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)
Foreign News
‘Time for Ukraine to get new president,’ says Trump after Zelensky condemns diesel deal
US President Donald Trump has said he thinks “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president” as he responded to Volodymyr Zelensky’s criticism of the US diesel deal with Russia.
The Ukrainian president warned a new deal to release millions of tonnes of Russian diesel into the US would provide Moscow with money to continue its war against his nation, calling it a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump told reporters outside the White House on Saturday that Zelensky “wants to make problems for the world” by continuing to authorise attacks on Russian refineries.
“He’d better damn well stop,” Trump said, before suggesting Ukraine should “get a new leader who can make a deal”.
Global fuel supplies, including diesel, have been severely limited by the war against Iran launched by the US and Israel, which led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil products usually flows.
Russia – a major producer – and Ukraine have recently intensified their strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure and transport facilities, further straining energy markets.
“We said, ‘you can do whatever you want to Russia, don’t hit the refineries’, because that’s a world problem that’s caused,” Trump continued.
“He could have made many deals and for some reason, he never does.”
Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev described Trump’s intervention as “iconic and historic”, saying that Ukraine “needs leadership actually focused on peace”.
The US president confirmed on Friday that an agreement had been reached with Moscow to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports until 7 April.
Zelensky reacted by saying it would allow Moscow to raise new funds to source new military equipment to continue the war.
He also accused Moscow of taking the deal “to mean they can keep fighting, to mean they keep dropping bombs on cities” following deadly new strikes on Zaporizhzhia.
The Ukrainian president spoke to several allies on Saturday to discuss the latest developments, calling for “real decisions to protect lives in Ukraine” and to protect European security.
A Downing Street spokesperson said UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham had spoken to Zelensky and offered his “complete solidarity”.
The pair had agreed Russia should acquiesce to “an immediate energy ceasefire” and end its attacks on shipping in the Black Sea, the spokesperson said, as “this would immediately release more energy and food supplies into the global market”.
News of the US-Russia diesel deal was also met with criticism by EU’s foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, who echoed Zelensky in saying that suspending sanctions “provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war”, adding: “This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t.”
She said European foreign ministers intended to approve the biggest set of sanctions on Russia since the start of its full-scale invasion on Monday.
The deal with Russia is the latest effort from Trump to lower fuel prices in the US ahead of the midterm elections, after months spent grappling with the political consequences of the Iran war.
That conflict, which began in February, has sent the cost of petrol and in particular diesel skyrocketing, which has soured his standing with the American public who have been stung by the higher pump prices and knock-on effects that led to across-the-board inflation.
The average price of diesel is currently $6.28 (£4.74) a gallon, according to the AAA – up from last month’s $5.94 average, and $3.68 last year.
Under the deal, Russia would release an initial 300,000 tonnes of diesel “to the American and global marketplace” followed by an additional 500,000 tonnes in November.
A further million would follow, Trump wrote on Truth Social, and then another 3m tonnes “within a short period of time” – but he noted that this delivery will be “based on the condition of their diesel refineries”.
In the past 10 months, Russia experienced two waves of severe fuel shortages across the country due to Ukrainian drones strikes on its oil refineries.
Diesel production in Russia dropped by an estimated 30%, according to the International Energy Agency.
Trump had already called for new elections in Ukraine last December, saying Ukrainian voters should have the choice to replace Zelensky.
Since the war broke out in 2022 Ukraine has been under martial law, meaning elections are suspended.
[BBC]
Pope Leo XIV has declared that the death penalty is “inadmissible” while his home country, the United States, announces plans to livestream an execution by firing squad.
Marking World Day Against the Death Penalty on Saturday, the pope reiterated the Catholic Church’s teaching on capital punishment, writing on X that it was “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.
“The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” his post said.
“Effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption,” added the leader of the Catholic Church.
The American Pope’s comments come days after US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Thursday that the firing squad execution of Nidal Malik Hasan on December 3 will be livestreamed.
Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in a shooting at the Fort Hood military base in 2009.
Pope Leo did not specifically refer to the planned execution, or last month’s botched execution attempt on Christa Pike, who survived two doses of the lethal injection in Tennessee.
But his post came hours after his top deputy, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, told Vatican News that the plan to livestream Hasan’s execution was “unacceptable”.
It was Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, in 2018 who first amended official Catholic teaching to declare capital punishment “inadmissible” in all circumstances.
[Aljazeera]
United States President Donald Trump said that Russia has agreed to supply 300,000 tonnes of diesel fuel to global markets amid discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
The president added that Russia would deliver an additional 3 million tonnes of fuel “within a short period of time”. He said that the country would supply 500,000 tonnes in November.
An envoy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kirill Dmitriev, praised cooperation between Russia and the United States on diesel and energy in a post on X shortly after.
“Russia-US cooperation on diesel and energy will benefit the world,” Dmitriev wrote on X.
Petrol price pressures
The deal comes despite Ukrainian air strikes, which have taken more than half of the country’s oil refining capacity offline, according to claims made by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence on Sunday.
The latest announcement comes a week after the G7 countries agreed to release 100 million barrels amid pressure from the White House.
Diesel prices have been elevated in recent months but have started to decline. The average price for a gallon is $6.27 ($1.66 per litre), according to the American Automobile Association (AAA), which tracks daily petrol prices. That’s down $0.10 from this time last week, but up $5.94 from this time one month ago.
[Aljazeera]
Rahmat, Malik fifties lead Afghanistan’s strong reply
Showers above 75 mm are likely at some places in the Western, Sabaragamuwa, Central, Uva and North-Western provinces and in Galle, Matara, Anuradhapura and Mannar districts.
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