The international community has betrayed the people of Gaza by failing to end an Israeli blockade to allow the territory to be rebuilt, a group of 16 rights groups said in a report yesterday.
The report said Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law by enforcing a “collective punishment” with an indiscriminate blockade on Gaza — punishing all for the acts of a few.
The Israeli authorities have allowed only 41 truckloads of construction materials into Gaza since the end of its three-week offensive last January, the report said, adding that thousands of such deliveries would be needed to repair homes.
PHOTO: REUTERS
“World powers have ... failed and even betrayed Gaza’s ordinary citizens,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam International’s executive director.
“They have wrung hands and issued statements, but have taken little meaningful action to attempt to change the damaging policy that prevents reconstruction, personal recovery and economic recuperation,” he said in a statement.
The report, produced by 16 international and Western European humanitarian and human rights groups, was released to coincide with the first anniversary of the Israeli offensive.
Reconstruction of Gaza, home to 1.5 million people, has been hampered by the Israeli blockade that stops materials such as cement and steel reaching the territory, despite billions of dollars of aid pledges.
Imposing the Gaza blockade with Egyptian help, Israel says it restricts the supply of materials that could be used for military purposes by Hamas and other armed groups that say they are bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor blamed Hamas for the restrictions.
“Those who want Gaza to have free access to the world should first and foremost endeavor to stop the Hamas rule of terror, so that crossings to Israel and to Egypt can be operated without fear,” he said.
The report’s authors urged the EU to take immediate and concerted action to secure the lifting of the blockade.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the