Latest news with #humanitariancrisis
The Sun
7 hours ago
- Health
- The Sun
At least 19 trampled to death and one stabbed as Hamas ‘agitators' spark deadly crowd crush at Gaza aid site
TWENTY people desperate to get food have been killed "amid a chaotic and dangerous surge" at an aid distribution site in southern Gaza. Nineteen were trampled to death with one person stabbed in the "tragic accident," the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) said. 2 The GHF said it believed the harrowing surge was "driven by agitators in the crowd" who were affiliated to Hamas. Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis said it had received 10 bodies who had died due to "suffocation" after an aid site was shut by the GHF's US private security contractors. The GHF added: "We have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd - armed and affiliated with Hamas - deliberately fomented the unrest". A medical source at Nasser Hospital said the victims were "heading to the aid distribution centre in northwest Rafah to receive food aid" but the main gate to the centre had been closed. The GHF started its operations on May 26 after Israel had halted supplies into the Gaza Strip for more than two months, sparking warnings of imminent famine. On Tuesday, the UN said it had recorded 875 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food, including 674 "in the vicinity of GHF sites", since the end of May. Last week, UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said that "most of the injuries are gunshot injuries". The GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points and the Israeli army has accused Hamas of being responsible for firing at civilians. The GHF said on Wednesday: "For the first time since operations began, GHF personnel identified multiple firearms in the crowd, one of which was confiscated. "An American worker was also threatened with a firearm by a member of the crowd during the incident." It added that it was part of a "deeply troubling pattern", including "false messages" about aid site openings. .
Yahoo
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.) Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me. The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5, are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them. They were stored in a Dubai warehouse and intended to go to the children this year. Since January, when the Trump administration issued an executive order that halted virtually all American foreign assistance, federal workers have sent the new political leaders of USAID repeated requests to ship the biscuits while they were useful, according to the two USAID employees. USAID bought the biscuits intending to have the World Food Programme distribute them, and under previous circumstances, career staff could have handed off the biscuits to the United Nations agency on their own. But since Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency disbanded USAID and the State Department subsumed the agency, no money or aid items can move without the approval of the new heads of American foreign assistance, several current and former USAID employees told me. From January to mid-April, the responsibility rested with Pete Marocco, who worked across multiple agencies during the first Trump administration; then it passed to Jeremy Lewin, a law-school graduate in his 20s who was originally installed by DOGE and now has appointments at both USAID and State. Two of the USAID employees told me that staffers who sent the memos requesting approval to move the food never got a response and did not know whether Marocco or Lewin ever received them. (The State Department did not answer my questions about why the food was never distributed.) In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told representatives on the House Appropriations Committee that he would ensure that food aid would reach its intended recipients before spoiling. But by then, the order to incinerate the biscuits (which I later reviewed) had already been sent. Rubio has insisted that the administration embraces America's responsibility to continue saving foreign lives, including through food aid. But in April, according to NPR, the U.S. government eliminated all humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen, where, the State Department said at the time, providing food risks benefiting terrorists. (The State Department has offered no similar justification for pulling aid to Pakistan.) Even if the administration was unwilling to send the biscuits to the originally intended countries, other places—Sudan, say, where war is fueling the world's worst famine in decades—could have benefited. Instead, the biscuits in the Dubai warehouse continue to approach their expiration date, after which their vitamin and fat content will begin to deteriorate rapidly. At this point, United Arab Emirates policy prevents the biscuits from even being repurposed as animal feed. Over the coming weeks, the food will be destroyed at a cost of $130,000 to American taxpayers (on top of the $800,000 used to purchase the biscuits), according to current and former federal aid workers I spoke with. One current USAID staffer told me he'd never seen anywhere near this many biscuits trashed over his decades working in American foreign aid. Sometimes food isn't stored properly in warehouses, or a flood or a terrorist group complicates deliveries; that might result in, at most, a few dozen tons of fortified foods being lost in a given year. But several of the aid workers I spoke with reiterated that they have never before seen the U.S. government simply give up on food that could have been put to good use. The emergency biscuits slated for destruction represent only a small fraction of America's typical annual investment in food aid. In fiscal year 2023, USAID purchased more than 1 million metric tons of food from U.S. producers. But the collapse of American foreign aid raises the stakes of every loss. Typically, the biscuits are the first thing that World Food Programme workers hand to Afghan families who are being forced out of Pakistan and back to their home country, which has been plagued by severe child malnutrition for years. Now the WFP can support only one of every 10 Afghans who are in urgent need of food assistance. The WFP projects that, globally, 58 million people are at risk for extreme hunger or starvation because this year, it lacks the money to feed them. Based on calculations from one of the current USAID employees I spoke with, the food marked for destruction could have met the nutritional needs of every child facing acute food insecurity in Gaza for a week. Despite the administration's repeated promises to continue food aid, and Rubio's testimony that he would not allow existing food to go to waste, even more food could soon expire. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of emergency food pastes, also already purchased, are currently collecting dust in American warehouses. According to USAID inventory lists from January, more than 60,000 metric tons of food—much of it grown in America, and all already purchased by the U.S. government—were then sitting in warehouses across the world. That included 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal, which were stored in Djibouti and intended for distribution in Sudan and other countries in the Horn of Africa. A former senior official at USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance told me that, by the time she'd left her job earlier this month, very little of the food seemed to have moved; one of the current USAID employees I spoke with confirmed her impression, though he noted that, in recent weeks, small shipments have begun leaving the Djibouti warehouse. [Read: 'In three months, half of them will be dead'] Such operations are more difficult for USAID to manage today than they were last year because many of the humanitarian workers and supply-chain experts who once coordinated the movement of American-grown food to hungry people around the world no longer have their jobs. Last month, the CEOs of the two American companies that make another kind of emergency food for malnourished children both told The New York Times that the government seemed unsure of how to ship the food it had already purchased. Nor, they told me, have they received any new orders. (A State Department spokesperson told me that the department had recently approved additional purchases, but both CEOs told me they have yet to receive the orders. The State Department has not responded to further questions about these purchases.) But even if the Trump administration decides tomorrow to buy more food aid—or simply distribute what the government already owns while the food is still useful—it may no longer have the capacity to make sure anyone receives it. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Al Arabiya
21 hours ago
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
EU weighs options to pressure Israel over Gaza but remains divided
In this episode of W News Extra, presented by Jono Hayes, we report on EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas saying the bloc is keeping the door open to possible action against Israel over the war in Gaza, if the humanitarian crisis worsens. Kallas has outlined 10 potential measures after Israel was found to have breached its human rights commitments under a cooperation agreement. Options include suspending the deal, limiting trade, imposing sanctions on ministers, an arms embargo, or halting visa-free travel. But despite rising anger over Gaza, EU countries remain divided, and no action was agreed at a meeting in Brussels.
UAE Moments
a day ago
- Politics
- UAE Moments
Here is Israel's Proposed Concentration Camp in Rafah
A controversial proposal by Israel's defense leadership has sparked international alarm and widespread condemnation, as it outlines a plan to relocate more than two million Palestinians to a designated area in Rafah, Gaza. Critics are calling it a blueprint for a modern-day concentration camp. What the Plan Proposes Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant recently revealed that an initial 600,000 Palestinians from the coastal al-Mawasi region would be transferred to southern Rafah within 60 days of a ceasefire agreement. This would mark the beginning phase of a broader operation that would eventually relocate Gaza's entire population, over two million people, into the southern city. While Gallant claims that the Israeli army will not administer the plan, he offered no clarity on which international organizations would manage this massive displacement. The absence of operational details has only fueled scepticism and fear among humanitarian groups and observers worldwide. A 'Humanitarian Transit Area' or a Concentration Camp? A proposal seen by Reuters contains details of a so-called 'Humanitarian Transit Area' (HTA), reportedly affiliated with the US-backed Global Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The HTA is described as a site where Gaza residents will "temporarily reside, deradicalise, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so." This language has raised red flags among human rights organizations. Critics argue that terms like 'deradicalise' and 'prepare to relocate' mirror tactics historically used in forced detention and ethnic cleansing programs. The plan bears disturbing similarities to systems of confinement and control, prompting some to refer to it as a "concentration camp" in all but name. Rapid Destruction in Rafah An Al Jazeera investigation uncovered that 12,800 buildings were destroyed between April and July 2025 alone. This surge in demolitions coincides with Israel's renewed offensive into Rafah launched in late March, further supporting the view that these clearances are part of a strategic operation to reshape Gaza's landscape in alignment with the new displacement plan. The proposal has yet to be formally adopted, but its existence signals a deeply troubling shift in Israel's approach to Gaza's population. Israeli journalist and author, Gideon Levy, told Al Jazeera, "It is very clear that the intention is more criminal than it seems from the outside because it is not only about concentrating those people – 600,000 – on a very small piece of land. The idea is to finally force those people to leave the enclave." Levy revealed that the plan has drawn condemnation from some Israeli politicians, but their opposition is unlikely to have any impact on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the plan is approved.
Associated Press
a day ago
- Health
- Associated Press
MSF accuses Ethiopian soldiers of 'targeted killing' of 3 staffers in Tigray in 2021
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — International aid organization Doctors Without Borders on Tuesday released a report describing the gunning-down of three staffers in Ethiopia's Tigray region four years ago as an 'intentional and targeted killing' by members of Ethiopia's military. María Hernández Matas, a 35-year-old Spanish doctor, local colleague Yohannes Haleform Reda and driver Tedros Gebremariam were shot dead in June 2021, forcing the medical charity also known by its French acronym, MSF, to stop its services in Tigray despite conflict there. The two years of fighting that ended in late 2022 between Tigrayans and the federal government and its allies left an estimated hundreds of thousands of people dead and an unknown number of others wounded. The new MSF report accuses the Ethiopian federal government of not following through on its promise to investigate and release its findings despite pressure from the families of the deceased and the humanitarian organization. 'And we know that our colleagues were not killed by mistake, or in a crossfire situation. There was no active fighting at that time. They were fully identifiable as humanitarian workers and were shot several times at close range while facing their attackers,' Paula Gil Leyva, president of MSF Spain, told The Associated Press. The report says Ethiopian troops were on the road where the MSF staffers were killed, and some civilian witnesses overheard a radio exchange between a commander and his troops as he gave an order to shoot. 'Our teams had been suffering hostility and aggressions by the (Ethiopian National Defense Force) ground troops, the (Eritrean Defense Force) troops and their allied militia for weeks before the killings,' Leyva said. Ethiopia's government has not commented on the new report and did not immediately reply to questions from the AP.
