Foreign News
Fears for Gazans as aid groups halt work over deadly Israeli strike
Many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will be wondering how they are going to feed their families after World Central Kitchen (WCK) paused its operations in response to the killing of seven of its aid workers in an Israeli air strike.
Another US charity it works with, Anera, has also suspended work because of the escalating risks faced by its local staff and their families.
Together, they were serving two million meals a week across the Palestinian territory, where the UN has warned that an estimated 1.1 million people – half the population – are facing catastrophic hunger because of Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries, the ongoing hostilities and the breakdown of order.
WCK’s decision to pause its work also led to the “freezing” of a maritime aid corridor from Cyprus, which the charity helped set up last month to increase the trickle of aid getting into the north of Gaza and avert a looming famine.
The WCK convoy was hit on Monday night as it travelled south along the Israeli-designated coastal aid route, just after they had unloaded more than 100 tonnes of food from a barge at a warehouse in Deir al-Balah.
That barge was part of a four-vessel flotilla that sailed back to Cyprus with 240 tonnes of supplies that could not be brought ashore in the wake of the strike.
The Norwegian Refugee Council warned that “what happened to World Central Kitchen threatens the entire aid system” and had left it “on the brink”.
Before the strike, World Central Kitchen was providing about 350,000 meals across Gaza each day
WCK accused the Israeli military of a “targeted attack” on vehicles clearly marked with the charity’s logo and whose movements had been co-ordinated with Israel authorities. The victims were British, Polish, Australian and Palestinian, and also included a dual US-Canadian citizen.
The military’s chief of staff, Lt Gen Herzi Halevi, described the strike as a “grave mistake” that had followed “misidentification at night”.
He also vowed to take “immediate action” to ensure that more was done to protect aid workers, including the immediate establishment of a new “humanitarian command centre” to improve co-ordination. “Israel is at war with Hamas, not with the people of Gaza,” he stressed.
However, aid groups say they are not sure such promises will lead to meaningful changes. They also assert that this was not an isolated incident, with 196 Palestinian aid workers reportedly killed since the war began in October.
Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council and a former UN humanitarian chief, told the BBC that WCK was “among those who have the closest co-operation with the Israelis”, in terms of sharing information about their workers’ locations and planned movements.
Before the strike, WCK was playing an increasingly prominent and important role in Gaza, with 400 Palestinian staff and 3,000 people working indirectly in its 68 community kitchens and distribution system across the territory.
WCK provided 12% of the 193,000 tonnes of aid from international organisations that had reached Gaza as of Tuesday, according to data from Cogat, the Israeli defence ministry body tasked with co-ordinating deliveries. However, UN agencies were responsible for 80% of the total.
WCK’s founder, the chef José Andrés, told Reuters news agency on Wednesday that it was “analysing the situation and how to keep doing the work we do”.
Anera – which was providing 150,000 meals a day in collaboration with WCK – said it understood the consequences pausing its own work would have on Palestinians, but that its Palestinian staff had for the first time deemed the risk to their safety and that of their families “intolerable”.
It said the charity’s logistics co-ordinator and his son had been killed in an Israeli air strike in Deir al-Balah in March, despite the fact that the co-ordinates of the shelter where they were staying had been provided to the Israeli military. “We’ve asked for explanation as to why that site was struck and we’ve received none,” Derek Madsen of Anera told the BBC. “These sites are known and so I think it is very difficult for us to understand how these strikes happen.”
For the people of Gaza, the suspension of WCK’s operations “means more famine, more dead children, more epidemic disease because people are so malnourished”, Mr Egeland warned.
At least 27 children are reported to have died as a result of malnutrition since October, according to the World Health Organization.
Mr Egeland urged Israel to start by opening the Karni and Erez border crossings with northern Gaza to allow aid convoys to drive there directly.
Most aid convoys are currently forced to start at the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom and Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossings with the south of Gaza and then pass through what the UN calls “high-risk areas”, mainly due to shooting and shelling or the breakdown in civil order.
The Open Arms. a Spanish charity vessel, returned to Cyprus on Wednesday after the maritime aid route was suspended (BBC)
Cogat says Israeli forces have co-ordinated the entry of more than 500 lorries into the north over the past two months via those routes as well as a new gate and military road that runs south of Gaza City.
Israel has also facilitated the now-suspended maritime corridor set up by WCK as well as airdrops of aid by Western and Arab countries, which the UN says are both helpful but cannot replace the large-scale delivery of aid by land.
The first WCK aid ship was carrying 200 tonnes of aid and took several days to reach Gaza. By comparison, a lorry can carry about 20 tonnes and the nearest Israeli container port is only a 40km drive from northern Gaza.
A C-130 transport plane meanwhile has a maximum payload of 21 tonnes, but only about 40 airdrops have taken place so far and they are considered expensive, ineffective and dangerous for people on the ground.
The UN says 159 lorry loads of aid crossed into Gaza by land each day on average between 1 and 28 March, and that the pre-war average was 500 lorry loads, including fuel.
Cogat says the pre-war average only included 70 food lorries and that 140 entered each day during March. It insists there is no limit to the amount of food and other humanitarian aid that can enter Gaza and accuses UN agencies of failing to distribute aid effectively.
There was no apparent drop-off in aid crossing into Gaza following the strike on the WCK convoy, with 217 lorries transferred via Israel and Egypt on Wednesday and 179 food packages being airdropped, according to Cogat.
But Nate Mook, who was chief executive of WCK until 2022, warned that the longer-term consequences could be “devastating” for Gazans because “we probably have not seen the last of the aid organisations to pull out”.
Aseel Baidoun of Medical Aid for Palestinians said it had not suspended operations after a strike in January damaged a residential compound that housed the British charity’s local team and their families, injuring several people. But now, she added: “We really are scared of the security situation.”
Natalia Anguera of Action Against Hunger told the BBC that it would try to continue working despite “more and more challenging” conditions.
“Most of our staff are… Palestinians. They are suffering themselves, but they also have a very strong and clear commitment to their humanitarian mandate. They want to go on delivering,” she said.
She said the international community needed to push strongly for a humanitarian ceasefire because it was the only way that aid organisations would be able to scale up their response to the level required.
Mr Egeland also stressed the importance of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which he said was “bigger than the rest of us combined” but was being “systematically undermined by Israel”.
Israel accuses UNRWA of supporting Hamas, which triggered the war when its gunmen attacked southern Israel on 7 October last year. The agency has denied this, but in January it sacked nine of the 12 employees accused in an Israeli document of playing a part in the attacks.
UNRWA called for a “complete reversal in policies” from Israel in response to Monday’s strike, including lifting the ban on it delivering aid to northern Gaza.
(BBC)
Three buses have exploded in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, in what Israeli police say is a suspected terror attack.
Devices in two other buses failed to explode, they said, adding that “large police forces are at the scenes, searching for suspects”.
Transport Minister Miri Regev paused all buses, trains and light rail trains in the country so that checks for explosive devices could be carried out, Israeli media reports said.
Footage on social media shows at least one bus on fire in a parking lot, with a large plume of smoke rising above.
There have been no reports of casualties at this stage, police said.
President Trump has launched a fresh attack on Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a “dictator” and deepening the rift between the two leaders.
His latest salvo came after Zelensky, reacting to US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia from which Kyiv was excluded, said the US president was “living in a disinformation space” governed by Moscow.
“Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a country left,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
The “dictator” slur quickly prompted criticism from European leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said “it is simply wrong and dangerous to deny President Zelensky his democratic legitimacy”.
UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer made it clear he backed Zelensky in a phone call to the Ukrainian president. A Downing Street spokesperson said Sir Keir “expressed his support for President Zelensky as Ukraine’s democratically elected leader”. It was “perfectly reasonable to suspend elections during war time as the UK did during World War Two,” the spokesperson added.
Zelensky’s five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024. However, Ukraine has been under martial law since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and elections are suspended.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson also criticised Trump’s use of the word “dictator” while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the comments “absurd”. “If you look at the real world instead of just firing off a tweet, then you know who in Europe has to live in the conditions of a dictatorship: people in Russia, people in Belarus,” she told broadcaster ZDF.
A White House official said Trump’s latest post was in direct response to Zelensky’s “disinformation” comments.
“I love Ukraine,” Trump continued, “but Zelensky has done a terrible job, his country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.” In the meantime, the US was “successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia,” he said.
On Tuesday US and Russian officials held their first high-level, face-to-face talks since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The former prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, told the BBC that Russia was “popping champagne right now” in response to Trump’s comments.
“Volodymyr Zelensky is a completely legitimate president,” he said. “We cannot hold elections under martial law.”
The war of words began with comments made by Trump on Tuesday at a news conference at Mar-A-Lago in Florida, when he blamed Ukraine for the war.
Trump was asked by BBC News what his message was to Ukrainians who might feel betrayed, to which he replied: “I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat, well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily.”
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump added.
Trump did not mention that President Vladimir Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022.
Then on Wednesday, Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv: “We are seeing a lot of disinformation and it’s coming from Russia. With all due respect to President Donald Trump as a leader… he is living in this disinformation space.”
He added that he believed “the United States helped Putin to break out of years of isolation”.
Later in the day, the Ukrainian leader said the world faced the choice to be “with Putin or with peace” and announced he would be meeting Washington’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Thursday.
Earlier, Zelensky also rejected Trump’s attempts to access Ukraine’s rare minerals, saying no security guarantees were offered in exchange.
Trump has attempted to make an issue out of Zelensky’s popularity, claiming the Ukrainian president had only a 4% approval rating. But BBC Verify reports that polling conducted this month found 57% of Ukrainians said they trusted the president.
In Wednesday’s explosive Truth Social post, Trump also took aim at Europe, saying the war in Ukraine is “far more important to Europe than it is to us”. “We have a big, beautiful ocean as a separation,” he said.
Europe had “failed to bring peace” in the region, he added.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin also spoke to reporters, saying he would meet Trump “with pleasure”.
For its part, the EU said it would place further sanctions on Russia.
The new sanctions target Russian aluminium and dozens of vessels suspected of illegally transporting oil. They would also disconnect more Russian banks from the global Swift payment system and ban more Russian media outlets from broadcasting in Europe.
[BBC]
Australian authorities are euthanising about 90 false killer whales which survived a mass stranding on a remote beach in Tasmania.
A team of experts at the site said complex conditions have made it impossible to save them.
They are part of a pod of 157 whales that had beached near Arthur River, in the island’s north west. The rest had died shortly after the stranding.
Tasmania has seen a series of mass whale strandings in recent years – including the country’s worst-ever in 2020 – but false killer whales haven’t mass stranded there in over 50 years.
False killer whales are technically one of world’s largest dolphin species, like their orca namesakes. They can grow up to 6m (19ft) and weigh 1.5 tonnes.
Authorities on Wednesday said the pod had been stranded at the site for 24 to 48 hours, and the surviving animals were already under extreme stress.
Local resident Jocelyn Flint told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she had travelled to the site on Wednesday morning after her son noticed the pod while out shark fishing overnight.
“There are babies… There’s just families of them. Their eyes are open, they’re looking at me, like ‘help’.”
“It’s just absolutely horrific.”
The site – about 300km (186 miles) from the city of Launceston – is extremely difficult to access and transport any rescue equipment to, marine biologist Kris Carlyon told media.
“This is possibly the trickiest location I’ve seen in 16 years of doing this role in Tasmania,” he said.
“We’re talking a very rough, steep, single lane road into the site. We can get four-wheel drives in there, but not a lot else.”
Rough conditions meant returning the animals to the sea at the location they stranded was impossible, so an expert team tried to relocate two and refloat them, but were unsuccessful.
“The animals just can’t get past the break to get out. They just keep turning around and coming back towards the beach,” said Shelley Graham, from Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service.
With conditions for the next two days forecast to be similar, expert wildlife veterinarians made the “tough” and “confronting” decision to euthanise the remaining whales.
“The longer these animals are out stranded, the longer they are suffering. All alternative options have been unsuccessful, euthanasia is always a last resort,” Dr Carlyon said.
That grim task – which involves shooting the animals – is expected to begin on Wednesday but continue on Thursday.
Authorities are still working out how to dispose of the carcasses. The site has important cultural heritage for Aboriginal people so a department spokesperson earlier suggested “it may be a case of… letting nature run its course”.
Authorities have asked members of the public to avoid the site, with bushfires burning nearby and limited road access.
More than 80% of Australian whale strandings take place in Tasmania – often on its west coast.
Around 40 pilot whales were stranded further south at Macquarie Harbour in 2020 and about 350 of them died despite rescue efforts. Another 200 became standed in the same harbour in 2022.
Whales are highly social mammals and are well known for stranding in groups because they travel in large, close-knit communities which rely on constant communication.
There are a range of theories for why beachings occur. Some experts say the animals can become disoriented after following fish they hunt to the shore.
Others believe that one individual can mistakenly lead whole groups to shore.
[BBC]
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