US says there were ‘serious concerns’ current UN ceasefire draft would slow down aid
The US said on Thursday that there were “serious and widespread concerns” that the current draft of a UN security council resolution that aims to boost humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip “could actually slow down” deliveries.
“The goal of this resolution is to facilitate and help expand humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza, and we cannot lose sight of that purpose,” said Nate Evans, spokesperson for the US mission to the UN, ahead of a likely vote on Thursday.
“We must ensure any resolution helps and doesn’t hurt the situation on the ground,” he said.
Key events
625,000 Palestinian students have been deprived of their education across Gaza as a result of Israeli attacks across the strip, the Palestinian foreign ministry announced.
Across the densely populated strip, 47% of the population are below 18-years old.
Since Israel’s attacks on Gaza, over 10,000 infants and children have been killed by Israeli strikes, according to the Switzerland-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Meanwhile, more than 18,000 children have been injured by Israeli strikes.
US says there were ‘serious concerns’ current UN ceasefire draft would slow down aid
The US said on Thursday that there were “serious and widespread concerns” that the current draft of a UN security council resolution that aims to boost humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip “could actually slow down” deliveries.
“The goal of this resolution is to facilitate and help expand humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza, and we cannot lose sight of that purpose,” said Nate Evans, spokesperson for the US mission to the UN, ahead of a likely vote on Thursday.
“We must ensure any resolution helps and doesn’t hurt the situation on the ground,” he said.
For Zaki Abu Sleyma, a Gaza resident, the water now flowing into the devastated enclave from a desalination project in Egypt tastes “like sugar” after weeks of Israel’s bombardment and siege left him and many others drinking unclean, brackish water.
The water comes from three plants built by the United Arab Emirates on the Egyptian side of the border and pumped into Rafah that started working on Tuesday, part of an effort to relieve one of the biggest humanitarian challenges in Gaza.
“We were really suffering … we used to bring water from the sea before. This water tastes like sugar, it is drinkable,” Abu Sleyman told Reuters.
But while clean water is badly wanted, Gaza’s ruined infrastructure means it is hard to distribute beyond the border town of Rafah, let alone pump up to rooftop tanks that allow people to use it in the enclave’s remaining buildings.
Israel cut off all external electricity supply to Gaza when the war began on 7 October with a Hamas attack on Israeli towns that killed 1,200 people. Its siege of the Palestinian territory has also stopped most fuel supplies, meaning local power generators do not work either.
“We hope they can provide us with an electricity station … as you can see we fill the buckets and take the water upstairs,” said Abu Sleyma. Filling upstairs tanks so that water can be used in taps in the house is hard, painful work.
Even in Rafah, where the Israeli army has told civilians to seek refuge, the dearth of food and clean water is so severe it is causing people to lose weight and get ill. At a water tank standing among houses in Rafah, a group of children took turns cupping their hands to drink from a pouring pipe, a rare sight in recent weeks.
Mohammed Sobhi Abu Reyala, head of water and sewage directorate in Jabalia, said that the displacement of thousands of Gazans to Rafah had compounded already existing problems in the city, where there was a lack of fuel to operate wells.
“Honestly, this new line which was provided via our brothers in the Arab Republic of Egypt, our brothers in Egypt, played a major role in alleviating the suffering of the displaced and the people of Rafah concerning water,” sad Abu Reyala.
The plants, connected to Egypt’s border with the Gaza strip by a 900-metre pipeline, desalinate around 600,000 gallons of water a day, covering the needs of about 300,000 people.
A group of Dutch civil servants staged an unusual protest in front of the country’s foreign affairs ministry on Thursday to call for a ceasefire in war-torn Gaza.
About 150 ministerial workers held up placards and unfurled a banner reading “Civil Servants Demand Ceasefire” over lunchtime, saying they were protesting the government’s current stance on the call for an end to hostilities.
A spokeswoman for the group, Angelique Eijpe, said:
There’s concern over the fact that the Dutch government is still not calling for a permanent ceasefire and that is in essence why we’re here today.
Eijpe told AFP she resigned last month over the continued Dutch position in the conflict.
The Netherlands, like Germany and Italy, last week abstained from voting for a ceasefire during a UN General Assembly meeting, despite an overwhelming number of countries voting in favour.
The Dutch foreign minister, Hanke Bruins Slot, afterwards said the abstention resulted from the text of the resolution “not being clear enough” on Israel’s right to defend itself, and it did not refer to the 7 October attack by Hamas.
But some civil servants disagreed with the Dutch position, staging the protest, which lasted about half an hour. Although protests often happen in the Netherlands, it is rare for civil servants to make their voices heard contrary to official policy.
“We are here because we disagree with the Netherlands’ stance on the ceasefire issue,” Jesse Jansen, a 34-year-old protester, told AFP. “We cannot just stand by and watch while international and humanitarian law are being violated.”
About 200 civil servants in October wrote letters to the Dutch cabinet asking it to call on Israel to halt the Gaza bombardment “and to protect innocent civilians.”
Support for a ceasefire call has been growing in the Netherlands, with almost two-thirds of Dutch people interviewed being in favour, a poll by the RTL public broadcaster said on Tuesday.
Nineteen Israeli prison guards under investigation over death of Palestinian prisoner
Israeli police say 19 Israeli prison guards are under investigation in the death of a 38-year-old Palestinian security prisoner.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, an advocacy group, says the prisoner was found with “severe signs of violence” on his body and died on 18 November at the Ketziot prison in the southern Negev Desert. He was 18 years into a 25-year sentence for attempted murder, according to PA.
Police announced the investigation of the guards on Thursday after a gag order expired. The Israel prison service says it is cooperating. The Prisoners’ Club says about 7,800 Palestinians are currently held by Israelis, including hundreds rounded up since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Here are the latest images coming across the wires from Gaza and Israel:
The UN Security Council has a long-delayed vote scheduled for Thursday on a new resolution about desperately needed aid to Gaza.
Tens of thousands of people are crammed into shelters and tent camps amid shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies. A World Health Organization official who visited two hospitals in northern Gaza said they were having to carry out more amputations because of staff, electricity and supply shortages, AP reports.
As diplomatic efforts continued to secure aid deliveries and another ceasefire in the conflict, Israel carried out more strikes and other operations across Gaza, but a territory-wide communications outage made it difficult to confirm details about the fighting. Hamas, meanwhile, fired a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, underscoring the militant group’s resilience in the face of Israel’s blistering campaign to destroy it.
Nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel declared war on Hamas, according to the health ministry in Gaza, which does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Israel says more than 130 of its soldiers have died in its ground offensive after Hamas raided southern Israel on 7 October, killing about 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and taking about 240 hostages.
He’s raising millions in aid for Gaza. But still he couldn’t save his family
Hani Almadhoun works in the US to support the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. The bad news keeps coming from home in Gaza
Hani Almadhoun braces himself whenever he hears his iPhone ping, the sound now a harbinger of bad news from his family in Gaza.
On Thanksgiving, it was a Facebook notification with a message that his 17-year old nephew had been shot in the head by a sniper.
A Telegram alert was how Almadhoun learned that his brother Mahmoud was taken by the IDF. He spotted him in a photo, blindfolded and stripped down to his underwear.
As the war continued, the bad news seemed to get closer. “At first it was the death of a good friend, someone who was in the US on a Fulbright, then it was cousins, then more cousins, then it was my sister-in-law’s entire family.”
It’s a situation that is common these days for diaspora Palestinians with family members and friends back in the Gaza Strip. Almadhoun, who hails from Gaza but has been in the US since 2000, works as the director of philanthropy for UNRWA USA, a charity that fundraises for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. The limitations of his work add another layer of helplessness.
Read more from Rhana Natour here.
Summary
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Prospects for an exchange deal involving the release of more hostages remained uncertain as Hamas insisted it would not discuss anything less than a complete end to Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh visited Egypt on Wednesday for the first time in more than a month for discussions with Egyptian officials who are seeking to mediate another truce. Reuters reports that a source said envoys were intensively discussing which of the hostages still held by Palestinian militants in Gaza could be freed in a new truce and which Palestinian prisoners Israel might release in return.
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The World Health Organization said on Thursday that northern Gaza had been left without a functional hospital due to a lack of fuel, staff and supplies. “There are actually no functional hospitals left in the north,” Richard Peeperkorn, the WHO representative in Gaza, told reporters via video link from Jerusalem. “Al-Ahli [hospital] was the last one but it is now minimally functional.”
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An Israeli air strike killed a Hamas-appointed senior border official and three others in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt, Hamas and health officials said. They said Col Bassam Ghaben, the Hamas-appointed director of the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom commercial crossing, and three other Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike near the gate of Rafah crossing.
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An Australian doctor who coordinated medical aid to Gaza has expressed horror at the “huge proportion of children being killed or maimed for life” as the UN security council again delayed a vote on a ceasefire resolution. Dr Natalie Thurtle, who helped oversee the response by Médecins Sans Frontières until last week, said it was “very confronting for colleagues trying to provide healthcare when it’s possible to be shot through the window of the hospital”.
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An Israeli strike killed an elderly woman and wounded her husband in their home in southern Lebanon, Lebanon’s state news agency and a security source said. The incident brought the civilian death toll from Israeli shelling of southern Lebanon in recent weeks to about 20, including journalists and children, according to a Reuters count.
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More than 8,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails, amid an intensified wave of arrests and detentions in Gaza and the West Bank since the 7 October attacks by Hamas, according to human rights groups. Addameer, a human rights group supporting Palestinian political prisoners, said the detainees included hundreds from Gaza, including 123 women, though the true total from the territory could be much higher.
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Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned the failure of the UN security council to pass a resolution on Gaza would mean applying “dangerous double standards.” Safadi said the draft resolution, which is expected to be voted on later on Thursday, focused on speeding up aid shipments that Jordan says Israel has been obstructing to prevent sufficient life-saving assistance from entering.
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Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), a human rights organisation partly founded by the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said it had submitted a dossier to the International Criminal Court naming 40 senior Israeli commanders who it argues should be investigated as war crimes suspects in relation to the war in Gaza. The watchdog accuses the commanders, headed by defence minister Yoav Gallant, of having responsibility for indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on Palestinian civilians, using starvation as a weapon of war, blocking humanitarian aid as the fighting has unfolded, and imposing a state of siege on Gaza.
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Sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and a Reuters camera crew witnessed rocket interceptions over Israel’s commercial capital after a TV channel showed launches from the Gaza Strip. There was no immediate word of any damage or casualties in what appeared to have been a long-range salvo by Palestinian militants.
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Palestinian factions will reject any talks about prisoner swaps until after Israeli “aggression” has ended, a statement published by Hamas said. “There is a Palestinian national decision that there should be no talk about prisoners or exchange deals except after a full cessation of aggression,” the statement said. In addition to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militant group, is also holding hostages in Gaza, Reuters reported.
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The Israeli army has acknowledged a significant misstep over the mistaken shooting of three Israelis held hostage in Gaza. An investigation has found that, five days before the shooting, a military search dog with a body camera had captured audio of them shouting for help in Hebrew, Associated Press reports.
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The German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd said that it would reroute 25 ships by the end of the year to avoid the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis are targeting merchant ships. “We will reroute around 25 vessels up to the end of 2023,” a spokesperson said in a written reply to an inquiry by Reuters. “Further decisions will be taken at the end of the year.” One of Hapag-Lloyd’s ships, the Al Jasrah, which was attacked near Yemen in December, was on its way to Singapore, the spokesperson also said.
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Egypt’s foreign minister said that countries on the Red Sea have a responsibility to protect its waters. “We continue to cooperate with many of our partners to provide suitable conditions for the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea,” Sameh Shoukry added in a press conference with the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, in Cairo.
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Israel ordered the evacuation of large areas of southern Gaza’s main city on Wednesday, the United Nations has said. Israel had released maps showing new areas covering about 20% of Khan Younis that had been marked for evacuation, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
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The Palestinian death toll in Gaza has passed 20,000, Hamas says. According to the latest figures from the media office of the territory’s government, those killed since the war began on 7 October included about 8,000 children and 6,200 women.
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The UN security council has postponed a vote calling for a ceasefire in Gaza until Thursday as diplomats struggle to agree on the language of the draft resolution. The UN resolution, drafted by the United Arab Emirates, has been changed several times amid reported policy differences inside the Biden administration.
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The Israeli military says it has uncovered a major Hamas command centre in the heart of Gaza City, inflicting what it described as a serious blow to the militant group. The army had exposed the centre of a vast underground network used by Hamas to move weapons, militants and supplies throughout the Gaza Strip, it said on Wednesday.
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The first aid convoy to travel direct from Jordan to Gaza since the start of the war has delivered 750 metric tonnes of food to the Palestinian territory, the UN World Food Programme has said. The 46-truck convoy travelled through the Israel-Gaza Kerem Shalom border crossing, through which Israel last week approved the temporary delivery of aid into Gaza, opening a new route for supplies. Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign minister has said it wants to fast-track the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza through a maritime corridor from Cyprus.
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Emmanuel Macron has said that Israel’s goal of fighting terrorism did not mean it had to “flatten Gaza”. The French president called on Israel “to stop this response, because it is not appropriate, because all lives are worth the same and we defend them”.
Dan Sabbagh
Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), a human rights organisation partly founded by the late journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said it had submitted a dossier to the International Criminal Court naming 40 senior Israeli commanders who it argues should be investigated as war crimes suspects in relation to the war in Gaza.
The watchdog accuses the commanders, headed by defence minister Yoav Gallant, of having responsibility for indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on Palestinian civilians, using starvation as a weapon of war, blocking humanitarian aid as the fighting has unfolded, and imposing a state of siege on Gaza.
Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director at Dawn, said:
While Israel has done its best to conceal the identities of many of its officers, they should be put on notice that they face individual criminal liability for the crimes under way in Gaza.
Last month, Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, said his office was conducting an investigation into the situation in Palestine that encompassed the events since Hamas launched its cross-border raid on 7 October, and he invited third parties to submit information and evidence to him.
Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which establishes the authority of the war crimes court, and does not accept its jurisdiction, but the Palestinian Authority signed up at the end of 2014.
The ICC says that it is able to investigate and operate in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and it can examine the actions of any party on that territory, including Israelis as well as Palestinians.
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned on Thursday the failure of the UN security council to pass a resolution on Gaza would mean applying “dangerous double standards.”
Safadi said the draft resolution that is expected to be voted on later on Thursday focused on speeding up aid shipments that the kingdom says Israel has been obstructing to prevent sufficient life-saving assistance from entering.
The German shipping company Hapag-Lloyd said on Thursday that it would reroute 25 ships by the end of the year to avoid the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis are targeting merchant ships.
“We will reroute around 25 vessels up to the end of 2023,” a spokesperson said in a written reply to an enquiry by Reuters. “Further decisions will be taken at the end of the year.”
One of Hapag-Lloyd’s ships, the Al Jasrah, which was attacked near Yemen in December, was on its way to Singapore, the spokesperson also said.
Apart from Hapag-Lloyd, other operators’ ships have also been attacked, including those of rivals Maersk and MSC.
Shipping freight rates and shipping stocks have risen as a result of the disruptions, which means that many east-west trades incur more expenses by having to circumnavigate Africa via the Cape of Good Hope.
Sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and a Reuters camera crew witnessed rocket interceptions over Israel’s commercial capital on Thursday after a TV channel showed launches from the Gaza Strip.
There was no immediate word of any damage or casualties in what appeared to have been a long-range salvo by Palestinian militants in the third month of a Gaza war between Israel and Hamas.
Palestinian factions reject any talks about prisoner swaps until after Israeli “aggression” is ended, a statement published by Hamas on Thursday said.
“There is a Palestinian national decision that there should be no talk about prisoners or exchange deals except after a full cessation of aggression”, the statement said.
In addition to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militant group, is also holding hostages in Gaza, Reuters reported.
Egypt’s foreign minister said on Thursday that countries on the Red Sea have a responsibility to protect it.
“We continue to cooperate with many of our partners to provide suitable conditions for the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea,” Sameh Shoukry added in a press conference with the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, in Cairo.
Four Palestinians killed in Israeli air strike near Rafah
An Israeli air strike killed a Hamas-appointed senior border official and three others in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt, Hamas and health officials said on Thursday.
They said Col Bassam Ghaben, the Hamas-appointed director of the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom commercial crossing, and three other Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike near the gate of Rafah crossing.
There was no immediate Israeli response to a Reuters request for comment.
An Israeli strike killed an elderly woman and wounded her husband in their home in southern Lebanon early on Thursday, Lebanon’s state news agency and a security source said.
The incident brought the civilian death toll from Israeli shelling of southern Lebanon in recent weeks to about 20, including journalists and children, according to a Reuters count.
Another Israeli strike overnight killed a member of Hezbollah, according to the armed group, which has lost more than 100 fighters in the recent hostilities with Israel.
Hezbollah has been trading fire with Israel at the border since Palestinian ally Hamas attacked southern Israel, igniting a conflict that has drawn in the heavily armed group and other Iran-aligned factions across the Middle East.
