In Belfast, N Ireland, this afternoon hundreds of young people walked to support the people of Gaza and protest the barbaric actions of the Israeli military that continue with air strikes, bombing and killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Mairead Corrigan Maguire
The youngsters also condemned the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by Israeli occupation forces wounding hundreds of Muslim worshipers.
These violations add to the myriad Israeli crimes against the Palestinians over decades.
Israel is an Apartheid State that continues with a policy of Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinian people.
These latest barbaric cruel actions by the Israeli Defense Forces are another breach of international law that must be condemned and stopped immediately.
Lessons on securing education for girls and boys alike from a World Food Programme-backed initiative
Mahmoud’s children on a pickup truck rented for weekly shopping trips to town. Photo: WFP/Egypt
(WFP)* — Mahmoud Ibrahim is one of the 300 people living in the desert village of Mogama’a Ibrahim — a remote community in Egypt’s north-western coastal governorate of Marsa Matrouh.
Ta’iz, Yemen (IOM)* – Deciding to leave their home was a difficult call for Aisha and Tawfiq, but two years ago, out of fear for their lives, the couple fled their farm in Ta’iz, Yemen.
A displaced person standing in front of a shelter that he is helping to construct in Yemen. Photo: IOM 2021/Majed Mohammed
UNITED NATIONS, May 17 2021 (IPS)* – In most civil wars and military conflicts across the politically-volatile Middle East, including in Syria, Yemen and Palestine, the ongoing battles are being fought not on a level playing field but on an uneven killing field.
Escalated hostilities in the Gaza Strip have resulted in heavy casualties and large-scale displacement. More than 50 children have been killed in the current crisis in the Middle East, a senior UN official, said May 15. Credit: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
And it is more so in the current fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, described as a “Middle East carnage” where children are among the civilians killed in airstrikes. The fighting is largely a battle of weapons: sophisticated US-supplied state-of-the-art fighter planes vs home-made rockets and mortars.
15 May 2021 (openDemocracy)* — Israel is the most powerful state in the Middle East. Its military forces may not match the likes of Egypt or Turkey in numbers, but the might of its training, equipment, technologies and nuclear weapons make it unassailable.
Pakistan restores mangroves for economy and ecosystem benefits
Dan Maisey/Unsplash / 14 May 2021
14 May 2021 (UNEP)* — As Pakistan prepares to host World Environment Day on June 5, ecosystem restoration, which includes critical ecosystems like mangrove forests, will be the focus.
Mr Quershi, who sadly passed away in December 2020, played a key role in the development of mangrove restoration in Pakistan and will be fondly remembered at the event.“He was a magnificent man.
World Food Programme partnerships officer Krystyna Kovalenko offers a glimpse of the south of the country, where thousands of people are starving
Every month, WFP provides food assistance to 750,000 people in Southern Madagascar. Photo: WFP/Krystyna Kovalenko
(WFP)* — The ‘Grand Sud’ in Madagascar looks like something out of a sci-fi film — totally dry, inhabitable and deserted. The land has suffered from several years of consecutive drought. But locals say that this year has been worse than any other.
13 May 2021 (UN News)* — The conflict in Yemen forced Asia El-Sayeed Ali and her family from her home in Aden’s Al Tawahi district, where there was active fighting, in 2015. Today, she works at a health clinic supported by the World Food Programme (WFP), where she cares for children, and their mothers, suffering from malnutrition.
“At the beginning of the war, my children and I were forced to flee our home, and move in with relatives in another part of Aden. The conflict affected all of us: my community, my family, and me. It took many people I was close to. It took away our youth and made our children grow up too soon. .I worked as a nurse from 2003 to 2011, and then I trained in nutrition, specialising in breastfeeding. Since then I have been able to return home to Al Tawahi, to work in the nutrition clinic, and for about eight years I have been working in the malnutrition unit.
UNITED NATIONS, May 14 2021 (IPS)* – The UN Security Council (UNSC), the most powerful political body at the United Nations, has largely remained silent or ineffective in resolving one of the longstanding military conflicts in the Middle East involving Israelis and Palestinians.
Smoke from an airstrike rises over the city of Rafah in southern Gaza Strip. Credit: UNICEF/Eyad El Baba
But, at the same time, several attempts to condemn Israel for its excesses have been thwarted by successive US administrations, which have exercised the veto power in the Security Council to protect a client state whose survival has depended largely on billions of dollars in US economic and military aid, state-of-the-art weapons systems and outright military grants doled out gratis.
Supporters of Palestinian rights have been fighting back successfully against efforts to silence their advocacy and suppress their solidarity actions, with major legal victories in four separate jurisdictions over the last year.
Jake Lynch
In Australia last month, Melissa Parke, a former Labor federal legislator and UN legal officer in Gaza, won a libel case against Colin Rubenstein, director of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council.
He issued a statement in settlement, affirming that she was not, in fact, “a compulsive slanderer, a conspiracy theorist, a liar, a fanatic, or an anti-Semite”.
Ms Parke had taken the action, she explained, “seeking an acknowledgment that I was not any of the things imputed of me” and to resist “the inappropriate weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism”.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 