be imposed on members of Netanyahu’s government, in particular national security minister Ben-Givr and finance minister Smotrich.
“If things continue to go in the same direction in Gaza, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of that happening,” O’Kane said.
There is also the possibility that the UK government could tighten restrictions on the export of arms to Israel.
In September last year the government suspended about 30 export licenses “for items used in the current conflict in Gaza … following a review of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law.”
However, more than 300 arms licenses remain unaffected. A case brought by the Palestinian rights organization Al-Haq, challenging the government’s decision to allow the export of components for F-35 fighter aircraft to continue, is under review in the UK’s High Court.
The government’s lawyers told the court this week that “no evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children.”
At the start of the case on May 13, Raza Husain KC, the lawyer acting for Al-Haq, told the court that, on the contrary, “acts of annihilation have been accompanied by persistent genocidal, dehumanizing and even celebratory statements made at all levels of the Israeli military and political structure, including such figures, I regret to say, as the prime minister, president, minister of defense, minister of national security, and minister of finance.”
Even if nothing comes of the threats by the EU, the UK and Canada to directly target Israeli ministers, the combined outrage at Israel’s behavior is creating political momentum behind a joint French-Saudi international conference that will open on June 17 at the UN in New York.
Anne-Claire Legendre, the French president’s adviser, told a preparatory meeting at the UN on May 23 that “faced with facts on the ground, the prospect of a Palestinian state must be maintained.
“Irreversible steps and concrete measures for its implementation are necessary. This is the purpose of the international conference to be held in June.”
Andrew Tate and brother charged with rape: UK prosecutors
- Andrew Tate and his brother have been charged in the UK with several counts of rape, assault and trafficking
LONDON: Avowed misogynist and social media influencer Andrew Tate and his brother have been charged with several counts of rape, assault and trafficking, UK prosecutors said Wednesday.
The accusations, which date back to between 2012 to 2015, were authorized by the Crown Prosecution Service in January 2024, but have only been revealed now.
Former kickboxer Tate, 38, faces 10 charges in the UK including rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution relating to three women.
His brother, Tristan, 36, has been accused of 11 similar charges against one woman.
“A European arrest warrant was issued in England in 2024, and as a result the Romanian courts ordered the extradition to the UK of Andrew and Tristan Tate,” prosecutors said in a statement.
“However, the domestic criminal matters in Romania must be settled first.”
Andrew Tate is facing legal action in several countries, including some cases where he is accused alongside his brother.
In Romania, the Tate brothers face separate allegations of trafficking minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering.
Both men, who have dual British-US nationality, have denied all charges against them.
Andrew Tate, the figurehead of the online masculinist movement, traveled to Florida with his brother in February, marking the first time they had left Romania since their 2022 arrest.
Romanian prosecutors allege that the brothers and two women set up a criminal organization in Romania in 2021 and sexually exploited several victims.
In a separate civil case in the United Kingdom, four British women have accused Andrew Tate of rape and coercive control.
Tate moved to Romania years ago after first starting a webcam business in Britain.
He leapt to fame in 2016 when he appeared on the “Big Brother” UK reality television show, but was removed after a controversial video emerged.
He then turned to social media platforms to promote his often misogynistic and divisive views on how to be successful.
Tate is followed by more than 10.7 million people on the social network X, where he shares his angry vision of masculinity and often homophobic and racist posts.
