International
Jamer Elder, UNICEF spokesman, from Gaza: “Children are as thin as paper”
“Children are thin as paper due to malnutrition,” laments James Elder, UNICEF spokesman who is currently in the Gaza Strip, where he has been able to travel north and witness the famine that is already looming over his population and that has claimed the lives of 27 children.
“We are beginning to see how children die of hunger, in the crudest literal sense,” he said in a telephone interview with EFE from Rafah, after having visited the Kamal Adwan hospital, in the north of the enclave, and having contemplated the total devastation in Gaza City or Jan Yunis.
More than twenty babies have died from malnutrition and dehydration in the last month: “Children are as thin as paper, and mothers and grandmothers are tied to their beds, crying, begging them to endure one more day.”
“I have never seen in my 20 years at the United Nations, a place where the nutritional situation has worsened so much in such a short time, to the point where we have caused a famine,” explained Elder, who already entered the Strip last December in the middle of the war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas.
Last week the UN published a report that establishes that half of the population of the Strip is at “imminent” risk of suffering catastrophic famine, while the enclave does not receive even half of the basic humanitarian aid it needs, much less in the north.
Hunger did not exist in Gaza six months ago and now, one in three children under the age of two suffers acute malnutrition – twice as much as last January – due to a crisis that is worsening at high speed, according to the UNICEF spokesman.
Precisely, the Commissioner General of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, denounced yesterday that Israel had communicated to the United Nations that it was not going to authorize more humanitarian convoys from UNRWA – which he accuses without convincing evidence of ties to Hamas – to the north, where hunger is already a reality.
The visit to the Kamal Adwan, in Beit Lahia – in the northern part of the enclave – has been one of the experiences that has most marked this humanitarian worker.
“People’s ability to survive has been destroyed; access to water and food has deteriorated as the bombings have continued. Fewer and fewer hospitals operate at a time when more and more children need medical attention,” Elder summarized about how the situation has worsened since his previous visit inside the enclave.
“The families have had to move again because of the fighting. The stress of leaving even more things behind, moving fewer and fewer belongings. I’ve never seen entire cities crumbled and annihilated,” he adds.
However, Elder sees a glimmer of hope, and that is that famine is “avoidable and reversible” since it has been provoked by man, and can still be solved with political will.
“Opening more ground access routes is a simple first solution,” he said.
At the moment Israel, after subjecting it to exhaustive controls, only allows the entry of humanitarian aid through two of the nine crossings in the Gaza Strip – Kerem Shalom and Rafah, bordering Egypt -, both in the south, so humanitarian agencies need security guarantees to be able to reach the north and convoys have frequently been subjected to attacks, in addition to the destruction of roads.
According to the Government of Gaza, controlled by Hamas, about 560 people have died in attacks on trucks or food warehouses or in incidents related to the distribution of aid, as happened on February 29 in the so-called “flour massacre”, in which 118 Gazans died and more than 700 were injured in a chaotic distribution of aid in Gaza City in which Israel admitted to having opened fire.
Elder acknowledged that the difficulties in distributing aid in the Gaza Strip are endless, nothing compared to the problems in other places of conflict such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Ukraine.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find words to describe what I see,” he lamented.
International
China shows at the UN its “condemnation” of Israel for the “violation of Iran’s sovereignty”
The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, showed the “condemnation” of his country against the “violation of the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Iran” after the air attack launched by Israel against multiple targets in that country, the official newspaper Diario del Pueblo reports this Saturday.
That media echoes Fu’s speech to the UN Security Council on Friday, in which he demanded that Israel “immediately stop all its military actions.”
“China (…) opposes the expansion of conflicts, and is deeply concerned about the serious consequences that may arise from Israel’s actions. The intensification of regional tensions does not interest any of the parties involved,” said the Chinese emissary.
Beijing called on Tel Aviv and Tehran to “resolve their disputes through political and diplomatic means, and maintain peace and stability at the regional level jointly.”
In Fu’s view, the Israeli attack will have a “negative impact” on the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program: “China has always been committed to the peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue through dialogue and consultations, and opposes the use of force, illegal unilateral sanctions and armed attacks on peaceful nuclear facilities.”
This Friday, China had already expressed its willingness to “play a constructive role” to curb the escalation of tensions and facilitate conciliation, in line with its traditional position of active neutrality in the region’s conflicts.
The Israeli attack, which according to Tehran caused dozens of deaths, including senior military commanders and at least six nuclear scientists, targeted key facilities such as the uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. Numerous civilian casualties were also reported.
Israel justified the offensive by claiming that the Iranian regime is secretly developing a program to manufacture nuclear weapons.
For his part, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, promised a “severe response” and assured that the attack would reveal the “evil nature” of Israel.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also expressed concern about the bombing, at a time when Iran and the US The United States is holding talks about the Iranian nuclear program.
International
Donald Trump’s government pauses its program of indiscriminate raides against migrants
The government of US President Donald Trump has decided to pause its campaign of discretionary roundings against migrants in certain areas due to its apparent concern about the growing unpopularity of these methods, according to The New York Times newspaper on Friday.
According to an email to which the newspaper has had access and the confirmation of US officials, the Executive has ordered the Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) to pause the beatings that affect the agricultural industry and the hospitality industry.
The spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed in a statement that “the president’s instructions” will be obeyed and the portfolio will also continue to “work to get the worst illegal foreign criminals out of the streets of the United States.”
The decision points out that this campaign of discretionary arrests to try to deport large-scale immigrants is harming industries and electoral constituencies whose support Trump wants to retain for next year’s legislative elections.
The new instructions were transmitted to ICE in an email sent last Thursday asking that “all investigations/law enforcement operations be suspended in work centers in the agricultural sector (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and hotels.”
These new guidelines come in turn after more than a week of intense protests in Los Angeles against this immigration policy and that Trump himself admitted that the raids seem to be affecting the agricultural sector, which in states like California, where beatings have intensified, depend almost exclusively on immigrant labor.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has implemented an aggressive policy of hard hand against immigration and as a sample of his Cabinet officials recently held a meeting with the ICE leadership to order them to carry out 3,000 arrests a day, a mandate that seems to be behind the intensification of the raids.
International
Trump says he knew “everything” about the attack on Iran and assures that the dialogue remains open
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington “known everything” about the Israeli attack on Iran and that the dialogue on Tehran’s nuclear program “is not dead.”
“We knew everything and I tried to avoid Iran all this humiliation and death. I tried hard to avoid it because I would have loved to see an agreement,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters.
The US president insisted on what he wrote today about the attack on social networks, where he said he gave an ultimatum of 60 days to Tehran to reach an agreement.
“We knew practically everything. We knew enough to give Iran 60 days to reach an agreement and today it is already 61 days,” he explained in the interview, in which he said he did not know what the current situation of the Iranian nuclear program is after the attack launched by Israel, which also ended the lives of key military leaders of the Persian country.
Regarding the dialogue between the US and Iran about the nuclear program of the ayatollahs, Trump assured that “he is not dead”, that “an agreement is still possible” and also recalled that on Sunday a sixth round of dialogue is scheduled in Muscat (Oman) that they consider is now in the air.
“We have a meeting with them on Sunday. Now, I’m not sure if that meeting will take place, but we have a meeting with them on Sunday,” he said.
The United States and Iran have held five rounds of talks on the Iranian nuclear program since April, with Washington demanding that Tehran discard its capabilities both to manufacture an atomic bomb and to enrich uranium, something that the ayatollahs considered unacceptable.
Both Israel and Trump himself had warned of possible preventive attacks on the Persian country due to this refusal by Iran.
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