More than 100 aid groups warn of 'mass starvation' spreading across Gaza
Israel is facing mounting international pressure over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territory, where more than 2 million people face severe shortages of food and other essentials after 21 months of conflict, triggered by Hamas's attack on Israel.
The U.N. said on Tuesday that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid since the U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operations in late May — effectively sidelining the existing U.N.-led system.
A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that "our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away."
The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through U.N.-led mechanisms.
It came a day after the United States said its envoy, Steve Witkoff, will head to Europe this week for talks on Gaza and may then visit the Middle East.
Witkoff comes with "a strong hope that we will come forward with another ceasefire as well as a humanitarian corridor for aid to flow, that both sides have in fact agreed to," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.
Even after Israel began easing a more than two-month aid blockade in late May, Gaza's population is still suffering extreme scarcities.
Israel says humanitarian aid is being allowed into Gaza and accuses Hamas of exploiting civilian suffering, including by stealing food handouts to sell at inflated prices or shooting at those awaiting aid.
In their statement, the humanitarian organizations said that warehouses with tons of supplies were sitting untouched just outside the territory, and even inside, as they were blocked from accessing or delivering the goods.
"Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires, only to wake up to worsening conditions," the signatories said.
"It is not just physical torment, but psychological. Survival is dangled like a mirage," they added.
"The humanitarian system cannot run on false promises. Humanitarians cannot operate on shifting timelines or wait for political commitments that fail to deliver access."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the "horror" facing Palestinians in Gaza under Israeli military attack was unprecedented in recent years.
The head of Gaza's largest hospital said Tuesday 21 children had died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory in the past three days.
"Twenty-one children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in various areas across the Gaza Strip," Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza, told reporters. Abu Salmiya said new cases of malnutrition and starvation were arriving at Gaza's remaining functioning hospitals "every moment," warning there could be "alarming numbers" of deaths due to starvation.
Israel and Hamas have been engaging in drawn-out negotiations in Doha since July 6 as mediators scramble to end nearly two years of war.
But after more than two weeks of back and forth, efforts by mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States are at a standstill.
More than two dozen Western countries recently urged an immediate end to the war, saying suffering in Gaza had "reached new depths."
Israel's military campaign in Gaza has killed 59,106 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which sparked the war, resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to a tally based on official figures.
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Japan Times
7 hours ago
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Israeli military intelligence goes back to basics with focus on spies, not tech
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country's military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam. The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse. Every part of Israel's security establishment has been engaged in a process of painful self-examination since Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas operatives entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others — and setting off a brutal war in which an estimated 60,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, with many more going hungry. Yet even as debate continues about who was at fault and how much Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew in advance of the attacks, the intelligence branch has accepted the brunt of the blame. The agency had a "fundamental misunderstanding' of Hamas ideology and its concrete plans, said a military intelligence officer, laying out the changes and speaking under standard military anonymity. While the service was aware of Hamas' scheme to capture military bases and civilian communities near Gaza, even watching militants rehearse in plain sight, the assessment was that they were fantasizing. Analysts concluded that the Iran-backed Islamist group was content in its role as ruler, pacified by foreign donations and well-paid work for some Gazans in Israel. The failure to meet the enemy on its own terms is one that Israel's security apparatus is determined never to repeat. "If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,' said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, "they'd understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.' The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls "a deep cultural shift' in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture "that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.' Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East. That hasn't always been the case. In the first decades of its existence, Israel had a large population of Jews who'd emigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. The nation was poor and surrounded by hostile neighbors with sizable armies, so survival was on everyone's mind. Many of these emigres put their skills to use in the intelligence service, including Eli Cohen, who famously reached the highest echelons of the Syrian government before he was caught and executed in the 1960s. (He was recently played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix hit "The Spy.") Today, Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, and Lebanon and Syria are weak states with little capacity to challenge Israeli might. The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don't speak Arabic, and Israel's 2 million Arab citizens aren't required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than 2% of the population. As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help. It's also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit's work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — ipcha mistabra — or "the reverse may be reasonable.' 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Dan Meridor, a former strategic affairs minister under Netanyahu who wrote a landmark study of Israel's security needs two decades ago, says the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the Hamas attack. "The failure of Oct. 7 wasn't a lack of knowledge of the verses in the Koran and Arabic dialect,' he says. Rather, he believes that Israel is viewing its neighbors only through the lens of hostility. "It's not more intelligence that we need,' he added, "it's more dialogue and negotiation.'
Japan Times
11 hours ago
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Japan reluctant to recognize Palestinian statehood
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NHK
a day ago
- NHK
US special envoy Witkoff visits Gaza
US special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff has visited the Gaza Strip, where people have been facing a severe food shortage. Israeli media reported on Friday that Witkoff visited a food distribution center in the enclave. A White House spokesperson had said Witkoff would inspect aid supply distribution in Gaza and hear directly from local people. UN-backed food security experts said, "The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza." The term represents the worst level on their food insecurity scale. US President Donald Trump said some children in Gaza are in "real starvation." Hamas said on social media that Witkoff's visit is propaganda to contain anger at the US and Israel that it says are causing the people of Gaza to starve. A statement issued by the group on Thursday says it is ready to resume ceasefire negotiations if the humanitarian crisis and famine are resolved.
