Israel strikes residential tower in southern Rafah as truce talks stall

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 09 March 2024

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By Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Bassam Masoud

CAIRO/RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Israel struck one of the largest residential towers in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday, residents said, stepping up pressure on the last area of the enclave it has not yet invaded and where over a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

The 12-floor building, located some 500 metres from the border with Egypt, was damaged in the strike. Dozens of families were made homeless though no casualties were reported, according to residents. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the incident.

One of the tower's 300 residents told Reuters that Israel gave them a 30-minute warning to flee the building at night.

"People were startled, running down the stairs, some fell, it was chaos. People left their belongings and money," said Mohammad Al-Nabrees, adding that among those who tripped down the stairs during the panicked evacuation was a friend's pregnant wife.

A Rafah-based official with the Fatah party, which dominates the Palestinian Authority that has limited self-rule in the occupied West Bank, another Palestinian territory, said he feared that hitting the Rafah tower was a sign of an imminent Israeli invasion.

Five months into Israel's unrelenting air and ground assault on Gaza, health authorities said nearly 31,000 Palestinians had been killed, over 72,500 were wounded and thousands were trapped under rubble.

The offensive has plunged the Palestinian territory, already reeling from a 17-year Israel-led blockade, into a humanitarian catastrophe. Much of it has been reduced to rubble and most of the 2.3 million population have been displaced, with the U.N. warning of disease and starvation.

Three Palestinian children died of dehydration and malnutrition at the northern Al Shifa Hospital overnight, said Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra. Qidra said this raised to 23 the number of Palestinians who had died of similar causes in nearly 10 days.

"This brutal war has ruptured any sense of a shared humanity," said Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

She called for an end of hostilities to allow for meaningful aid distribution in Gaza, for Hamas to release all hostages without conditions and for Israel to treat Palestinians in its custody humanely and to permit them to contact their families.

The war was triggered by an Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, where 1,200 people were killed and 253 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Negotiations on a ceasefire and the release of 134 hostages still in Gaza seemed to stall ahead of the hoped-for deadline, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on or around March 10.

A Hamas source told Reuters that the group's delegation was "unlikely" to make another visit to Cairo over the weekend for talks. Hamas blamed the lack of progress on Israel, which has so far refused to give guarantees or commitments to end the war or pull out forces from the Gaza Strip.

In a speech marking Martyrs' and Veterans' Day in Egypt on Saturday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the cost of rebuilding Gaza could exceed $90 billion.

In a statement summarizing its operations in Gaza over the past day, the Israeli military said it conducted arrests, located weapons and killed over 30 fighters in Khan Younis, including in the Hamad area, in central Gaza and in the area of Beit Hanoun in the north.

Gaza's health ministry said at least 82 people were killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip in the last day.

In Khan Younis, medics said at least 23 people were killed in military raids on homes and in Israeli shelling of a housing project in the Hamad area of the city. In the northern Gaza Strip, Israeli fire killed a Palestinian fisherman along the beach, medics said.

What is the humanitarian situation in war-torn Gaza?

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 06 March 2024

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GENEVA - The Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip has displaced most of the enclave's 2.3 million people and caused a grave humanitarian crisis including acute shortages of food, water and medicine.

Here are some key facts about the conditions in the Palestinian territory:

DISPLACEMENT

An estimated 1.7 million people, more than 75% of Gaza's population, have been displaced, many of them forced to move repeatedly across the enclave, according to the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA).

Israel last month intensified its bombardment of Rafah, a town in southern Gaza on the border with Egypt, where about 1.5 million people are estimated to be crammed.

Most people there have fled their homes further north to escape Israel's military assault, which was launched in the wake of a deadly rampage by Hamas militants in southern Israel on Oct. 7.

HEALTH AND HOSPITALS

The World Health Organization says most of the enclave's 36 hospitals have stopped working. Only 12 are partially functioning - six in the north and six in the south - and one, the Al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, is considered to be minimally functional.

Dr. Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative for Gaza and the West Bank, said on Tuesday that more than 8,000 people needed to be referred outside Gaza for medical treatment.

He said some 6,000 people needed to be referred for war-related injuries and ailments, while 2,000 others suffered from cancer or serious chronic illnesses.

On March 3, WHO and its partners visited the Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda hospitals in northern Gaza to deliver supplies for the first time since the start of hostilities. Peeperkorn described the situation at Al-Awda Hospital as "particularly appalling" because one of the buildings had been destroyed.

"Both hospitals we visited represent the overall health system in Gaza - struggling to survive with small doses of aid keeping them barely functional enough to serve those most in need," said Dr Ahmed Dahir, head of the WHO Gaza sub-office.

"Both hospitals faced shortages of fuel, power, and specialized staff. Trauma cases constituted the majority of admissions."

At least 15 children have died over the past few days from malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, the health ministry in Gaza said on Sunday.

Most of WHO'S requests to visit northern Gaza to deliver supplies were denied in January, with only three out of 16 requests facilitated. No requests to carry out WHO-led missions to the north were facilitated last month, it said.

HUMANITARIAN AID, HUNGER

Israel stopped all imports of food, medicine, power and fuel into Gaza at the start of the war. Although it later let in aid deliveries, aid organisations say security checks and the difficulty of moving through a war zone have greatly hindered their operations.

United Nations organisations have said that child malnutrition levels in northern Gaza were "particularly extreme" and about three times higher than in the south of the Palestinian enclave where more aid has been available.

"When children are starting to die from starvation, that should be a warning like no other," said Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian office.
"If not now, when is the time to pull the stops, break the glass, flood Gaza with the aid that it needs?"

Peeperkorn of the WHO said that one in six children under two years of age were acutely malnourished in northern Gaza.

Calls for Israel to do more to address the humanitarian crisis have grown louder since the deaths of Palestinians lining up for aid in Gaza last month.

Gaza health authorities said 118 people were killed, attributing the deaths to Israeli fire and calling it a massacre. Israel, which says many people were trampled or run over, has pledged to investigate.

The U.S. military carried out its first air drop of food to Gazans on Saturday and plans more.

The air drop has been viewed as a latest sign that Washington is moving beyond diplomacy with Israel, which the U.N. and other relief agencies complain has blocked or restricted aid. Israel denies hindering humanitarian aid.

Scientists unearth mysteries of giant, moving Moroccan star dunes

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Written by northsouth

Category: MENA

Published: 04 March 2024

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By Will Dunham

RABAT, MOROCCO- They are among the wonders of our deserts: star dunes, the vaguely pyramid-shaped sand formations up to about 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall with arms stretching out from a central peak to give them a star-like appearance when viewed from above.

Scientists on Monday unveiled the first in-depth study of a star dune, revealing the internal structure of these geological features and showing how long it took for one of them to form - more quickly than expected but still a process unfolding over many centuries.

The study focused upon a star dune in eastern Morocco called Lala Lallia, meaning "highest sacred point" in the local Berber language, situated within the Sahara Desert in a small sand sea called Erg Chebbi about 3 miles (5 km) from the town of Merzouga, close to the border with Algeria.

Experts from universities including Aberystwyth in Wales have now pinpointed the age of a star dune in a remote area of Morocco and uncovered details about its formation and how it moves across the desert.

Prof Geoff Duller of the department of geography and earth sciences at Aberystwyth said: “They are extraordinary things, one of the natural wonders of the world. From the ground they look like pyramids but from the air you see a peak and radiating off it in three or four directions these arms that make them look like stars.”

They discovered that the very base of the dune was 13,000 years old but were surprised that the upper part of the structure had only been formed in the last 1,000 years or so. “It turned out to be surprisingly young,” said Duller.

The base continued to build up until about 9,000 years ago. “Then the surface stabilised. We think it was a bit wetter than today. We can see traces of old plant roots, suggesting the dune was stabilised by vegetation. It seems to have stayed like that for about 8,000 years. Then the climate started to change again and this star dune started to form.”

Duller said the dune was formed because the wind blows in two opposing directions – from the south-west and the north-east – leading to the sand building up. A steady third wind that blows from the east is shifting the dune slowly to the west at a rate of about 50cm a year.

“That’s important when you’re thinking about building roads, pipelines or any sort of infrastructure,” said Duller. “These things actually do move.”

Luminescence dating techniques developed at Aberystwyth were used to discover the last time minerals in the sand were exposed to sunlight to determine their age.

Duller said: “We’re not looking at when the sand was formed – that’s millions of years ago – but when it was deposited. The grains of quartz have a property like a mini rechargeable battery.

“It can store energy that it gets from naturally occurring radioactivity. When we bring it back to the laboratory, we can get it to release that energy. It comes out in the form of light. We can measure that and the brightness tells us the last time the sand grain saw daylight.”

Lala Lallia rises about 330 feet (100 meters) above the surrounding dunes and is approximately 2,300 feet (700 meters) wide, containing about 5-1/2 million metric tons of sand.

The researchers used ground-penetrating radar to peer inside the dune and employed luminescence dating to determine how long Lala Lallia has taken to form, a method based on the amount of energy trapped inside the grains of sand. The answer: about 900 years, accumulating roughly 6,400 metric tons annually as wind relentlessly blows sand through the desert.

Star dunes make up just under 10% of the dunes in Earth's deserts and are the tallest ones, surpassing other types such as crescent-shaped barchan dunes and straight and lengthy linear dunes. They also have been spotted on Mars and on Saturn's large moon Titan.

"I first encountered star dunes in Namibia 20 years ago, and was instantly amazed at the size of them. I have a vivid memory of the long climb to the top, struggling up very loose sand in the heat of the day," said geographer Geoff Duller of Aberystwyth University in Wales, co-author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"I find desert dunes very beautiful," Duller added. "The sight of the sinuous curves, and the way that the light and shadow changes with the sun mean that they always look different, whether that is in the cool of the morning, the midday sun or near sunset.

The different colours of sand in different deserts are also very striking, with yellow, white, red and even black dunes in different parts of the world."

The ground-penetrating radar revealed the layers within the Lala Lallia dune, showing how it was constructed over time through accumulating sand and how parts of its internal structure resembled other types of dunes.

"Star dunes are formed in areas with complex wind regimes, which means winds blowing from different directions, and net sand accumulation, points within the desert where big piles of sand can be blown around to form giant dunes," said Birkbeck University of London sedimentologist and study co-author Charlie Bristow.

The researchers also determined that Lala Lallia is moving westerly at a speed of about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) annually.

While many star dunes are known today, only a single ancient one has been found preserved as sandstone in the geological record, dating to about 250 million years ago, in Scotland. By revealing their internal structure, the researchers said their findings provide a guide for geologists to identify more sandstone remnants of ancient star dunes.

Earth's largest star dunes are found in the Badain Jaran desert in western China. Star dunes also are found in places including the Namib Sand Sea in Namibia, large sand seas in Algeria such as the Grand Erg Oriental and Grand Erg Occidental, and Rub' al Khali in Saudi Arabia. In North America, Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado contains a series of them.

"They form extraordinary and awe-inspiring landscapes," Bristow said. "From the ground they can be intimidating, mobile mountains of sand."

One catch is that they have to collect the grains of sand without exposing them to light. They did this by cutting pits into the dunes and hammering in an old piece of drainpipe to gather the samples.

“That part isn’t terribly hi-tech,” said Duller. The work in the lab – which is much more hi-tech and sensitive – has to be carried out in the same sort of conditions as a photographic darkroom.

The same luminescence technique was used to date remnants of what is thought to be the world’s oldest known wooden structure, an arrangement of logs on the bank of a river bordering Zambia and Tanzania that predates the rise of modern humans.

The dune discoveries are published in the journal Scientific Reports.