Jordan to host emergency Gaza humanitarian response conference
Jordan to host emergency Gaza humanitarian response conference/node/2521146/middle-east
Jordan to host emergency Gaza humanitarian response conference
About 2.3 million residents are under extreme suffering as Israel’s devastating war on Gaza has resulted into a threat of famine, widespread trauma and unprecedented levels of destruction. (AFP)
Jordan to host emergency Gaza humanitarian response conference
Israel’s war on Gaza has left 2.3 million Palestinians under extreme suffering
Updated 01 June 2024
Arab News
DUBAI: Jordan will host jointly with Egypt and the UN on June 11 an emergency international conference to boost the urgent humanitarian response for Gaza.
The “Call for Action: Urgent Humanitarian Response for Gaza” conference, to be held at the King Hussein bin Talal Convention Center at the Dead Sea, will gather together heads of state and government as well as leaders of international humanitarian and relief organizations, state news agency Petra reported.
The meeting aims to identify ways to bolster the international community’s response to the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, amid UN concerns that humanitarian aid allowed into the besieged enclave was not getting to civilians in need.
The conference aims to outline effective measures and procedures, as well as operational and logistical needs for this purpose, while seeking commitment for a collective coordinated response to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, Petra reported.
“The aid that is getting in is not getting to the people, and that’s a major problem,” said Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.
“We continue to insist that Israeli authorities’ obligation under the law to facilitate delivery of aid does not stop at the border,” Laerke said.
About 2.3 million residents are in extreme need as Israel’s devastating war on Gaza has resulted in the threat of famine, widespread trauma and unprecedented levels of destruction, as well as lack of access to food, water, shelter or medicine.
Dominant Kurdish parties maintain their sway in the election for the parliament in the Iraqi region
The election outcome will also play a pivotal role in determining how Kurdish leaders handle ongoing disputes with Baghdad
Updated 31 October 2024
AP
IRBIL, Iraq: Election results from the vote for the regional parliament in Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region show the two dominant Kurdish parties have maintained their hold while an opposition party has made inroads, officials said Wednesday.
According to the Independent High Electoral Commission, the Kurdistan Democratic Party — with its base of support in the regional capital, Irbil, and the city of in Dohuk — made the strongest showing, securing 39 seats.
The rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan won 23 seats, continuing its influence over the city of Sulaymaniyah. In the 2018 elections, the two parties won 45 and 21 seats, respectively.
A relatively new opposition party, New Generation, won 15 seats, a significant increase from the eight seats it got in 2018, when the party was first established.
The Kurdistan Islamic Union, which came in fourth with seven seats, announced it will join the New Generation in opposition in the regional, 100-seat parliament. Other minor parties took a smattering of seats.
Despite some technical issues at the polls, voters turned out in large numbers, with 72 percent of eligible voters casting ballots.
The surge in support for the New Generation appeared to stem from growing disillusionment among younger voters, who are increasingly frustrated with the region’s ongoing economic challenges, including delays in salary payments, high unemployment, and perceived corruption within the traditional political leadership.
Economic concerns remain at the forefront — widespread dissatisfaction over delayed payments to civil servants, fluctuating oil prices, and ongoing budget disputes with the central government in Baghdad have fueled calls for reform.
Three Assyrian Christian candidates and two Turkmen candidates secured the five remaining quota seats for minorities, despite the Iraqi federal court’s controversial elimination of the reserved seats for ethnic and religious minorities earlier this year.
These seats are usually filled by candidates backed by the major political parties, leading some to say that they do not offer a genuine minority representation.
“We no longer have true representation in the parliament or the government; our voices are being silenced,” said Toma Khoshaba, an Assyrian ethnic activist.
Khoshaba argued that that these “so-called independent Assyrian representatives occupying the quota seats are largely supported by the Kurdistan Democratic Party” or by Shiite factions.
“Their loyalty lies with these dominant political groups, not with our communities,” he said.
The election outcome will also play a pivotal role in determining how Kurdish leaders handle ongoing disputes with Baghdad, particularly over oil revenue sharing and budget allocations, as well as the region’s broader economic challenges.
A Gaza medic realizes he’s carrying his own mother’s body, killed by an Israeli airstrike
Israel says it carries out precise strikes in Gaza targeting Palestinian militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. But the strikes often kill women and children
Updated 31 October 2024
AP
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza: A Palestinian ambulance worker made a horrifying discovery when the bloody sheet was lifted: The corpse on the stretcher was his own mother, killed by an Israeli airstrike Wednesday in central Gaza.
“Oh God, I swear- she’s my mother! I didn’t know it was her!” Abed Bardini sobbed as he leaned over his mother, Samira, cradling her head in his arms. Fellow Red Crescent medics tried to console him, without success.
Bardini had unknowingly sat in the ambulance beside her body, wrapped in a white sheet stained dark with blood, as the vehicle bounced across broken roads for about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) toward Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah.
Three people were killed and 10 wounded by the Israeli strike on a car in Maghazi refugee camp, according to Palestinian health officials and Associated Press journalists. Health officials at the hospital said two of the dead were men sitting in the vehicle, while the blast fatally injured 61-year-old Samira Bardini as she stood nearby.
Abed Bardini was in one of two ambulances dispatched to the scene. Back at the hospital, he unloaded the stretcher with practiced professionalism, squinting into the late afternoon sun as he wheeled the body across the hospital courtyard.
Inside, medical staff pulled back the blanket to check for signs of life, and Bardini’s strength collapsed.
Later, his tears exhausted, he sat in the morgue beside Samira’s body with his head in his hands, comforted by his Red Crescent colleagues. They held a funeral prayer over her body in the parking lot, then Bardini personally helped carry the body into an ambulance for burial.
A spokesperson for the Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike. Israel says it carries out precise strikes in Gaza targeting Palestinian militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. But the strikes often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted around 250 in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered the war. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were combatants but say more than half were women and children. Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday that 102 deaths were recorded over the past 24 hours.
UN mission in Lebanon targeted 30 times in October
Andrea Tenenti: ‘Peacekeepers performing their monitoring tasks, as well as our cameras, lighting and entire watchtowers, have been deliberately targeted by the IDF’
Tenenti: ‘To be clear, the actions of both the IDF and Hezbollah are putting peacekeepers in danger’
Updated 31 October 2024
AFP
UNITED NATIONS, New York: The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon recorded more than 30 incidents this month resulting in property damage or injury to peacekeepers, about 20 of them from Israeli fire or action, a spokesman said Wednesday.
The UN peacekeeping force has been deployed in Lebanon since Israel’s 1978 invasion of the country. More recently it has been thrust into the front lines of the new war between Israel and Hezbollah, with Israel repeatedly calling on peacekeepers to abandon their positions.
Of the 30 incidents this month, “about 20 of those we could attribute to IDF fire or actions, with seven being clearly deliberate,” Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the force, known as UNIFIL, told a news conference held by video.
“What has been very concerning are incidents where peacekeepers performing their monitoring tasks, as well as our cameras, lighting and entire watchtowers, have been deliberately targeted by the IDF,” Tenenti said, referring to the Israeli military.
On Monday a rocket that was probably fired by Hezbollah or an affiliated group hit the headquarters of the UN mission in the Lebanese city of Naqoura, he said.
For about a dozen other incidents, the origin of fire could not be determined.
“To be clear, the actions of both the IDF and Hezbollah are putting peacekeepers in danger,” the spokesman added.
Lebanon PM says hopes for ceasefire with Israel in ‘coming hours or days’
Hochstein was heading to Israel on Wednesday to discuss conditions for a ceasefire with Hezbollah, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said
Updated 30 October 2024
AFP
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s prime minister said US envoy Amos Hochstein had signalled during a phone call Wednesday that a ceasefire in the Israel-Hezbollah war was possible before US elections are held on November 5.
“The call today with Hochstein suggested to me that perhaps we could reach a ceasefire in the coming days, before the fifth” of November, Najib Mikati said in a televised interview with Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed.
Hochstein was heading to Israel on Wednesday to discuss conditions for a ceasefire with Hezbollah, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters.
Hezbollah’s new leader Naim Qassem on Wednesday said the group would agree to a ceasefire with Israel under acceptable terms, but added that a viable deal has yet to be presented.
“We are doing our best... to have a ceasefire within the coming hours or days,” Mikati told Al-Jadeed, adding that he was “cautiously optimistic.”
Mikati said Hezbollah is no longer linking a ceasefire in Lebanon to a truce in Gaza, however criticizing the group over the “late” reversal.
Previously, Hezbollah had repeatedly declared that it would only stop its attacks on Israel if a ceasefire was reached in Gaza.
But Qassem on Wednesday said the group would accept a ceasefire under conditions deemed “appropriate and suitable,” without any mention of the Palestinian territory.
Mikati said a ceasefire would be linked to the implementation of a United Nations resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 states that only the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers should be deployed in southern Lebanon, while demanding the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory.
“The Lebanese army is ready to strengthen its presence in southern Lebanon” and ensure that the only weapons and military infrastructure in the area are those controlled by the state, Mikati said.
Israel wages deadly Gaza strikes as northern areas plead for help
Fresh offensive has killed hundreds and helped choke aid supplies to their lowest level
Updated 31 October 2024
Reuters
CAIRO/GAZA: Israel pummeled the Gaza Strip with new bombardments that killed at least 20 people on Wednesday, Palestinian medics said, a day after one of the deadliest single strikes of the year-old war killed scores in the north of the enclave.
Eight of Wednesday’s victims were killed in a strike on the Salateen area of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. The area is near where medics said at least 93 people were killed or missing on Tuesday in an Israeli strike Washington called “horrifying.”
The Israeli assault that has laid waste to the Gaza Strip and killed tens of thousands of people shows no signs of slowing as Israel wages a new war in Lebanon.
Northern Gaza, where Israel said in January it had dismantled militant group Hamas’ command structure, is currently the focus of the military’s assault. It sent tanks into Beit Lahiya and the neighboring towns of Beit Hanoun and Jabalia earlier this month to flush out Hamas militants who it said had regrouped in the area.
The new operation has killed hundreds of Palestinians, medical workers say, and has helped choke aid and food supplies to their lowest level since the beginning of the war.
Officials in Beit Lahiya issued a statement urging world powers and aid agencies to halt Israel’s attacks and bring in basic medical supplies, fuel and food, saying the latest military actions had left the area “without food, without water, without hospitals, without doctors.”
Dr. Eid Sabbah of Beit Lahiya’s Kamal Adwan hospital said that bodies and injured people remained trapped under rubble.
He said the destruction of hospitals and lack of medical supplies meant doctors and nurses mostly had no chance of saving people who came in with injuries from airstrikes and gunfire.
“Whoever is injured, just lies there on the ground and whoever is killed can’t be transported, except by mule-drawn cart,” he said.
Israel’s decision this week to ban the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating on its territory could have a disastrous impact on humanitarian efforts in Gaza, UN officials said.
Israel presses on with assaults on Gaza despite the killing this month of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks whose death was a key aim of the war. Several Israeli soldiers have been killed this month in northern Gaza, the military said on Tuesday.
As families fled the Beit Lahiya area last week, parents wheeled children in prams and wooden carts and dragged suitcases through the mud. Israel earlier in October told residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes or face missile strikes.
Dalia Al-Kharawat, a mother-of-five from Jabalia, begged locals in Gaza City to let her stay and now sleeps in the open-air car park of a destroyed building with her children.
“When we need to sleep, we go here in the rubble, the sand, the broken glass. There is no place at the school shelters,” she said.
Israel has bombed schools where homeless families are staying on a number of occasions, according to Palestinian hospital workers in Gaza.
