Israel/Palästina

The United Nations continues to draw attention to the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, where starvation and malnutrition are at the highest levels since hostilities began nearly three years ago. … OCHA also updated on the situation in the occupied West Bank, where another Palestinian Bedouin community was displaced on Monday due to violence by Israeli forces and settlers. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said early Friday that his security cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City in a further escalation of its 22-month war with Hamas.

To avert further deaths and inhuman suffering by starvation, Israel must immediately restore unimpeded access to Gaza by impartial humanitarian organisations, including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UN experts* said today. 

The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has announced his country plans to formally recognise Palestine during the UN general assembly in September, after France and 14 other countries co-signed a declaration that pointed towards a wave of future recognitions of an independent Palestinian state.

With Gaza in ruins and the two-State solution in jeopardy, ministers convened at the United Nations this week to jumpstart political momentum toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a crisis Secretary-General António Guterres warned is “at a breaking point.”

“The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza,” UN-backed food security experts said on Tuesday, in a call to action amid unrelenting conflict, mass displacement and the near-total collapse of essential services in the war-battered enclave.

Hamas confirmed on Thursday that it has responded to an Israeli proposal for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza, after more than two weeks of indirect talks in Qatar have failed to yield a truce.

A senior UN official on Wednesday urged the Security Council to push for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all hostages, warning that the war has become “a nightmare of historic proportions” and it is “long past time” for the fighting to end and for hostages to return home.

Twenty-eight countries including Britain, Japan and a host of European nations issued a joint statement Monday saying the war in Gaza “must end now” — the latest sign of allies’ sharpening language as Israel’s isolation deepens.

A coalition of countries has announced at a meeting in the Colombian capital of Bogota that they will pursue accountability for Israeli abuses in Gaza, including by preventing the transfer of weapons to Israel. The two-day meeting concluded on Wednesday with two dozen countries agreeing to six measures to “restrain Israel’s assault on the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.