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Finland has announced it will close all but one of its border crossings with Russia after a rise in the arrivals of refugees and migrants whom the government claims Moscow is intentionally pushing to the country’s frontiers.

Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said on Wednesday that as of the end of Friday, only its northernmost border crossing with Russia, Raja-Jooseppi, will remain open.

Finland had already shut four of its eastern border checkpoints last week and is set to close three of the four remaining crossing points.

“Raja-Jooseppi is the northernmost [border crossing], and it requires a real effort to get there,” Orpo said at a press conference.

‘Surge’ in arrivals

More than 600 asylum seekers have entered Finland via Russia in November, compared with only a few dozen in September and October. They were mostly from countries such as Yemen, Afghanistan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, according to border officials. Most were young men in their 20s, but some were families with children, border guard data and photos from news outlets showed.

Officials also said Finnish border guards and soldiers have begun erecting barriers, including concrete obstacles topped with barbed wire, at some of the crossing points.

After the recent closures, arrivals shifted north along the countries’ 1,340km (832-mile) border to Vartius and Salla, two border stations that still accepted asylum applications, Finland said.

“Undoubtedly Russia is instrumentalising migrants” as part of its “hybrid warfare” against Finland, Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said on Wednesday.

Moscow has denied it is funneling desperate migrants and refugees to the Finnish border.

Finland joined NATO in April after decades of military non-alignment and pragmatic friendly relations with Moscow. Its border with Russia serves as the European Union’s external border and makes up NATO’s northeastern flank.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday that Russian authorities are ready to work together with Finnish officials to reach an agreement on the border issue. Finland should have “put forward its concerns to work out a mutually acceptable solution or receive explanation”, she argued.

On Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Finnish ambassador in Moscow to lodge a formal protest over the closure of the most used checkpoints on the border.

About 30 to 70 refugees and migrants are arriving each day at the Vartius checkpoint in Kainuu and the Salla checkpoint in Finland’s Arctic Lapland region, where winter conditions have meant temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) and plenty of snow.

Andrei Chibis, governor of northern Russia’s Murmansk region, which borders Finland, on Wednesday posted pictures of migrants in a tent near the Salla checkpoint set up by the regional authorities to let them warm themselves up, eat and drink hot tea.

He described the situation as a “humanitarian crisis” and blasted the Finnish authorities, saying “foreign citizens can’t cross the border” to the Finnish side.

“At the EU border with Finland, Russian border guards have been letting people through without Schengen visas or EU residence permits. People who are being misled. People who are being used by Russia,” EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson said on Tuesday.

“The Finnish border is the EU’s border. The European Union is behind you,” Johanssen said, adding that Finland has requested additional operational support from Frontex, the EU’s border agency, and up to 60 officers.

In 2011, 3,000 to 4,000 asylum seekers became stranded in no-man’s land on the border between Poland and Belarus as Warsaw deployed security forces to stop migrants and refugees from entering at a time of freezing winter temperatures and lack of access to vital supplies and medical care.

Lithuania and Latvia also reported sharp increases in the number of people trying to cross their borders at the time.

The EU accused Minsk of deliberately enticing migrants and refugees to Belarus and then funnelling them westwards with promises of easy entry into the bloc as part of a “hybrid attack” on its member states in retaliation for sanctions. Warsaw accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of masterminding the crisis.

Both Belarus and Russia denied the allegations.

Human rights groups accused Poland of conducting illegal pushbacks at its border and raised concerns for the wellbeing of the stranded refugees and migrants.

Dozens of people from the same family have been killed in the Jabalia refugee camp, the Palestinian foreign minister has said, as Israel continued to bombard the besieged Gaza Strip in the hours after an agreement was reached for a truce that was expected to go into effect on Thursday.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said on a visit to London on Wednesday that 52 members of one family were killed in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.

“Only this morning, from the Qadoura family in Jabalia, 52 people have been wiped out completely, killed,” he said.

“I have the list of the names, 52 of them. They were wiped out completely from grandfather to grandchildren.”

In southern Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said that heavy strikes continued on Wednesday in the lead-up to the humanitarian pause.

“These areas are considered to be ‘safe places’ to flee to from the north,” he said after an Israeli strike left a residential building in Khan Younis “completely destroyed”.

“But they are experiencing the same level of Israeli bombardments.”

Separately in Khan Younis, the bodies of more than 100 Palestinians originally held at the al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, which has been repeatedly raided by Israeli forces, were buried in a mass grave.

The agreement between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that governs Gaza, comes after nearly seven weeks of war in the besieged territory that has killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands of others.

Key details of the agreement remain unclear, but it is expected to include the release of 50 civilian hostages held in Gaza, the release of 150 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons and a four-day halt to hostilities in Gaza. The pause is expected to coincide with an influx of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

United Nations chief Antonio Guterres described the agreement as “an important step in the right direction,” but added that “much more needs to be done to end the suffering”.

The deal, expected to come into effect on Thursday morning, has been welcomed by rights groups and political leaders as a sign of potential progress towards the end of the fighting, which began on October 7 when Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

Israeli authorities have said that most of the victims were civilians and that Palestinian armed groups also took about 240 others captive during the attack.

Israel promised to dismantle Hamas and unleashed a devastating assault on Gaza that has wiped out entire neighbourhoods and killed more than 14,500 people, according to Palestinian authorities, including more than 5,600 children.

Alongside the bombardment, Israel has severely restricted supplies of food, electricity, fuel, and water for the Strip’s more than 2.3 million residents, with international aid groups warning of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Medical officials have warned that disease could spread amid dire conditions and contaminated water.

Refugee camps, UN schools, and hospitals sheltering the displaced have all been targeted, and a trickle of humanitarian assistance coming through the border crossing with Egypt has not been enough to address the scale of suffering.

Aid groups say a key ambition is to get help to northern Gaza, which has been largely inaccessible and where nearly all hospitals stopped working during a blistering air and ground offensive by Israeli forces.

“The entire humanitarian sector is ready to scale up once everything is set,” said Tommaso Della Longa, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Israeli authorities have stressed that the temporary pause to the fighting will not mean an end to the war.

“We are at war, and we will continue the war until we achieve all our goals: to destroy Hamas, return all our hostages and ensure that no entity in Gaza can threaten Israel,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a recorded message.

Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said the implementation of the agreement was a “complex process that may take time”.

Officials from Arab countries welcomed the truce and said they hoped it could lead to further agreements in the future.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud also welcomed the truce, but insisted that increased humanitarian assistance resulting from the deal “must remain in place and must be built upon”.

Qatari official Mohammed al-Khulaifi, who helped broker the deal, said that he hopes the agreement will lead to a “bigger agreement and a permanent cease of fire”.

NewsFeed

“We want our homes back.” For hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza to the south, the 4-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas is being met with mixed reaction.

On November 8, the Israeli media monitoring group “Honest Reporting” published a report suggesting six Gaza-based freelance photographers who have been covering Israel’s war on Gaza for four leading international media organisations may have had advance notice of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel.

Israel’s reaction to the suggestion was swift and brutal.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office accused the journalists named in the report of being “accomplices in crimes against humanity”. Danny Danon, a senior member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, wrote on X that the photojournalists should be “eliminated”.”We will hunt them down together with the terrorists,” he wrote.

The discourse on whether the Palestinian photojournalists and those who published their work had prior knowledge of the Hamas attack occupied media airways for a few days.  But the controversy soon came to an abrupt end when all four media companies in question –  CNN, Reuters, The Associated Press and The New York Times – firmly rejected insinuations that they or the photographers they work with had any advance knowledge of the attack. They called Honest Reporting’s story “irresponsible” and said, “It jeopardised the safety of all media working in Israel or the Palestinian territories.”

Honest Reporting Executive Director Gil Hoffman said he was “so relieved” to have found the four companies’ statements on the issue “adequate”. He added that his organisation never “accused” the media companies of having advance knowledge of the attack but had only “raised questions”.

Why is this debacle worth remembering today? Because the incident had all the hallmarks of standard Israeli propaganda: using the real trauma and tragedy of a horrific attack to portray a conspiracy of collusion between Western media organisations and Israel’s enemies.

Propaganda campaigns or single salvos already dominate Palestinian-Israeli confrontations. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has developed effective propaganda and information manipulation techniques that give it an edge in getting the Western media to reflect its side of the story.

So it’s important to note when things in this realm start to change. This tale about whether Gaza photojournalists had advance knowledge of Hamas’s attack was the latest addition to a rapidly expanding list of recent Israeli propaganda efforts that have failed – mainly because Palestinians, Arabs, and most international observers of the conflict and the region now routinely investigate any serious Israeli accusation, and often expose it as a lie.

Consequently, American media, including organisations that traditionally presented Israeli views and allegations as fact without due diligence, now assess Israel’s media statements and narratives more carefully, especially when they are about military actions that kill Palestinian civilians.

One national newspaper reporter privately told me that journalists in the United States are increasingly sceptical of narratives pushed by security forces whether in the US, Israel or any other country because of how the Black Lives Matter movement has raised awareness of social justice issues and exposed police hypocrisy and lies.

“A soul-searching kind of change is going on,” the journalist said, “because we have to do better when reporting on race and ethnicity, especially in cases of violent incidents involving the police or military. Since 2020, we see the parallels between Black Lives Matter and Gaza very clearly.”

In recent years, there have been many occasions when Israel was caught bending the truth or outright lying to hide from the world its crimes against Palestinians and violations of international law .

After Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed during an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank in May 2022, for example, Israel claimed she was  “hit by indiscriminate Palestinian gunfire” in an exchange of fire with Palestinian gunmen. Yet, in a matter of days, several independent investigations confirmed that she was killed in a targeted attack by an Israeli sniper.

More recently, in early November, an Israeli air strike on an ambulance convoy in the besieged Gaza Strip killed 15 Palestinians. Israel said it was targeting “Hamas positions” but failed to convince the international community.

On November 11, the official Arabic account run by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a video of a nurse, apparently agitated, talking about Hamas overrunning the al-Shifa Hospital and taking supplies meant for patients. It was clearly a fake and was deleted by Israeli authorities without explanation after significant public backlash.

Last week, the Israeli military released a video of a room in Gaza’s al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital that it claimed included a duty roster in Arabic of Hamas militants guarding Israeli captives there – which in fact was just a handwritten calendar with the days of the week.

These are just a few recent examples of Israeli officials obfuscating the truth or outright lying to try to hide their criminal activity from global media audiences (and probably also from the International Criminal Court). These repeated and easily exposed lies have sharply raised American journalists’ scepticism of official Israeli statements. These days, even the most Israel-friendly media organisations are reluctant to publish Israeli claims as fact without seeing hard evidence.

Even journalists who tend to identify with Israeli views are more careful now when they deal with Israeli military statements, especially in cases of deaths and injuries, another television journalist told me. This change in approach can easily be seen in the US media’s relatively careful handling of Israeli claims that Palestinian hospitals in Gaza shelter Hamas military bases or command centres.

Israeli views continue to dominate American mainstream media, but as a result of this trend, the Israelis are increasingly being pushed to provide evidence for claims that the media once disseminated with no questions asked. Palestinian views also appear in the media more often, partly reflecting a critical structural change in society: Young Americans are much more even-handed between Israel and Palestine and more actively challenge US and Israeli government actions that they feel are excessively militaristic, unwarranted or unjust.

Another journalist with domestic and global reporting experience summed it up to me like this: “We’re feeling unprecedented generational and societal changes simultaneously in contexts of racial and social justice. This is a reckoning for the journalism industry.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Authorities say two people inside the vehicle have died, explosion took place on US side of bridge connecting countries.

Four border crossings have been closed between the United States and Canada after a vehicle exploded at a checkpoint on the US side of a bridge connecting the two countries at Niagara Falls, in New York state, authorities said.

Two people inside the vehicle were killed in the explosion that took place on the US side of the Rainbow Bridge that goes across the Niagara River, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press news agency.

Three other bridges between western New York and Ontario were quickly closed as a precaution, and the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport began security checks on all cars and told passengers to expect additional screenings, according to AP.

The Buffalo, New York, field office of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was coordinating with all law enforcement agencies and described the situation as “fluid”, in a post on X.

#FBI Buffalo statement on investigation at the Rainbow Bridge: pic.twitter.com/jRaGLL8sU8

— FBI Buffalo (@FBIBuffalo) November 22, 2023

No further information was immediately available on the cause of the explosion.

Photos and video taken by bystanders and posted on social media showed thick smoke and a security booth that had been singed by flames. Videos showed the fire was in a US Customs and Border Protection area just east of the main vehicle checkpoint.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was briefed and the White House said that it was closely monitoring the situation.

“This is obviously a very serious situation in Niagara Falls,” Trudeau said in Parliament. “We are taking this extraordinary seriously.”

Ivan Vitalii, a Ukrainian visiting Niagara Falls, told The Niagara Gazette newspaper that he and a friend were near the bridge when they “heard something smash”.

“We saw fire and big, black smoke,” he was quoted as saying.