The Israeli military says its troops have taken « operational control » of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Rafah has been a key entry point for aid and the only exit for people able to flee since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October.

The United Nations and aid agencies have slammed the Israeli army for cutting off an essential aid route by seizing the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and southern Gaza, warning that already scarce supplies will be further depleted in the enclave that is on the brink of famine.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres demanded that Israel reopen two key land crossings to enable desperately needed aid supplies to reach Palestinians in Gaza.

“The closure of both the Rafah and Kerem Shalom [Karem Abu Salem] crossings is especially damaging to an already dire humanitarian situation. They must be reopened immediately,” he said on Tuesday.

Israel seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing earlier on Tuesday, as ceasefire talks with the Palestinian group Hamas remain precarious.

Hamas said late on Monday that it had accepted a Gaza ceasefire proposal put forward by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Israel said the proposal fell short of Israeli requirements and that it would send a delegation to meet the mediators.

Guterres warned an assault on Rafah, where more than 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, would “be a strategic mistake, a political calamity and a humanitarian nightmare”.

Amnesty International called on the international community to pressure Israel to immediately halt its ground operations in Rafah and ensure unfettered access for humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Hamas said Israel’s incursion and seizure of the Rafah crossing was aimed at undermining attempts by regional mediators to secure a new ceasefire deal.

The Palestinian armed group said on Monday that it had accepted a proposal from Egypt and Qatar, the basis of which is a weeks-long pause in the fighting and the release of several dozen hostages still held in Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that Hamas’s announcement was « very far from Israel’s necessary requirements » and that it was a failed attempt to « disrupt the entry of our forces into Rafah » .

He said he had instructed the mid-level Israeli delegation sent to Cairo on Tuesday to « stand firm » on the conditions required for the return of the hostages and on « vital requirements for ensuring Israel’s security »..

World Opinions – Agencies

L’article UN, aid urgencies urge Israel to halt Rafah assault after crossing seized.. Video est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

A senior UN aid official has warned that half of Gaza’s population is starving, as fighting there continues.

Carl Skau, deputy director of the UN World Food Programme, said only a fraction of supplies needed have been able to enter the Strip – and nine out of 10 people cannot eat every day.

Conditions in Gaza have made deliveries « almost impossible », Mr Skau said.

Israel says it must continue air strikes on Gaza to eliminate Hamas and bring Israeli hostages home.

Israel Defence Forces spokesman Lt Col Richard Hecht told the BBC on Saturday that « any death and pain to a civilian is painful, but we don’t have an alternative ».

« We are doing everything we can to get as much as possible inside the Gaza Strip, » he said.

Herzi Halevi, chief of staff of the IDF, was filmed telling soldiers the army has to « press harder » because « we’re seeing terrorists surrendering… a sign their network is collapsing ».

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has used an emergency law to bypass Congress and authorise the sale of some 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106m (£85m) to Israel.

Movement in and out of Gaza has been heavily restricted since 7 October, when Hamas fighters broke through Israel’s heavily-guarded perimeter fence – killing 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages.

In response, Israel closed its borders with Gaza and began launching air strikes on the territory, restricting aid deliveries which Gazans heavily relied on.

The Hamas-run health ministry says Israel has killed more than 17,700 Gazans in its retaliatory campaign, including more than 7,000 children.

Only the Rafah crossing bordering Egypt has been open, allowing limited quantities of aid to reach Gaza. This week Israel agreed to open the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel into Gaza in the next few days – but only for the inspection of aid lorries. The trucks would then go to Rafah to cross into Gaza.

Mr Skau said nothing had prepared him for the « fear, the chaos, and the despair » he and his WFP team encountered during their trip to Gaza this week.

They witnessed « confusion at warehouses, distribution points with thousands of desperate hungry people, supermarkets with bare shelves, and overcrowded shelters with bursting bathrooms, » he said.

International pressure and a temporary seven-day ceasefire last month had allowed some badly-needed aid to enter the Gaza Strip, but the WFP insists a second border crossing is now needed to meet demand.

Nine out of 10 families in some areas are spending « a full day and night without any food at all », according to Mr Skau.

People in Khan Younis in the south of Gaza, a city now surrounded on two fronts by Israeli tanks, say the situation there is dire.

Dr Ahmed Moghrabi, head of the plastic surgery and burns unit in the city’s only remaining health facility, Nasser hospital, fought back tears as he spoke to the BBC about the lack of food.

« I have a daughter, three years old, always she ask me (for) some sweets, some apple, some fruits. I can’t provide. I feel helpless, » he said.

« There is not enough food, there is not enough food, only rice, only rice can you believe? We eat once, once a day, only. »

Khan Younis has been the focus of heavy air strikes in recent days and the boss of Nasser hospital there said his team had « lost control » over the numbers of dead and wounded arriving at the facility.

Israel says Hamas leaders are hiding in Khan Younis, possibly in an underground network of tunnels, and that it is fighting house to house and « shaft to shaft » to destroy the group’s military capabilities.

Speaking on Saturday, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, accused the United States of being complicit in war crimes, after it vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Out of 15 of the Security Council members, 13 countries voted in favour of the resolution calling for a ceasefire. The UK abstained from the vote and the US was the only country to vote against the resolution.

Mr Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, said he held Washington responsible for « the bloodshed of Palestinian children, women, and elderly in Gaza at the hands of [Israeli] occupation forces ».

The US ambassador to the UN, Robert Wood, defended the veto, and said the resolution was calling for an « unsustainable ceasefire » which « would leave Hamas in place able to repeat what it did on October 7 ».

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Saturday he appreciated the « correct stance » the US had taken at the security council.

A seven-day temporary ceasefire ended just over a week ago. Under the truce, 78 hostages were released by Hamas in exchange for 180 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

There are still more than 100 hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.

On Saturday, it was confirmed that Israeli hostage Sahar Baruch, 25, had been killed, his kibbutz and a hostages’ group said in a statement.

It comes after the armed wing of Hamas released a video on Friday which it said showed the bloody aftermath of a failed IDF operation to free an Israeli hostage.

By Fiona Nimoni – BBC News

L’article Israel-Gaza war: Half of Gaza’s population is starving, warns UN.. Video est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

As we’ve just seen with the UN secretary-general, not even the slightest diversion from Israel’s counter-reality is permissible – lest the whole edifice come tumbling down.

On top of its genocidal escapades in the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel is now also having a hissy fit.

The tantrum is primarily directed at United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who in recent remarks before the UN Security Council in New York had the audacity to point out the bleeding obvious. “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said, in reference to the October 7 Hamas operation that Israel sees as justifying the slaughter of more than 7,000 Palestinians in less than three weeks.

The Secretary-General continued: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Had Guterres wanted to fill in the vacuum a little more, he could have mentioned the past 75 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and massacres suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel, which has now added forced starvation to its deadly anti-Palestinian arsenal.

Notwithstanding his vacuum observation, Guterres apparently found it necessary to abide by the unwritten rule that you must never criticise Israel – however indirectly – without criticising the other side, as well. And so he declared that the “grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas” – never mind that the attacks in question would never have taken place in the absence of three-quarters of a century’s worth of Israeli-induced “grievances”.

At any rate, the glimmer of context was still more than Israel could handle, and Israeli officials went about registering their displeasure in typical grown-up fashion. Foreign Minister Eli Cohen cancelled his scheduled meeting with Guterres in New York, and Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan announced petulantly that Israel would henceforth refuse visas to UN representatives, starting with Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Martin Griffiths.

Warning that “the time has come to teach them [the UN] a lesson”, Erdan took to the platform X (formerly known as Twitter) to accuse Guterres of “distort[ing] and twist[ing] reality” with his vacuum comment, and called for the UN leader’s resignation.

In reality, of course, it is Israel that presides over a calculated assault on reality, dependent as the Israeli narrative is on an absolute vacuum of truth when it comes to the Palestinians. Call it “Israelspeak”, if you will: a language in which mass murderers are victims, killing children is self-defence, left is right, up is down and black is white.

And as we’ve just seen with Guterres, not even the slightest diversion from this counter-reality is permissible, lest the whole edifice come tumbling down. In short: if your mouth is not permanently and unwaveringly puckered up next to Israel’s rear end, you’re on the side of the “terrorists”.

To be sure, Israel has never had the greatest relationship with the UN – despite the fact that the international body is largely to thank for signing off on Israel’s existence in the first place. In recent years, Israel’s relations with the organisation have mainly consisted of ignoring all resolutions pertaining to Israeli crimes against Palestinians and intermittently engaging in crimes against the UN itself, such as bombing UN institutions and personnel.

In July 2006 in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam, for example, the Israeli military disregarded consecutive warnings before bombing a UN post and killing four unarmed UN observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland. This episode took place in the context of a 34-day Israeli assault on Lebanon that killed some 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians; then as now – surprise, surprise – the United States agitated at the UN against a ceasefire.

As for attacks on the UN in Palestine, the Times of Israel reported on October 12 – five days into the latest round of carnage – that 11 UN staff and 30 students at UN-run schools had thus far been killed in the Gaza Strip. Among the staff were five teachers, a counsellor, an engineer and a gynaecologist.

This, mind you, was almost two weeks before the UN was elevated to the status of semiofficial enemy of Israel on account of Guterres’ willingness to deploy a bit of truth against Israelspeak.

Granted, this was not the secretary-general’s first transgression. In May 2021, during an 11-day Israeli onslaught on Gaza that killed some 260 people, including 67 children, the UN chief stated: “If there is a hell on Earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza.” But not even hell, it seems, is exempt from the “both sides” requirement, and Guterres went on to denounce as “unacceptable” the mostly ineffective rocket fire directed at Israel by Hamas.

Now, life in Gaza has become significantly more hellish for all involved, while Israel continues to push its forcible inversion of reality and usurped victimhood down everyone’s throats.

In his anti-Guterres rant on (the ex-Twitter) X, Israeli UN envoy Erdan contended that “a Secretary-General who does not understand that the murder of innocents can never be understood by any ‘background’ cannot be Secretary-General”.

What, then, should be said of a state that does not understand exactly that?

By Belén Fernández – Al Jazeera – World Opinions

L’article Analysis. Guterres, Gaza and the consequences of countering ‘Israelspeak’.. Video est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

The presence of Israeli hostages held at gunpoint in at least two locations close to the Gaza-Israel border presents Israel with a delicate dilemma where there are no easy options.

A rescue operation by Special Forces is an obvious choice and the IDF – Israel Defence Forces – have said they are already deployed in more than one location.

The risk here is that the captors kill the captives before the rescuers can reach them.

Negotiation is the other option but it’s hard to see this happening in such a febrile atmosphere where the death toll on both sides is still mounting by the hour.

It’s also worth noting that when the Israeli serviceman Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Palestinian militants in a cross-border raid in 2006 it took five years of tortuous negotiations.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN has said Hamas “holds the sole responsibility and will bear the results” of the ongoing fighting.

“The state of Israel will act in any way necessary to protect its citizens and sovereignty from the ongoing terrorist attacks originating from the Gaza Strip and carried out by Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan wrote to the 15-member UN Security Council in a letter.

Hamas says fired 150 rockets at Tel Aviv

The latest barrage of rockets came at 8pm local (17:00 GMT). The military wing of Hamas has said the rockets are a response to Israel’s attack on a high-rise building in the heart of Gaza City.

A spokesperson for Israel’s national emergency medical service, Magen David Adom, said it was searching areas with reports of injuries, including in Yavne, Givatayim, Bat Yam, Beit Dagan, Tel Aviv and Rishon Letzion.

Videos on social media showed a barrage of rockets over Tel Aviv. It was not immediately clear how many had been intercepted.

Netanyahu invites opposition to form emergency government

Israel’s PM Netanyahu has invited opposition leaders – Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – to form an emergency national government, according to a statement from his party Likud.

Earlier, Lapid told Israeli media that he is willing to form an emergency government with Netanyahu.

A short while ago, I met with Prime Minister Netanyahu. I told him that in this emergency situation I’m willing to form an emergency, narrow, professional government with him. Netanyahu knows that with the current extreme and dysfunctional security cabinet, he can’t manage a war.

Yair LapidLeader of Israeli opposition and Yesh Atid party

Public broadcaster Kan says Lapid and Gantz are meeting now to discuss the conditions for them entering government.

Palestinian militants have taken dozens of Israelis captive, both military and civilian, in an unprecedented development.

Some are thought to be being held in some of the small towns near the Gaza Strip, while others have been taken back into Gaza.

Video has emerged showing the moment a man, believed to be an Israeli hostage, is pushed into a car, which is then driven away.

World Opinions + Agencies

L’article Israel-Palestine escalation: Gaza under bombardment after Hamas attack.. Videos est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

The UN has condemned an airstrike on a detention centre in northern Yemen as the death toll rose to more than 80.

The airstrike in the rebel-held Sa’ada province on Friday morning followed a Houthi drone attack on the United Arab Emirates on Monday that killed three people. It marks an intensification of violence in the seven-year civil war between the government, supported by a Saudi-led coalition, and the Iranian-backed rebels.

Hundreds of people were injured in the attack on the detention centre. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that al-Gumhourriyeh hospital in Sa’ada had taken in about 200 wounded patients was unable to provide care for any more.

MSF also said 82 deaths had been confirmed, citing figures from the health ministry in Sana’a. At least 266 people had been injured, it said.

The Saudi-led coalition denied reports that it had bombed the prison in a statement on Saturday morning.

“The coalition will inform the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Yemen and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the facts and details,” the official Saudi news agency said, citing a coalition spokesman. The coalition also said the prison had not been on a no-targeting list agreed with the UN and and had not been reported by the Red Cross.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said in response to Friday’s attacks that the “escalation needs to stop”. In a statement issued by his spokesperson, he said the airstrikes, which included other parts of the country, had resulted in child casualties, and he reminded all parties that “attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, are prohibited by international humanitarian law”.

A separate strike in the port city of Hodeida hit a telecommunications centre, reportedly killing three children playing in a football field and downing the country’s internet access.

Hundreds also wounded as Saudi-led coalition denies reports it bombed detention centre in Sa’ada

MSF’s head of mission in Yemen, Ahmed Mahat, said: “There are many bodies still at the scene of the airstrike, many missing people. It is impossible to know how many people have been killed. It seems to have been a horrific act of violence.”

The strikes on rebel-held parts of Yemen came after a drone attack on Monday in Abu Dhabi for which the Houthi leadership claimed responsibility.

The UN security council condemned the Houthi attack, which killed three people and wounded six, in a statement on Friday: “The members of the security council condemned in the strongest terms the heinous terrorist attacks in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Monday 17 January, as well as in other sites in Saudi Arabia,” it said.

“The members of the security council underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice.”

The UN estimates that the war in Yemen had killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease. Millions more have been displaced. It said earlier this week that the level of violence this month could soon surpass that witnessed in December, because of the number of airstrikes, drones and rockets launched, with an alarming number used against civilians and non-military targets.

World Opinions – theguardian.com

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