[🇧🇩] Israel and Hamas war in Gaza-----Can Bangladesh be a peace broker?

[Saif]

Gaza aid far from enough, UN warns

The UN warned yesterday that already low levels of aid trickling into Gaza had dwindled further, with the situation in the besieged north especially “catastrophic”.

www.thedailystar.net

Gaza aid far from enough, UN warns
14 Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes

Palestinians displaced from shelters in Beit Hanoun cross the main Salaheddine road into Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip following Israeli army evacuation orders yesterday. Photo: AFP

The UN warned yesterday that already low levels of aid trickling into Gaza had dwindled further, with the situation in the besieged north especially "catastrophic".

The warning from UNRWA, the United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees, came as Israel said it was opening an additional aid crossing into Gaza on the eve of a US-imposed deadline to improve humanitarian conditions in the war-ravaged territory.

Asked about whether there were signs the situation had improved ahead of yesterday's deadline, Louise Wateridge, an UNRWA emergencies officer, highlighted that "aid entering the Gaza Strip is at its lowest level in months".

Speaking to a Geneva media briefing via video-link from Gaza, Wateridge said that "the average for October was 37 trucks a day into the entire Gaza Strip... That is for 2.2 million people".

Death toll in Palestinian enclave rises to 43,665

"Children are dying. People are dying every day," she said, stressing that "people here need everything".

Meanwhile, Gaza's civil defence agency said yesterday that at least 14 people were killed in Israeli strikes on the Palestinian territory.

Israel's military campaign has levelled much of Gaza and killed at least 43,665 Palestinians since the offensive began in October last year, Gaza health officials said.

Wateridge also said that testimonies from the north painted "an endlessly horrific" picture that was becoming "more critical" by the hour.

"Hospitals have been bombed, the doctors inform us that they have run out of blood supplies, they have run out of medicine... there are bodies in the streets," she added. No food was permitted to enter besieged northern Gaza for an entire month, Wateridge said, adding that UN requests to access the area have been repeatedly denied.​

 

[Saif]

Mideast peace requires end to Israeli occupation

Arab and Muslim leaders demanded on Monday that Israel withdraw from occupied Palestinian territories as a precondition for regional peace, while denouncing ‘shocking’ Israeli crimes in war-ravaged Gaza.

www.newagebd.net

Mideast peace requires end to Israeli occupation
Agence France-Presse . Riyadh 12 November, 2024, 22:29

AFP photo

Arab and Muslim leaders demanded on Monday that Israel withdraw from occupied Palestinian territories as a precondition for regional peace, while denouncing ‘shocking’ Israeli crimes in war-ravaged Gaza.

A summit meeting in the Saudi capital Riyadh gave the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s 57 nations a chance to speak with one voice on turmoil engulfing the region, more than a year into the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

It came less than a week after Donald Trump secured a second term as president of the United States, Israel’s top military backer.

The summit’s closing statement said that ‘a just and comprehensive peace in the region cannot be achieved without ending the Israeli occupation of all occupied Arab territories to the line of June 4, 1967,’ referring to the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem as well as Gaza and the Golan Heights.

The statement mentioned UN resolutions which have called on Israel to withdraw from these areas, and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, in which Arab nations offered Israel normalised ties in return for a two-state agreement with the Palestinians along the 1967 lines.

The international community should ‘launch a plan with specific steps and timing under international sponsorship’ to make a sovereign Palestinian state a reality, the statement said.

Hamas later urged Arab and Muslim nations to back up those pledges with action.

‘The establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital would require more immediate efforts and practical solutions to force (Israel) to stop its aggression and genocide against our people,’ Hamas said in a statement.

The hard-right Israeli government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains opposed to Palestinian statehood and Israel’s new foreign minister, Gideon Saar, dismissed the prospect as not ‘realistic’.

Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich later Monday vowed to push for annexation of parts of the West Bank in 2025.

The Riyadh summit reiterated regional leaders’ call for Palestinian territories — including Gaza, which is separated from the West Bank by Israeli territory — to be grouped together in a future state.

The leaders also condemned ‘horrific and shocking crimes’ by Israel’s army, saying they occurred ‘in the context of the crime of genocide’.

The war began with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 last year, which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 43,600 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.

Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, which like Hamas is backed by Iran, began firing on Israel after the October 7 attack, in stated support of its Palestinian ally.

The regular cross-border exchanges escalated in late September. Israel has intensified its air strikes and later sent ground troops into southern Lebanon.

Addressing Monday’s summit, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the world must ‘immediately halt the Israeli actions against our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon’ and condemned Israel’s campaign in Gaza as ‘genocide’.

Prince Mohammed, the Gulf kingdom’s de facto ruler, also called on Israel not to attack Iran, highlighting improving ties between Riyadh and its regional rival Tehran.

Lebanon’s prime minister Najib Mikati warned that his country was suffering an ‘existential’ crisis and hit out at countries meddling in its internal affairs — a thinly veiled swipe at Iran.

Trump’s election last week for a second term in the White House was likely on leaders’ minds, said Anna Jacobs, senior Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank.

‘This summit is very much an opportunity for regional leaders to signal to the incoming Trump administration what they want in terms of US engagement,’ she said.

Iranian first vice president Mohammad Reza Aref said in his remarks that ‘the world is waiting’ for Trump ‘to immediately stop the war against the innocent people of Gaza and Lebanon’.

The final statement included a call for a ban on the export and transfer of weapons to Israel.

Despite criticism of the impact Israel’s military campaign has had on Gaza civilians, outgoing US president Joe Biden has ensured that Washington remains Israel’s most important military backer during more than a year of fighting.

In his first term, Trump defied international consensus with a series of moves praised by the Israeli government but condemned by Palestinians.

He recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the US embassy there, and endorsed Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law.​

 

[Saif]

Destruction in north Gaza widespread

Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza said Israeli forces had inflicted widespread destruction on their home districts in their latest six-week-old offensive and a rights group raised concerns Israel might put some areas permanently off-limits.

www.thedailystar.net

Destruction in north Gaza widespread
Say displaced Palestinians as rights group warns some may never return

Palestinians displaced from northern Gaza said Israeli forces had inflicted widespread destruction on their home districts in their latest six-week-old offensive and a rights group raised concerns Israel might put some areas permanently off-limits.

Jabalia, one of the largest of Gaza's eight historic refugee camps, as well as the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun and nearby villages, were among the first targets of Israel's ground offensive in October 2023 after Hamas members attacked Israel.

Tanks have gone in several more times in what Israel says are necessary operations against Hamas fighters there who still pose a threat. Yesterday, it said its troops had killed dozens of "terrorists" and found a large quantity of weapons.

Former construction contractor Abu Raed, who was displaced from Jabalia, said Israeli forces were blowing buildings up remotely after booby-trapping them or sending in robots.

Palestinian health ministry officials said Israel's latest airstrikes killed at least 15 people across the enclave, including four at Gaza City's Salahudeen School, which shelters displaced families. At least 43,736 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's offensive on Gaza since Oct 7, 2023.

The Human Rights Watch report was the latest to warn about the dire humanitarian situation. "Forced displacement has been widespread, and the evidence shows it has been systematic and part of a state policy. Such acts also constitute crimes against humanity," it said.

It said the displacement "is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors".​

 

[Saif]

Hamas says ‘ready for ceasefire’ as Israel presses Gaza campaign

A senior Hamas official on Friday said the group is ‘ready for a ceasefire’ in Gaza, urging US president-elect Donald Trump to ‘pressure’ Israel as it continued to pound the Palestinian territory.

www.newagebd.net

Hamas says ‘ready for ceasefire’ as Israel presses Gaza campaign
Agence France-Presse . Jerusalem 16 November, 2024, 00:54

A man reacts as he sits in a heavily damaged building following an Israeli strike in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Friday. | AFP photo

A senior Hamas official on Friday said the group is ‘ready for a ceasefire’ in Gaza, urging US president-elect Donald Trump to ‘pressure’ Israel as it continued to pound the Palestinian territory.

It comes nearly a week after Qatar, which hosts much of the Palestinian group’s political bureau, announced it was suspending its role as a mediator in the war and urging all parties to show ‘seriousness’.

‘Hamas is ready to reach a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip if a ceasefire proposal is presented and on the condition that it is respected’ by Israel, Doha-based Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim said.

‘We call on the US administration and Trump to pressure the Israeli government to end the aggression.’

On Saturday, Qatar announced it was suspending its role as a mediator in indirect talks towards a ceasefire and hostage release deal in the Gaza war that has ground on for more than a year.

‘Qatar would resume those efforts when the parties show their willingness and seriousness,’ Doha’s foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement.

Friday’s announcement by Hamas came as Israel continued to strike Gaza, with residents of the central city of Deir el-Balah searching through the rubble of their destroyed homes after overnight strikes.

‘I woke up to the bombing at 2:30am and was surprised by the rubble and glass falling on me and my children,’ said Mohamed Baraka, one of the residents, adding that the strike ‘resulted in three martyrs and 15 injuries’.

‘Put an end to this war because there are innocent people who are losing defenceless children who have nothing to do with this,’ he said.

The war erupted with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 43,764 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.

Militants also kidnapped 251 hostages during the attack, 97 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 whom the Israeli military says are dead.

Earlier Friday, the Hamas-allied militant group Islamic Jihad released a new clip of Israeli hostage Sasha Trupanov, after issuing a first video earlier this week.

Trupanov, 29, is a dual Russian-Israeli citizen who was abducted with his girlfriend, Sapir Cohen, from the Nir Oz kibbutz near the Gaza border.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called for the release of Trupanov and another hostage, Maxim Herkin, in comments made before the release of the latest clip.

Fears surged over the fate of the hostages after Qatar announced its withdrawal from mediating talks — the latest blow in a protracted negotiation process that has hit repeated impasses.

Israel on Friday also continued to strike Lebanon, where it intensified in September its air offensive and later sent in ground troops following a year of low-intensity cross-border exchanges with the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.

A building in Beirut’s southern suburbs collapsed in a gigantic cloud of smoke and dust, an AFP photographer reported, as two strikes attributed to Israel hit the Hezbollah bastion.

A series of images from the strike captures a falling projectile slamming into the lower floors of the building, which erupt in a huge fireball, causing the structure to collapse.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported a ‘heavy raid carried out by aircraft of the Israeli enemy’ in the Ghobeiri area of southern Beirut.

It said the raid had been preceded by two missile strikes on the same target by an Israeli drone.

The strikes followed a call by the Israeli military to evacuate the area. The evacuation call posted on X by Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee told residents to leave, warning of imminent strikes.

‘All residents in the southern suburbs, specifically in the Ghobeiri area, you are located near facilities and interests affiliated with Hezbollah,’ Adraee said in an Arabic-language post on X.

‘For your safety and the safety of your family members, you must evacuate these buildings and those adjacent to them immediately.’

Later in the morning, a second strike hit the Bourj al-Barajneh area of the southern suburbs, an AFP journalist reported.

NNA said two missiles had been fired by an ‘enemy aircraft’.

Lebanese authorities say more than 3,380 people have been killed since October last year, when Hezbollah and Israel began trading fire.​

 

[Saif]

Critical race theory, Euro-American pride and the genocide in Gaza

Proponents of CRT believe that racist practices are not individual or idiosyncratic, but are inherent in institutions, policies and structures of governance.

www.thedailystar.net

Critical race theory, Euro-American pride and the genocide in Gaza

Photo: Reuters

The critical race theory (CRT) emerged in the United States between the 1970s and 1980s and gained momentum in academic circles in the late 1990s. The theory addresses racial inequalities and injustices and explicates how racism operates in society and is normalised. Ideas of legal scholar Derrick Bell, who became the first tenured black professor at Harvard University in 1971, are considered instrumental in expanding this theory. He was once "arrested for using a Whites-only phone booth in Jackson" in Mississippi.

The CRT took a discursive form in Bell's 1970 book Race, Racism, and American Law, which argues that White supremacy is an integral part of US institutions. He argued that victories of the civil rights movement in the US "were not a sign of moral maturation in White America but a reflection of its geopolitical pragmatism." At 28 years old, Barack Obama introduced Bell to a rally at Harvard and said, "[Bell's] scholarship has opened up new vistas and new horizons and changed the standards of what legal writing is about."

The 1995 anthology of essays titled Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement articulated the principal arguments of CRT and gave it a wider scope. Subsequently, the 1619 Project was launched in the US in 2019 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of first African slaves in North America. It sought to relook at the country's history by rediscovering the contributions of African-Americans to American society from colonial Virginia to the present day. The project created an urgency to understand the long and enduring legacy of slavery in the US and thus increased the importance of CRT.

In 2020, in the aftermath of the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by White police officers in the US, protest marches under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement broke out in cities around the world. As a result, critical race theory came to prominence again as an emancipatory discourse. Its proponents felt vindicated that such killings "were not anomalies but evidence that the system was functioning as it was designed to." Especially in the US, academics gave CRT renewed attention to address racial disparities through the education system and put its opponents on the ropes.

Proponents of CRT believe that racist practices are not individual or idiosyncratic, but are inherent in institutions, policies and structures of governance. While persistence of discrimination and oppression is looked at through the prism of slavery and racial segregation in the US, in Europe the focus is on colonialism and the slave trade.

Emboldened and stoked by political demagogues both in Europe and the US, opponents of the critical race theory have mounted resistance under the pretext of defending positive images of their countries that were involved in colonialism, slavery and other forms of oppression. They view it as an attempt to "cannibalise" Euro-American countries. For instance, an anti-CRT commentator in the US complained that CRT teaches "young people to hate the country they are going to inherit."

Critics also argue that CRT leads to the indoctrination of students into anti-White stereotyping and the perpetuation of a struggle between Black and White people. Cynics among its detractors characterise the theory as "Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness." Many US states have banned CRT or any discussion that characterises the US society as inherently racist and segregationist. However, many agree with Derrick Bell and believe that critical race theory "means telling the truth, even in the face of criticism."

Critics of critical race theory don't deny that people of colour endured unspeakable injustice in the past through racism, colonialism, transatlantic slavery and other systems of exploitation. Nor do they seemingly suggest that such discriminatory practices should continue. They tend to focus on the here and the now and seek to herald a new beginning. Diverse groups of people rally around this idea of emphasising the present and the future.

For example, in the run up to the Commonwealth Summit (October 25-26, 2024) in the small island country of Samoa, there was a row between some member countries and former coloniser Britain on the question of reparation for slavery and colonialism. Although the British PM acknowledged that the slave trade was "abhorrent," he was unwilling to discuss the question of reparation in the summit. He expressed a desire to be "forward-looking" and to address "today's challenges." In this respect, the British government is not alone; other former colonial and slave-owning powers would perhaps make similar statements when they are forced to address the question of reparation.

Against this backdrop, the ongoing genocide in Gaza stares in the face of Western governments. It belies their assertion that they really "abhor" historical injustices for which repair and reckoning are being demanded. Their complicity in the killings in Gaza don't prove that they are opposed to injustices or committed to a just world where apartheid and ethnocentric arrogance are unacceptable.

Without the continuous supply of deadly weapons and ammunition from—and diplomatic coverups by—the US, Britain, Germany and some other former colonial countries, Israel would not have been able to continue its ongoing genocide in Gaza for over a year. This sponsorship of genocide is making it impossible for citizens of these powerful countries to throw off their sense of guilt. Rather, it is adding more reasons for them and for their future generations to be ashamed of the actions of their governments.

Since October 7, 2023, tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian babies, children, women and men have been killed in Gaza. This is robbing the conscientious people of genocide-enabling countries of their national pride. What's more, decades and centuries down the road, it will bring shame on citizens of the countries that have abetted it. Their future generations may not feel proud to know that their countries stood by a genocide-perpetrating regime even when it was slaughtering hundreds of healthcare providers and journalists so no one can treat the injured or report its massacres.

In these circumstances, can one really say that critical race theory is irrelevant in today's world?

Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Malaysia.​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 20 Palestinians in Gaza

Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed 20 Palestinians yesterday, including six people who were killed in attacks on tents housing displaced families, medics said.

www.thedailystar.net

Israeli strikes kill 20 Palestinians in Gaza
Say medics; Lebanon ceasefire hopes rise

Israeli military strikes across the Gaza Strip killed 20 Palestinians yesterday, including six people who were killed in attacks on tents housing displaced families, medics said.

Four people, two of them children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a tent encampment in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, designated as a humanitarian zone, while two others were killed in temporary shelters in the southern city of Rafah and another in drone fire, health officials said.

In Beit Lahiya town in northern Gaza, medics said an Israeli missile struck a house, killing at least two people and wounding several others. On Sunday, medics and residents said dozens of people were killed or wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a multi-floor residential building in the town.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said at least 43,922 people have been confirmed killed since the offensive erupted on October 7, 2023.

Meanwhile, the US official overseeing contacts to secure a ceasefire between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon is due to visit Beirut today, sources in Lebanon said yesterday, with Beirut expected give its response to a US truce proposal.

Israel continued to pound Lebanon, killing eight more paramedics in an air raid on central Beirut yesterday. The Israeli campaign has uprooted more than 1 million people in Lebanon.​

 

[Saif]

China's Xi calls for Gaza ceasefire: Xinhua

Chinese President Xi Jinping yesterday called for a ceasefire in Gaza, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported

www.thedailystar.net

China's Xi calls for Gaza ceasefire: Xinhua

Photo: AFP

Chinese President Xi Jinping yesterday called for a ceasefire in Gaza, as he visited Brazil's capital, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

Xi expressed concerns about the spread of the conflict in Gaza, and "called for a ceasefire and an end to the war at an early date," the agency said, as he met with his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The Chinese president's appeal for a halt to fighting in Gaza -- where Israel is pressing an offensive -- echoed one he and other G20 leaders made during a summit held Monday and Tuesday in Rio.

That summit's joint statement called for a "comprehensive" ceasefire in both Gaza and Lebanon, where Israel is also waging an offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.

Yesterday, the UN Security Council held a vote on a resolution calling for "an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire" in Gaza, but it was vetoed by Israel's ally the United States, which said it was not linked to a hostage release.​

 

[Saif]

UN chief slams ‘systematic’ looting of Gaza humanitarian aid

The United Nations chief on Tuesday denounced the ‘systematic’ looting of humanitarian aid in Gaza, a day after the territory’s Hamas authorities said 20 people were killed in a security operation targeting such actions...

www.newagebd.net

UN chief slams ‘systematic’ looting of Gaza humanitarian aid
Agence France-Presse . United Nations 20 November, 2024, 21:38

Displaced people use animal-drawn carts for transportation in al-Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip on Wednesday. | AFP photo

The United Nations chief on Tuesday denounced the ‘systematic’ looting of humanitarian aid in Gaza, a day after the territory’s Hamas authorities said 20 people were killed in a security operation targeting such actions.

‘Armed looting has become systematic and must end immediately. It is hindering life saving aid operations and further endangering the lives of our staff,’ said Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres.

‘However, the use of law enforcement operations must be lawful, necessary and proportionate.’

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza in the early stages of the war last year, and the UN warned on November 9 that famine was looming in some areas due to a lack of aid.

Aid distribution in Gaza is complicated by shortages of fuel, war-damaged roads and looting, as well as fighting in densely populated areas and the repeated displacement of much of the territory’s 2.4 million people.

Several humanitarian officials have said that almost half the aid that enters Gaza is looted, especially basic supplies.

On Monday, Gaza’s interior ministry said it had carried out a major operation targeting looters.

‘More than 20 members of gangs involved in stealing aid trucks were killed in a security operation carried out by security forces in cooperation with tribal committees,’ the ministry said in a statement.

It said the operation was ‘the beginning of a broad security campaign that has been long planned and will expand to include everyone involved in the theft of aid trucks.’

On Tuesday, the US-based Washington Post newspaper cited a UN memo as saying some of the gangs were receiving ‘passive if not active benevolence’ or ‘protection’ from the Israel Defence Forces.

Dujarric said he was unaware of the memo, but that the allegation was ‘fairly alarming’ if true.

‘The idea that the Israeli forces may be allowing looters or not doing enough to prevent it is frankly, fairly alarming, given the responsibilities of Israel as the occupying power to ensure that humanitarian aid is distributed safely,’ he said.​