Palestinians in Gaza yesterday were left waiting for the promised arrival of food, despite mounting international and domestic pressure on the Israeli government to allow more aid to reach a population on the brink of famine after an 11-week blockade.
Fewer than 100 aid trucks have entered Gaza, Israeli military figures showed, since Monday, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government agreed to lift the blockade that has forced Gazans into a desperate struggle to survive.
Israeli strikes continued to pound the Gaza Strip yesterday, killing at least 82 people, including several women and a week-old infant, the Gaza Health Ministry and area hospitals said.
Photo: Reuters
Israel began allowing dozens of humanitarian trucks into Gaza on Tuesday, but the aid has not yet reached Palestinians in desperate need.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesman Jens Laerke said no trucks were picked up from the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom, the Israeli border crossing with southern Gaza.
With airstrikes and tank fire continuing to pound the enclave, local bakers and transportation operators said they had yet to see fresh supplies of flour and other essentials.
Abdel-Nasser al-Ajramy, the head of the bakery owners’ society, said at least 25 bakeries that were told they would receive flour from the World Food Programme had seen nothing and there was no relief from the hunger for people waiting for food.
“There is no flour, no food, no water,” said Sabah Warsh Agha, a 67-year-old woman from the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya sheltering in a cluster of tents near to the beach in Gaza City. “We used to get water from the pump, now the pump has stopped working. There is no diesel or gas.”
The resumption of the assault on Gaza since March, following a two-month ceasefire, has drawn condemnation from countries that have long been cautious about expressing open criticism of Israel. Even the US, the country’s most important ally, has shown signs of losing patience with Netanyahu.
The UK has suspended talks with Israel on a free-trade deal, and the EU said it would review a pact on political and economic ties over the “catastrophic situation” in Gaza. The UK, France and Canada have threatened “concrete actions” if Israel continues its offensive.
Within Israel, left-wing opposition leader Yair Golan drew a furious response from the government and its supporters this week when he declared that “a sane country doesn’t kill babies as a hobby” and that Israel risked becoming a “pariah state among the nations.”
Golan, a former deputy commander of the Israeli military who went single-handedly to rescue victims of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, 2023, leads a party with little electoral clout.
However, his words, and similar comments by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in an interview with the BBC, underscored the deepening unease in Israel at the continuation of the war while 58 hostages remain in Gaza.
Although Netanyahu dismissed the criticism, opinion polls show widespread support for a ceasefire that would include the return of all the hostages, with a survey from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem this week showing that 70 percent of respondent were in favor of a deal.
Additional reporting by AP
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS