NEW YORK: The United Nations said on Monday that it will start bringing in more armored vehicles and personal protection equipment for its humanitarian aid operations in the Gaza Strip after receiving approval from Israeli authorities.
The approval was in response to a UN letter sent to Israel last month on safety and security in Gaza, said Scott Anderson, deputy humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as the war between Israel and Palestinian militants Hamas enters its tenth month and law and order has broken down.
The UN has long complained of obstacles to getting aid into Gaza — Israel inspects and approves all trucks — and says it is also struggling to distribute aid amid “total lawlessness” within the enclave of 2.3 million people, where a global hunger monitor last month said there is a high risk of famine.
Anderson said the UN was due to start bringing more armored vehicles and protection equipment into Gaza on Tuesday.
“Some communications equipment has also been approved,” he told reporters, like hand-held radios, but added that discussions are still continuing on a UN request for stable Internet access.
The UN has said it wants communications that did not rely on cell phone towers because they were not reliable. However, Israeli authorities have security concerns about what Hamas could do if it accessed satellite Internet service.
‘CRIME FAMILIES’
Anderson said the UN needed to bring in aid in the right quantity and quality, but several factors “continue to stand in our way.” He listed problems including restrictions on movement, aid worker safety, unpredictable working hours, communications challenges and a lack of fuel.
“And we’ve seen a complete breakdown of law and order and we’ve seen essentially what are crime families preventing the free movement of aid into Gaza to assist people,” he said.
“The truck drivers that we use have been regularly threatened or assaulted ... they’ve become less and less willing, understandably, to move assistance from the border crossings to our warehouses and then onto people that are in need,” Anderson said.
He said the UN was getting between 25 and 70 aid trucks a day into northern Gaza, but there was no commercial access.
Anderson said in southern Gaza “we’ve been barely able to hit 100 trucks on a good day over the last week because of law and order problems,” but that commercial deliveries were doing a little better “but they pay essentially protection money to the families in the south and they also have armed guards.”
Aid officials say about 600 trucks of humanitarian and commercial supplies are
needed in Gaza daily
to meet the needs of the population.
He said the UN was “in talks with everybody about trying to get some sort of police force established” and in the meantime was working with the families that are hindering aid deliveries to try and address the problem.
“It’s a few families that are trying to take advantage of this opportunity and that’s why I’m confident if we get police back at work that they can address the issue,” Anderson said.
Israel allows UN to bring in more equipment amid Gaza lawlessness
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Israel allows UN to bring in more equipment amid Gaza lawlessness
- The UN has long complained of obstacles to getting aid into Gaza
Blinken wraps up Mideast tour with Gaza truce plea
- Blinken met earlier in the day in Cairo with Egypt’s President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi
- Top diplomat’s visit to the region also included meetings in Israel on Monday
DOHA: Top US diplomat Antony Blinken said Tuesday that “time is of the essence” to secure a Gaza truce as he wrapped up a Middle East tour with a plea for a deal.
The US secretary of state, on his ninth regional visit since the 10-month-old Israel-Hamas war began, made a brief stop in mediator Qatar but was unable to meet its emir.
Speaking on the tarmac in Doha before heading back to Washington, Blinken reiterated his call for Hamas to accept a “bridging proposal” for a deal, which he said Israel had accepted, and asked both parties to work toward finalizing it.
“This needs to get done, and it needs to get done in the days ahead, and we will do everything possible to get it across the finish line,” he said.
Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose October 7 attack triggered the war, said it was “keen to reach a ceasefire” agreement but protested “new conditions” from Israel in the latest US proposal.
Earlier Tuesday, Blinken flew from Israel to Egypt for talks with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who told him that “the time has come to end the ongoing war,” according to an official Egyptian statement.
El-Sisi warned of the consequences of “the conflict expanding regionally,” it said.
Blinken then traveled to Doha to meet with Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, though a US official said the Qatari ruler was feeling unwell and the two will instead talk on the phone soon.
Mohammed bin Abdulaziz bin Saleh Al-Khulaifi, minister of state at the Qatari foreign ministry, met with Blinken to discuss “joint mediation efforts to end the war,” Doha said.
Both Egypt and Qatar are working alongside the United States to broker a truce, which diplomats say would help avert a wider conflagration that could draw in Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Israel and Hamas have blamed each other for delays in reaching an accord that would stop the fighting, free Israeli hostages and allow vital humanitarian aid into the besieged Palestinian territory.
Medics and civil defense rescuers in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip said Israeli bombardment on Tuesday killed more than two dozen people, and Israel announced it had recovered the bodies of six hostages.
Mediators met last week with Israeli negotiators in Doha, and more truce talks are expected in Egypt this week.
One of the main sticking points has been Hamas’s long-standing demand for a “complete” withdrawal of Israeli troops from all parts of Gaza, which Israel has rejected.
Israeli media quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying Israel would insist on maintaining control of a strategic strip on the Gaza-Egypt border, known as the Philadelphi corridor.
A US official traveling with Blinken, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said that “maximalist statements like this are not constructive to getting a ceasefire deal across the finish line.”
In Doha, Blinken said Washington opposes “any long-term occupation of Gaza by Israel.”
Fears of a regional escalation have mounted since Hezbollah and Iran vowed to respond after an attack last month, blamed on Israel, killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, shortly after an Israeli strike on Beirut killed a top Hezbollah commander.
Lebanon’s health ministry said four people were killed in Israeli strikes on Tuesday and Hezbollah claimed a string of attacks on Israeli troops, in the latest of the cross-border exchanges which have raged almost daily since the Gaza war began.
Hamas had called on the mediators to implement a framework set out by US President Joe Biden in late May, rather than hold more negotiations.
The Biden plan would freeze fighting for an initial six weeks while Israeli hostages are exchanged for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and humanitarian aid enters Gaza.
Hamas said on Sunday that the current US proposal, which Washington had put forward after two days of meetings in Doha, “responds to Netanyahu’s conditions.”
And on Monday, in response to comments by Biden that it was “backing away” from a deal, the Iran-backed group said the “misleading claims... do not reflect the true position of the movement, which is keen to reach a ceasefire.”
Hamas officials as well as some analysts and critics in Israel have accused Netanyahu of prolonging the war for political gain.
The October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 40,173 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.
Most of the dead are women and children, according to the UN human rights office.
Out of 251 hostages seized during the attack, 105 are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israeli army operations in Gaza have continued throughout the truce talks.
An Israeli strike on Tuesday hit a school in Gaza City where the civil defense agency said at least 12 Palestinians were killed and the military said a Hamas command center was based.
Thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in the facility, civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said.
AFP photos showed the Mustafa Hafiz school partly reduced to rubble, with Palestinians fleeing.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Bassal and medical sources reported at least 17 killed in four separate strikes.
The Israeli military said forces had retrieved the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in the southern Gaza district of Khan Yunis.
The United Nations said parts of a north-south Gaza road that is “a crucial passage for humanitarian missions were included in the latest evacuation order” issued by the Israeli military on Saturday.
“This has made it nearly impossible for aid workers to move along this key route,” a UN statement said, preventing “critical supplies and services, such as water trucking” from reaching those in need.
Bus carrying Shiite pilgrims from Pakistan to Iraq crashes in Iran, killing at least 28 people
- The pilgrims were on their way to Iraq to commemorate Arbaeen, which marks the 40th day following the death of a Shiite saint in the 7th century.
TEHRAN: A bus carrying Shiite pilgrims from Pakistan to Iraq crashed in central Iran, killing at least 28 people, an official said Wednesday.
The crash happened Tuesday night in the central Iranian province of Yazd, said Mohammad Ali Malekzadeh, a local emergency official, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
Another 23 people suffered injuries in the crash, 14 of them serious, he added. He said all the bus passengers hailed from Pakistan.
There were 51 people on board at the time of the crash outside of the city of Taft, some 500 kilometers (310 miles) southeast of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Iranian state television later blamed the crash on the bus brakes failing and a lack of attention by its driver.
In Pakistan, media reports quoted a local Shiite leader, Qamar Abbas, saying as many as 35 people had died in the crash. He described those on the bus as coming from the city of Larkana in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province. Pakistan’s government offered no immediate comment.
Iran has one of the world’s worst traffic safety records with some 17,000 deaths annually. The grave toll is blamed on wide disregard for traffic laws, unsafe vehicles and inadequate emergency services in its vast rural areas.
The pilgrims had been on their way to Iraq to commemorate Arbaeen.
A separate bus crash early Wednesday in Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan province killed six people and injured 18, authorities said.
Libya’s instability has ‘quite rapidly’ deteriorated and will worsen if no elections, says UN envoy
- The country’s current political crisis stems from the failure to hold elections on Dec. 24, 2021
UNITED NATIONS: The top UN official in Libya warned Tuesday that the political, military and security situation in the oil-rich north African country has deteriorated “quite rapidly” over the past two months – and without renewed political talks leading to a unified government and elections there will be greater instability.
Stephanie Khoury painted a grim picture to the UN Security Council of rival government forces unilaterally moving toward each other in July and August, sparking mobilizations and threats to respond, and unilateral attempts to unseat the Central Bank governor and the prime minister in the country’s west.
Libya plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. In the chaos that followed, the country split, with rival administrations in the east and west backed by rogue militias and foreign governments.
The country’s current political crisis stems from the failure to hold elections on Dec. 24, 2021, and the refusal of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah — who led a transitional government in the capital of Tripoli in the west — to step down. In response, Libya’s east-based parliament appointed a rival prime minister who was replaced, while the powerful military commander Khalifa Haftar continues to hold sway in the east.
Khoury warned the council that “Unilateral acts by Libyan political, military and security actors have increased tension, further entrenched institutional and political divisions, and complicated efforts for a negotiated political solution.”
On the economic front, she said, attempts to change the Central Bank governor are fueled by the perception of political and security leaders, and ordinary Libyans, that the bank “is facilitating spending in the east but not in the west,”
Khoury also pointed to the unilateral decision by the Libyan National Army, which is under Haftar’s control, to close the Sharara oil field, the country’s biggest, “causing the Libya National Oil Corp. to declare force majeure on Aug. 7.” Force majeure frees companies from contractual obligations because of extraordinary circumstances.
The National Oil Corp. accused the Fezzan Movement, a local protest group, of responsibility for the shutdown. But several Libyan papers reported that it was a result of Haftar’s retaliation against a Spanish company that is part of the joint venture operating Sharara for an arrest warrant issued by Spanish authorities accusing him of arms smuggling.
In one of the latest political acts, some members of the east-based House of Representatives met in Benghazi on Aug. 13 and voted to end the mandate of the Government of National Unity and Presidency Council in the west. The House members also voted to transfer the role of Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces to the speaker of the House of Representatives, and endorsed its designated government in the east “as the only legitimate executive” – moves immediately rejected by leaders in the west.
Khoury told council members “the status quo is not sustainable.”
“In the absence of renewed political talks leading to a unified government and elections you see where this is heading — greater financial and security instability, entrenched political and territorial divisions, and greater domestic and regional instability,” she warned.
Lebanon says five killed in fresh Israel strikes
- Lebanon’s health ministry said three emergency personnel from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee were hurt when the Israeli military “targeted them” in south Lebanon, causing “significant damage to the ambulance they were traveling in”
BEIRUT, Lebanon: Lebanon’s health ministry said early Wednesday that Israeli strikes in the country’s east killed one person and wounded 20 others, hours after it said four people were killed in the south.
The strikes came more than 24 hours after Israel carried out similar raids deep inside east Lebanon and as tensions mounted in the wake of the Israeli killing of a top Hezbollah commander.
“Israeli enemy strikes on the Bekaa” valley killed one person “and wounded 20 others,” the health ministry said in an updated toll.
The statement said one person was in critical condition while “eight children and a pregnant woman were moderately wounded.”
A Hezbollah source, requesting anonymity, said several strikes hit east Lebanon near the city of Baalbek, including the village of Nabi Sheet, without specifying what was targeted.
A source from a local hospital told AFP that five children no older than 10, all from the same family, were among the wounded.
The strikes around midnight came after similar raids in the Bekaa region on Monday evening that Israel said targeted “Hezbollah weapons storage facilities.”
They also came as Hezbollah said four of its fighters had been killed, after the health ministry said Tuesday that four people died in Israeli strikes in the southern border village of Dhayra.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Palestinian armed group Hamas, has traded near-daily cross-border fire with Israeli forces since the Gaza war began in October.
The violence has largely been restricted to the Lebanon-Israel border area, although Israel has repeatedly struck the country’s eastern Bekaa valley near the border with Syria where Hezbollah also has a strong presence.
Hezbollah claimed a string of attacks on Israeli troops and positions on Tuesday, including sending barrages of Katyusha rockets at several north Israel military positions in stated retaliation for Israeli strikes, including in Dhayra.
The Shiite Muslim movement also said it launched “squadrons of explosive-laden drones” and “intense rocket barrages” at several Israeli positions in the annexed Golan Heights in response to Monday night’s strikes in the Bekaa valley.
The Israeli military in separate statements said a total of around 115 “projectiles” were identified crossing from Lebanon.
It also said that “numerous suspicious aerial targets were identified crossing from Lebanon,” with air defenses intercepting some of them.
No injuries were reported, though the military said the incidents sparked fires in some areas.
The military also said air forces struck projectile launchers and several “Hezbollah military” structures in south Lebanon.
Lebanon’s health ministry said three emergency personnel from the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Health Committee were hurt Tuesday when the Israeli military “targeted them” in south Lebanon, causing “significant damage to the ambulance they were traveling in.”
The ministry “condemned in the strongest terms the repeated targeting of health workers in south Lebanon.”
Several militant groups in Lebanon operate health centers and emergency response operations, with at least 21 rescue workers killed since October, according to an AFP tally.
Fears of a major escalation have mounted since Hezbollah and Iran vowed to respond to twin killings blamed on Israel late last month.
An Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, shortly before an attack in Tehran blamed on Israel killed Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.
The cross-border violence has killed some 590 people in Lebanon, mostly Hezbollah fighters but also including at least 128 civilians, according to AFP’s tally.
On the Israeli side, including in the annexed Golan Heights, 23 soldiers and 26 civilians have been killed, according to army figures.
Blinken hopes Sudan humanitarian progress brings broader deal
DOHA: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken voiced hope Tuesday that an emerging humanitarian agreement in Sudan would build momentum for a broader deal to end the country’s devastating war.
Blinken, on visits to Egypt and Qatar mostly focused on bringing a ceasefire in the Gaza war, said he also consulted on the US-brokered talks on Sudan underway in Switzerland.
“With everything else going on in the world, the worst humanitarian situation in the world right now is in Sudan,” Blinken told reporters as he left Doha.
“There are more people in Sudan who are suffering from fighting, from violence, from lack of access to food and basic humanitarian assistance,” Blinken said.
The United States said Monday that the talks in Switzerland were finalizing ways to open three humanitarian routes for badly needed food, including a critical crossing from Chad.
“We obviously need to see that move forward, but that’s critical in bringing life-essential assistance to people who desperately need it,” Blinken said.
“As we’re doing that, of course, we’re working on trying to get a broader agreement on a cessation of hostilities,” he said.
The US point man on Sudan who is leading negotiations, Tom Perriello, joined Blinken for his talks earlier Tuesday with the Egyptian leadership in the coastal city of El Alamein.
Perriello said he would also meet with a Sudanese government delegation in his latest bid to persuade Sudan’s army to take part in the talks.
War broke out in April last year between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), devastating what was already one of the world’s poorest nations.
More than 25 million people — over half of Sudan’s population — face acute hunger, according to UN agencies, with famine declared in a displacement camp in Darfur, which borders Chad.
The RSF has sent a delegation to Switzerland but the army has refused to join.
Perriello has consulted with the army remotely and Blinken has twice called army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan to press him to participate.
