UNRWA Commissioner-General on East Jerusalem: An assault on children. An assault on education
From Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA Commissioner-General as posted on his official X account (previously known as Twitter)
From Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA Commissioner-General as posted on his official X account (previously known as Twitter)
“A nuclear power considers a sick baby to be a security concern.”
Israeli-born legal scholar Dr Noam Peleg gave this year’s Yoliswa Dwane Lecture on 6 May. The annual lecture is hosted by Equal Education and UCT’s Centre for Law and Society, in memory of activist and Equal Education co-founder Yoliswa Dwane who died of cancer in 2022. This is a lightly edited and slightly shortened transcript of the lecture.
Prime Minister Mohamed Mustafa declared the Gaza Strip a famine zone on Wednesday. During a press conference on the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, attended by the government’s emergency operations room, Mustafa called on the entire UN system to immediately activate its mechanisms and treat Gaza as a famine zone.
GENEVA – Escalating atrocities in Gaza present an urgent moral crossroads and States must act now to end the violence or bear witness to the annihilation of the Palestinian population in Gaza – an outcome with irreversible consequences for our shared humanity and multilateral order, UN experts warned today, demanding immediate international intervention.
After serving more than 130 million total meals and 26 million loaves of bread over the past 18 months, World Central Kitchen no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza.
Foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp tells top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas he believes Israel is in breach of rights obligations linked to trade agreement
The undersigned 55 organisations operating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) call for urgent action from the international community against new Israeli registration rules for international NGOs. Based on vague, broad, politicised, and open-ended criteria, these rules appear designed to assert control over independent humanitarian, development and peacebuilding operations, silence advocacy grounded in international humanitarian and human rights law, and further entrench Israeli control and de facto annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory.
For two months now, Israel has been blocking the entry of food and humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, deliberately starving over two million people, including more than one million children. On 16 April, Defense Minister Katz declared Israel would continue to block the entry of food and aid into Gaza, effectively admitting it is using starvation as a method of warfare. On 25 April, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) announced that its food warehouses in Gaza were now empty.
The UN Secretary-General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have made clear that we will not participate in any scheme that does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality. In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the heads of all UN entities and non-governmental organizations under the Humanitarian Country Team have unanimously affirmed this position. Humanitarian action responds to people’s needs, wherever they are. Our teams remain in Gaza, ready to again scale up the delivery of critical supplies and services: food, water, health, nutrition, protection and more. We have significant stocks ready to enter as soon as the blockade is lifted.
“I’m not someone who says, ‘History will judge them’ — they will have to be judged before then,” Francesca Albanese said in an exclusive interview.