US group distributing aid in Gaza reopens sites after deadly shootings
The organisation halted distributions on Wednesday and said it was pressing Israeli forces to improve civilian safety beyond the perimeter of its operations after dozens of Palestinians were shot dead near the Rafah site over three consecutive days.
The Israeli military said on Sunday and Monday its soldiers had fired warning shots, while on Tuesday they also fired warning shots before firing towards Palestinians it said were advancing towards troops. The GHF has said aid was safely handed out from its sites without any incident. The US organisation, which uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid to its distribution points inside Gaza, from where it is collected, said that it has so far distributed 8.4-million meals.
The UN and international humanitarian groups refuse to work with the GHF because they said aid distribution is essentially controlled by Israel's military and forces the displacement of Palestinians by limiting distribution points to a few venues in central and southern Gaza.
Footage released by the GHF this week showed hundreds of Palestinians crowding its site in Rafah, collecting aid from piles of stacked boxes without any clear system of distribution. Muslims around the world will begin celebrating Eid al Adha from Thursday, a holiday typically marked by slaughtering livestock, but in Gaza food is scarce after nearly two years of war and Israeli siege.
Israeli opposition lawmaker Avigdor Lieberman accused the government on Thursday of arming Palestinian militia perceived to be hostile to Hamas in Gaza.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Israel was acting 'in various ways' on the recommendation of the security establishment. It did not deny Lieberman's accusation. Israeli media reported Israel had transferred weapons to Yasser Abu Shabab, a leader of a large clan in the Rafah area, which is under full Israeli army control.
Abu Shabab previously said he was building up a force to secure aid deliveries into some parts of Gaza.
Hamas security officials told Reuters Abu Shabab was wanted for 'collaborating with the occupation against his people'. They said Hamas forces had killed at least two dozen of his men before January in what they said were clashes with looters.
Israel has long accused Hamas of stealing aid, which the group denied. On Wednesday, a Palestinian transport company contracted by UN agencies suspended operations indefinitely after an armed gang intercepted its aid trucks in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, killing one driver and injuring another.
The war in Gaza has raged since Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people in Israel in the October 2023 attack and took 251 hostages back to the enclave, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel responded with a military campaign that has killed over 54,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.
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eNCA
15 hours ago
- eNCA
France opens 'complicity in genocide' probes over blocked Gaza aid
PARIS - French anti-terror prosecutors have opened probes into "complicity in genocide" and "incitement to genocide" after French-Israelis allegedly blocked aid intended for war-torn Gaza last year, they said on Friday. The two investigations, opened after legal complaints, were also to look into possible "complicity in crimes against humanity" between January and May 2024, the anti-terror prosecutor's office (PNAT) said. They are the first known probes in France to be looking into alleged violations of international law in Gaza, several sources with knowledge of the cases told AFP. In a separate case made public on the same day, the grandmother of two children with French nationality who were killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza has filed a legal complaint in Paris, accusing Israel of "genocide" and "murder", her lawyer said. The French judiciary has jurisdiction when French citizens are involved in such cases. Rights groups, lawyers and some Israeli historians have described the Gaza war as "genocide". Israel, created in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews during World War II, vehemently rejects the accusation. The French probes were opened after two separate legal complaints. In the first, the Jewish French Union for Peace (UFJP) and a French-Palestinian victim filed a complaint in November targeting alleged French members of hardline pro-Israel groups "Israel is forever" and "Tzav-9". It accused them of "physically" preventing the passage of trucks at border checkpoints controlled by the Israeli army. Lawyers for the plaintiffs, Damia Taharraoui and Marion Lafouge, told AFP they were happy a probe had been launched into the events in January 2024 -- "a time when no-one wanted to hear anything about genocide". A source close to the case said prosecutors last month urged the investigation in relation to events at the Nitzana crossing point between Egypt and Israel, and the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel into Gaza. Around that time, hardline Israeli protesters -- including friends and relatives of hostages held in Gaza -- blocked aid lorries from entering the occupied Palestinian territory and forced them to turn back at Kerem Shalom. A second complaint from a group called the Lawyers for Justice in the Middle East (CAPJO) accused members of "Israel is forever" of having blocked aid trucks. It used photos, videos and public statements to back up its complaint. - 'Genocide' complaint - No court has so far concluded that the ongoing conflict is a genocide. But in rulings in January, March and May 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations' highest judicial organ, told Israel to do everything possible to "prevent" acts of genocide during its military operations in Gaza, including through allowing in urgently needed aid. In the separate case, Jacqueline Rivault, the grandmother of six- and nine-year-old children killed in an Israeli strike, filed her complaint accusing Israel of "genocide" and "murder" with the crimes against humanity section of the Court of Paris, lawyer Arie Alimi said. Though formally against unnamed parties, the complaint explicitly targets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government and the military. The complaint states that an Israeli missile strike killed Janna, six, and Abderrahim Abudaher, nine, in northern Gaza on 24 October, 2023. "We believe these children are dead as part of a deliberate organised policy targeting the whole of Gaza's population with a possible genocidal intent," Alimi said. The children's brother Omar, now five, was severely wounded but still lives in Gaza with their mother, identified as Yasmine Z., the complaint said. A French court in 2019 convicted Yasmine Z. in absentia of having funded a "terrorist" group over giving money in Gaza to members of Palestinian militant groups Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. - Famine warnings - Israel said last month it was easing the complete blockade of Gaza it imposed on 2 March but on 30 May the United Nations said the territory's entire population of more than two million people remained at risk of famine. AFP | - A US-backed aid group last week began distributions but reports that the Israeli military shot dead dozens of Palestinians trying to collect food has sparked widespread condemnation. The UN and major aid organisations have refused to cooperate with the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund, citing concerns that it was designed to cater to Israeli military objectives. Hamas fighters launched an attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. A total of 1,218 people died, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. The militants abducted 251 hostages, 55 of whom remain in Gaza, including 32 the Israeli military says are dead. Israel's retaliatory war on Hamas-run Gaza has killed 54,677 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry there, figures the United Nations deems reliable. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. It also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif over similar allegations linked to the 7 October attack but the case against him was dropped in February after confirmation Israel had killed him. By Julia Pavesi, Guillaume Daudin And Alice Hackman
Daily Maverick
16 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Waving wads of cash as inducement to sell homes and heritage in the Bo-Kaap
I spent a brief period of my early teenage life in District Six. This was during the early 1970s, when District Six was on the verge of complete destruction, and when its denizens were being moved, more rapidly, to places like Hanover Park or Retreat. It was on the Cape Flats where family members and community friends were moved to, by various means of coercion and consent. In the Bo-Kaap, where I attended school – I walked all the way from Albert Street in District Six, through the Gardens to Vista High School – we spent many hours on the street corners and in the mosque on Upper Chiappini Street, which was built in the mid-1800s. Whereas much of District Six was demolished by the time of South Africa's first democratic election, political economic apartheid's rampaging policies directed at places like the Bo-Kaap were replaced, seamlessly, by straight-up economic apartheid. It is a lot like the way that a place like Camps Bay was secured for white people (politically), and after apartheid it was secured for moneyed people. Very few black people had the money to own properties in Camps Bay, or anywhere along the Atlantic Seaboard, for that matter. The Bo-Kaap, or Malay Quarter, has a rich cultural heritage which is being eroded by inducements, promises of cash, by gentrification driven by estate agents. I guess if you wave wads of cash at relatively poor people, they would sell their homes, and in the case of the Bo-Kaap, their cultural heritage. We cannot possibly expect estate agents to understand the loss of cultural heritage of Malays and Muslims in the Bo-Kaap. One of the problems is that the provincial government, and local politicians, seem quite uninterested in preserving heritage that is not Eurocentric or Western. Osman Shabodien, chairperson of the Bo-Kaap Ratepayers Association, has responded to the pernicious propaganda that foregrounds profit-making and painting the area white based on spurious (convenient) claims that the Bo-Kaap should not become a corner of cultural exclusivity. 'For decades, Bo-Kaap has been multicultural and we haven't had any problems,' Shabodien has said. 'Many of us attended the St Paul's Parish school, the St Monica's Maternity Hospital was donated by the church – there've been Muslim, Christian and Hindus staying in the area for all the years… Gentrification doesn't have colour, it has money and attitude that doesn't tolerate other people's cultures.' It is a combination of profiteering and intolerance of 'others' that is driving the political economic erasure of the Bo-Kaap as a heritage site by private enterprise under the protection of the state. This is not dissimilar to the pact between the state and criminal organisations in Sicily, which I have written about before. The Bo-Kaap, and the City Bowl, is home to the oldest mosques in the country and, well, the rampant Islamophobia, and notions of exceptionalism (and indeed of exclusivity) is precisely what is driving the city of Cape Town towards an Airbnb paradise and luxurious residences for whites, very many of whom would prefer the city to be the capital of an independent Cape, as my old colleague Mondli Makhanya has suggested in City Press. Bo-Kaap is in the way of white exclusivity and exceptionalism Erasure of the Bo-Kaap is part of this grand project. Worse still, is that since the departure of Thabo Mbeki – a high point of whose presidency was what should have been an epoch-defining I am an African speech – there has been a type of double movement; whites have become emboldened to the extent that they (settlers of European colonialism) are claiming indigeneity, and at the same time ethno-centrism of a particular kind has laid down the law, in a manner of speaking, that nobody is sufficiently African unless 'pure Africans' say so. The latter is what Julius Malema and the post-Mbeki ANC bequeathed the country. Stuck in the middle, as it were, are the coloured or mixed-race people, many of whom were born and raised and continue to live in the Bo-Kaap. For rapacious estate agents, the Bo-Kaap is in the way of profit-making, and for the Western Cape government, the Bo-Kaap is in the way of a white dominance in the Cape. They have, of course, added colour with people who share their notions of (white/European/anti-African) purity and exceptionalism. It's the same old story of European conquest and domination; co-opt a few natives and you have a veneer of legitimacy… and you feel good about yourself. These days, when I go to the Bo-Kaap, I see a hollowing-out of spaces, interspersed by gentrification. This gentrification has resulted in displacement and is ' pro tanto unjust in virtue of instantiating a distinctive nexus of domination between state actors, private landlords, and gentrifying residents', as Daniel Putnam of Dartmouth University wrote in 'Gentrification and Domination', research published in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 2020. Putnam cited, appropriately, the British sociologist Ruth Glass, who explained that once the 'process of 'gentrification' starts in a district… it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupants are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed'. I always find it amusing that some of our compatriots travel to places like Türkiye, and admire the beauty of places like the Suleymaniye Mosque, but they don't want to live anywhere where they can hear the athaan – the Muslim call to prayer, which the Democratic Alliance government of the province has, in one instance, considered to be a noise nuisance. So…. you send in the estate agents to wave wads of cash, the bureaucrats approve construction, and the politicians drive the political economic (including social) agenda to remove non-whites and Muslims out of the City Bowl, and (probably) dump them in places not unlike Hanover Park and Mitchells Plan. When all is said and done, they will have established the racial grounds for secession of the Cape …. it's not beyond the imagination. We should probably enjoy the colour and vibrancy of the Bo-Kaap while it lasts – before it becomes a whites-only space, and we're back to the era when my family and friends were driven from the City Bowl to the Cape Flats. Only this time, it's not political policy, but economic practice. DM
The Citizen
17 hours ago
- The Citizen
French grandmother files ‘genocide' complaint over Gaza killings
France's crimes against humanity court receives a complaint over an Israeli strike that killed two French-Palestinian children in Gaza. The grandmother of two children with French nationality killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza has filed a legal complaint in Paris, accusing Israel of 'genocide' and 'murder', her lawyer said Friday. Jacqueline Rivault filed her complaint with the 'crimes against humanity' section of the Court of Paris, lawyer Arie Alimi said. Rivault hopes the fact her daughter's children, aged six and nine, were French citizens means the country's judiciary will decide it has jurisdiction to designate a magistrate to investigate the allegations. Rights groups, lawyers and some Israeli historians have described the Gaza war as 'genocide'. But Israel, created in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews during World War II, vehemently rejects the explosive term. The complaint states that 'two F16 missiles fired by the Israeli army' killed Janna, six, and Abderrahim Abudaher, nine, in northern Gaza on October 24, 2023. They and their family had sought refuge in another home 'between Faluja and Beit Lahia' after leaving their own two days earlier due to heavy bombardment, the 48-page document stated. ALSO READ: WATCH: 'ICJ case never came up' in meeting with Trump, says Ramaphosa One missile entered 'through the roof and the second directly into the room where the family was', it said. Abderrahim was killed instantly, while his sister Janna died shortly after being taken to hospital. The complaint argues the 'genocide' allegation is based on the air strike being part of a larger Israeli project to 'eliminate the Palestinian population and submit it to living conditions of a nature to entail the destruction of their group'. Though formally against unnamed parties, the complaint explicitly targets Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government and the military. Mother convicted The children's brother Omar was severely wounded but still lives in Gaza with their mother, identified as Yasmine Z., the complaint said. A French court in 2019 convicted Yasmine Z. in absentia of having funded a 'terrorist' group over distributing money in Gaza to members of Palestinian militant groups Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Hamas's unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. ALSO READ: Gazan twin brothers' Cannes film mourns a Gaza lost to war Militants abducted 251 hostages, 55 of whom remain in Gaza, including 32 the Israeli military says are dead. Israel's retaliatory offensive in Hamas-run Gaza has killed 54,677 people, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry there, figures the United Nations deems reliable. No court has so far ruled the ongoing conflict is a genocide. But in rulings in January, March and May 2024, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations' highest judicial organ, told Israel to do everything possible to 'prevent' acts of genocide during its military operations in Gaza. The International Criminal Court has issued arrests against Netanyahu and ex-defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif over allegations of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the October 7 attack, but the case against him was dropped in February after confirmation Israel had killed him. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan initially sought warrants against Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh as well, but dropped those applications after their deaths in Israeli attacks. NOW READ: Israel launches expanded Gaza offensive aimed at defeating Hamas – By: © Agence France-Presse
