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UNICEF cautions ‘every minute counts’ as hunger kills children in Gaza

By
IFP Media Wire
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Gaza War

Russell took to her social media account X to express shock over the report a day before that some 10 children died of malnutrition in Gaza.

“Horrific new out of Gaza that at least 10 children have died of malnutrition and dehydration so far while many more are on the brink”, she wrote, adding that 1 in 6 children under the age of two in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished.

Russell called for a “ceasefire now”, arguing that “every minute counts” for children in Gaza facing “deadly” malnutrition.

She stated that even a minute’s delay in the access of Palestinian children in Gaza to food, water, medical care and protection from Israeli bullets and bombs will have terrible consequences.

“None of these things will be possible without establishing a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza,” stressed the UNICEF chief who once called Gaza the “most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”

Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has also called for sanctions against Israel after warning a “famine may very well be already occurring” in Gaza amid reports a 10th child died from starvation.

“Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 8,” Fakhri said in a post on social media.

“The only way to end/prevent this famine is an immediate ceasefire. And the only way to get a ceasefire is to sanction Israel,” he added.

The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip has announced on Sunday that 90 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in “nine massacres” over the past 24 hours, with 117 others wounded.

This brings the death toll from the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip since October 7 to 30,410, with about 71,700 injured.

Israelis rally against Netanyahu’s government, demand release of Hamas-held hostages

By
IFP Media Wire
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Israel Protest

“Israeli police arrested 7 protesters in Kaplan Square in downtown Tel Aviv on charges of rioting during the rally demanding the government to strike a deal with Hamas to release the hostages held in Gaza,” the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported.

It pointed out that other demonstrators closed Begin Street — a vital thoroughfare in Tel Aviv — as part of pressure on the government.

In West Jerusalem, hundreds of Israelis demonstrated near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence, demanding he strike a deal with the Palestinian resistance group.

Protesters also demanded immediate elections, according to the daily.

In Caesarea in northern Israel, 1,200 demonstrated in front of Netanyahu’s house, demanding the release of the hostages and the resignation of the government, according to the Israeli broadcasting authority.

Demonstrators chanted against Netanyahu’s government and shouted, “Elections now!”

Thousands of Israelis also participated in other areas of Israel, including Haifa, Raanana and Rehovot.

Qatar, alongside Egypt and the United States, is sponsoring negotiations to reach a prisoner exchange deal and a cease-fire in Gaza between Tel Aviv and Palestinian factions, with sources suggesting it could happen before March 11, when Ramadan is expected to begin.

Israel vowed to destroy Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks in which around 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage in Gaza.

More than 30,000 Palestinians have since been killed in Israeli strikes, and many more bodies are likely unaccounted for under the rubble across the besieged enclave.

Israel and Hamas have been negotiating through Egyptian, Qatari and American mediators on a possible cease-fire.

An earlier truce for cessation of hostilities and hostage-prisoner exchange lasted for one week in late November.

US airdrops food into besieged Gaza Strip, aid organizations outraged

By
IFP Media Wire
-
Gaza War

The US, together with Jordan’s air force, “conducted a combined humanitarian assistance airdrop into Gaza … to provide essential relief to civilians affected by the ongoing conflict”, US Central Command said in a statement on Saturday.

The C-130 planes “dropped over 38,000 meals along the coastline of Gaza allowing for civilian access to the critical aid”, it added, as the enclave faces a humanitarian crisis after almost five months of war.

US President Joe Biden had announced a day earlier that Washington would airdrop aid there after more than 100 Palestinians were killed on Thursday in northern Gaza while queuing for aid.

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday that the US will carry out multiple airdrops in the next few weeks, which will be coordinated with Jordan.

Kirby added the airdrops have an advantage over trucks because planes can move aid to a particular area quickly. However, in terms of volume, the airdrops will be “a supplement to, not a replacement for moving things in by ground”, he continued.

The Biden administration is also considering shipping aid by sea from Cyprus, according to a US official.

Since Israel’s war began on October 7 following Hamas’s attack, Israel has barred the entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies, except for a tiny trickle of aid entering the south from Egypt at the Rafah crossing and Israel’s Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing.

The US’s move has been criticised as inefficient and simply a public relations move by members of international aid organisations.

“The airdrops are symbolic and designed in ways to appease the domestic base,” Dave Harden, former USAID director to the West Bank, told Al Jazeera.

“Really what needs to happen is more crossings [opening] and more trucks going in every day.”

“I think the United States is weak and that’s really disappointing to me,” Harden continued, adding, “The US has the ability to compel Israel to open up more aid and by not doing that we’re putting our assets and our people at risks and potentially creating more chaos in Gaza.”

UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) echoed Harden’s statement, telling Al Jazeera in a statement that the US, the UK and others should instead work to “ensure that Israel immediately opens all crossings into Gaza for aid”.

Oxfam also blasted the Biden administration’s plans, labelling the effort an attempt to assuage the guilty consciences of US officials.

“While Palestinians in Gaza have been pushed to the absolute brink, dropping a paltry, symbolic amount of aid into Gaza with no plan for its safe distribution would not help and be deeply degrading to Palestinians,” Scott Paul, who leads Oxfam’s US government advocacy work, said in a statement on X.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry also criticised the US for acting as a “weak, marginal state” unable to secure aid to Palestinians.

Mahjoob Zweiri, the director of the Gulf Study Centre in Doha, told Al Jazeera the international community is not putting enough pressure on Israel to allow the waiting aid trucks to enter Gaza by land.

“Why not send food in through Karem Abu Salem?” Zweiri said, adding, “There are 2,000 trucks waiting to get into Gaza” at border crossings, he said, while food and medicines pile up for months past their expiry dates.

“Why is the international community not putting enough effort into delivering aid in an organised manner?” he asked.

Scholz, Macron ‘don’t get along’ amid rift over Ukraine war: Report

By
IFP Media Wire
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Scholz and Macron

The rift between Paris and Berlin was exposed earlier this week when Macron declared that while “there’s no consensus today to send… troops on the ground” to Ukraine, “we cannot exclude anything.”

Responding a day later, Scholz told reporters that there will be “no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil, who are sent there by European or NATO countries”, and that the alliance’s leaders were “unanimous as far as this question is concerned”.

Macron’s statement was “deliberately ambiguous”, and intended to “create uncertainty in the mind of Russian military planners”, Bloomberg reported, paraphrasing anonymous officials. However, it was made “against the express wishes of Scholz’ office”, the same officials said.

In a further dig at the German chancellor, Macron followed up his comment by calling out NATO members who had offered Ukraine nothing but “helmets and sleeping bags” when the conflict with Russia began in February 2022. According to Bloomberg, this was perceived as an insult by the chancellery, considering that Scholz rapidly overcame his initial reluctance to send lethal weapons to Ukraine, with Germany now Kiev’s second-largest provider of military aid.

Despite Macron’s apparent willingness to escalate, Germany has sent Ukraine 27 times more bilateral military aid than France (€17.7 billion to €0.64 billion), according to figures from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

“In Berlin”, Bloomberg noted, “Macron is seen as a monarchical figure who is better at issuing grand visions than delivering.” Close aides to Scholz acknowledged to Bloomberg that “the two don’t get along.”

On the other hand, “Macron sees Scholz as a leader without courage and ambition who cannot think beyond the short term”, a French official told the American news site.

Further evidence of this rift emerged on Monday when Macron announced that he was leading a coalition of states to provide Ukraine with “medium and long-range missiles and bombs” to strike deep into Russian territory. On Thursday, Scholz said that he was reluctant to send long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Kiev, as they could potentially be used to strike Moscow.

Scholz also angered British and French officials earlier in the week when he said that British Storm Shadow and French SCALP-EG cruise missiles – which are already being used by Ukraine and are roughly equivalent to the Taurus – required British and French crews to operate, a statement implying that both countries already had military personnel on the ground in Ukraine..

In his annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Western leaders toying with the idea of intervening in Ukraine “have already forgotten what war is”. Russia, he said, has a massive nuclear arsenal, and therefore “the consequences for potential invaders would be far more tragic” than in bygone eras.

UN Security Council voices ‘deep concern’ over Israel fatal raid on Gaza aid convoy

By
IFP Media Wire
-

The joint statement from members added that several hundred people were also injured in the Thursday incident, and some had sustained “gunshot wounds as observed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)”.

It, however, did not specify who was responsible for the gunfire.

The Security Council members went on to “extend their sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wish a swift and complete recovery for those who have been injured”.

The members also “urged Israel to keep border crossings open for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, to facilitate the opening of additional crossings to meet humanitarian needs at scale, and to support the rapid and safe delivery of relief items to people in all of the Gaza Strip”.

They urged for the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure, and reminded all parties that they “must comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law”.

The council members said they also have “grave concern” over the estimation…that all 2.2 million people in Gaza would face alarming levels of acute food insecurity.

They called for parties to the conflict to allow, facilitate, and enable the immediate, rapid, safe, sustained and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale to the Palestinian civilian population throughout the Gaza Strip.

The statement comes less than two days after the US blocked a previous UN Security Council statement, blaming Israel for the aid calamity.

More than 30,400 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been confirmed killed and over 71,000 others injured so far during Israel’s genocidal war, which began following Operation al-Aqsa Storm by Gaza-based resistance movements.

Israel ‘more or less’ accepts framework agreement for Gaza ceasefire: US

By
IFP Media Wire
-
Gaza War

“There’s a framework deal. The Israelis have more or less accepted it,” a senior US official in the Joe Biden administration told reporters on a conference call on Saturday.

“Right now, the ball is in the camp of Hamas,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The announcement comes a day before talks to reach a truce agreement are expected to resume in Egypt.

International mediators have been working for weeks to broker a deal to pause the fighting before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins around March 10.

The framework proposal includes a six-week ceasefire, as well as the release by Hamas of captives considered vulnerable, which includes the sick, the wounded, the elderly and women, the US official stated.

A deal would also likely allow aid to reach hundreds of thousands of desperate Palestinians in northern Gaza, which humanitarian officials say are under threat of famine.

Israel has severely restricted the entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies into the Gaza Strip since its war began on October 7.

News of the framework deal “sounds like a significant development from the Americans because they want it to sound like a significant development,” stated Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on Saturday.

“But it clearly looks like an attempt to pile on the pressure on Hamas before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan begins in just over a week from now,” he added, saying that the proposal is presenting them with a six-week pause in fighting and the promise of more aid deliveries at a desperate time.

Earlier this week, senior Hamas official Basem Naim told Al Jazeera that “the gap is still wide” in reaching an agreement with Israel, as the Palestinian group is calling for a total ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

Naim’s comments followed remarks from President Biden on Monday that a truce was a week away – comments the US president later walked back on.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Tel Aviv, said there had not been any Israeli response to the Biden administration official’s comments about the ceasefire framework.

“Over the last week, the only thing we’ve been hearing about are impasses when it comes to this deal, and conflicting reports about where delegations are or are not being sent,” she added.

In recent days, several Israeli media outlets have reported that there will not be an Israeli delegation going to the next round of truce talks.

A senior Egyptian official said mediators Egypt and Qatar are expected to receive a response from Hamas during the Cairo talks reportedly scheduled to start on Sunday. The official also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not publicly authorised to discuss the sensitive talks.

Hamas has not backed away from its position that a temporary truce must be the start of a process towards ending the war altogether, Egyptian sources and a Hamas official told the Reuters news agency.

However, the Egyptian sources also noted assurances had been offered to Hamas that the terms of a permanent ceasefire would be worked out in the second and third phases of the deal.

During a Qatari-mediated weeklong truce in November, 105 captives were released in exchange for 150 Palestinian women and children held in Israeli prisons.

Several killed, wounded in Russian drone attacks on Ukraine’s Odessa

By
IFP Media Wire
-
Russia Ukraine War

The drone attack on Saturday destroyed 18 flats in a nine-storey apartment block, the authorities said.

The bodies of a woman and a three-month-old child were pulled from the rubble, stated the governor of the Odessa region, Oleh Kiper, in the evening.

During the day, more bodies had been recovered, including a three-year-old child. Another three-year-old child and a pregnant woman were among the injured, added Kiper.

The hit caused extensive destruction, with rubble strewn over a large area, according to images and videos released by the authorities. Volunteers joined search and rescue efforts to help in the aftermath.

Another person also died in a drone attack in the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the attack and expressed his condolences to the relatives.

He stressed Ukraine needed a stronger air defence system, a plea he has been issuing for months.

“We need more air defense capabilities from our partners. The Ukrainian air shield must be strengthened in order to effectively protect our people from Russian terror,” he said in a statement posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“More air defense systems and air defense missiles are what saves lives.”

Moscow has bombarded the city on the Black Sea with missiles several times since launching its full-scale war on Ukraine more than two years ago.

“Russia is killing civilians,” the head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, Andrii Yermak, wrote on Telegram, adding, “We need help to stop this.”

Ukraine’s air defences said that in total, they had shot down 14 drones and a Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jet during the night.

Ukraine has been calling on its Western allies to provide significantly more air defence support and additional air defence systems for months, to better protect its cities from Moscow’s attacks.

Ukraine has been heavily reliant on Western support in its two-year defence against the Russian invasion.

The pressure is on Kiev after Russia has started to make some gains in recent weeks and test Ukrainian forces on the front line.

Meanwhile, Russia has likely grounded its fleet of A-50 reconnaissance aircraft after Kiev shot down a second one in a short time, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) claimed on Saturday.

In its daily intelligence report posted X, formerly known as Twitter, the MoD said the aircraft will likely remain grounded while “internal investigations take place surrounding the failure to protect another [high-value] enabler … ”

According to military experts, the Kremlin only has around half a dozen operational aircraft of this type that are used to detect enemy aircraft and air defence systems.

The loss of this capability which provides daily command and control to Russian air operations significantly degrades the situational awareness provided to Russian air crews, the MoD added.

Since the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine a good two years ago, the British Ministry of Defence has published daily information on the course of the war. Moscow accuses London of disinformation.

Russia says has received no ‘serious’ proposals for talks with Ukraine

By
IFP Media Wire
-
Russia Ukraine War

Russia has not seen any “serious” negotiation proposals since the failed spring 2022 Istanbul peace deal, the foreign minister told journalists at the Diplomacy Forum in Antalya on Saturday.

Earlier this week, Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that his nation was ready to host peace talks between Moscow and Kiev and act as a mediator in this process.

”This is not a question for us,” he stated, when asked about the potential talks and Ankara’s readiness to provide a platform for such a dialogue.

“We confirm once again… that Russia has never given up on [peace] talks,” Lavrov continued, adding that this question has been raised “more than a dozen of times.”

In November, David Arakhamia – who was Ukraine’s top negotiator in Istanbul – stated that then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had traveled to Kiev and persuaded Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to withdraw from the talks. Johnson himself has denied any role in this.

In autumn 2022, Zelensky issued a decree banning Ukraine from holding any talks with the current Russian leadership. He also put forward his own peace plan, which has subsequently become known as “Zelensky’s formula”. This plan demanded that Russia withdraw its forces from all the territories Kiev claims as its own before any talks could even be launched.

Moscow dismissed this plan as absurd and is blaming Kiev and its backers in the West for refusing any meaningful dialogue. It also said it was ready for peace talks as long as the reality on the ground is taken into account.

On Saturday, Lavrov said that the “legitimate interests” of the people of Donbass have never been taken into account by Kiev Western nations. When those people were still formally citizens of the Ukrainian state, the governments of the former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko and Zelensky were “consistently denying them their rights”, he added.

“We have no lack of goodwill [for talks],” Lavrov said, adding that Moscow “sees the lack of it on the other side”.

The West also lacks “understanding” of the situation on the ground and still seeks Russia’s defeat through military means, he noted.

Iran parliamentary elections likely to go to run-off

By
IFP Editorial Staff
-
Iran Election

With 4,000 out of the 5,000 ballot boxes in Tehran counted, some of the candidates seem to have to compete in a runoff as there were no clear winners among them, officials say.

“The law says any candidate who wins at least 20% of the valid votes can enter Parliament in the first round, but if they fail to garner at least 20% of the ballots, they will probably go to a second round,” said Governor of Tehran Province Alireza Fakhari.

Elections were held across the nation on Friday for Parliament and the Assembly of Experts.
Official sources have put the voter turnout at 41%.

Out of the total 290 parliamentary seats, 30 ones are up for grabs in the Tehran constiuency.

Raisi: Having economic ties with Israel tantamount to supporting regime

By
IFP Editorial Staff
-
Raisi and Qatar Emir

On Saturday afternoon, President Raisi met with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani , Emir of Qatar, on the sidelines of the 7th meeting of the Heads of Gas Exporting Countries, which was hosted by Algeria.

In the meeting , Raisi described the level of bilateral relations as good and underlined that the agreements made between the two countries should be implemented as soon as possible.

He said such a move is necessary for further expanding the Tehran-Doha ties.

Raisi also spoke about the crimes of the Zionist regime in Gaza. While expressing deep regret over some Islamic governments’ inaction and extreme indifference towards the Palestinian issue, Raisi said the Palestinian people are expecting practical and effective steps from the Islamic governments today.

The Iranian president described economic relations with the Zionist regime as being tantamount to financial support for the regime.

He noted that what these governments do will be backfire. This comes as the US and the Zionist regime keep committing crimes and genocide in Gaza and seek to buy time to continue the atrocities.

The Qatari emir for his part said bilateral ties between Tehran and Doha are in the best conditions and that this is a source of pride for the Qatari government.

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