Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
A three-ship convoy left a port in Cyprus on Saturday with 400 tons of food and other supplies for Gaza as concerns about hunger in the territory soar.
World Central Kitchen said the vessels and a barge were carrying an estimated 300 tons of ready-to-eat items like rice, pasta, flour, legumes, canned vegetables and proteins that were enough to prepare more than 1 million meals. Also on board were dates, which are traditionally eaten to break the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan.
Earlier in March, World Central Kitchen, which is led by celebrity chef José Andrés, brought 200 tons of food, water and other aid to the Palestinian territory via an Open Arms ship. That was the first food delivery made by sea since the outbreak of the war.
The United Nations and partners have warned that famine could occur in devastated, largely isolated northern Gaza as early as this month. CBS News previously reported that an estimated 1.7 million people in Gaza have been displaced in the territory, according to the United Nations, with many having no access to food, water, medicine or appropriate shelter.
World Central Kitchen told CBS News that it has sent more than 37 million meals to the territory since Oct. 7, when Hamas militants launched a terror attack in Israel that triggered the war. World Central Kitchen also said it opened more than 60 community kitchens in the territory. The organization has also airdropped meals into the region, and delivered food to families in Lebanon who have been displaced by the conflict.
Humanitarian officials say deliveries by sea and air are not enough and that Israel must allow far more aid by road. The top U.N. court has ordered Israel to open more land crossings and take other measures to address the humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, the United States welcomed the formation of a new Palestinian autonomy government, signaling it is accepting the revised Cabinet lineup as a step toward political reform.
The Biden administration has called for “revitalizing” the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in the hope that it can also administer the Gaza Strip once the Israel-Hamas war ends. It is headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who tapped U.S.-educated economist Mohammad Mustafa as prime minister earlier this month.
But both Israel and Hamas — which drove Abbas’ security forces from Gaza in a 2007 takeover — reject the idea of it administering Gaza, and Hamas rejects the formation of the new Palestinian government as illegitimate. The authority also has little popular support or legitimacy among Palestinians because of its security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank.
The war began after Hamas-led militants stormed across southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking about 250 others hostage.
More than 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank or east Jerusalem since Oct. 7, according to local health authorities. Dr. Fawaz Hamad, director of Al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, told local station Awda TV that Israeli forces killed a 13-year-old boy in nearby Qabatiya early Saturday. Israel’s military said the incident was under review.
A major challenge for anyone administering Gaza will be reconstruction. Nearly six months of war has destroyed critical infrastructure including hospitals, schools and homes as well as roads, sewage systems and the electrical grid.
Airstrikes and Israel’s ground offensive have left 32,705 Palestinians dead, local health authorities said Saturday, with 82 bodies taken to hospitals in the past 24 hours. Gaza’s Health Ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants in its toll but has said the majority of those killed have been women and children.
Israel says over one-third of the dead are militants, though it has not provided evidence to support that, and it blames Hamas for civilian casualties because the group operates in residential areas.
The fighting has displaced over 80% of Gaza’s population and pushed hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine, the U.N. and international aid agencies say. Israel’s military said it continued to strike dozens of targets in Gaza, days after the United Nations Security Council issued its first demand for a cease-fire.
Aid also fell on Gaza. The U.S. military during an airdrop on Friday said it had released over 100,000 pounds of aid that day and almost a million pounds overall, part of a multi-country effort.
Israel has said that after the war it will maintain open-ended security control over Gaza and partner with Palestinians who are not affiliated with the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. It’s unclear who in Gaza would be willing to take on such a role.
Hamas has warned Palestinians in Gaza against cooperating with Israel to administer the territory, saying anyone who does will be treated as a collaborator, which is understood as a death threat. Hamas calls instead for all Palestinian factions to form a power-sharing government ahead of national elections, which have not taken place in 18 years.
The father of a woman who Hamas killed has defended an award-winning image of her.
The Associated Press image showed Shani Louk half-naked and face down in the back of a Hamas pickup truck.
This article contains an image that may cause distress.
The father of a woman who was killed during Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel has defended the decision to present a prestigious journalism award to a freelancer who photographed her dead body.
The Associated Press freelancer Ali Mahmud won the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Team Picture Story of the Year for the image, which showed Shani Louk’s lifeless body splayed in the back of a pickup truck and surrounded by Hamas militants.
Louk, a German tattoo artist, had been attending an outdoor “Festival for Peace” party near Kibbutz Urim when Hamas fighters targeted the area in a terrorist attack.
The decision to award the prize for Mahmud’s photo received fierce backlash on social media and from some Jewish commentators.
The official X, formerly Twitter, profile for the State of Israel appeared to react to the news of the award by sharing several images of Louk alive and smiling, writing: “This is how we want Shani Louk to be remembered.”
Israeli writer Hen Mazzig also took to X to hit out at the decision, saying that the image “dehumanizes” Louk.
“The biggest photojournalism competition in the world decided to trample on the family’s wishes in favor of giving a photo of Shani’s mutilated body a prestigious award,” he wrote.
“Photos showing violence and death can be newsworthy or important when they humanize the dead or galvanize the public. The ‘winning’ photo does neither; it only further dehumanizes Shani, retraumatizes her family and legitimizes Hamas’s actions under the guise of journalistic neutrality,” he added.
But Louk’s father, Nissim Louk, told Israeli news outlet Ynet that he was glad the photo won the award.
“It’s good that the photo won the prize. This is one of the most important photos in the last 50 years. These are some of the photos that shape human memory,” he said.
Nissim added that the image of his daughter and those of Noa Argamani being taken hostage by Hamas militants on a motorcycle were images that “symbolize this era.”
“I think it’s a good thing to use it to inform the future. If I start crying, what will come of it? This is history. In 100 years, they will look and know what happened here,” he added. “I travel the world, and everyone knows who Shani is.”
Hamas’ October 7 attacks killed around 1,200 people and saw around 240 others were kidnaped and taken hostage in Gaza.
Israel responded to the attacks with relentless airstrikes and a ground invasion of the territory. More than 32,000 Palestinians have so far been killed, Al Jazeera reported.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Beirut — The Syrian army said Friday that Israeli airstrikes near the northern city of Aleppo had killed or wounded “a number of” people and caused damage. A war monitoring group said the strikes killed 44 people, most of them Syrian troops.
The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor group, said Israeli strikes hit missile depots belonging to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group in Aleppo’s southern suburb of Jibreen, near the Aleppo International Airport, and the nearby town of Safira, home to a sprawling military facility.
The observatory said 36 Syrian troops, seven Hezbollah fighters and a Syrian member of an Iran-backed group died and dozens of people were wounded, calling it the deadliest such attack in years.
There was no immediate statement from Israeli officials on the strikes specifically, but Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was quoted by the Times of Israel’s defense correspondent as saying hours after that the military would be expanding its ongoing campaign against the powerful Iran-allied group, and that Israel was “turning from defending to pursuing Hezbollah.”
“We will reach wherever the organization operates, in Beirut, Damascus and in more distant places,” Gallant said, according to Times reporter Emanuel Fabian.
Israel, which has vowed to stop Iranian entrenchment in its northern neighbor, has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets in government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years, but it rarely acknowledges them.
On Thursday, Syrian state media reported airstrikes near the capital, Damascus, saying they wounded two civilians.
Hezbollah has had an armed presence in Syria since it joined the country’s civil conflict more than a decade ago, fighting alongside government forces.
Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and once its commercial center, has come under such attacks in the past that led to the closure of its international airport. Friday’s strike did not affect the airport.
The strikes have escalated over the past five months against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and ongoing clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli forces on the Lebanon-Israel border.
Hezbollah is an ally of Gaza’s Hamas rulers, who sparked the current war with their bloody Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Both groups are considered part of the network of armed proxy forces backed by Iran across the Middle East.
In neighboring Lebanon, an Israeli drone strike hit a car near the southern port city of Tyre and killed a Hezbollah member, Lebanese state media reported. Israel’s military said the targeted man was Ali Naim, the deputy head of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile program. The group confirmed he was killed, without stating what his job was within the organization.
The drone strike that killed Naim came a day after Hezbollah fired rockets with heavy warheads at towns in northern Israel, saying it used the weapons against civilian targets for the first time in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes the night before that killed nine people, including what the group said were several paramedics.
Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, concerns have grown that near-daily clashes along the border between Israel and Lebanon could escalate into a full-scale war, which could draw in other countries including Iran.