(UN News)* — Aid corridors in southern Gaza must be fully opened to allow the entry of food, fuel and other desperately needed relief items, a senior official with the World Food Programme (WFP) said on .
Matthew Hollingsworth, WFP Country Director in Palestine, warned that with limited access to the south “we will no doubt see what we saw happen in the north in the first months of the war”.
Mr. Hollingsworth recently spent 10 days in Gaza. Speaking from Jerusalem, he told journalists in New York that people in the enclave “really are at their wits’ end”.
A horrific ‘exodus’
He said the “exodus” from Rafah over the past 20 days “has been an awesome and horrific experience for many, many people.”
(UN News)* — Far too little aid is reaching people in Gaza to the extent that children are now starving, UN humanitarians said on Friday [], in a renewed appeal to Israel to respect international law regarding the safe passage of lifesaving relief in the war-shattered enclave.
The alert from the World Health Organization (WHO) follows the finding that more than four in five children “did not eat for a whole day at least once in the three days” ahead of a food insecurity survey.
GENEVA – Israeli air strikes on a camp sheltering displaced civilians in Tal al-Sultan in Rafah, that have reportedly claimed at least 46 lives including 23 women, children and older persons on Sunday night are an outrage, UN experts* said today [29 May 2024], demanding decisive international action to end the bloodshed in Gaza.
(UN News)* —With no let up in reported street battles and Israeli bombardment across Gaza on Thursday [], UN humanitarians warned that the flow of vital lifesaving aid into the enclave has fallen by more than two thirds since the Israeli military stepped up its campaign in Rafah and seized the key aid conduit.
UN News/Ziad Taleb | Conditions at Al Mawasi camp in southwest Gaza remain unsuitable for the hundreds of thousands of Gazans uprooted by the latest escalation of violence in nearby Rafah and elsewhere across the Gaza Strip.
“Humanitarian facilities in Rafah are forced to close one after another…The flow of humanitarian aid supplies into Gaza, already insufficient to meet the soaring needs, has dropped by 67 per cent since 7 May,” reported the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, amid reports that kitchens, clinics and hospitals are shutting down.
GENEVA (UN Human Rights) – UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk on Monday [27 May 2024] voiced his horror at the further loss of civilian life in Gaza, after Israeli air strikes on Sunday hit a camp for displaced people in the southern city of Rafah.
“The images from the camp are horrific and point to no apparent change in the methods and means of warfare used by Israel that have already led to so many civilian deaths,” said Türk.
“Sunday’s strike underscores once again that there is literally no safe place in Gaza.”
Media update from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) on the latest situation in Gaza, Thursday 23 May 2024. An update from Suze van Meegen, NRC’s head of operations in Gaza:
.
.
“The city of Rafah is now comprised of three entirely different worlds: the east is an archetypal war zone, the middle is a ghost town, and the west is a congested mass of people living in deplorable conditions.
“People have no choice but to put their faith in so-called ‘humanitarian safe zones’ designated by the forces that have killed their family members and destroyed their homes.
“They have dragged their families and few possessions onward to new locations for the seventh, eighth, ninth time in seven months of war. But as far as we can see, there is nothing ‘humanitarian’ about these areas.
Responding to the International Court of Justice’s ruling today [24 May 2024], which ordered Israel to immediately halt military operations in the governorate of Rafah, following South Africa’s application for additional provisional measures in its genocide case, Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:
“With this order the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – the UN’s principal court – has made it crystal clear: the Israeli authorities must completely halt military operations in Rafah, as any ongoing military action could constitute an underlying act of genocide.
(UN News)* —The International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday [] issued new provisional measures that order Israel to immediately end military operations in Rafah in southern Gaza and to open the governate’s border crossing for urgent aid deliveries.
This follows a request from South Africa in a pending case accusing Israel of violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
Reading the new provisional measures in an open session at the court in The Hague, ICJ Justice Nawaf Salam announced that Israel must abide by its obligations under the Genocide Convention to “immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in the Rafah governate which may inflict upon the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that would bring about its physical destruction in whole and in part”.
(UN News)* — The UN General Assembly on Thursday [] designated 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, in which at least 8,372 people were killed, thousands displaced and whole communities destroyed.
Adopting a resolution with the same title, the Assembly also asked the Secretary-General to establish an outreach programme on the Srebrenica genocide in preparation for the 30th anniversary next year.
For spurious and sinister reasons, the Western political and media classes are isolating themselves from public opinion and international law on the Gaza genocide in ways hard to believe. Here are a few examples among myriad.
May 1 solidarity march in New York. (Pamela Drew, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
13 May 2024 – Incredibly, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no medical facilities operational now anyway.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 