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

[Saif]

https://thefinancialexpress.com.bd/world/who-says-israeli-military-attacked-staff-residence-in-gaza

WHO says Israeli military attacked staff residence in Gaza

REUTERS
Published :
Jul 22, 2025 12:57
Updated :
Jul 22, 2025 12:57

Smoke rises during Israeli strikes amid the Israeli military operation in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip on July 21, 2025 — Reuters photo

The World Health Organization said the Israeli military attacked its staff residence and main warehouse in the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah on Monday, compromising its operations in Gaza.

The United Nations agency said the WHO staff residence was attacked three times, with airstrikes causing a fire and extensive damage, and endangering staff and their families, including children.

Israeli tanks pushed into southern and eastern districts of Deir al-Balah for the first time on Monday, an area where Israeli sources said the military believes hostages may be held. Tank shelling in the area hit houses and mosques, killing at least three Palestinians and wounding several others, local medics said.

"Israeli military entered the premises, forcing women and children to evacuate on foot toward Al-Mawasi amid active conflict. Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot, and screened at gunpoint," WHO said.

Two WHO staff and two family members were detained, it said in a post on X, adding that three were later released, while one staff member remained in detention.

"WHO demands the immediate release of the detained staff and protection of all its staff," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Deir al-Balah is packed with Palestinians displaced during more than 21 months of war in Gaza, hundreds of whom fled west or south after Israel issued an evacuation order, saying it sought to destroy infrastructure and capabilities of the militant group Hamas.

WHO said its main warehouse, located within an evacuation zone, was damaged on Sunday due to an attack that triggered explosions and a fire inside.

WHO stated it will remain in Deir al-Balah and expand its operations despite the attacks.

Britain and more than 20 other countries called on Monday for an immediate end to the war in Gaza and criticised the Israeli government's aid delivery model after hundreds of Palestinians were killed near sites distributing food.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

The Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has since killed over 59,000 Palestinians, according to health officials, displaced almost the entire population, and caused a humanitarian crisis.

The World Health Organization describes the health sector in Gaza as being "on its knees", with shortages of fuel, medical supplies and frequent mass casualty influxes.​

 

[Saif]

Making concentration camp Gaza

THE odious idea of a camp within a camp. The Gaza Strip, with an even greater concentration of Palestinian civilian life within an ever-shrinking stretch of territory. These are the proposals ventured by the Israeli government even as the official Palestinian death toll marches upwards to...

www.newagebd.net

Making concentration camp Gaza
Binoy Kampmark 23 July, 2025, 00:00

CounterPunch/Ashraf Amra

THE odious idea of a camp within a camp. The Gaza Strip, with an even greater concentration of Palestinian civilian life within an ever-shrinking stretch of territory. These are the proposals ventured by the Israeli government even as the official Palestinian death toll marches upwards to 60,000. They envisage the placement of some 600,000 displaced and houseless beings currently living in tents in the area of al-Mawasi along Gaza’s southern coast in a creepily termed ‘humanitarian city’. This would be the prelude for an ultimate relocation of the strip’s entire population of over two million in an area that will become an even smaller prison than the Strip already is.

The preparation for such a forced removal — yet another among so many Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians — is in full swing. The analysis of satellite imagery from the United Nations Satellite Centre by Al Jazeera’s Sanad investigations unit found that approximately 12,800 buildings were demolished in Rafah between early April and early July alone. In the Knesset on May 11 this year, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave words to those deeds: ‘We are demolishing more and more [of their] homes, they have nowhere to return to. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.’

Camps of concentrated human life — concentration camps, in other words — are often given a different dressing to what they are meant to be. Authoritarian states enjoy using them to re-educate and reform the inmates even as they gradually kill them. Indeed, the proposals from the Israel’s defence department carry with them plans for a ‘Humanitarian Transit Area’ where Gazans would ‘temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate, and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so’.

The emetic candy floss of ‘humanitarian’ in the context of a camp is a self-negating nonsense similar to other experiments in cruelty: the relocation of Boer civilians during the colonial wars waged by Britain to camps which saw dysentery and starvation; the movement of Vietnamese villagers into fortified hamlets to prevent their infiltration by the Vietcong in the 1960s; the creation of Pacific concentration camps to detain refugees seeking Australia by boat in what came to be called the ‘Pacific Solution’.

Those in the business of doing humanitarian deeds were understandably appalled by Israel’s latest plans. Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, stated that this would ‘de facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations’. It would certainly ‘deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland.’ Self-evidently and sadly, that would be one of the main aims.

A few of Israeli’s former prime ministers have ditched the coloured goggles in considering the plans for such a mislabelled city. Yair Lapid, who spent a mere six months in office in 2022, told Israeli Army Radio that it was ‘a bad idea from every possible perspective — security, political, economic, logistical’. While preferring not to use the term ‘concentration camp’ with regards such a construction, incarcerating individuals by effectively preventing their exit would make such a term appropriate.

Ehud Olmert’s words to The Guardian were even less inclined to varnish the matter. ‘If they [the Palestinians] will be deported into the new “humanitarian city”, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing’. To create a camp that would effectively ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza of its population could hardly be understood as a plan to save Palestinians. ‘It is to deport them, to push and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have at least.’

Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg was also full of candour in expressing the view that the plan was ‘for all facts and purposes a concentration camp’ for Gaza’s Palestinians, ‘an overt crime against humanity under international humanitarian law’. This would also add the burgeoning grounds of illegality already being alleged in this month’s petition by three Israeli reserve soldiers of Israel’s Supreme Court questioning the legality of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Instancing abundant examples of forced transfer and expulsions of the Palestinian population during its various phases, commentators such as former chief of staff of the IDF, Moshe ‘Bogy’ Ya’alon, are unreserved about how such programs fare before international law. ‘Evacuating an entire population? Call it ethnic cleansing, call it transfer, call it deportation, it’s a war crime,’ he told journalist Lucy Aharish. Israel’s soldiers had been sent in ‘to commit war crimes.’

There is also some resistance from within the IDF, less on humanitarian grounds than practical ones. To even prepare such a plan in the midst of negotiations for a lasting ceasefire and finally resolving the hostage situation was the first telling problem. The other was how the IDF could feasibly undertake what would be a grand jailing experiment while preventing the infiltration of Hamas.

This ghastly push by the Netanyahu government involves an enormous amount of wishful thinking. Ideally, the Palestinians will simply leave. If not, they will live in even more carceral conditions than they faced before October 2023. But to assume that this cartoon strip humanitarianism, papered over a ghoulish program of inflicted suffering, will add to the emptying well of Israeli security, is testament to how utterly desperate, and delusionary, the Israeli PM and his cabinet members have become.

CounterPunch.org, July 21. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.​

 

[Saif]

100 NGOs warn ‘mass starvation’ spreading across Gaza

More than 100 aid organisations and human rights groups warned on Wednesday that ‘mass starvation’ was spreading in Gaza, as the United States said its top envoy was heading to Europe for talks on a possible ceasefire and aid corridor...

www.newagebd.net

100 NGOs warn ‘mass starvation’ spreading across Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Jerusalem 24 July, 2025, 00:01

Yazan, a malnourished 2-year-old Palestinian boy, sit with his brothers at their family’s damaged home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on Wednesday. | AFP photo

More than 100 aid organisations and human rights groups warned on Wednesday that ‘mass starvation’ was spreading in Gaza, as the United States said its top envoy was heading to Europe for talks on a possible ceasefire and aid corridor.

Israel is facing mounting international pressure over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, where more than two million people are facing severe shortages of food and other essentials after 21 months of conflict.

But it denied blocking supplies, saying that 950 trucks’ worth of aid were in Gaza waiting for international agencies to collect and distribute.

‘We have not identified starvation at this current point in time but we understand that action is required to stabilise the humanitarian situation,’ an unnamed senior Israeli security official was quoted as saying by the Times of Israel.

On the ground, the Israeli military said it was operating in Gaza City and the north, and had hit dozens of ‘terror targets’ across the Palestinian territory.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said that Israeli strikes killed 17 people overnight, including a pregnant woman in Gaza City.

The United Nations said on Tuesday that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food since the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operations in late May — effectively side-lining the longstanding UN-led system.

A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that ‘our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away’.

The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through UN-led mechanisms.

The United States said its envoy Steve Witkoff will head to Europe this week for talks on Gaza and may then visit the Middle East.

Witkoff comes with ‘a strong hope that we will come forward with another ceasefire as well as a humanitarian corridor for aid to flow, that both sides have in fact agreed to,’ State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.

Even after Israel began easing a more than two-month aid blockade in late May, Gaza’s population is still suffering extreme scarcities.

Israel says humanitarian aid is being allowed into Gaza and accuses Hamas of exploiting civilian suffering, including by stealing food handouts to sell at inflated prices or shooting at those awaiting aid.

GHF said the United Nations, which refuses to work with it, ‘has a capacity and operational problem’ and called for ‘more collaboration’ to deliver life-saving aid.

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that oversees civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said nearly 4,500 trucks entered Gaza recently, with flour, baby food and high-calorie food for children.

But it said there had been ‘a significant decline in the collection of humanitarian aid’ by international organisations in the past month.

‘This collection bottleneck remains the main obstacle to maintaining a consistent flow of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip,’ it added.

Aid agencies, though, said permissions from Israel were still limited and coordination to move trucks to where they are needed — and safely — was a major challenge.

The humanitarian organisations said warehouses with tonnes of supplies were sitting untouched just outside the territory, and even inside, as they were blocked from delivering the goods.

‘Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires, only to wake up to worsening conditions,’ the signatories said.

‘It is not just physical torment, but psychological. Survival is dangled like a mirage,’ they added.

‘The humanitarian system cannot run on false promises. Humanitarians cannot operate on shifting timelines or wait for political commitments that fail to deliver access.’

The head of Gaza’s largest hospital said Tuesday that 21 children had died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory over the previous three days.

Mediators have been shuttling between Israeli and Hamas negotiators in Doha since July 6 in search of an elusive truce, with expectations that Witkoff would join the talks as they entered their final stages.

More than two dozen Western governments called on Monday for an immediate end to the war, saying suffering in Gaza had ‘reached new depths’.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed 59,219 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which sparked the war, resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.​

 

[Saif]

Senior Hamas source says Gaza truce deal possible despite Israeli stalling

A senior Hamas source told Reuters on Thursday that there was still a chance of reaching a Gaza ceasefire agreement but it would take a few days because of what he called Israeli stalling. The source said Hamas' response to the latest ceasefire proposal included requesting a clause that would prev

thefinancialexpress.com.bd

Senior Hamas source says Gaza truce deal possible despite Israeli stalling

REUTERS
Published :
Jul 24, 2025 22:41
Updated :
Jul 24, 2025 22:41

Palestinians seeking aid supplies from the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation travel in an animal-drawn cart, near Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 24, 2025. Photo : REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

A senior Hamas source told Reuters on Thursday that there was still a chance of reaching a Gaza ceasefire agreement but it would take a few days because of what he called Israeli stalling.

The source said Hamas' response to the latest ceasefire proposal included requesting a clause that would prevent Israel from resuming the war if an agreement was not reached within the 60-day truce period.​

 

[Saif]

Brazil to join South Africa's 'genocide' case against Israel

Brazil on Wednesday announced its intention to join a South African-led case before the ICJ in which Israel stands accused of committing 'genocide'

en.prothomalo.com

Brazil to join South Africa's 'genocide' case against Israel
AFP Brasília, Brazil
Published: 24 Jul 2025, 12: 26

A Palestinian boy walks past debris after an Israeli strike on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on 23 July, 2025 AFP

Brazil on Wednesday announced its intention to join a South African-led case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which Israel stands accused of committing "genocide" in Gaza.

The foreign ministry in Brasilia said the country was "in the final phase of presenting a formal intervention" in the case already formally joined by states including Colombia, Libya and Mexico, and supported by many others.

In December 2023, South Africa brought a case to the United Nations' highest court in The Hague, alleging Israel's Gaza offensive breached the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Israel denies the accusation.

In rulings in January, March and May 2024, the ICJ told Israel to do everything possible to "prevent" acts of genocide during its military operations in Gaza, including by providing urgently needed humanitarian aid to prevent famine.

A statement from Brazil's foreign ministry denounced what it described as "indiscriminate violence" against civilians and the "blatant use of hunger as a weapon of war."

"The international community cannot remain inert in the face of ongoing atrocities," it read.

Israel is facing growing international pressure to end the war in Gaza that was triggered by a murderous attack on its soil by Palestinian group Hamas on 7 October, 2023.

Israel hit back on Wednesday at accusations it was behind chronic food shortages in Gaza.

More than 100 aid and human rights groups have warned that "mass starvation" was spreading in the war-ravaged territory.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has repeatedly denounced an Israeli "genocide" in Gaza.

The UN Genocide Convention defines the term as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."​