As Millions Starve in Gaza, Israel Terminates Agreement With UNRWA

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

Palestinians scramble to receive sacks of flour at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency aid distribution center in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on November 3, 2024. (Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“Restricting humanitarian access and at the same time dismantling UNRWA will add an additional layer of suffering to already unspeakable suffering,” said the U.N. agency’s commissioner-general.

Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry on Sunday formally notified the United Nations that it has terminated a decades-old legal agreement governing the country’s relations with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a move that aid workers and advocacy groups say will spell further disaster for Gaza’s besieged and famine-stricken population as winter approaches.

The director-general of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry announced the decision to scrap the 1967 agreement in a letter to the president of the U.N. General Assembly, a message sent roughly a week after Israeli lawmakers approved legislation banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating or providing services “in the sovereign territory of the state of Israel.”

The new letter states that the legislation “will enter into effect following a three-month period.”

The Washington Post reported Monday that Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, said that “the agency expected to continue its work coordinating the distribution of aid in Gaza and the West Bank at the operational level.”

But aid groups have warned that Israel’s UNRWA ban could inflict fatal damage to humanitarian operations in Gaza and the West Bank, given Israeli control over access to the illegally occupied territories. The legislation Israeli lawmakers passed last week bars the government from issuing work permits to foreign UNRWA staff and prevents the military from coordinating with the aid agency.

“The human cost of this ban is immeasurable,” Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, said in a statement last week. “This Israeli Knesset vote banning UNRWA is not merely an attack on the U.N. agency; it’s an attack on the fundamental rights and dignity due to all human beings. The consequences of this ban could result in the loss of tens of thousands, if not more, precious Palestinian lives. Where is the humanity?”

“You can hear children crying, people screaming, people running for their lives, and it has been nonstop for 24 hours. There’s nowhere to go. People are trapped.”

The U.S., Israel’s main ally and arms supplier, urged the Israeli government last week not to implement the newly passed legislation, even though the U.S. has yet to restore its own funding to UNRWA. The Biden administration suspended U.S. funding for UNRWA in January after Israel accused a small number of agency employees of taking part in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.

The U.N. fired nine UNRWA workers after an investigation determined that they “may have been involved” in the attack. UNRWA has roughly 13,000 staffers in the Gaza Strip, and the agency is the most important aid group operating in the enclave.

Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, argued that by terminating its agreement with UNRWA, “Israel is also further breaking U.S. law prohibiting the restriction of aid delivery.”

“It’s a definitive rejection of an explicit demand in the Biden administration’s October 13 letter and by law must result in halting U.S. arms and military aid to Israel,” Williams added.

The Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry’s announcement came as Israel’s military continued its bombing campaign and ground attacks across Gaza. Reuters reported that at least a dozen Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Monday, including seven people in an attack on houses in northern Gaza.

“It is absolutely terrifying,” Louise Wateridge, an UNRWA spokesperson, told Al Jazeera on Saturday, referring to conditions on the ground in Gaza. “You can hear children crying, people screaming, people running for their lives, and it has been nonstop for 24 hours. There’s nowhere to go. People are trapped.”

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Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, said Monday that Israeli authorities allowed an average of just 30 aid trucks to enter Gaza per day last month.

Prior to October 7, 2023, around 500 aid trucks were entering the enclave daily.

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“This cannot meet the needs of over 2 million people, many of whom are starving, sick, and in desperate conditions,” Lazzarini said Monday. “Restricting humanitarian access and at the same time dismantling UNRWA will add an additional layer of suffering to already unspeakable suffering.”

“Only political will,” he added, “can put an end to a politically made situation.”

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

Continue ReadingAs Millions Starve in Gaza, Israel Terminates Agreement With UNRWA

‘If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is,’ Says Israeli Newspaper of North Gaza Siege

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

Forcibly displaced Palestinians flee after an evacuation order by the Israeli military in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip on October 23, 2024.  (Photo: Rami Zohud/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

“If this process doesn’t stop immediately, hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”

The editors of Israel’s oldest newspaper on Wednesday published an editorial decrying the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza amid a ferocious Israeli offensive there that’s killed more than 1,000 people over the past three weeks.

“For three and a half weeks, Israeli forces have been besieging the northern Gaza Strip,” the editors of the left-wing newspaper Haaretz wrote in Wednesday’s lead editorial. “Israel has almost completely blocked the entry of humanitarian aid, thereby starving the hundreds of thousands of people who live there. Information emerging from the besieged area is only partial, because ever since the war began, Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza.”

“Israel says it told the residents that they needed to leave northern Gaza, and even now, they can still move southward on routes the army has designated for this purpose,” the editors noted. “Thus the residents, many of whom have already been uprooted two or three times or even more from the places to which they have fled the terrors of war, are now being asked to move again. Yet Israel has refrained from giving the displaced any guarantee that they will be able to return once the war ends.”

“Given this,” they added, “it’s no wonder that grave suspicions have arisen that Israel is effectively perpetrating ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza and that this operation is intended to permanently empty this area of Palestinians.”

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“This suspicion fits with both the principles of the ‘Generals’ Plan’ being pushed by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland—a plan Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has denied implementing—and the demands of the Jewish supremacist parties in the governing coalition that are openly pursuing a policy of mass expulsions and the renewal of Jewish settlement in northern Gaza,” the editorial states.

Last week, senior Israeli officials including members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet and far-right Knesset lawmakers gathered near the Gaza border for a conference dedicated to the ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jewish recolonization in the embattled Palestinian enclave.

“We came here with one clear purpose: to settle the entire Gaza Strip… Every inch from north to south,” settler leader Daniella Weiss told attendees of the rally, which was backed by Netanyahu’s Likud party. “Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”

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As the Haaretz editors noted:

Ethnic cleansing is both a moral crime and a legal one. Criminal law treats mass expulsions as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. Horrifyingly, some members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government want to commit these crimes. As soon as the war began, they began calling for “erasing Gaza” and for perpetrating a “second Nakba.” But many Israelis made light of such statements, and the law enforcement system, headed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, refrained from dealing with this incitement to commit crimes.

Now, we can see the results: Israel is sliding into ethnic cleansing; its soldiers are carrying out the criminal policies of the messianic, Kahanist right; and even the opposition on the center and center-left isn’t making a peep. This consensus behind ethnic cleansing is shameful, and every public leader who doesn’t demand an end to the de facto expulsion is supporting this crime and has become a party to it.

“If this process doesn’t stop immediately,” the editors stressed, “hundreds of thousands of people will become refugees, entire communities will be destroyed and the moral and legal stain of this crime will cling to and pursue every Israeli.”

Israel was founded in 1948, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Zionist militias—the two most violent of which were led by future Israeli prime ministers—utilized terror tactics including massacres and a death march to force the Indigenous Arabs from their homeland.

Israeli ethnic cleansing continued over the following eight decades and, according to critics, currently involves home demolitions and expulsions in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, systematic land theft, and pogroms and other violent attacks by Jewish settler colonists backed—and sometimes joined—by Israel Defense Forces troops.

United Nations officials and international human rights groups said this week’s Knesset vote to ban the life-saving U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) will exacerbate Israeli crimes in Gaza, including ethnic cleansing.

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“Efforts to eliminate UNRWA are illegal under international law and will only amplify the genocide and ethnic cleansing Israel is enacting in Gaza while also undermining long-term prospects for peace,” the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, said Tuesday. “The Israeli government is not only deliberately blocking humanitarian and medical aid to people who are starving and dying, it is undermining support for Palestine refugees and the international legal framework protecting their rights.”

On Monday, Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on Palestine, published a report “contextualizing the situation within
a decadeslong process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”

Albanese’s report was released a day after Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who supports the “total annihilation” of Gaza and said that killing 2 million Palestinians would be “justified and moral”—reiterated his call for Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank and the expulsion of the occupied territory’s Palestinians.

Israel’s policies and practices in Gaza—where more than 150,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—are the subject of an ongoing South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

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 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
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 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 suspeding 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.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Continue Reading‘If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is,’ Says Israeli Newspaper of North Gaza Siege

Israel continues to block aid into Gaza and is killing people fleeing in the north, UN officials warn

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/israel-continues-block-aid-gaza-and-killing-people-fleeing-north-un-officials-warn

Israeli soldiers stand near trucks carrying humanitarian aid just before they cross into the Gaza Strip at Erez crossing in southern Israel, October 21, 2024

ISRAEL’S military continued to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza today, and reportedly killed people trying to flee Jabalia in the north, UN officials warned today.

The Israeli military (IDF) began blocking all supplies of food, medicine and fuel to the people under siege in northern Gaza on October 1.

On the 15th, the IDF allowed what the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said was “a token amount of aid” to enter, but since then nothing else has been allowed in.

The Israeli government has called on all civilians in the north to leave, but has continued to bomb the area, making escape just as dangerous for the Palestinians as staying in their destroyed homes.

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said on social media today that humanitarian agencies must get access to north Gaza.

“Hospitals have been hit and are left without power, while injured people are left without care,” he said.

“UNRWA’s remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets.

“According to reports, people attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street. Missions to rescue people from under the rubble are also being denied.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/israel-continues-block-aid-gaza-and-killing-people-fleeing-north-un-officials-warn

Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party's support for and complicity in Israel's genocide of Gaza.
UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Continue ReadingIsrael continues to block aid into Gaza and is killing people fleeing in the north, UN officials warn

The Labour Party conference exposed Starmer’s unflinching support for Israeli aggression

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Original article by Patrick Ward republished from Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Pro-Palestinian protesters take part in a Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstration as they march to the Labour Party conference venue on September 21, 2024 in Liverpool, England. [Ian Forsyth/Getty Images]

It’s difficult to comprehend the horrors of what’s happening in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond in the Middle East. The heartbreaking scenes of dirt-encrusted toddlers screaming as they’re pulled from the rubble of what was once their homes; the small children carrying plastic bags containing the remains of their slain siblings; the white-bandaged bodies of whole families laid out next to hospitals in their hundreds; the shaking youngsters trying to hide as Israeli soldiers fire indiscriminately at anything that moves. Surely, feeling a deep, painful empathy for the victims of such savagery, especially the children, is part of what gives us our humanity.

This isn’t the same for everyone, of course. Not for the perpetrators, who use their cutting-edge western-manufactured machines of death to extinguish these innocent lives. Nor, in most cases, for politicians here in Britain. For Prime Minister Keir Starmer, these scenes are even the set up for a joke.

During the new prime minister’s triumphant speech at this week’s Labour Party conference, a heckler dared to challenge the Dear Leader on his lack of empathy for Israel’s victims. After Starmer said that, “Every child, every person, deserves to be respected for the contribution they make,” Labour member Daniel Riley, 18, shouted in response: “Does that include the children of Gaza?”

“This guy’s obviously got a pass from the 2019 conference,” quipped the smug Starmer, in a reference to years when Labour was led by pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn. The more sycophantic element of Starmer’s congregation, stronger than ever thanks to Sir Keir’s purges of the left, lapped up the jibe.

It’s become a cliché to respond to such things with variations of “imagine the response if Corbyn had said something like that about Israeli children,” but sometimes you can’t help but be stunned at the double standards. Corbyn would never have said such a thing, but if he had it would have been frontpage news; irrefutable proof of his alleged anti-Semitism.

READ: Israel rights groups accuse media of incitement to exterminate Palestinians

But they weren’t Israeli children. They were Arabs. And in mainstream western discourse, they don’t count. They don’t suffer. They don’t have dreams. They’re abstract numbers, if that.

They’re just Arabs, unworthy of our empathy.

To really hammer home the hypocrisy, the words “genocide” and “apartheid” had already been banned from the Labour conference. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign was forced to remove both words from the title of its fringe meeting. Some activists responded by painting the words “genocide conference” on the windows of the venue.

In many ways, the Labour government, elected in July after 14 years in the wilderness, is an improvement on their Conservative predecessors regarding Palestine. But that’s a pretty low bar. Starmer may have banned his MPs from attending the huge protests against the war on Gaza, which often numbered hundreds of thousands of people, but he didn’t go as far as former home secretary Suella Braverman, who branded them “hate marches”.

Pro-Palestinian protesters campaign near Downing Street in London, UK, on Wednesday, July 24, 2024. [Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

And despite Labour’s top team repeating the mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” like a broken record whenever the issue comes up, it has at least (and belatedly) called for a ceasefire and the establishment of a Palestinian state (however problematic that demand in itself is).

The Labour government has also drawn the ire of Israel for dropping its opposition to the International Criminal Court’s bid for an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu. A further schism was seen when the UK resumed its £21 million funding to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. Again, it was a low bar.

Much has also been made of the new government’s decision to block arms sales to Israel (although this is limited to a pitiful eight per cent of exports). Unsurprisingly, the Palestine solidarity movement says it’s not enough. And so do the British public: in May, 55 per cent of the British public wanted arms sales to Israel to be suspended until the war against the Palestinians in Gaza ends.

Even less surprisingly, it was met with fury from Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu said that it was “sending a horrible message” to Hamas. Starmer responded to Netanyahu’s comment during an interview on LBC Radio over the conference period. “No, he’s not right about that,” he tried to reassure the audience. “We had to comply with international law and our domestic law in relation to that. I’ve always been clear, I support Israel’s right to self-defence, I’ve been robust about that… I’ve taken blows in relation to that – there’s no doubting that support – but it’s got to be done in accordance with international law.”

In other words, “I’m really sorry, and I’m not saying you’re committing war crimes, it’s just that it would be a bad look for a former lawyer to end up in The Hague.”

READ: Latin American presidents use UN platform to call for end to Gaza genocide

Foreign Secretary David Lammy was also questioned on LBC during the conference about why the other 92 per cent of arms sales to Israel had not been banned, including the export of parts for F-35 fighter jets, which Israel has used, among other things, to bomb heavily-populated refugee camps in Gaza. Lammy said that a full embargo would limit Israel’s ability to fight the Houthis in Yemen “and other proxies”.

“I think that would be a mistake,” he added. “It would lead to a wider war and an escalation that we here in the UK are committed to stopping, so I’m afraid I disagree with that position.”

In Lammy’s eyes, war is peace.

By coincidence, two of the arms companies currently selling their merchandise to Israel for use in Gaza were also at the conference. According to Private Eye magazine, BAE Systems, which makes parts for the F-35, hosted a high-profile meeting with defence secretary John Healey. A separate event, featuring armed forces minister Luke Pollard, was sponsored by US arms firm Northrop Grumman. Northrop Grumman makes parts for the F-35, the F-16 and the Apache helicopter. All are being used to massacre civilians in Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider region.

To ensure compliance with the Zionist narrative, Israeli politicians came to the conference themselves. Among them was opposition leader Yair Golan, who has said that Palestinians should “starve to death” until the hostages are released. He was granted audiences with several ministers, including Lammy, and attended a meeting hosted by Labour Friends of Israel.

Nevertheless, the conference did at least spark some hope for the Palestine cause, albeit inadvertently. During its opening weekend, 15,000 protesters gathered in Liverpool to send a message to Labour over its appalling support for the occupation state.

And that’s where the hope is. The Labour government won’t stand up to Israel’s devastating behaviour without pressure. If what we’ve seen already isn’t enough to make them change this attitude, I’m not sure what would. If Israel invaded London, Keir Starmer would probably still be trying to sell them the weapons to do it with.

OPINION: Internationalism is needed urgently to stand against the politics of genocide

Labour has pretty much always backed wars that align with the needs of the British and now US empires, from the First World War to Vietnam. It wants to preserve the British state, its crown and its interests, albeit in a way that slightly improves life for its working-class base. It’s currently in the interests of the British ruling class to cling to the coattails of the United States. The US, in turn, needs Israel as its outpost in the Middle East. This is all hardwired into Establishment politics.

Politicians who deviate from such norms, such as Corbyn, are vilified. That’s not how we do grown-up politics in this country, don’t you know?

Starmer is no radical. He’s not really much at all.

His main use was to seize back control of the Labour party from the left and return it to the hands of the Establishment. He did this by standing on a left-wing manifesto during his leadership election only to abandon it, ally himself with the right of the party and purge the left once he assumed the leadership.

His domestic agenda is hampered severely by his unwillingness to tax the rich to repair the devastation left by the Conservatives. Instead, he is removing winter fuel allowances from pensioners and maintaining benefit restrictions on anyone with more than two children. These, he keeps saying, are “tough choices”, even though they are the easiest choices for him, as he is so scared of upsetting the rich and powerful.

He’s desperate to be seen as an effective manager for the British state, which means maintaining the easy ride enjoyed by the wealthy and aligning himself with US-led geopolitical interests. Moreover, the British Establishment that Starmer works for is fully behind the US and its Middle Eastern proxy, Israel.

Just as a middle manager at a fast food company would enthusiastically and unquestioningly promote its unhealthy products, despite their harmful effects on consumers, Starmer is hardwired to enthusiastically and unquestioningly execute the will of the people with real power over Britain. That’s not the electorate.

Tales of children suffering in Gaza are as irrelevant to him as children suffering under his benefit restrictions in Britain. Elderly people freezing in makeshift shelters in Lebanon are as irrelevant to him as elderly people freezing in Britain because they can’t afford to pay their energy bills.

And all the while, Starmer enjoys the patronage of the powerful. His bewilderment at a recent outcry over major donations of cash, designer clothes and tickets to football matches and concerts to him and his top team reveals his belief that he should be reaping the rewards of his subservience as much as any effective manager.

The Labour party conference showed us a government that will continue to stand firmly behind Israel, no matter what the state does or the wider horrors it looks set to unleash. Mild reprimands aside, Labour under Starmer will not abandon the apartheid state without huge pressure.

That’s why real opposition to Israel’s crimes remains in the hands of those outside parliament who take to the streets, occupy their universities and speak up loudly in defence of Palestinians. The Labour leadership’s limited concessions to Palestinian rights would not have been made without that pressure from below. It’s only when actions like these begin to challenge Starmer’s tentative grip on power that he will be forced to offer any sort of meaningful opposition to Israel’s barbarism.

OPINION: Erdogan calls for UN military action to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Original article by Patrick Ward republished from Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Isreal. He also confirms the UK government's support for Israel's Gaza genocide.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.
Continue ReadingThe Labour Party conference exposed Starmer’s unflinching support for Israeli aggression

UNRWA Says There Is ‘Nowhere to Go’ as Israel Orders Evacuation of Gaza Safe Zones

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

Palestinians, carrying their belongings, migrate towards areas they believe to be safer after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the eastern areas of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on August 16, 2024. (Photo: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale,” the U.N. agency wrote on social media.

Following a series of evacuation orders this week, Israeli forces issued another on Friday for areas in central and southern Gaza, including “safe zones,” leaving Palestinian families gripped with fear and with “nowhere to go,” according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Israel’s Arabic spokesperson announced on social media that people in six neighborhood blocks in various towns, several of which were part of a proclaimed humanitarian zone, must “immediately move,” leading to a scramble of evacuations in those areas.

“Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go,” UNRWA wrote on social media. “People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale.”

Friday’s evacuation orders were for areas in eastern Deir el-Balah, al-Qarara, al-Mawasi, al-Jalaa, Hamad City, and Nasser, Al Jazeerareported.

An Israeli military strike on al-Mawasi, previously a humanitarian zone though long the target of Israeli strikes, killed four Palestinians including three children, the news outlet reported on Friday.

The Israeli army said Hamas had used the areas to fire mortar and rocket attacks, and explained that it had issued warning flyers and text message alerts to reduce the impact on the Palestinian civilian population, according toReuters.

Bombings and evacuations have continued this week—at least 80 Palestinians were killed in a strike on a school-turned-shelter on Sunday—even as peace talks proceeded in Doha, Qatar. A two-day session of talks finished Friday, with the United States, Egypt, and Qatar saying progress was made and they hoped to seal a deal between Israel and Hamas next week. Hamas didn’t directly participate in this week’s talks because the militant Palestinian group said Israel had added new demands to a proposal it had already agreed to in principle.

The death toll of Palestinians during the 10-month war, based on figures from Gaza’s health ministry, reached 40,000 this week—what the U.N. called a “dark milestone.”

“Most of the dead are women and children,” U.N. rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement. “This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.”

“On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months,” he added, saying the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship [is] deeply shocking.”

Türk said that both Israel and armed Palestinian groups including Hamas had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. The armed Palestinian groups killed more than 1,100 Israelis in a shocking and horrifying massacre in southern Israel on October 7 in which they also took some 250 hostages.

Israel’s sustained assault on Gaza over the last 10 months has not only killed a disproportionate number of children but also displaced most of those who’ve survived—and separated many from their families.

report released Friday by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) documents the scale of the separation crisis and its psychological toll on unaccompanied children. UNICEF estimates that roughly 17,000 Gazan children are unaccompanied, but the IRC warns that the real figure may be much higher.

Unaccompanied youth are at risk of labor exploitation, starvation, and mental health problems that can plague them for the rest of their lives. Gazan children, shocked by the war, are “clinging to others during loud sounds, wetting the bed, having nightmares, and are wanting to sleep under the bed to feel secure,” the report says.

The Associated Pressreported Tuesday that Israeli strikes were leaving “children without parents and parents without children,” and has previously reported that the war has wiped out entire Palestinian extended families.

Israeli violence against Palestinians has not been restricted to Gaza. Israeli settlers attacked the West Bank town of Jit on Thursday night, setting fire to cars and houses, killing one Palestinian man and seriously injuring another. Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he was “appalled” by the attack and the perpetrators should be held accountable, but Israeli human rights group B’Tselem responded on social media by saying that the Israeli state and its leadership should be held accountable.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Wednesday reported that it had recorded about 1,250 settler attacks on Palestinians since October 7. The settlements are illegal under international law, according to the International Court of Justice.

The push for a peace deal is aimed not just at ending the carnage in Gaza and defusing West Bank tensions but also preventing a wider war in the Middle East. Israel is bracing for retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah after it conducted assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran and Beirut in late July.

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

Continue ReadingUNRWA Says There Is ‘Nowhere to Go’ as Israel Orders Evacuation of Gaza Safe Zones