A poverty reduction of 35% on 2023 levels could avoid 293 infant deaths, 458 childhood admissions with nutritional anaemias and 32,650 childhood emergency admissions. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA
England research shows huge benefits with resulting savings for NHS and councils
Curbing child poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap would save hundreds of lives a year and avoid thousands of admissions to hospital, the largest study of its kind suggests.
Keir Starmer has faced repeated demands from within Labour ranks and opposition leaders to abolish the policy, which was announced in 2015 by George Osborne, then chancellor. Almost half of all children in some towns and cities now live below the breadline.
Now researchers from the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle have shown for the first time the extraordinary impact that reducing child poverty with measures such as ditching the two-child benefit cap could have in England.
Tackling it would substantially cut the number of infant deaths and children in care, as well as rates of childhood nutritional anaemia and emergency admissions, with the most deprived regions, especially in north-east England, likely to benefit the most, the projections indicate.
Rescue teams recover the bodies of those killed in an Israeli attack on schools in Gaza City, Gaza on August 4, 2024. (Photo: Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Remember that each one of those numbers is one person, a child who has been forever changed by what’s happened.”
Israeli forces killed dozens of displaced Palestinians—mostly children—on Sunday with attacks on a pair of United Nations-run schools in the Gaza Strip as diplomats in the region worked to prevent all-out war from breaking out in the aftermath of Israel’s latest assassination spree.
Al Jazeera reported that 80% of the roughly 30 people killed in the Israeli attacks on two schools in Gaza City were children. The strikes came shortly after Israel’s military bombed a hospital complex in central Gaza, killing at least five people.
“This is beyond horror now,” David Shoebridge, an Australian senator, wrote in response to the attacks on schools-turned-shelters.
Tareq Abu Azzoum of Al Jazeera noted that rescue teams were still searching the rubble of the two schools for survivors on Monday.
“At least 16 Palestinians are still missing, including children, under the remnants of these areas that were targeted by Israel without any prior warning,” Azzoum wrote. “Civil defense crews have been using only their bare hands in order to look for survivors. They have been saying that sometimes the process for recovering and pulling out victims can take days simply because there isn’t enough fuel to operate the vast majority of bulldozers, and due to the Israeli attacks on bulldozers at the municipal facilities, used in the initial months of the war to rescue victims.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1820104591565795824
Israel’s monthslong war on the Gaza Strip has devastated the territory’s children, killing more than 14,000, wounding more than 12,000, and leaving over 20,000 missing. The physical toll has been compounded by what one Gaza mother recently described as the “complete psychological destruction” of the enclave’s youth.
Becky Platt, a British pediatric nurse who recently returned from Gaza after a stint at a field hospital there, wrote Monday that “the psychological distress that I witnessed among children and young people is like nothing I’d ever seen before.”
“It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers when we watch the news or read about what’s happening in Gaza,” Platt continued. “Remember that each one of those numbers is one person, a child who has been forever changed by what’s happened. Then multiply that one child by thousands. That’s the work that needs to be done.”
Israel’s attacks came after a round of cease-fire talks in Cairo concluded without a deal to end the assault on Gaza. Critics, including some Israeli officials, believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is actively sabotaging cease-fire talks in a bid to remain in power.
Axios reported Sunday that “Israeli officials and families of hostages are concerned Netanyahu, who recently toughened his demands and presented new conditions for a hostage and cease-fire deal, sent the delegation [to Cairo] only to create an appearance of negotiations to relieve some of the pressure from” U.S. President Joe Biden, who has called for a cease-fire while continuing to provide military support for the war on Gaza.
“Hamas rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions, which include forming an international mechanism to prevent weapons transfers from southern Gaza to the north,” according to Axios. “Israeli officials say this and other new demands are making a deal impossible.”
Meanwhile, diplomats are trying to prevent the region from descending into full-scale military conflict following Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah commander and Hamas’ political leader.
Late last week, the Pentagon announced it would “deploy additional fighter jets and Navy warships to the Middle East” as lawmakers and anti-war campaigners warned of deepening U.S. involvement in the regional war.
“Americans do not want to fight another war in the Middle East,” Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said last week, “and the path out of the unimaginable death and destruction in Gaza that threatens to engulf the region is through a cease-fire.”
“This is what fascism and the desire for mass extermination and displacement look like,” a Palestinian-American expert said. “These criminals want to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, not just Hamas.”
Palestinian Faouzi Abdel Aal, 21, is rushed to Nasser hospital in the southern Gaza Strip to receive treatment for his injuries, after being reportedly released from an Israeli detention center on July 25, 2024. (Photo: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images)
The U.N. report found evidence of sexual violence, waterboarding, and the use of dogs against detainees, many of whom were deprived of food, water, sleep, and toilet access.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday released a report detailing torture and abuse of Palestinians at Israeli detention centers, including sexual violence, waterboarding, and the use of dogs.
Israeli security forces have also used electric shocks, burned detainees with cigarettes, and deprived them of food, water, sleep, and toilet access, according to the 23-page OHCHR report, based largely on interviews with released detainees. Some detainees said they were held with their arms suspended from the ceiling; were forced to be naked for prolonged periods, wearing only diapers; and were blindfolded for extended periods.
Israel security forces have arrested thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza since October, many of them arbitrarily; they held more than 9,400 “security detainees” as of the end of June, often in secret and incommunicado, without providing a reason for the detainment, the report says.
“The testimonies gathered by my office and other entities indicate a range of appalling acts, such as waterboarding and the release of dogs on detainees, amongst other acts, in flagrant violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law,” U.N. Human Rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement accompanying the report.
New @UNHumanRights report addresses arbitrary, prolonged & 'incommunicado' detention of thousands of Palestinians by Israeli authorities since October.
Most of the detainees have been men and adolescent boys, though some are also women and adolescent girls, and there are many reported instances of sexual and gender-based violence, the report says, including “the forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers.”
OHCHR also said it had video evidence of detainees filmed in “deliberately humiliating positions” while handcuffed and blindfolded, and noted it received “consistent reports” of Israeli security forces “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses.”
Some detainees also reported “cage-like” facilities and overcrowding. The report says that 13 to 20 male detainees were kept in cells designed for five people, forcing many to sleep on the floor. There were “poor living, hygiene, and health conditions, with reports of water running only one hour per day over several weeks” and detainees faced “exposure to cold temperatures due to the confiscation of blankets and removal of windows panes in cold weather.”
At least 53 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli detention centers since October, according to the report, which suggests that the detention system appears “to constitute a collectively punitive measure against Palestinians,” citing the words of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, who has said that “terrorists” deserve the most “stringent conditions.” Male detainees reported losing between about 55 and 120 pounds while in custody.
The OHCHR report comes as a highly controversial case involving detention abuse unfolds in Israel. The Israeli military is investigating nine soldiers for alleged “substantial abuse” of a Palestinian detainee who reportedly had to be hospitalized and could not walk after they attacked him. Far-right Israeli groups and political figures have protested the investigation.
Concern about Israeli detentions of Palestinians has been high for many months. In January, a Palestinian watchdog group issued a report condemning the forced disappearance of Gazans, and The New York Times found evidence of detainees being stripped and beaten.
Not all of the alarms about the situation in Israeli detentions centers have come from abroad. In February, Israeli’s public defender’s office issued a report calling for improved prison conditions, including for Palestinians. In April, local human rights groups called for a closure of the Sde Teiman military base detention center, due to its notorious conditions.
The calls were prompted in part by gruesome reports including amputations of detainees’ limbs due to handcuff injuries. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East then issued a damning report on detainee treatment, including of its own staff, some of whom had been detained and subjected to harsh interrogation.
Last week, Save the Children called for an end to the Israel’s arbitrary detainment of Palestinian minors, with a regional director saying that “these children are trapped, unable to move or see the sun, forced into crowded cells with appalling, unsanitary conditions, and subject to severe abuse and violence.”
Experts said Wednesday that the OHCHR report served mainly to confirm previous findings on Israeli detention centers. Neil Sammonds, a campaigner at the U.K.-based progressive advocacy group War on Want, said on social media that leaders of the new U.K. government haven’t spoken up about abuses at Israeli detention centers. He also said that the report could be used as evidence by the International Criminal Court, which has sought arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders.
Latest UN report on Israel's abusive detention & torture adds little to what we've known for months, but underscores inertia of political leaders (I personally briefed still silent @DavidLammy & @Keir_Starmer in March) & opens door even wider for the ICC https://t.co/qOjDsR2ikN
The new report also addresses abuses of Israelis held by Hamas and affiliated groups. The Palestinian militants killed roughly 1,200 people in a horrific set of attacks in southern Israel on October 7 and kidnapped about 250 Israelis, more than 100 of whom have since been released. Like Palestinian detainees, the released Israelis reported “appalling” conditions, the report says, including beatings, receiving surgery without anesthetic, and sexual and gender-based violence. The Israeli government has reported that 44 of the remaining hostages in Gaza have died.
Both Israel and Hamas have refused to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit detainees or hostages. The OHCHR called for both sides to allow such independent monitoring.
A Palestinian boy walks past the rubble of a school destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, July 27, 2024
ISRAELI air strikes destroyed a school used by displaced Palestinians in central Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 30 people, including several children.
Seven children and seven women were reportedly among the dead taken from the girls’ school in Deir al-Balah to al-Aqsa Hospital.
Israel’s military said that the air raid was targeted at a Hamas command centre used to direct attacks against Israeli troops and store “large quantities of weapons.”
Hamas slammed the Israeli claim as false.
Civil defence workers in Gaza said thousands had been sheltering in the school, which also contained a medical site.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least another 12 people were killed in other strikes on Saturday.
Palestinians wounded by Israeli attacks are brought to Nasser Hospital for medical treatment in Khan Younis, Gaza on July 22, 2024. (Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets.”
As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Thursday, dozens of American healthcare workers who recently volunteered in the Gaza Strip urged the U.S. leaders to do everything in their power to end Israel’s assault on the enclave, citing the horrors they witnessed firsthand.
In an open letter addressed to Biden, Harris, and First Lady Jill Biden, 45 physicians, surgeons, and nurses wrote that “we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them.”
“We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget,” the letter reads. “We cannot believe that anyone would continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children after seeing what we have seen.”
The healthcare workers called on the Biden administration to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the state of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of both Israel and all Palestinian armed groups until a permanent cease-fire is established, and until good-faith negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians lead to a permanent resolution of the conflict.”
“We are not politicians. We do not claim to have all the answers,” they continued. “We are simply physicians and nurses who cannot remain silent about what we saw in Gaza. Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: End this madness now!”
This is an open letter addressed to @POTUS, @VP , and @FLOTUS signed by 45 American physicians and nurses, about what we saw while working in Gaza. Please feel free to distribute. A PDF can be downloaded from the link and/or QR code on page 1. pic.twitter.com/LHVvmeAFad
The letter was released as Netanyahu, fresh off his widely condemned address to the U.S. Congress, met separately on Thursday with Biden and Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
In remarks following her meeting with Netanyahu, Harris said that “what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating,” pointing to “the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.”
“We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” the vice president added. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”
Harris said she told Netanyahu directly to “get this deal done”—referring to a cease-fire agreement with Hamas—but, as expected, she did not break with the administration on supplying arms to the Israeli military.
While there has been no obvious policy change from the administration now that Harris has taken over for Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft argued that the vice president “clearly broke with Biden on Israel in terms of rhetoric and tone.”
Parsi also contended that there was “a substance shift.”
“Biden has disingenuously claimed that Hamas blocked a cease-fire deal,” Parsi wrote on social media. “By saying that she urged Netanyahu ‘to clinch the deal,’ Kamala pointed to the real obstacle.”
BREAKING: VP Harris speaks after meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu
Harris calling for an immediate cease-fire deal to free the hostages.
The VP saying she “will not be silent" about the suffering in Gaza, the "devastating" loss of life and the "dire" humanitarian crisis. pic.twitter.com/Fe5QPoOuFh
In their letter to Harris and Biden, the healthcare workers wrote that Israel “has directly targeted and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system” and “targeted our colleagues in Gaza for death, disappearance, and torture.” According to figures from the United Nations Human Rights Office, Israeli forces have killed one in every 40 healthcare workers in the Palestinian territory since October as diseases spread and the number of Gazans killed or wounded continues to grow by the hour.
The healthcare workers expressed the view that—based on available evidence and their experiences—”the death toll from this conflictis many times higher than what is reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health,” which currently stands at over 39,100.
“We also believe this is probative evidence of widespread violations of American laws governing the use of American weapons abroad, and of international humanitarian law,” they continued. “We cannot forget the scenes of unbearable cruelty directed at women and children that we witnessed ourselves.”
