الكاتب: kafej

Palestinian authorities in Gaza reject Israeli claims that weapons were found in raid on al-Shifa Hospital.

The United States has denied giving Israel a green light for a raid on al-Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip after backing Israeli claims that the medical facility was being used for military purposes.

Speaking on Wednesday, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby countered accusations from Hamas that President Joe Biden’s administration was complicit in the raid.

“We did not give an OK to their military operations around the hospital,” Kirby told reporters.

Kirby declined to say whether Israel gave the US advanced warning of the attack during talks between Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

“I won’t go into detail about the conversation,” he said, adding that “there’s no expectation by the United States to map it all out.”

The US had previously stated that an intelligence assessment backed up Israel’s claims that al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, sat atop a large Hamas command centre.

Kirby said the US remained “comfortable with our own intelligence assessment”.

Israeli forces raided al-Shifa, which is sheltering hundreds of patients and thousands of displaced Palestinians, early on Wednesday, drawing alarm from international organisations and political leaders.

“Hospitals are not battlegrounds,” the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and its emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in a social media post in response to the raid.

While Biden had called on Israel to take “less intrusive action” at al-Shifa on Monday, Israel does not appear to have taken those demands seriously.

“It really does underscore that even as the US is supporting – not just in spirit but also militarily in billions of dollars annually – Israel’s ‘defence’, as they call it, the Israelis are really proceeding against the wishes, sometimes, of the United States,” Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett reported from the White House.

Omar Zaqout, an emergency room worker at the Gaza City facility, told Al Jazeera that Israeli soldiers “detained and brutally assaulted” some of those seeking shelter at the hospital.

The attack followed several days of encirclement by Israeli forces. Hospital staff said on Tuesday that they were barred from exiting the facility and they were forced to bury decomposing bodies in a mass grave.

The Israeli military said its troops found an operational command centre and assets belonging to Hamas in its raids on the hospital, but it has not produced any firm evidence to substantiate the claim that it is a central node of Hamas operations.

Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the troops had found weapons, combat gear and technological equipment there and were continuing their search.

The military also released a video that they said showed some of the materials recovered from an undisclosed building in the hospital compound, including automatic weapons, grenades, ammunition and flak jackets.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Wednesday that the Israeli military did not find any weapons when it stormed the hospital.

“The occupation forces did not find any [military] equipment or weapons in the hospital. Essentially, we don’t allow this [weapons in a hospital],” Munir al-Bursh, Health Ministry director, said in a statement.

Turkish president sharpens criticism of Israel and its allies and calls for Israeli officials to be tried for war crimes.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called Israel a “terror state”, stepping up his condemnation of the Israeli assault on the besieged Gaza Strip ahead of a sensitive visit to Germany.

Erdogan said on Wednesday that Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian armed group Hamas included “the most treacherous attacks in human history” with “unlimited” support from the West.

He called for Israeli leaders to be tried for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and repeated his view – and Turkey’s position – that Hamas is not a “terrorist organisation” but a political party that won the last Palestinian legislative elections held in 2006.

“I say clearly that Israel is a terror state,” Erdogan told members of his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) in parliament.

“While we curse the Israeli administration, we do not forget those who openly support these massacres and those who go out of their way to legitimise them,” he said, pointing to the United States and other Western allies of Israel.

“We are faced with a genocide,” Erdogan added.

He called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce whether Israel has nuclear weapons and added that Netanyahu would soon be a “goner” from his post.

Ankara would take steps to ensure Israeli settlers in occupied Palestinian territories are recognised as “terrorists”, he said.

Netanyahu, speaking at an event in Israel, said he will not be “morally lectured” by the Turkish leader, saying Erdogan supports “the terrorist state Hamas”.

The Turkish leader had taken a more nuanced line immediately after Hamas launched attacks on southern Israel on October 7. About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and about 240 people taken hostage, according to Israeli officials.

But Erdogan’s rhetoric has escalated as the scale of Israel’s military response has grown.

Health officials in the Hamas-run territory said more than 11,300 people have been killed in Gaza, including more than 4,000 children.

Turkey this month recalled its ambassador to Israel and broke off official contacts with Netanyahu, suspending recent attempts by the two countries to repair their rocky relations.

Israel has also said it is “re-evaluating” relations with Ankara after calling back its diplomatic staff from Turkey and other countries in the region as a security precaution.

Erdogan made his comments two days before a planned meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has been forced to defend his decision to receive the Turkish leader.

Germany has backed Israel, and Scholz said he is opposed to an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza.

“I don’t think the calls for an immediate ceasefire or long pause – which would amount to the same thing – are right,” Scholz said on Sunday.

“That would mean ultimately that Israel leaves Hamas the possibility of recovering and obtaining new missiles,” he added, echoing the position of the US government and calling instead for “humanitarian pauses”.

Grindavik is now a ghost town.

It has all the familiar places – shops, cafes, schools and apartment blocks.

But they are all empty, abandoned in the rush to flee an earthquake swarm over the weekend.

We were taken into the town under police escort, passing through several checkpoints.

Follow live: 800 new earthquakes raise volcanic eruption fears

The authorities are jumpy.

The magma is now thought to be just 500m below the surface right on the edge of town and they fear there could be an eruption at any time.

In the town centre the ground looks like it is being unzipped, with a gash stretching 150m or so.

Where it crosses a main road the rip is a couple of metres wide, with one side a metre lower than the other. There are enormous forces at work, splitting megatonnes of rock.

And the earth is still moving, stones shifting and tumbling down into the crack. In places it was too deep to see the bottom.

Clouds of steam rise from the gash. Hot water pipes that once heated homes and businesses are now pulled apart with the shifting ground.

The ground beneath our feet is supposed to be rock solid. We even call it ‘terra firma’. But it’s not in Grindavik, not now. You feel it could swallow you up at any moment.

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That sounds like a disaster movie, and the town looks like a Hollywood set.

But a few days ago this was a thriving community of almost 4,000 people.

They have been allowed to dash back to their homes in recent days to collect essential belongings.

Now, that seems to have now stopped, and it’s largely emergency workers left in the town.

There isn’t much more they can do.

Grindavik is at the mercy of the molten rock rising from beneath. And at some point it will be left to its fate.

When French President Emmanuel Macron called for a ceasefire last Friday, he said he was hoping the US and UK would follow suit.

So far, they have not.

There has been a marked shift in rhetoric in most Western capitals vis-a-vis how Israel is exercising its manifest right to defend itself, as the horrors of its campaign in Gaza pervade the world’s mobile phone screens.

Israel-Gaza latest: UN issues dire warning

The demands that Israel abides by its obligations under international humanitarian law have grown ever more insistent, with the focus on the desperate situation across Gaza’s hospitals, as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) hones in on what it says are Hamas strongholds located in and beneath hospital compounds.

But despite the clamour both from the street and from across the political spectrum – look no further than the potential rebellion within the UK Labour Party over calls for a ceasefire – government policy in the West remains largely committed, for now, to the shorter-term, holding notion of humanitarian pauses.

“We all want to take the next steps towards a ceasefire but it cannot be one-sided,” said Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong.

“Hamas still holds hostages, Hamas is still attacking Israel.”

For civilians in Gaza, humanitarian pauses are simply a way of prolonging their agony.

Dregs of aid brought in for brief, four-hour stints – a glimmer of relief that cannot possibly satisfy the gaping humanitarian need – before the fighting and the bombardment and the terrible bloodshed resumes.

This is why calls for a ceasefire have resonated globally in the way that they have.

They are an urgent and perfectly understandable human response to the sight of bloodied babies grey with the dust from rubble, of an escalating civilian death toll which claims mostly women and children, to the tears, screams and despair of the people of Gaza.

They also gloss over Israel’s concern that any longer-term ceasefire agreed before the IDF achieves, or at the very least nears, its stated goal of wiping out Hamas will allow their fighters time to regroup and recalibrate.

For now, efforts to secure even a limited hostage release deal have been stymied by both a lack of trust between the parties and domestic political pressure back in Israel.

As recently as last week, CIA director William Burns and David Barnea, his counterpart at Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Mossad, met Hamas officials in Doha to try and thrash out a deal on a limited hostage release in exchange for an extended pause in the fighting.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, so far, has reportedly turned such suggestions down.

Read more:
Village caught in crossfire ‘could turn into battlefield’
Israel claims al Shifa hospital has a dark side
Footage shows soldier toss grenades back at Hamas

Humanitarian pauses and ceasefires are, under international law, distinct terms representing different phases in a conflict and its resolution.

Until Israel can be sure Hamas even wants the guns to fall silent, it is unlikely to agree to anything even resembling a ceasefire.

That will only confirm the narrative of Israel’s opponents that it is engaged in an unjust war of aggression, with one senior UN human rights official resigning from his post over what he described as Israel’s “genocidal actions” – and the UN’s apparent failure to do anything about it.

In the meantime, Israel’s allies must reassure their own constituencies that they are not simply standing idly by while Israel flouts international humanitarian law in the name of self-defence.

Politicians have elections to fight and different peoples to placate.

Unqualified support for Israel is no longer a given, as Macron’s comments made clear.

In the immediate aftermath of 7 October, US President Joe Biden called on Israel not to let rage consume it.

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Those warnings have continued, his latest being that hospitals must be protected.

So far, they appear to have gone unheeded.

Leader of UN’s meteorological agency says the world is still ‘heading in the wrong direction’ and must cut use of fossil fuels.

The United Nations says the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere surged to new highs last year as climate change fuelled extreme weather across the globe.

In a bulletin released on Wednesday, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said three main greenhouse gases broke records in 2022 and warned that there is “no end in sight”.

“Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, thousands of pages of reports and dozens of climate conferences, we are still heading in the wrong direction,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.

This month, the UN’s annual climate summit is scheduled to start in Dubai and could include a push to phase out the use of fossil fuels before 2050. But thus far, countries that account for large shares of the world’s carbon emissions have fallen far short of the cuts needed.

The UN weather agency said global concentrations of carbon dioxide were 50 percent higher than the pre-industrial average, an unsettling new record. Other gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, also reached new highs.

“The current level of greenhouse gas concentrations puts us on the pathway of an increase in temperatures well above the Paris Agreement targets by the end of this century,” said Taalas, referring to the goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times.

“This will be accompanied by more extreme weather, including intense heat and rainfall, ice melt, sea level rise and ocean heat and acidification.”

About 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the G20, a group of the world’s major economies.

While carbon emissions can be cut, Taalas said that once concentrated in the atmosphere, carbon “takes thousands of years” to be removed, contributing to trends such as the rise in sea levels.

“About half of the planet has been facing an increase of flooding events, and one third of the planet has been facing an increase of drought events,” Taalas said.

“We must reduce the consumption of fossil fuels as a matter of urgency,” he added.