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)
The execution of a Tennessee death row inmate has been postponed after staff were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal drug.
Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was set to be executed on Thursday.
But the state’s Department of Corrections said that while its medical team did find a primary IV line to carry out the lethal injection, they could not find a suitable second vein to establish a backup line, which is required under lethal injection execution protocol.
In response, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he would grant Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.
After finding the primary injection line, “the team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein”, the corrections department said in a statement.
“The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful,” the statement continued. “The execution was then called off.”
Carruthers was convicted in 1996 for the kidnapping and murders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker.
The men were beaten and shot and the three were buried alive in a Memphis cemetery.
Carruthers’ case has drawn national attention as advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have argued there were significant problems with his trial, including that he was forced to represent himself.
Carruthers himself has consistently maintained his innocence.
“His trial was riddled with errors. He was denied legal counsel. There was no physical evidence linked to him,” the ACLU said in a press release demanding the “wrongful execution” of Carruthers be called off.
“The evidence against him that was presented at trial came from informants who have since recanted their statements or been discredited,” the ACLU continued.
The nonprofit group also collected more than 130,000 signatures calling for the execution to be halted to allow for “necessary fingerprint and DNA testing”.
Advocates and community groups delivered that petition to the governor’s office at the Tennessee capitol on Monday, but Gov Lee announced the following day that Carruthers’ execution would go forward as planned.
Last week, Kim Kardashian took up Carruthers’ cause, urging her fans in a social media post to call the governor’s office and demand the DNA evidence be tested “before it’s too late”, according to US media.
In a petition for clemency filed on Wednesday, attorneys for Carruthers argued that his current mental state – resulting from Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type, and brain damage – is too impaired for him to be executed.
“These disorders manifest in current symptoms of unending, synergistic, and complex delusions that thwart a rational understanding of his imminent execution,” his lawyers argued.
In response to the news of the temporary reprieve, Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the ACLU will continue fighting on Carruthers’ behalf.
“Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence,” DeLiberato said.
[BBC]
A French appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of manslaughter in 2009 Rio de Janeiro – Paris crash that killed 228 people – the worst aviation disaster in the country’s history.
The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that both companies were “solely and entirely responsible for the crash of flight AF447”, and ordered a payment of 225,000 euros ($261,720) for each passenger, the maximum fine possible for corporate manslaughter.
Although the penalties are largely symbolic, they capped an eight-week trial that victims’ families saw as a last chance to find justice two years after a lower court acquited Airbus and Air France.
Both companies have repeatedly denied all charges.
Following the ruling, Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court, saying the latest finding contradicted submissions from prosecutors and the 2023 acquittal.
Prosecutors previously warned that an appeal was likely and denounced the companies’ behaviour throughout the decade-plus legal process.
“Nothing has come of it – not a single word of sincere comfort,” said prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann as the trial was under way last November. “One word sums up this whole circus: indecency.”
The crash unfolded on June 1, 2009, when flight AF447 disappeared from radar screens as it headed from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to the French capital Paris with 216 passengers and 12 crew.
Two years passed before a deep-sea search uncovered the plane’s black boxes, which record flight data.
Investigators found the pilots had pushed the jet into a climb as it struggled with sensors blocked with ice during a mid-Atlantic storm. The plane stalled and crashed into the ocean.
While Airbus and Air France have blamed pilot error, the lawyers for passengers’ families argued that both companies knew that there was a problem with the plane’s pitot tubes, which measure flight speed.
Pilots were not trained to deal with such an emergency as the tubes malfunctioned, prosecutors said, triggering alarms in the cockpit and turning off the plane’s autopilot function.
Air France lawyer Pascal Weil said in October that the company “had the means to conduct high-altitude training, but we did not do so because we sincerely believed it was unnecessary”.
[Aljazeera]
The US has charged former Cuban leader Raúl Castro with conspiracy to kill US nationals and other crimes over the 1996 downing of two planes between Cuba and Florida.
The case unveiled on Wednesday accuses Castro and five others in the shooting down of the aircraft belonging to Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue and killing four people, including three Americans.
Castro, now 94, was then head of the country’s armed forces and faced international condemnation over the crash.
As the US seeks to exert increasing pressure on Cuba’s communist rule, President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the charges “a political manoeuvre, devoid of any legal foundation”.
Speaking at Freedom Tower in Miami, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the US would also charge Castro with destruction of aircraft, and four individual counts of murder over the deaths of Armando Alejandre Jr, Carlos Alberto Costa, Mario Manuel de la Peña, and Pablo Morales.
“The United States, and President Trump, does not, and will not, forget its citizens,” Blanche said.
The charges must be argued in a US court, with some carrying the possibility life terms. The murder charges each carry a maximum penalty of death or life imprisonment.
The justice department’s new charges take aim at a key figurehead of Cuba’s communist leadership when it is facing intense US pressure to make significant political and economic reforms to its one-party rule there.
“I think the strategy is to increase the pressure gradually to the point where the Cuban government will give in and surrender at the bargaining table,” said Wiliam LeoGrand, a expert on Latin American politics at American University.
The US has issued sanctions on the country and imposed a blockade on oil to Cuba that has resulted in blackouts and food shortages.
Earlier on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a message to the Cuban people timed to the country’s independence day.
“President Trump is offering a new path between the US and a new Cuba,” Rubio said.
Rubio told citizens of the island that a Cuban military run conglomerate known as GAESA is primarily responsible for the blackouts and food shortages that the country continues to endure.
GAESA owns or operates most of the lucrative parts of the Cuban economy from the ports to the petrol pumps to five-star hotels.
In response to Rubio’s message, Díaz-Canel accused the US of lying and imposing a collective punishment on the Cuban people.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the charges in Miami. (BBC)Díaz-Canel also said that the indictment of Castro was being used to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba” and accused the US of distorting the facts around the downing of the plane.
Asked by reporters about the prospects of bringing Castro to the US to face charges, Blanche responded that there was a warrant for his arrest.
He did not confirm whether the US would try to capture Castro, but said, “we expect he will show up here, by his own will or another way”.
American University’s LeoGrande said he believes the US is ready to capture the former Cuban leader “if the Cubans don’t surrender at the bargaining table”.
In January, the US staged a military operation to seize former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and bring him to the US, after the justice department indicted him.
It transformed Venezuela’s relationship with Washington, something LeoGrande cautioned would be unlikely to have the same effect in Cuba, noting Castro retired almost a decade ago.
Nearly 95 years old, Castro, the brother of late Cuban leader Fidel Castro, remains an influential figure, acknowledged on the island as the surviving “leader of the Cuban Revolution”.
Blanche said he would “not compare cases” between Castro’s and that of Maduro.
President Donald Trump was asked about the political aspect of Wednesday’s indictment.
“A lot of those people are related to me in the sense that I’ve had such a great relationship with Cuban-Americans,” Trump said. “On a humanitarian basis, we’re here to help.”
While Castro is not expected to be extradited or to appear in the case, all options appear to be on the table, says attorney Lindsey Lazopoulos Friedman, who served as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Miami.
“If he did appear in the case, he would be afforded the same legal rights as any other defendant,” Friedman said, adding that would ultimately include a trial by jury.
“No one expects that the case will follow this typical path… but the indictment is compelling and is supported by significant evidence,” she told the BBC.
Cuba unlikely to bow without a fight
The Miami centre where US officials announced the indictment of Raúl Castro was full of Cuban Americans, mostly representing Cuban exile organisations that have for decades led opposition of the Cuban government from within the United States.
Surrounded by pictures of the four people who died in the 1996 crashes, many at the Miami event described being thrilled by the news.
“It was time, 67 years of that murderous regime,” said Isela Fiterre. “Raúl Castro did not merely kill four individuals. Over the course of many years, he has killed countless people,” Fiterre said.
She said it is never too late for justice and that she is grateful to the Trump administration for taking this step.
Another attendee, Mercedes Puid-Soto, echoed those sentiments.
“I feel very happy. Justice has been served,” she said. “It’s very important that the families can close that chapter, and we Cubans too.”
“It’s unlikely that the Cuban regime will surrender to the United States without a fight,” Vigil noted. “And any move that includes working with the Cuban regime would be very difficult for the Cuban diaspora in the United States to accept.”
US and Cuban representatives, including Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, have held “conversations” in recent months, but US charges against the former president are unlikely to smooth these contacts.
On the contrary, the Cuban side showed signs of further entrenching into its “no surrender, no concessions” position against US pressure, with Cuban state media outlets blasting what they called the “false accusations”.
(BBC)
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