Baby twins killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza as father registered births

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 14 August 2024

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GAZA - An Israeli military strike in Gaza killed a set of newborn twins along with their mother and grandmother just as the father was registering their birth at a local government office.

Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan was getting birth registration certificates made for the twins – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – when his neighbours called to inform him that his house in Deir al Balah had been bombed by the Israelis.

The family had reportedly evacuated to a “safer area” as instructed by the Israelis.

“I don’t know what happened,” Mr Abu al-Qumsan said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”

“I didn’t even have the time to celebrate them.”

The Independent has reached out to the Israeli military for comment.

Since the start of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, more than 7,000 children have been killed in airstrikes, artillery and mortar fire.

Israeli forces launched an air and ground war on the territory last October and killed nearly 39,790 Palestinians, 16,400 of them children, over the past 10 months, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The Israelis launched the offensive after Hamas raided southern Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people.

Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had her twin babies delivered by Caesarean section four days earlier and shared the news on Facebook. She described the twins as a “miracle” in her post.

“I went to get my children’s birth certificates. My wife gave birth days ago and I did not have the opportunity to celebrate their birth. She had a c-section and she was very tired. She was unable to leave the house,” the father told Al Jazeera.

The twins and their mother were buried in the same body bag.

In videos posted on social media, the father is shown kneeling beside the shrouded bodies of his family, leading the funeral prayers.

Meanwhile, the US has approved $20bn in arms sales to Israel despite pressure from activists and human rights groups.

According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the Israeli war has displaced at least 1.9 million people in Gaza and left the entire population of over 2.2 million at the risk of famine and disease.

“The footage the world sees on television gives an important peek into the living hell people are enduring for over 10 months. What it does not fully show is how behind the crumbled buildings – whole neighbourhoods, livelihoods and dreams have been levelled to the ground,” Salim Oweis, a communications officer for another UN agency, Unicef, said last week.

“When you see an image of a displaced mother carrying her child and all their possessions on her back, you do not see hundreds of uprooted people following her up the road? The life of a child in Gaza, in month ten of this conflict, is not a life. We cannot say it enough. There’s no safe place and everything is running out – food, water, fuel, medicines. Everything.”

Israel keeps up strikes in Gaza as fears of wider war grow

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 12 August 2024

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By Nidal Al-Mughrabi

CAIRO - Israeli forces pressed on with their operations near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on Monday amid an international push for a deal to halt the fighting in Gaza and block a slide into a wider regional conflict with Iran and its proxies.

Palestinian medics said Israeli military strikes on several areas of Khan Younis on Monday killed at least 16 people and wounded several. Meanwhile more families and displaced persons streamed out of areas threatened by new evacuation orders telling people to clear the area.

As fighting continued in several areas of the Gaza Strip, Hamas reacted sceptically to the latest round of Egyptian and Qatari-brokered talks due on Thursday, saying it has seen no sign of movement from the Israeli side.

The group said in a statement on Sunday mediators must force Israel to accept a ceasefire proposal based on ideas by U.S. President Joe Biden, which Hamas had accepted, "instead of pursuing further rounds of negotiations or new proposals that would provide cover for the occupation's aggression."

Two sources close to Hamas told Reuters the group was convinced the new call for talks was coordinated beforehand with Israel to deter responses from Iran and Hezbollah to the assassination of the group's chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and a top Hezbollah leader in Lebanon.

"It is a mild rejection you can say. Should Hamas receive a workable plan, an Israeli positive response to the proposal it had accepted, things may change, but so far Hamas believes Netanyahu isn't serious about reaching a deal," said one Palestinian official close to the mediation effort.

Hamas' reaction to the talks came as preparations for a larger scale confrontation grew, with Washington ordering a guided missile submarine to the Middle East and the Abraham Lincoln strike group accelerating its deployment to the region.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that Iran was making preparations for a large-scale military attack on Israel, Barack Ravid, a normally well-sourced reporter for Axios News reported on Twitter.

Israel has been braced for a major attack since last month when a missile strike killed 12 youngsters in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Israel responded by killing a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut.

A day after that operation, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, was assassinated in Tehran, drawing Iranian vows of retaliation against Israel.

The potential escalation underlined how far the Middle East has been thrown into turmoil by the war in Gaza, now into its 11th month.

The Hamas-led attack on Israeli communities around the Gaza Strip killed some 1,200 people, with more than 250 taken into captivity in Gaza, according to Israeli tallies, in one of the most devastating blows against Israel in its history.

In response, Israeli forces have flattened Gaza, displaced most of the population and killed around 40,000 people, according to the Palestinian health ministry, in a war that has caused horror around the world.

On Saturday, scores of people were killed in Israeli strikes on a school building in Gaza City that the military said targeted fighters from the amred wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Gaza health officials say most of the fatalities have been civilians but Israel says at least a third are fighters. Israel says it has lost 329 soldiers in Gaza.

UN rights chief ‘shocked and appalled’ by Israeli minister’s comment on starving Gazans to death

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Written by Super User

Category: MENA

Published: 10 August 2024

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GENEVA - The UN human rights office, OHCHR, called on Friday for the Israeli authorities to monitor senior officials whose public statements on the Gaza conflict may promote war crimes.

OHCHR spokesperson Jeremy Laurence said UN Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk “is shocked and appalled” by comments made by Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who suggested that letting two million Palestinians in Gaza starve to death could be “justified and moral” in order to free hostages.

The High Commissioner condemned these words in the strongest terms, which also incite hatred against innocent civilians.

Risk of incitement

Mr. Laurence explained that the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the collective punishment of the Palestinian population are both war crimes.

“This direct and public statement risks inciting other atrocity crimes,” he said. “Such statements, especially by public officials, must cease immediately. They must be investigated and if found to amount to a crime, must be prosecuted and punished.”

Mr. Laurence also reiterated OHCHR’s long-standing appeal for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages and increased humanitarian aid flows into the enclave.

“This is an immediate call to the Israeli authorities that it is their responsibility to monitor this behaviour,” he said. “Beyond that, let's take it one step at a time. That is the first stage. It is the Israelis’ responsibility.”

‘Exodus’ from Khan Younis

Meanwhile, the effects of the latest evacuation order in Gaza are already “very visible”, a senior communications officer with the UN agency that assists Palestine refugees, UNRWA, said on Friday.

Louise Wateridge spoke to UN News a day after the Israeli military issued the directive, forcing thousands to flee eastern and central Khan Younis and the Al Salqa area of Deir Al-Balah.

Ms. Wateridge was in Khan Younis on Thursday afternoon and witnessed hundreds of families heading west in temperatures that surpassed 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit).

“The scenes were horrific,” she said. “It's like an exodus of these people once again. They're carrying whatever they can. They don't appear to have many belongings left. We saw less vehicles with families and it was mostly people on foot.”

Polio vaccine campaign

Ms. Wateridge also addressed plans to vaccinate more than half a million children in Gaza against polio following the discovery of the disease in sewage samples last month.

UNRWA, together with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Gaza Ministry of Health are set to launch two rounds of inoculations in the coming days.

“This campaign, of course, would be much easier to facilitate and much quicker to facilitate with a ceasefire,” she said.

“We have been calling for a ceasefire for several months. It will deeply benefit any kind of humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip, including the vaccination response to polio.”

She underlined UNRWA’s deep commitment to lead the vaccination campaigns on the ground, highlighting the agency’s role as the largest organization in the Gaza Strip.

No safe space for children

Separately, UNICEF continues to highlight the dire situation of children in Gaza whose “only hope of survival is a ceasefire”, communications officer Salim Oweis told journalists in Geneva on Friday.

“The life of a child in Gaza, in month 10 of this conflict, is not a life. We cannot say it enough – there is no safe place, and everything is running out – food, water, fuel, medicines. Everything,” he said, speaking from Amman, Jordan.

Mr. Oweis was recently in Gaza, where he was “shocked by the depth of suffering, destruction and widespread displacement”.

Sanitation system overburdened

He spoke of walking through “mazes of makeshift shelters” where “you struggle to climb the sand they lay on and you smell the strong odour of sewage filling the paths around.”

Water and waste are a huge problem, he said, referring to the situation in Deir Al-Balah, where most displaced people have fled in recent months.

The partially functioning sanitation system there is estimated to be overloaded by seven times its capacity, meaning that the decades old sewage network is mostly clogged and leaking.

Lack of medicines

“Families urgently asked me for soap and hygiene supplies. They are using water and salt to clean their children or boiling water with lemons to try and treat skin rashes,” Mr. Oweis said.

“They tell me doctors do not have the capacity or medicines to treat them, with more serious medical cases arriving every hour and no supplies on the shelves. And so, the rashes spread.”

He pointed to the serious dearth of medicines for children with cancer, congenital ailments and other pre-existing conditions.

While at Al-Aqsa hospital, Mr. Oweis met a 10-year-old boy called Abdel Rahman, whose leg was injured in an airstrike and never healed. He was later diagnosed with bone cancer.

The boy’s mother, Samar, told him that she wished her son would die and not be suffering - something she could not believe that she would wish for.

Slow death sentence

“A child with a disease in the Gaza Strip has been handed a sentence to a slow death because he cannot receive the treatment he needs, and he is unlikely to survive long enough to make it out,” said Mr. Oweis.

“Their only hope of survival is a ceasefire. The children of Gaza are still clinging to the belief that this day will come, and UNICEF shares this hope.”

He insisted that “achieving a ceasefire is still possible, more necessary now than ever and way overdue, and everyone must do everything in their power to advocate for it.