crisis

Lifesaving Gaza Aid ‘Has Fallen to an All-Time Low’ Under Israeli Siege

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A driver prepares a truck full of humanitarian aid from the European Union for entry into Gaza at the Erez West crossing in Israel on November 11, 2024.  (Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images)

“There is a strong likelihood that famine is already occurring in northern Gaza, and that immediate action is required within days, not weeks, to address the crisis,” a new analysis warns.

More than two dozen international relief groups operating in Gaza warned Thursday that humanitarian assistance entering the embattled Palestinian enclave “has fallen to an all-time low” as Israel continues to block lifesaving aid, fueling nascent famine in the north.

“An average of only 37 humanitarian trucks per day entered Gaza in October, and an average of 69 per day during the first week of November. This is still well below the average of 500 per day which entered Gaza… before October 7, 2023, and was insufficient to meet the needs of the population,” the seventh Gaza Humanitarian Aid Snapshot notes.

“For almost a month, Israel has blocked attempts by aid organizations to deliver aid in areas of northern Gaza, effectively severing the population from access to vital lifelines, including food, medical supplies, and all other humanitarian aid,” the report continues, adding that “there is a strong likelihood that famine is already occurring in northern Gaza, and that immediate action is required within days, not weeks, to address the crisis.”

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“Tragically, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 20 aid workers from both Palestinian and international organizations,” the analysis laments. “Staff were killed in their homes, in displacement camps, and while delivering lifesaving aid. Many aid workers lost close family members and relatives.”

One forcibly displaced resident of northern Gaza told the report’s authors:

Everyone has received this call before: One of your friends or colleagues or relatives or cousins is under the siege or bombs. And they ask for help. And you can’t do anything. You can’t do anything for them. And they die. They die while they are asking us to help them. This is the worst thing.

The report also notes widespread looting by desperate Gaza residents—a consequence not only of the bombing, invasion, and siege but also of Israel’s targeted killing of Palestinian police officers—and criminal gangs extorting aid groups for “protection” money.

The new analysis came on the same day that a United Nations committee published a report concluding that Israel’s policies and practices in Gaza “are consistent with the characteristics of genocide” and two days after the Biden administration—which backs Israel with arms and diplomatic support—sparked worldwide anger by asserting that Israel is not violating humanitarian law during the war.

A scorecard published earlier this week by some of the same groups that compiled the Humanitarian Aid Snapshot detailed how Israel has failed to fully comply with any of the Biden administration’s 19 demands indicating compliance with humanitarian law.

As children in Gaza began starving to death earlier this year, the International Court of Justice—which is weighing a genocide case against Israel—ordered the Israeli government to stop blocking aid from entering the enclave. Israel has been accused of ignoring the order.

As the Humanitarian Aid Snapshot notes, Israeli forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded over 103,000 others as of November 12. Approximately 80% of Gazans are under forced displacement orders—a policy denounced by many as ethnic cleansing—and around 90% of Gaza residents have been forcibly displaced, most of them multiple times.

“The population in northern Gaza faces starvation, severe shortages of clean water, critical supply scarcity, and ever-increasing desperation,” Mercy Corps, one of the groups that contributed to the analysis, said in a statement. “We call on all those with influence and power to take urgent action to de-escalate and halt the unrelenting violence in Gaza, to protect civilians and aid workers, and to do everything possible to achieve an immediate and lasting cease-fire.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that his active support and that of UK's air force has been essential in Israel's mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government's support for Israel's Gaza genocide and the UK government and military's active participation in genocide.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Continue ReadingLifesaving Gaza Aid ‘Has Fallen to an All-Time Low’ Under Israeli Siege

15 Arab and African countries sound the alarm on the risks of famine in Sudan

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Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Sudanese refugees in Chad. Over 10 million people have been forcibly displaced in over a year of war in Sudan. Photo: Wikimedia commons

Famine looms in Sudan, forcing people to flee to neighboring countries, while talks between warring parties and a UN envoy are still under way in Geneva

The governments of 15 Arab and African countries issued a statement on Tuesday, July 16, expressing their deep concerns regarding the escalating food security crisis in war-torn Sudan. The countries included the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Morocco, Mauritania, Chad, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Benin, Seychelles, Senegal, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mozambique and Nigeria.

The statement came as a reaction to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report, which was published on June 27, 2024. “Fourteen months into the conflict, Sudan is facing the worst levels of acute food insecurity ever recorded by the IPC in the country,” the report said, pointing out that more than half of the population in Sudan have experienced severe hunger, which makes Sudan the world’s largest hunger crisis. 

The number of starving people is estimated at 25.6 million people, with 14 areas at the risk of famine including greater Darfur, Greater Kordofan, Al Jazirah and some hotspots in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. Many starving Sudanese people have been reportedly fleeing Sudan to seek asylum in neighboring countries due to hunger and looming famine. 

The countries who issued the statement expressed their concern about what was set out in the IPC report as a “stark and rapid deterioration” in food security, and its dire impact on the safety and well-being of civilians, including thousands of children, who have suffered from severe acute malnutrition.

According to a Save the Children report published on July 7, due to the war in Sudan 30% of children are acutely malnourished and 20% of the overall population is facing extreme food shortages.

Since the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in April 2023, the destruction caused by the fighting resulted in a sharp decrease in the agricultural production, and therefore a hike in food prices and food scarcity. The hunger crisis in Sudan has been further deepened by the severe restriction on the movement of food and aid convoys due to the ongoing conflict.

Reiterating the United Nations Security Council’s call from June of 2023, the countries urged all the parties to the conflict to ensure immediate, safe, and unrestricted access to civilian humanitarian aid. They also called on the conflicting parties to adhere to international humanitarian law and to comply with all relevant Security Council resolutions. 

The statement also addressed foreign actors requesting them to stop providing armed or material support to the parties involved in the conflict and to refrain from any action which may ignite the conflict. Furthermore, it called on the international community for immediate and coordinated international response to tackle the urgent needs of the affected Sudanese population. The countries encouraged the international community to scale up the humanitarian assistance it provides, and to support the IPC recommendations for increasing nutrition interventions, restoring productive systems and improving data collection.

While the humanitarian situation in Sudan is constantly deteriorating, talks between a United Nations envoy and delegations from both conflicting parties continue in Geneva this week. The talks started last Thursday, focusing on humanitarian aid and the protection of civilians.

There were a few “promising signs” emerging from Monday’s talks in Geneva, the Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Sudan, Shible Sahbani commented. “Let’s wait for the coming hours and days, and we hope that if we don’t get a ceasefire, at least we can get the protection of civilians and the opening of humanitarian corridors,” he added. 

Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue Reading15 Arab and African countries sound the alarm on the risks of famine in Sudan

13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called ‘Another Red Alert’ for Humanity

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Rescuers carry away a man, affected by the scorching heat, on a stretcher as Muslim pilgrims arrive to perform the symbolic “stoning of the devil” ritual as part of the Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Saudi Arabia on June 16, 2024. (Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)

“This alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance,” said one campaigner.

Scientists on Monday underscored the urgent need to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy following the publication of data from the European Union’s climate change monitor showing that last month was the hottest June ever recorded and that 2024 is likely to be the planet’s hottest year on record.

Each month since June 2023 has been the hottest since records have been kept, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last week in its latest monthly bulletin.

According to the agency, June “was 1.50°C above the estimated June average for 1850-1900, the designated preindustrial reference period, making it the 12th consecutive month to reach or break the 1.5°C threshold.”

“European temperatures were most above average over southeast regions and Turkey, but near or below average over western Europe, Iceland, and northwestern Russia,” C3S noted. “Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa, and western Antarctica.”

“Temperatures were below average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, indicating a developing La Niña, but air temperatures over the ocean remained at an unusually high level over many regions,” the agency added.

C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement Monday that “even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm.”

“This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans,” he stressed.

In an interview with The Associated Press published Monday, C3S climate scientist Nicolas Julien called the new data “a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris agreement.”

“The global temperature continues to increase,” he added. “It has at a rapid pace.”

Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the California-based nonprofit Berkeley Earth, told Reuters, “I now estimate that there is an approximately 95% chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.”

As Reuters reported Monday:

The changed climate has already unleashed disastrous consequences around the world in 2024. More than 1,000 people died in fierce heat during the Hajj pilgrimage last month. Heat deaths were recorded in New Dehli, which endured an unprecedentedly long heatwave, and amongst tourists in Greece.

“This is not good news at all,” Aditi Mukherji, who co-authored the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, told The Guardian.

“We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming,” she added, “and at 1.5°C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.”

The Guardian surveyed hundreds of IPCC authors earlier this year. Three-quarters of them said they expect Earth to heat by at least 2.5°C by the end of this century. Half of the surveyed scientists expect temperatures to rise above 3°C by 2100.

“It is a crisis,” said Mukherji, and one that has a clear solution, given that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of global heating.

Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, told Nation of Change that “as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves are becoming more common, and intense heatwaves are more frequent.”

“We can break the cycle, we can make oil companies stop burning fossil fuels,” she added.

Reacting to the latest C3S data, Amnesty International climate adviser Ann Harrison said on social media that “this alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance.”

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called ‘Another Red Alert’ for Humanity

Coral Bleaching ‘Off the Charts’ in Atlantic as NOAA Warns Ocean Going ‘Crazy Haywire’

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A bleached mound of coral at the Cheeca Rocks monitoring site in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary that had been previously tagged shows the coral skeleton. (Photo: NOAA AOML)

“We had to add additional bleaching alert levels to appropriately categorize just how hot it was,” said a coral reefs expert at the agency.

The phrase “off the charts” is no exaggeration in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest warning about a global coral bleaching event that scientists have linked to rising ocean temperatures and heat stress.

Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Program, told reporters Thursday that about 60.5% of the world’s coral reefs are now experiencing heat stress severe enough to cause bleaching, which can make the reefs more vulnerable to disease and harm the biodiversity they support.

Manzello said at the press briefing that after observing the first months of the coral bleaching event, which began in early 2023, NOAA changed its existing bleaching alert system because conditions were so abnormally warm in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea.

The agency’s new bleaching alert system categorizes heat stress for coral reefs on a scale of 1-5, with Alert Level 5 representing ocean heat that could kill “approximately 80% or more of corals on a particular reef,” Manzello said.

“We had to add additional bleaching alert levels to appropriately categorize just how hot it was,” he said, with Level 5 “analogous to a Category 5 hurricane or cyclone.”

“I hate that I have to keep using that word ‘unprecedented.’… But, again, we are seeing unprecedented patterns again this year.”

The world’s oceans, Manzello, said, are going “crazy haywire.”

In the Caribbean this year, heat stress off the coasts of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Colombia are now at levels that in previous years weren’t seen until the summer months.

“I hate that I have to keep using that word ‘unprecedented,'” Manzello told The New York Times. “But, again, we are seeing unprecedented patterns again this year.”

The bleaching that took place last year resulted in coral mortality of at least 50% and as high as 93% in reefs off the coast of Huatulco, Mexico, according to a team of Mexican scientists.

In the Atlantic, fossil fuel-driven planetary heating has been exacerbated by El Niño—the natural phenomenon that causes warmer-than-normal ocean surface temperatures—and has caused the “most unprecedented and extreme” bleaching-level heat stress observed in the past year.

Manzello said 99.7% of reef areas in the Atlantic have experienced heat stress that could cause bleaching.

“The Atlantic Ocean has been off the charts,” he said.

Scientists have recorded four global bleaching events since 1998 and have linked all of them to warmer ocean temperatures. Since 1950, the world has lost half of its coral reefs, according to a 2021 study.

Along with serving marine life, a quarter of which rely on coral reefs at some point in their life cycles, reefs also protect coasts from storms, whose growing severity in recent years scientists have also linked to planetary heating.

The current bleaching event has affected reefs off the coasts of at least 62 countries and territories.

Scientists earlier this year confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year in human history and the warmest year on record for the world’s oceans, which absorb more than 90% of excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions.

“I am very worried about the state of the world’s coral reefs,” Manzello said. “We are seeing [ocean temperatures] play out right now that are very extreme in nature.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingCoral Bleaching ‘Off the Charts’ in Atlantic as NOAA Warns Ocean Going ‘Crazy Haywire’

Number of homeless children in England reaches record high

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/04/number-of-homeless-children-in-england-reaches-record-high/. Many articles from Left FootForward featured today.

A record 145,800 children are now homeless in England, the government’s latest quarterly homelessness stats have shown, highlighting once more the sheer scale of the housing crisis in the country.

The number of children living in temporary accommodation is now at the highest ever level recorded and up 15% on last year.

Almost 320,000 households were assessed as homeless or at risk of homelessness – also a  record high, while the number of households threatened with homelessness and owed a prevention duty because of a section 21 notice is the highest on record, at 25,910 over the last year. It was only last week that the government failed to set a date for banning section 21 no-fault eviction notices, which continue to have devastating impacts for low-income and vulnerable households up and down the country.

Reacting to the record figures, Matt Downie, chief executive at Crisis, said: “Today’s statistics need to be a wake-up call. We are failing to stop people being forced into homelessness and we are failing to help them back out. These are the appalling consequences of our failure to get a grip on this crisis.

…

https://leftfootforward.org/2024/04/number-of-homeless-children-in-england-reaches-record-high/. Many articles from Left FootForward featured today.

Continue ReadingNumber of homeless children in England reaches record high