Hind Khoudary, with the World Food Programme in Gaza, recounts hard days in the strip during and after a brief humanitarian pause.
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After seven weeks of relentless bombardment that left 80 percent of Gaza’s population – 1.8 million people – displaced, trapped and acutely hungry, a week-long humanitarian pause came into effect offering a temporary respite and allowing some aid into the small, decimated and fully-deprived enclave where food, water, medicine and any of life’s necessities are dangerously low.
(UN News)* — Some Gazans are so desperate for food that they are now stopping aid trucks and immediately eating what they find, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Thursday [].
Speaking later in the day at UN Headquarters, the deputy head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), confirmed that following a food assessment, around half of all Gazans “are starving”, with no idea where their next meal is coming from.
Briefing journalists in Geneva uon his return from Rafah governorate, Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, explained that people were “desperate, hungry and are terrified”, 69 days since the Israeli military bombardment began in response to the 7 October Hamas terror attacks in southern Israel.
(UN News)* — Heavy rains created new misery in Gaza as UN humanitarians repeated deep concerns on Thursday [] over the deteriorating health situation in the Strip, amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and fighting with Palestinian armed groups.
UN humanitarian affairs coordination office OCHA said that many areas in the enclave have been flooded, “worsening the struggle of displaced Palestinians”, while UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini was due to brief journalists in Geneva on the situation on Thursday, following his most recent visit to Gaza.
4 Dec 2023 – Yesterday, a large number of registered voters in Venezuela voted in a referendum over the Essequibo region that is disputed with neighboring Guyana. Nearly all those who voted answered yes to the five questions.
Vijay Prashad
These questions asked the Venezuelan people to affirm the sovereignty of their country over Essequibo.
“Today,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, “there are no winners or losers.” The only winner, he said, is Venezuela’s sovereignty. The principal loser, Maduro said, is ExxonMobil.
In 2022, ExxonMobil [read Rockefeller] made a profit of $55.7 billion, making it one of the world’s richest and most powerful oil companies.
(UN News)* —Civilians in Sudan – where rival militaries are waging a bloody war, with devastating consequences – are at a high risk of falling into catastrophic levels of hunger by May next year, the UN emergency food relief agency warned on Wednesday [].
(UN News)* — The outbreak of conflict seven months ago in Sudan has led to “a convergence of a worsening humanitarian calamity and a catastrophic human rights crisis”, according to a senior UN official, and the restive region of Darfur has been particularly badly affected.
Close to nine million people need humanitarian assistance and reports suggest that some 4000 people have been targeted and killed because of their ethnicity.
(UN News)* — A record 114 million forcibly displaced around the world represents a “crisis of humanity”, UN refugee agency (UNHCR) chief Filippo Grandi said on Wednesday [] as the Global Refugee Forum got underway in Geneva.
The world’s largest gathering dedicated to refugee issues, the Forum is co-hosted by UNHCR and Switzerland and convened by Colombia, France, Japan, Jordan and Uganda.
Thirty years ago, Philip Roth wrote a profound, funny, disturbing novel about Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism called Operation Shylock.
In this story, an American Jewish writer named Philip Roth discovers that another writer who also calls himself Philip Roth is giving people in Israel fits by preaching “Diasporism” – a doctrine calling on Israel’s Jews to return to the mostly European lands from which they or their parents originally came.
Roth #2 considers Europe and America to be the Jews’ true homelands: places where a humane, creative Jewish culture once flourished, and which are now needed as sanctuaries because of Israel’s failure to make peace with the Palestinians and the Islamic world’s hostility to Israel.
(UN News)* —The last barely functioning hospital in northern Gaza is a “humanitarian disaster zone”, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday [], highlighting the disastrous consequences of ongoing Israeli bombardment for critically ill and injured civilians across the enclave.
(UN News)* — Myanmar is now the world’s largest opium producer, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported on Tuesday [], as the economic and political crisis following the 2021 coup and widening conflict between the military and armed groups continues to drive farmers towards illicit opium poppy production.
The southeast Asian country’s opium output has surpassed that of Afghanistan, where the Taliban imposed a ban on its production in April last year – leading to a 95 per cent fall in cultivation, UNODCsaid.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 