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The Guardian
3 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
Hamas must accept hostage deal or be ‘annihilated', warns Israeli defence minister – Middle East crisis live
Update: Date: 2025-05-31T08:10:07.000Z Title: Israel threatens Hamas with 'annihilation' as Trump says Gaza ceasefire 'very close' Content: Israel has said Hamas must accept a hostage deal in Gaza or 'be annihilated', as Donald Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement was 'very close'. It comes amid dire conditions on the ground, with the United Nations warning that Gaza's entire population was at risk of famine. Agence-France Presse (AFP) reported that on Friday, defence minister Israel Katz said Hamas must agree to a ceasefire proposal presented by US envoy Steve Witkoff or be destroyed, after the Palestinian militant group said the deal failed to satisfy its demands. However, Hamas said it was still considering the text. 'The Hamas murderers will now be forced to choose: accept the terms of the 'Witkoff deal' for the release of the hostages – or be annihilated,' said Katz. Negotiations to end nearly 20 months of war in Gaza have so far failed to achieve a breakthrough, with Israel resuming operations in March after a short-lived truce. In the US, the Trump told reporters 'they're very close to an agreement on Gaza', adding: 'We'll let you know about it during the day or maybe tomorrow.' Meanwhile, food shortages in Gaza persist, with aid only trickling in after the partial lifting by Israel of a more than two-month blockade. Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), called Gaza 'the hungriest place on Earth'. He said: It's the only defined area – a country or defined territory within a country – where you have the entire population at risk of famine. In other developments: Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha), has described the difficulties faced by the UN in delivering humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip as an 'an operational straitjacket'. Laerke said the mission to deliver aid was 'in an operational straitjacket that makes it one of the most obstructed aid operations not only in the world today, but in recent history'. Once truckloads entered Gaza, they were often 'swarmed by desperate people', he said. Israel will not allow a planned meeting in the Palestinian administrative capital of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, to go ahead, an Israeli official said on Saturday, after media reported that Arab ministers planning to attend had been stopped from coming. The delegation included ministers from Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Palestinian Authority officials said. Israeli airstrikes have struck western Syria, the Israeli military and Syrian state media have said, and reportedly one civilian has been killed in the first such attack on the country in nearly a month. 'A strike from Israeli occupation aircraft targeted sites close to the village of Zama in the Jableh countryside south of Latakia,' state television said. Foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday that Iran considers nuclear weapons 'unacceptable', reiterating the country's longstanding position amid delicate negotiations with the United States. Iran has held five rounds of talks with the US in search of a new nuclear agreement to replace the deal with major powers Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018. The commander of Kurdish forces that control northeast Syria said on Friday that his group is in direct contact with Turkey and that he would be open to improving ties, including by meeting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Middle East Eye
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Daniella Weiss, Israel's ‘settler godmother', has a hotline to Netanyahu - and plans for Gaza
As far back as she can remember, Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss was a Zionist. 'Zionism was the crown of our family talk, our family atmosphere,' the 79-year-old tells Middle East Eye over the phone from her home in Kedumim, a settlement in the northern occupied West Bank. 'God gave me pride that I'm Jewish. Love of our homeland. Love of the Bible. God gave me that unexchangeable trait of optimism.' Weiss, a figurehead for the settler movement, has, in her own words, spent 50 years 'dedicated to building the land of Israel', playing a role in establishing each of the 141 settlements and 224 outposts that dot the landscape of the West Bank, which was occupied by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war. The settlements are illegal under international law. The outposts – settlements established since the 1990s without government approval – are illegal under Israeli law. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Between 1 January 2024 and 31 March 2024, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) recorded 1,804 attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlers, either attacking alone or with the Israeli army, killed 11 Palestinians. Homes were attacked, vehicles burned, water supplies cut off, orchards destroyed and roads blocked. Settlers also attacked aid convoys heading for Gaza. Ocha says that 844 Palestinians were 'displaced due to settler violence and access restrictions'. Last month Weiss came to prominence when she appeared in Louis Theroux's BBC documentary The Settlers, which described her as 'high profile extremist settler leader'. This week she was sanctioned by the UK government for being 'involved in threatening, perpetrating, promoting and supporting, acts of aggression and violence against Palestinian individuals' as part of its harder approach towards Israel's war on Gaza (she spoke to MEE before the announcement). But when Theroux put it to her that settlements are considered war crimes under international law, she laughed. 'It's a light felony.' Once dubbed "the queen of the Knesset cafeteria" because of her regular informal contacts with members of the Israeli parliament, Weiss has returned to prominence during the past few years, and especially since 7 October 2023, as the godmother of a settler movement whose current leaders, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, hold major positions in the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Theroux dubbed her lack of concern for Palestinian lives 'sociopathic': Weiss has said that there is 'no such thing' as settler violence. Experts are divided on Weiss's significance. But all agree that, despite being one of the last of the founding generation of settler leaders left alive, she still has an energy and charisma that help power her activism. 'I didn't sing or act, but when I give lectures, I do some stand-up presentations,' Weiss says. 'That's my nature. When I speak people like to listen because I make it vivid. Daniella Weiss speaks to Louis Theroux for his documentary 'The Settlers' (BBC/Mindhouse) 'I do mobilise all the things that God gave me for enhancing the Zionist dream. And I do by being aware of it. In full awareness.' Hagit Ofran, the director of advocacy group Peace Now's Settlement Watch project, tells MEE that Weiss believes that occupation is good and that she is proud of it. 'She's very articulate and very straightforward about what she believes in, and I think this is why she's famous – because she's clear about her intentions.' Gaza: 'We are the owners of the land' With her allies in government and settlement building accelerating across the West Bank, Weiss says that now is a 'good moment for our movement'. Having spent five decades extending Israeli Jewish presence, she now has her sights set on Gaza. 'The plan has become so famous,' she says. 'People stop me in Tel Aviv and ask me to keep a place for them in Gaza. I tell them to enrol in our long list of 900 families and we will find a good plot for you.' In January 2024, Weiss's organisation, the Nachala Settlement Movement, sponsored a conference, attended by 11 Israeli cabinet ministers and thousands of other public figures, calling for the resettlement of Gaza. The event, entitled 'Conference for the Victory of Israel - Settlement Brings Security,' called for Palestinians to be expelled from the besieged enclave and featured maps of proposed settlement sites. 'It can take a year, it can take three years, but it will happen. It's started' - Daniella Weiss In November 2024, the Israeli military took Weiss into northern Gaza, where she surveyed those possible sites, including the former settlement of Netzarim, despite orders restricting civilian access to the devastated enclave. Netzarim is significant for Weiss and her followers: first settled in 1972, it was the last community to be evacuated under Israel's disengagement from Gaza in August 2005. Just as in the West Bank, Weiss explains, the process of settling Gaza will begin with army positions, then 'envelope communities' of settlers living alongside the army, then finally towns. Weiss is convinced her dream will be realised, but there is resistance to it even from her allies. 'My good neighbour Bezalel Smotrich is doing very good work with the development of Judea and Samaria,' she says, using the Biblical name used by right-wing Israelis to refer to the West Bank. 'I am less satisfied with his support for settlements in Gaza. I would expect of him – and I told him a number of times – to be more vocal and to speak with more emphasis on the immediate need for settling at least the northern part of the Gaza area.' The settler leader is a little more critical of Netanyahu, whose aides Weiss says she can call whenever she likes, saying he is 'a bit slow with it'. She adds: 'I understand he has world pressures and leftist pressures, but the idea is already free in the air.' But the 2.3m Palestinians now living in Gaza – who have survived Israel's war on the enclave, which has killed more than 53,000 - will no longer be there. Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir attends a convention calling for Israel to rebuild settlements in the Gaza Strip, in Jerusalem, 28 January 2024 (Reuters) 'They lost the right to be there on 7 October,' Weiss says, of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel. 'They will find their way to Indonesia, to Africa, to different countries, to the western world. It will take some time, but they lost the right. The massacre changed their history.' Previously, she has said that 'no Arab will remain in Gaza' and that, 'if we don't give them food, they will leave'. In October last year, at a conference that felt more like a festival on Israel's frontier with Gaza, Weiss said that Palestinians will 'disappear' from the territory. Her comments were echoed on that day by Ben Gvir, who told the crowd: 'We are the owners of the land.' Referring to the prospect of Israeli settlements in Gaza, Ofran says: 'It would have been unheard of before 7 October.' 'The history of Zionism is a personal diary' Daniella Weiss was born in 1945 in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv, in Mandatory Palesine. She grew up on a farm in an Orthodox Jewish environment, went to a religious high school and was part of a religious Zionist movement that saw itself as being separate to, and often considered inferior than, the secular Zionism that then dominated Israel's mainstream society and elite circles. Her first memory, she says, was of the Tel Aviv area being shelled by Egyptian forces in May 1948, just days after the creation of the state of Israel. 'My parents put a carpet under the bed and told me to go and lie down there. I was with my little sister. It was exciting. It was an adventure,' she recalls. 'I never felt scared in my life.' Weiss's father was born in the US and her mother came to Palestine from Poland as a one-year-old. They were, Weiss says, 'very smart people', involved firstly in the Zionist paramilitary group Lehi, the Stern Gang, and then, after Israel's creation, the right-wing party Likud. She was one of three daughters. 'We were raised in Sparta,' Weiss says, adding that, even years later, she and her sisters still laugh about it. 'Life was very tough. We were raised with the idea that we should bless God all the time that we are living in an independent Jewish state. That was the atmosphere at home all the time.' Part of this, Weiss says, was a dedication to knowing what was happening in the world – and to Israel. 'We knew that the time of the news – it was usually every hour – was the holy time of every hour and nobody was to say a word while listening to the news. 'This to me is the core of identifying with the cause of the nation… The pride that we have a state of our own was like an ongoing parade in our everyday life. It was like holding your hand on the pulse of the nation.' Israeli forces during the Suez Crisis of 1956 (left) and the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 (right), both of which were formative experiences for Daniella Weiss (AFP) This was particularly true at moments of heightened tension and drama. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Israel, and its allies France and the UK, invaded and briefly held Egyptian-occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Weiss remembers clearly 'how we followed minute by minute the advance of the IDF [Israel Defence Forces]. 'There was so much delight in our power and worry about casualties. For me, the history of Zionism is a personal diary. I remember things so acutely that it's like an open book all the time.' This personal diary went hand in hand with Weiss's love of the Bible. 'I am very much with the women all through the Bible,' she says. 'If you follow it minutely then you see that women decided the fate of the nation, not men. This is why I thank God so much that I'm a woman, not a man.' Weiss's Biblical heroes are Esther, a Jewish queen of Persia who prevents a massacre of her people; Sarah, Abraham's wife; and Deborah, who Weiss 'adopts with both hands in my endless endeavour to prevent any fencing of communities in Judea and Samaria'. The Bible is also where her concept of the Jewish nation comes from. 'The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest,' she says, referring to a Greater Israel that would include not just historic Palestine but parts of many other modern countries in the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Rabin's murder: 'A new era opened up for us' If the Suez Crisis was evocative for the young Weiss, it was the 1967 Middle East war, in which Israel defeated a coalition of Arab armies and occupied the Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza, that proved truly inspirational. After the war, Moshe Levinger, a religious Zionist activist and Orthodox rabbi, helped establish a Jewish presence in the territories Israel had occupied. Levinger, who was charged in 1988 with beating a six-year-old Palestinian boy, and who served 92 days in prison after shooting dead one Palestinian and injuring another that same year, became a mentor to Weiss. Together, they played a key role in the ultra-nationalist movement Gush Emunim - Weiss was later its secretary general - which was committed to settlement building. The movement combined, as Weiss always has, Messianic thinking with pragmatic political institutions aimed at expanding the project. It was also violent. In April 1987, hours after the killing of a Jewish settler and ahead of the First Intifada later that year, Levinger and Weiss spearheaded a wave of brutality in the northern West Bank Palestinian city of Qalqilya, during which settlers attacked homes, vandalised cars and destroyed orchards. After days of settler violence, the Israeli military was brought in to quell the rampage, culminating in what became known in Hebrew as the 'night of bottles'. The Israeli legal rights group Yesh Din said at the time that Weiss 'managed to get away with a fine and a suspended sentence', marking the 'tradition of our courts of being merciful toward hooligan settlers'. Louis Theroux forces Britain to face uncomfortable truth of Israeli settler barbarism Read More » Gershom Gorenberg, author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, told MEE: 'The religious settlement movement is in many ways the hard nationalist right of Israel. Weiss places herself on the radical end of the settlement movement. She was highly critical of the establishment end of the movement for being "too moderate". Subject to criticism from within Gush Emunim over her strident style, Weiss served as mayor of her home settlement, Kedumin, between 1996 and 2007. In 2010, she founded the Nachala Settlement Movement, which has become a vehicle for Weiss to do what Weiss has always done: expand the land of Israel. Today, Weiss is as animated by this goal as she always has been. She has four daughters and is a grandmother. In 2006, her son-in-law Avraham Gavish, at home on leave from an elite army unit, was shot and killed along with his parents by a Palestinian gunman. Weiss's daughter and granddaughter survived the attack by hiding under a table. On the day she spoke to MEE, Weiss had gone to bed at 5am, having stayed up all night to write a 'very serious article' about Gaza and the crucial need for Jewish settlements there. 'I slept for two hours, and since then I've been working, doing political meetings on Zoom. I have spent three hours already this morning on politics. I have my movement, Nachala… I meet my management and the heads of the different committees on Zoom and at the same time I wash the dishes, fold the laundry, speak to my husband and serve him breakfast.' She does all this simultaneously, she says. Though her and her husband Amnon Weiss, a successful businessman and former Israeli Paralympian, who has polio, initially moved to the 'mountains of Samaria' during the 1970s, the family live in what one visitor described as a 'surprisingly bourgeois house' and are clearly wealthy. Weiss's organisations have long attracted donations, and in 2023 it was revealed that Leah Dankner, a millionaire who was then 99, had given almost $2m to Nachala. The settler movement has, more generally, been subsidised and supported by every Israeli government apart from that led by Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Israeli ultranationalist who opposed peace efforts and who had helped found a settlement outpost. Daniella Weiss (left), founder of Nachala, an Israeli settlers organisation, speaks during a conference on the resettlement of the Gaza Strip, in Be'eri, southern Israel in October 2024 (Reuters) Rabin once referred to the West Bank settlement movement as a 'cancer', and was dismissive of settlers' capacity to endure tough conditions in the name of their project. He underestimated them. As soon as Weiss heard about his murder, she says she 'thought history changed, that Rabin's plan of withdrawal from here, from Judea and Samara, came to a stop and a new era opened up for us'. The settler movement has also created headaches for Israel abroad. Alon Pinkas, a prominent Israeli diplomat who served under four Israeli foreign ministers, tells MEE that settlement expansion made it 'very difficult' for him with other governments. 'The West Bank was occupied and you cannot settle an occupied land acquired in a war," according to the Geneva Convention. 'Settlements were illegal according to Israeli law, so how were they defensible? Settlements were justified in Biblical terms, not modern political concepts. That was impossible to argue.' Pinkas also says that the treatment of Palestinians: 'Even if it was short of 'apartheid', was indefensible." Amnon Weiss's breakfast, on the morning of our interview, consists she says of 'omelette, avocado, tomatoes, cheese, roll, coffee, chocolate cake, orange juice'. The couple go to Tel Aviv twice a week to eat good food, meet friends and head for the Mediterranean. This, Weiss says, satisfies her husband's preference for city life, while also ensuring they do not 'turn into field mice'. 'I tell my friends, I serve the Caesar so he will be a little more patient with me,' Weiss says of her husband. 'He wants two contradictory things to happen at the same time: he wants me to succeed very much in my work because he's very idealistic and very Zionistic. But he also wants me to dedicate more time to him.' Weiss spends 'five days and nights every week dedicated to building the land of Israel'. But from Friday evening until Sunday, she observes Shabbat with her family, who all come to her house, sleep over and eat several meals together. 'My children and grandchildren, they laugh at me because I do not let them talk when there is a political analysis on the radio,' she says. 'While we do the cooking and preparing for Shabbat, they have their earphones on, listening to music, and I have my political programmes, and one doesn't touch the other. At the table, they do not have much of a choice. There, I give my speeches and my preaching.' The day after her interview with MEE, Weiss goes to Gaza to once again survey sites for her planned 'envelope communities'. Daniella Weiss holds an Israeli flag during a scouting mission to find hilltops to settle near the Israeli settlement of Kokhav Hashahar, Israeli-occupied West Bank, in November 2022 (Reuters) Ofran, of Peace Now, says: 'I believe her when she says they are ready to go into Gaza. Right now, with this government, she is much more connected and supported. In any Messianic thinking the war is an opportunity, the redemption comes after it. This is where she lives, this is what she believes.' Gorenberg points out that Weiss is 'not representative of a mainstream view in Israel', and that 'Smotrich represents a small, hyper pro-settlement faction that has outsized influence in the government". But he concedes: 'The last thing I would do anywhere in the world today is dismiss extreme movements, particularly those of the right.' For Weiss, the settlement of Gaza seems pre-determined, part of a 'return to Zion' that will end the dispersion of the Jewish people that began after the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE, over 2,500 years ago. 'It will happen,' she tells MEE of her march into Gaza. 'It can take a year, it can take three years, but it will happen. It's started.'
Saudi Gazette
22-05-2025
- Health
- Saudi Gazette
Gazans fear shutdown of water plants as Israel widens offensive
JERUSALEM — Chronic shortages of water in Gaza are worsening as Israel's expanding military offensive causes new waves of displacement - and desalination and hygiene plants are running out of fuel. The UN's humanitarian office has said its partners are warning that, without immediate fuel deliveries, a full shutdown of water and sanitation facilities is possible by the end of the week. Days after Israel imposed its blockade on aid in early March - which is only now being eased - it also cut off power lines to the main desalination plants - a vital source of water for Gazans. It said these steps were to put pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages it is holding. Although Israel has said it will now permit the entry of basic supplies into Gaza, so far this has not included fuel. However, some drinking water was loaded on the dozens of UN lorries that have entered the strip - with supplies not yet distributed. Parents have told the BBC that during 19 months of war, their children have grown used to drinking salty water - with doctors saying they have seen a rise in serious kidney complaints as a result. "Often the water turns out to be half sweet [fresh], half salty," said Raed al-Zaharneh, a father-of-four in Khan Younis who, like most Gazans, now relies on water delivered on lorries. "We know it is undrinkable water, and we still drink it," he went on. "We've had stomach pain and diarrhoea, but we put up with it. What do we do? We need to drink. There's no alternative." Earlier this month, there was still a loud whirring sound at a desalination plant in southern Gaza as Jonathan Crickx of Unicef visited. He said that production at the site had been reduced by 80% after electricity was recently cut off. However, it was still producing thousands of litres per day. "The problem is that to produce water we now need fuel," Mr Crickx said. "And afterwards we need to truck the water to the different communities." "This is a difficult process as we have less and less fuel, not only to produce the water but to run the trucks." While some lorries as well as donkey carts have continued to distribute water in recent days, the ramping up of Israel's military offensive and new waves of displacement - affecting some 140,000 people in the north and south of the strip - have made this even more challenging. The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) says that water and sanitation services have already been severely disrupted by ongoing fuel shortages. In northern Gaza, no fuel is currently available and only half the needed supply was received last week, Ocha says. This has meant the operating hours for water wells have been further reduced with complete shutdowns expected. In southern Gaza, Ocha says that UN water utilities have not received any fuel, although 140,000 liters of fuel per week are needed to keep them going. This has led to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities reducing their operating hours by more than one fifth. UN workers have said they try daily to retrieve fuel from reserves in areas where they are required to co-ordinate with the Israeli authorities, such as Rafah - which has been a main focus of military operations. However, these continue to be denied. No new fuel has been allowed into Gaza since Israel imposed its full blockade on 2 March. A kidney specialist at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Dr Ghazi al-Yazji, told the BBC he was seeing more patients with new infections and conditions caused by contaminated water and drinking water with high salinity. "We don't have precise figures, but the cases are noticeably higher among children," he said. Even before the war, shortages of water and the poor quality of supplies in Gaza contributed to relatively high numbers of patients with serious kidney complaints. Dr al-Yazji says his department has 220 patients requiring kidney dialysis and that they have been disproportionately affected by the worsening water problems. Several, he said, had recently died. — BBC
Telegraph
12-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Development experts mull cash transfers amid shrinking aid budgets
As aid budgets are slashed across the world, some experts believe that big savings could be made by transferring cash directly to those in need, rather than going through charities and NGOs. Tom Fletcher, the Secretary General of the United Nations coordinating body (Ocha), has put cash programming at the heart of his vision to reform the aid system. He recently said that a shift towards cash would 'enabl[e] the responsible transition out of areas of work that we can no longer sustain'. But are cash transfers – where money is sent directly to those affected via mobile phone – really the answer to saving more lives? The idea is simple enough: send donor money directly to those in need and you will save millions by cutting out the aid worker middle man. Better still, the money will be better spent because recipients are best placed to understand their own needs. But what's the reality? Cash transfers have long been experimented with by the aid community and they have shown mixed results. There is solid evidence that cash transfers can be an efficient and effective way to distribute emergency aid. Cash transfers can also remove the need to expose aid workers to dangerous environments. Last year was the deadliest year on record for humanitarian personnel, with at least 334 aid workers killed in 2024, according to the UN. Cash transfers are even being used to mitigate climate disasters. In Nigeria, cash is remotely sent to vulnerable communities ahead of the flood season, enabling them to take preemptive measures like early harvesting, stockpiling food and moving livestock. The Calp network – a group of global organisations focussed on humanitarian cash and voucher assistance – accepts that cash programming is not always feasible. Cash transfers only work if there is a functioning market. Pumping money into an area with a critical shortage of food and water will not help. As Danny Sriskandarajah, former head of Oxfam GB, puts it: 'The financial side of development is only ever part of the problem.' In Gaza, for example, Israel's aid blockage has sparked rampant inflation – a $100 cash transfer designed to sustain a family for a few weeks would now only buy a single bag of flour. 'The challenge with the cash led model is that if it's not supported by effective investments in civic institutions and public bodies, then you're not necessarily going to get the transformation that we're all after,' added Mr Sriskandarajah. For instance, Ukraine recently saw the largest and fastest cash programming scale-up in history: more than $1.8 billion of cash and voucher assistance was rolled out in the first three months of the war. It was possible because aid agencies piggybacked on existing government systems to reach the most vulnerable. But in places like Sudan, where the civil war has decimated social order in many regions, those systems no longer exist. Moreover, cash transfers rely heavily on digital communication. Global digital coverage now stands at around 92 per cent but some 2.6 billion people – a third of the world's population – still do not have internet access. There is also a serious risk of cash transfers being stolen or diverted. In many countries across West Africa, such as Chad and Burkina Faso, national governments are highly sceptical about cash programming for fear it could end up fuelling crime, including kidnappings and weapons purchases. 'We have to be honest and say there's never a context where there isn't a risk of loss and diversion. Particularly in these complicated conflict economies, cash will end up in the wrong hands,' said Cate Turton, director of the Calp network. 'It's not a magic solution. But it's the best solution we've got for reaching really vulnerable people in difficult places and empowering them to make sensible choices.' As rapidly shrinking aid budgets force agencies to slim down, some are calling for the use of direct cash payments to be stepped up. They see cash as a way to make limited funds go further, but are they right? This isn't the first time that there have been calls for cash transfers to be made greater use of. In 2016, the Grand Bargain – an agreement between humanitarian organisations and donors to make the delivery of aid more efficient – included a commitment to increase cash programming. By 2022, the volume of humanitarian cash assistance doubled from 10 per cent to about 20 per cent. However, it has since flatlined. Experts believe that, had momentum continued, cash assistance could easily make up 30 to 50 per cent of aid today. Rory Stewart, former UK Secretary of State for International Development, said that now is the time to put cash back on the table. 'During the era of ever-expanding aid budgets, everyone could keep doing what they were doing, even if it wasn't working, sprinkling in more cost-effective aid at the margins,' he told The Telegraph. 'The Grand Bargain made all the right noises, but vested interests prevailed. Now that funding's been slashed, there is no longer room for anything less than the most impactful aid.' Mr Stewart is a senior adviser to Give Directly, an American NGO specialising in cash transfers. It is one of the agencies spearheading cash transfers in crisis zones. In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where over 500,000 people have been recently displaced by violent fighting, GiveDirectly was able to tap into existing and common mobile infrastructure to reach the most vulnerable. It used cell tower data and satellite-enabled remote targeting to identify and wire cash to displaced families on the run, allowing them to meet their immediate needs such as food, water, and shelter, without sending aid workers into a volatile environment. 'The uncomfortable truth is that much of traditional aid delivery has been driven by institutions trying to justify their own existence – hiring more staff to run more complex programmes,' said Mr Stewart. 'Cash challenges that model. It asks: why not just trust people? If budgets are shrinking, we must focus on the most efficient, effective, and dignified forms of assistance. Cash is all three.' But it is not all plain sailing. In 2023, GiveDirectly reported that the group's own staff on the ground stole at least $900,000 over six months from one of its projects in the DRC. Ultimately, however, it's not the technology which will determine the success or otherwise of cash transfer systems. Even if they become universally accepted as the most effective way to distribute aid, they will not function without cash to feed them. The real question the humanitarian system faces is: where will the money come from? 'The fundamental challenge facing the system today is that there's tens of billions being pulled out of aid budgets. Being more efficient isn't going to make up for that,' said Mr Sriskandaraja.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
World must act urgently to help Gazans, top UN officials urge
The heads of six UN agencies have appealed to world leaders to act urgently to make sure food and supplies get to Palestinians in Gaza, where Israel has stopped letting deliveries in. In a joint statement, they said Palestinians are "trapped, bombed and starved again" with supplies "piling up" at crossing points. Israel has blocked the entry of supplies, including humanitarian aid, since 2 March, after the first stage of a ceasefire expired, demanding Hamas agree to extend that part of the truce. Hamas has refused, accusing Israel of reneging on its commitments. Israel says there is still enough food in Gaza "for a long period of time", but the agencies said this was not the case. "The latest ceasefire allowed us to achieve in 60 days what bombs, obstruction and lootings prevented us from doing in 470 days of war: life-saving supplies reaching nearly every part of Gaza," the statement says. "While this offered a short respite, assertions that there is now enough food to feed all Palestinians in Gaza are far from the reality on the ground, and commodities are running extremely low. The statement was signed by the heads of the UN's office for humanitarian affairs Ocha; the UN's children's agency Unicef; UN's project management service Unops; the World Food Programme (WFP) agency; and the World Health Organization (WHO). Because of the blockade all UN-supported bakeries have closed, markets are empty of most fresh vegetables and hospitals are rationing painkillers and antibiotics. The statement says that Gaza's "partially functional health system is overwhelmed [and]... Essential medical and trauma supplies are rapidly running out." "With the tightened Israeli blockade on Gaza now in its second month, we appeal to world leaders to act – firmly, urgently and decisively – to ensure the basic principles of international humanitarian law are upheld. "Protect civilians. Facilitate aid. Release hostages. Renew a ceasefire." The two-month pause in fighting saw a surge in humanitarian aid let into Gaza, as well as the release by Hamas of 33 hostages were released - eight of them dead - in exchange for about 1,900 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Israel renewed its aerial bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza on 18 March. The war was triggered by Hamas's unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. More than 50,752 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive since then, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.
