GAZA: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has halted the delivery of aid through the key Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza after it became “impossible,” its chief said Sunday.
“The road out of this crossing has not been safe for months. On 16 November, a large convoy of aid trucks was stolen by armed gangs,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.
“Yesterday, we tried to bring in a few food trucks on the same route. They were all taken,” he added, warning hunger was “rapidly deepening” in Gaza.
Lazzarini listed how the humanitarian operation had become “unnecessarily impossible” because of “the ongoing siege, hurdles from Israeli authorities, political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid, lack of safety on aid routes and targeting of local police.”
It comes after the United Nations warned Friday that Gaza has descended into anarchy, with hunger soaring, looting rampant and rising numbers of rapes in shelters as public order falls apart.
Israel, which imposed a total siege on the Hamas-ruled territory in the early stages of the war last year, blames the inability of relief organizations to handle and distribute large quantities of aid.
“Only 7 percent of the aid that came into the Gaza Strip in November was coordinated by UNRWA,” the Israeli defense ministry agency responsible for civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, said on X.
“There are dozens of humanitarian organizations operating in the Gaza Strip that continue to take a growing role in delivering humanitarian aid,” it added.
During a press visit Thursday, the Israeli army showed aid shipments at the crossing and said they wait at the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom for “months.”
Lazzarini also said Israel “must refrain from attacks on humanitarian workers.”
His demand follows an Israeli strike Saturday that killed three contractors of the US charity World Central Kitchen, including one who Israel’s military said was involved in Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Save The Children later said a strike killed one of its staff members, the second employee to be killed since the war began last October.
The UN last month said 333 aid workers had been killed since the war began in October last year, 243 of them employees of UNRWA.
Lazzarini reiterated his call for a ceasefire “that would also secure the delivery of safe and uninterrupted aid to people in need.”
A summit of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders urged an “immediate and permanent cessation of Israeli fire and military operations” as well as “the delivery of all humanitarian and relief aid and basic needs to the residents of Gaza.”
German deputy foreign minister Tobias Linder also said Israel had no excuse for hampering aid delivery to Gaza before a conference in Cairo on the subject Monday.
Jean-Francois Corty, president of France-based charity Medecins du Monde, warned UNRWA’s decision was a “very bad omen” and “tragic in a context that was already so.”
Claire Nicolet, head of mission in Jerusalem for Doctors Without Borders, told AFP the situation was “already catastrophic” and that UNRWA’s announcement was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” because the UN agency was “the backbone of aid for the supply of food and equipment.”
The Hamas attack in October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,207 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
At least 44,429 Palestinians, a majority of them civilians, have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip since the war began, according to data provided by the health ministry in the territory.
The UN has acknowledged these figures to be reliable.
UNRWA pauses aid delivery via key Gaza-Israel crossing
https://arab.news/54zs8
UNRWA pauses aid delivery via key Gaza-Israel crossing
- Delivery through Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing has been paused due to unsafe route and looting by armed gangs inside Gaza
Turkish prosecutors target the Istanbul Bar Association
“The Istanbul public prosecutor’s office has begun legal action to remove Istanbul Bar Association president Ibrahim Kaboglu and his executive board,” Turkish Bar Association head Erinc Sagkan wrote on X late Tuesday.
The lawsuit was filed several weeks after the Istanbul Bar Association demanded an investigation into the deaths of two journalists from Turkiye’s Kurdish-majority southeast who were killed in northern Syria.
Nazim Dastan, 32, and Cihan Bilgin, died on December 19 when their car was hit by what the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said was a “Turkish drone strike” during clashes between an Ankara-backed militia and the SDF, a US-backed group of mainly Kurdish fighters.
Turkiye sees the SDF as a terror group tied to the PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.
The pair worked for Syrian Kurdish media outlets Rojnews and the Anha news agency, and the strike denounced by the Turkish Journalists’ Union.
The Turkish military insists it never targets civilians but only terror groups.
At the time, the Istanbul Bar Association issued a statement saying “targeting members of the press in conflict zones is a violation of International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Convention.” It demanded “a proper investigation be conducted into the murder of two of our citizens.”
Prosecutors immediately opened an inquiry into allegations of “making propaganda for a terrorist organization” and “publicly spreading false information” on grounds the two journalists had ties to the PKK.
The Istanbul Bar Association denounced the lawsuit as having “no legal basis” and said its executive council was “fulfilling its duties and responsibilities in line with the Constitution, democracy and the law.”
Turkish Bar Association head Sagkan said: “Although the methods may change, the only thing that has remained constant for the past half century is the effort by the government’s supporters to pressurise and stifle those they see as opponents.”
UNRWA chief vows to continue aid to Palestinians despite Israeli ban
OSLO: The UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA will continue to provide aid to people in the Palestinian territories despite an Israeli ban due to be implemented by the end of January, its director said Wednesday.
“We will ... stay and deliver,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told a conference in Oslo. “UNRWA’s local staff will remain and continue to provide emergency assistance and where possible, education and primary health care,” he said.
Erdogan says Turkiye can ‘crush’ all terrorists in Syria
ANKARA: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday urged all countries to “take their hands off” Syria and said Turkiye had the capacity and ability to crush all terrorist organizations in the country, including Kurdish militia and Islamic State.
Speaking in parliament, Erdogan said the Kurdish YPG militia was the biggest problem in Syria now after the ousting of former President Bashar Assad, and added that the group would not be able to escape its inevitable end unless it lays down its arms.
World must keep pressure on Israel after Gaza truce: Palestinian PM
OSLO: The international community will have to maintain pressure on Israel after an hoped-for ceasefire in Gaza so it accepts the creation of a Palestinian state, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Mustafa said on Wednesday.
A ceasefire agreement appears close following a recent round of indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying late Tuesday that a deal to end the 15-month war was “on the brink.”
“The ceasefire we’re talking about ... came about primarily because of international pressure. So pressure does pay off,” Mustafa said before a conference in Oslo.
Israel must “be shown what’s right and what’s wrong, and that the veto power on peace and statehood for Palestinians will not be accepted and tolerated any longer,” he told reporters.
He was speaking at the start of the third meeting of the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, gathering representatives from some 80 states and organizations in Oslo.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, the host of the meeting, said a “ceasefire is the prerequisite for peace, but it is not peace.”
“We need to move forward now toward a two-state solution. And since one of the two states exists, which is Israel, we need to build the other state, which is Palestine,” he added.
According to analysts, the two-state solution appears more remote than ever.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, firmly supported by US President-elect Donald Trump, is opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israel is not represented at the Oslo meeting.
Norway angered Israel when it recognized the Palestinian state, together with Spain and Ireland, last May, a move later followed by Slovenia.
In a nod to history, Wednesday’s meeting was held in the Oslo City Hall, where Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
The then-head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Israeli prime minister and his foreign minister were honored for signing the Oslo accords a year earlier, which laid the foundation for Palestinian autonomy with the goal of an independent state.
Syrians in uproar after volunteers paint over prison walls
DAMASCUS: Families of missing persons have urged Syria’s new authorities to protect evidence of crimes under president Bashar Assad, after outrage over volunteers painting over etchings on walls inside a former jail.
Thousands poured out of prisons after Islamist-led rebels toppled Assad last month, but many Syrians are still looking for traces of tens of thousands of relatives and friends who went missing.
In the chaos following his ouster, with journalists and families rushing to detention centers, official documents have been left unprotected, with some even looted or destroyed.
Rights groups have stressed the urgent need to preserve “evidence of atrocities,” which includes writings left by detainees on the walls of their cells.
But a video appearing to show young volunteers paint over such writings at an unnamed detention center with white paint and adorning its walls with the new Syrian flag, the depiction of a fireplace or broken chains has circulated on social media in recent days, angering activists.
“Painting the walls of security branches is disgraceful, especially before the start of new investigations into human rights violations” there, said Diab Serriya, a co-founder of Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP).
It is “an attempt to destroy the signs of torture or enforced disappearance and hampers efforts to... gather evidence,” he said.
Jomana Hasan Shtiwy, a Syrian held in three different facilities under Assad, often changing cells, said the writings on the walls held invaluable information.
“On the walls are names and telephone numbers to contact relatives and inform them about the fate of their children,” she said on Facebook.
In each new cell, “we would write a memory so that those who followed could remember us,” she said.
A petition appeared on Tuesday calling for the new Syrian authorities to better protect evidence, and give investigating the fate of those forcibly disappeared under Assad “the highest priority.”
It slammed what it called “the insensitive treatment of the sanctity” of former detention centers.
“Some have gone as far as to paint cells, obscuring their features, which for us represents... a great wronging of detainees,” said signatories, including ADMSP.
The president of the International Committee for the Red Cross said last week determining the fate of those who went missing during Syria’s civil war would be a “huge challenge.”
Mirjana Spoljaric said the ICRC was following 43,000 cases, but that was probably just a fraction of the missing.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, says more than 100,000 people have died in detention from torture or dire health conditions across Syria since 2011.
