International US finds that Israel is not impeding assistance to Gaza; aid groups disagree

[LeonardoBjj]

By Humeyra Pamuk and Daphne Psaledakis

• Summary

• State Dept says Israel made progress on humanitarian demands
• Aid groups say Israel missed Tuesday deadline for improvement
• US says humanitarian situation remains dire, more change needed

WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden's administration has concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating U.S. law, the State Department said on Tuesday, even as Washington acknowledged the humanitarian situation remained dire in the Palestinian enclave.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in an Oct. 13 letter gave their Israeli counterparts a list of specific steps that Israel needed to do within 30 days to address the worsening situation in Gaza. Failure to do so may have possible consequences on U.S. military aid to Israel, they said in the letter.

Eight international aid groups, including Oxfam and Save the Children, said in a report that Israel had failed to meet the demands by the Tuesday deadline.

In a later statement on Tuesday, the Palestinian Hamas militant movement that rules Gaza criticized the Biden administration's assertion that Israel had taken measures to improve the humanitarian situation in the enclave.

The assessment was "an affirmation of President Biden's complete partnership in the brutal genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip," Hamas said.

The group again accused Washington of providing political and military cover for Israel and protecting it from being held accountable.

Sir. Were suporting a terrorist army doing a genocide?
- Dont be a fool, Joe. Baby US is incapable of any wrongdoing!
Were the good guys, dammit!

Biden, whose term ends soon, has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages.

More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then. Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than 2 million Gazans seek shelter as best they can.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a Nov. 4 briefing that despite Israel's measures to increase aid access the results on the ground in Gaza were not good enough.

Blinken in a meeting with Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer on Monday also emphasized the need for Israel's steps to lead to improvements on the ground.

Patel declined to say why Washington chose to make its assessment based on Israel's measures to address the problems instead of results on the ground, which U.S. officials have repeatedly said would be their measuring stick.

- Super-Man slaping a genocide suport!

ISRAEL'S STEPS​

On Tuesday, Patel said Israel had taken some steps, including reopening the Erez crossing, waiving certain customs requirements, and opening additional delivery routes within Gaza.

COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, on Sunday published a list of Israeli humanitarian efforts over the past six months, "highlighting recent initiatives and detailing plans to sustain support for Gaza as winter approaches."

Israel's U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon welcomed the statement from the State Department. "We work very closely with our allies in Washington," he told reporters. "We did a lot. We worked very hard in order to assist the humanitarian needs in Gaza."

"It's challenging ... because on the other side, you have Hamas. So even if we allow trucks to cross the checkpoints, Hamas will hijack the trucks, and sometimes even when we do 100% we cannot guarantee the results," he added.

The U.S. deadline expired just days after global food security experts said there was a "strong likelihood that famine is imminent" in parts of northern Gaza, as Israel pursues a military offensive against Hamas militants in the area.

For more than a month, Israeli forces have been pushing deeper into northern Gaza, surrounding hospitals and shelters and displacing new waves of people in an operation they say is designed to prevent Hamas fighters regrouping.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-finds-that-israel-is-not-impeding-assistance-gaza-2024-11-12/

 

[Spam On Rye]

Netanyahu win Time's man of the year yet?

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Deadly Israeli strike shatters sense of ‘safety’ in remote north Lebanon​

The villagers of Ain Yaaqoub spent days identifying charred remains. They fear Israel was targeting displaced people.

A red 'I love you' teddy bear lies in the ruins of a two-storey apartment block in Ain Yaaqoub, Akkar, Lebanon, in the aftermath of an Israeli air raid on Monday night [Raghed Waked/Al Jazeera]

By Madeline Edwards
Published On 13 Nov 202413 Nov 2024

Ain Yaaqoub, Lebanon – Shredded clothing, dusty broken table legs, torn copies of the Quran, a red “I love you” teddy bear and a book on Aristotle amid piles of socks – these, among many other things, lie strewn amid the rubble in the northern Lebanese village of Ain Yaaqoub in Akkar following a deadly Israeli air raid.

Beneath all this, at least one body remains trapped under the rubble of what was a two-storey apartment building, Red Cross rescuers say. Metres away, charred, unrecognisable body parts litter the ground.

- Dont worry fellow Israely. Hollywood will do a movie, painting us as heroes! Go find some woman that we can rape!

Monday night’s Israeli air strike on Ain Yaaqoub in this remote, far northern corner of Lebanon, killed at least 14 people, says Walid Semaan, head of the Lebanese Red Cross’ northern branch.

This was the second Israeli attack on Akkar, Lebanon’s northernmost governorate, since Israel ramped up its deadly bombardment of Lebanon in late September. The previous hit, a week before, destroyed a bridge linking two remote villages in the mountainous region. Nobody was killed that time around.

The attack on Monday, however, was even further north and was nothing less than a “massacre”, according to people in Ain Yaaqoub, taking out not only the apartment building but many more homes around it as well.

“There were so many women and children,” says Feryal Harb, whose deceased brother owned the building that was struck. She weeps as she sits on a concrete block next to the wreckage while neighbours unearth family photo albums and Qurans, handing them to her in succession. “We have so many memories here,” she says.

A little way up the hill from the blast site, Red Cross volunteers shout that they have found more body parts.

Another relative, Hassan Sahmarouni, says he believes the building had been housing about 26 people. But rescuers could not determine which of the dead they unearthed were women, men or children; their bodies were charred and crushed beyond recognition.

At a nearby government hospital are 14 wounded, expected to survive. Another hospital received a burned torso late on Monday night; administrators say they cannot yet determine its identity.

- Kill all civilians. Mmma US will protect us. Err, unless we cross paths with China!

The concrete building housed a Syrian woman and her four daughters who had moved in several years ago. One floor above them was a Lebanese family who had arrived in recent weeks from southern Lebanon’s Nabatieh district, fleeing Israeli bombs, neighbours told Al Jazeera. It was not clear to them why this building in a tiny mountain village, surrounded by olive groves and little else, was struck.

“They kept to themselves, we never got to know them,” says Amina Radwan, a mother of four, whose next-door home is now mangled and blanketed in shards of window glass. She and her children had been out of the house shopping for groceries when the bomb hit. “If we got back home five minutes earlier, God knows what would have happened.”

A false sense of security?

- Heey guys, theres bedridden perople at the hospital. They ease to shot, since we got horrible aim!

With so many dead and multiple surrounding homes ripped apart, residents here now fear they are no longer isolated from a war that has, until now, spared them.

Since October last year, Israeli strikes on Lebanon have killed about 3,300 people, the majority of them since Israel’s onslaught escalated in September. More than 1.2 million people have fled their homes in these two months. Tens of thousands have taken refuge in schools converted into shelters.

Others, however, have moved into vacant apartments in quieter areas of the country away from the front lines, including here in mountainous Akkar.

Some 170km (105 miles) from Lebanon’s embattled southern border and a three-hour drive from the capital, Beirut, Akkar’s remoteness has long meant government neglect. With few job opportunities, many residents work in agriculture or join the army – lending the governorate its nickname, “storehouse of the army”.

- We shoot another american citzen. Don't worry, US goverment will protect us!

But since Israel began its onslaught on Gaza which triggered a near-daily exchange of fire with Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon more than a year ago, that distance gave Akkar a sense of relative safety.

“We didn’t think this could happen here,” says Ahmed Rakhieh, who lives right next to the bomb site.

“Now, khalas [enough]! Nowhere is safe.”

Moments later, the sound of an unseen Israeli fighter jet reverberates.

Zangief: Are you sayng those people defend Israel, even thought they're the bad guys?

 

[LeonardoBjj]

‘I am sleeping among the ashes’​

Steps from the destroyed building, 45-year-old Ammar Khodr’s ground-floor kitchen has been blown out, leaving just a mishmash of roof tiles and splintered cabinets. “I can’t fix anything,” he says, dazed. Instead, he is simply “sleeping among the ashes”, while his five children are now staying with relatives.

Next door, at Amina Radwan’s house, her children’s beds are covered in broken glass. She says she is worried that there may have been Hezbollah members among the displaced who took up residence next door, and this may have prompted Israel’s Monday night bombing. “[Hezbollah supporters] shouldn’t come and live among us here, around children and innocent people.”

- I never killed that many people. And i am the villain?

Rumours were circulating on Tuesday that the target of the previous night’s strike was a family member of Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem. But a family friend of one of the injured, also from Nabatieh, tells Al Jazeera from the Akkar hospital that the building residents were “innocent” and did not belong to Hezbollah.

About 10,500 displaced people from Lebanon’s south and the Bekaa Valley – areas under heavy Israeli bombardment – have taken refuge in this part of Akkar, according to a local official who requested anonymity.

Some 120 of them are in al-Ayoun, the next village over from Ain Yaaqoub, Asaad Ibrahim, a municipal council member, says, sitting in his garden on Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the deadly Israeli attack, with his family members.

At first, in September, when Israeli strikes forced hundreds of thousands to flee, there was a sense of solidarity in Akkar, says Ibrahim. Residents were proud to provide housing for their countrymen, displaced from the front line – no formal rental contracts required.

“But people are scared now,” he says. The mosque next to his home sounds out the noontime call to prayer. September’s solidarity is fading. Is Akkar still far removed from the war, after Monday night?

- Trump shaking the hands of his boss!

“There’s no such thing as ‘far’.”

Ibrahim and others told Al Jazeera on Tuesday they fear the Israeli bombing, and the deaths and damage it caused, could ignite social tensions towards the displaced Lebanese, most of whom are Shia Muslims now living in a majority Sunni and Christian part of northern Lebanon which has no traditional support base for Hezbollah.

- The next fake Christian that say they're killing innocent people in Gaza, in my name, will get punched in the mounth!

One block away from Ibrahim’s house, on their balcony overlooking a quiet alleyway, two women from a displaced south Lebanon family declined to be interviewed, saying they fear social repercussions.

Loved ones of those injured in Monday’s strike, whom Al Jazeera found gathered at the nearby government hospital, also declined interviews, still upset by the bombing and fearful of security risks should they speak with the press.

Among the injured survivors is Akil Harb, a young NGO project manager from Nabatieh whose childhood friend, Hassan Hassan, is waiting in the emergency ward hallway.

“He’s in shock,” Hassan says. “His father and two siblings died, and his mother was wounded … People are still too upset to speak.” Hassan insists he still feels welcome in north Lebanon after locals donated blood following Monday night’s Israeli strike.

‘They’re family’​

Meanwhile, the neighbours are beginning to clean up their shattered homes.

Others just want to leave altogether, rattled by the bombing or distraught at thoughts of the astronomical repair costs.

Hassan Sahmarouni, the cousin of the destroyed building’s owner, says he won’t lay blame on the displaced family from Nabatieh. “We don’t see them as ‘refugees from the south’,” he says, standing atop the debris.

“We see them as family.”

Later on, Radwan’s four daughters sweep up glass in what remains of their home into little piles.

A bucket of olives, gathered two days ago as part of the yearly harvest, sits in the kitchen, spoiled by shards of window. The girls gather bags of clothing to take elsewhere, ready to flee a war that has now reached Akkar.

Outside, Red Cross volunteers fish out charred bits of former neighbours from the ground and collect them in plastic biohazard bags; it is all that is left of them.

- Heey US, that thing in yourt teeths is just Israel pubic hair!

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/...illagers-fret-israel-targets-displaced-people

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Netanyahu win Time's man of the year yet?

- Kamala vs Trump was just a excuse to see who would be Israel new court jester!

 

[Deleted member 585708]

If Israel's investigations into themselves aren't conclusive, the US will be sure to clear them.

Freedom bless.

 

[Fedor>Cain]

Lmao at TRT Jesus wanting to punch fake Christians in the face.

A+ photo work in this one

 

[Fox by the Sea]

we have investigated the guy we're giving guns to and decided giving guns to him is fine.

 

[SammyPops]

So .... Orwell's doublethink is real ....

 

[Renard]

The American corpocracy has investigated their Middle-East subsidiary and found no evidence of wrongdoing.

 

[I Am Legion]

Do the citizens hold Hamas accountable for starting the offensive after taking hostages, raping and killing women, and citizens at a music festival?

 

[Natural Order]

Netanyahu win Time's man of the year yet?

Blinken probably due up for a Nobel peace prize too, come to think of it!

 

[fungi]

They are trying for WW3. Pushing hard.
No one's biting so far. Not even Iran.

 

[ShadowRun]

Do the citizens hold Hamas accountable for starting the offensive after taking hostages, raping and killing women, and citizens at a music festival?

Who cares about little details like that bro

 

[Spam On Rye]

- Kamala vs Trump was just a excuse to see who would be Israel new court jester!

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[Blastbeat]

i appreciate the depiction of events with Lego scenes.

 

[avenue94]

Do the citizens hold Hamas accountable for starting the offensive after taking hostages, raping and killing women, and citizens at a music festival?

What does holding Hamas accountable look like exactly? Odd way to excuse the killing of children.

 

[kflo]

What does holding Hamas accountable look like exactly? Odd way to excuse the killing of children.

it's funny that this is the first war where civilians are killed......including children...........

again, you're still under some delusion that hamas SHOULD still govern gaza (after 10/7) and it would just work out well through diplomatic means. the future for gaza and the innocent civilians therein would look worse than the last 18 years with hamas in power.

 

[avenue94]

it's funny that this is the first war where civilians are killed......including children...........

again, you're still under some delusion that hamas SHOULD still govern gaza (after 10/7) and it would just work out well through diplomatic means. the future for gaza and the innocent civilians therein would look worse than the last 18 years with hamas in power.

I didn't say they should. I said Hamas is the default option until something or someone better comes along. You work with what you have.

But again do tell me about how Bibi has a super duper top secret plan but just can't share it yet.

 

[kflo]

I didn't say they should. I said Hamas is the default option until something or someone better comes along. You work with what you have.

well, they're not the default anymore. you wouldn't accept that as your neighbor after 10/7. and accepting it just means having more and more restrictions on the people there. it's a hopeless situation, as it's been the last 18 years there.

But again do tell me about how Bibi has a super duper top secret plan but just can't share it yet.

i didn't say he has a super duper top secret plan. i have said total regime change was necessary, and that's happening. step 1......