An Israeli air strike on a house in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah killed at least 10 people, including six children, hospital authorities said, as Israel pursues its nearly seven-month offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory.
Funerals were held on Saturday for those killed in the deadly strike on Rafah’s western Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood the night before, according to Gaza’s civil defence.
At al-Najjar Hospital, the site of the area’s main morgue, relatives sobbed and hugged white-shrouded children’s bodies. “Hamza my beloved. Your hair looks so pretty,” a mourning grandmother said.
The fatalities included Abdel-Fattah Sobhi Radwan, his wife Najlaa Ahmed Aweidah and their three children, according to his brother-in-law Ahmed Barhoum. Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter, Alaa.
“This is a world devoid of all human values and morals,” Barhoum told The Associated Press, crying as he gently rocked Alaa’s body.
“They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children. The only martyrs were women and children.”
A young Palestinian mourns over the bodies of children killed in Israeli bombing in Rafah [AFP]
The scene of bodies being transferred from al-Najjar Hospital to their final burial was heartbreaking, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said, reporting from Rafah.
“The majority were children, wrapped in white sheets soaked in blood … We spoke to a doctor from the hospital [where the children were brought] who described them as having devastating wounds, soaked in blood,” he said.
“Their burns were so bad that even if they made it to the hospital alive, they would have quickly lost their lives because there’s no way such injuries could be treated right away given the current situation.”
Al Jazeera’s reporters said the Israeli military continued its assault on the city on Saturday. “There has been no let-up in the fighting,” said correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum.
‘No plans for food, water, civil services’
Israel has been promising a major invasion into Rafah, which hosts more than half of Gaza’s population of about 2.3 million and is the only area in the territory to have been spared Israel’s ground forces so far.
According to two Gaza war monitors, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Critical Threats Project (CTP), United States and Israeli officials held a high-level “virtual meeting” on Thursday to discuss a Rafah incursion.
Palestinians, including children, examine the rubble of destroyed buildings as a result of an Israeli attack east of Rafah, in Gaza [Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu Agency]
The US-based think-tanks said Israel shared with the US its plan to move some 1.4 million Palestinian civilians out of Rafah ahead of its promised ground invasion; however, the plan did not include “concepts for access to food, water and other civil services” according to reports.
Al Jazeera’s Abu Azzoum said Rafah has been witnessing a surge of Israeli military strikes in the past couple of weeks and these attacks could be seen as a sign that further military incursion could be carried out, specifically in light of Israel’s mobilisation of its troops near the border with Rafah.
“Right now, we are in central Rafah, and we can clearly see in the sky above the Kuwaiti Hospital, at least four Israeli military surveillance drones, hovering at a very low altitude,” he said.
“Different areas have been attacked in Rafah … One of the latest strikes targeted an empty house on the western side of that very densely populated area.”
Additionally, there were Israeli strikes on other areas of the Gaza Strip on Saturday, including the Jabalia, Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij refugee camps, our correspondent said.
More than 34,000 people have been killed and over 76,900 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 7.
In England, a landmark independent review into gender care services for young people has exposed one of the biggest medical negligence scandals of recent times and vindicated those who have been accused of engaging in malicious “culture wars” and branded as unkind bigots for opposing unnecessary medicalisation of children.
The review, conducted by respected paediatrician Hilary Cass, found that some of the most vulnerable members of society – children presenting with “gender dysphoria” which, in many cases, masks autism, sexual abuse, trauma and confusion over same-sex attraction, among other conditions – have been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions in England’s gender care clinics.
The National Health Service (NHS England) said it commissioned the review, published on April 10, to ensure that “children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or experiencing gender dysphoria receive a high standard of care, that meets their needs, is safe, holistic and effective.”
The review’s intentions, and thus its conclusions, are of course disputed by those who insist that anyone claiming to be transgender must be instantly affirmed – and in the case of a child, given access to puberty blockers.
Puberty blockers – hormones that stop the progress of puberty – have long been at the centre of the dispute over whether medical interventions offered to gender-questioning children are safe and fit for purpose.
In short, Cass has found that puberty blockers do indeed have side effects and negative health implications. Her inquiry concluded that there is, at best, weak evidence that these drugs are safe and beneficial to gender-questioning children, especially in the long term.
Cass told the BBC that the use of puberty blockers to “arrest puberty” started out as a clinical trial, but has been expanded to a wider group of young people before the results of that trial were available.
“It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that’s been a particular problem that we have not had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are,” she said.
To make sense of this scandal, and understand how the NHS came to offer this experimental treatment to vulnerable children without obtaining meaningful evidence for its safety and efficacy, we must examine how British institutions have been captured by “gender ideology” – the belief that an individual’s internal sense of gender, or “gender identity”, should supersede their sex in all aspects of life and under law.
In 2016, Women and Equalities Minister Maria Miller led an inquiry into transgender equality that strongly recommended that the United Kingdom legally adopt principles of gender self-declaration, which would allow any individual to decide whether they would be considered male or female according to their own “gender identity”.
Miller signed off a report advising a change to the Equality Act which would replace the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” with “gender identity”. In so doing, she suggested that the inner feeling of “gender” should take precedence over legal sex.
Feminists complained – for us, this was a matter of protecting our hard-won sex-based rights. But Miller dismissed women’s fury about the erosion of single-sex provisions in domestic violence refuges and prisons among other aspects of life as “extraordinary” bigotry.
The feminist resistance to gender ideology and objection to harm it inflicts on women and children, however, did not start with Miller’s misguided inquiry, which ramped up institutional capture.
The first article I ever wrote on the trans issue was published in the Telegraph Magazine in November 2003. It was about those who had undergone “sex change” surgery (the popular parlance of the time).
Researching that article, I discovered that Mermaids (a charity supporting children and teenagers with “gender identity disorder”) had seen a dramatic increase in inquiries since its founding in 1995. “Sex-change” treatment, including puberty blockers, was available to children as young as 14, despite evidence (even then) from the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust that one in four teenagers seeking “gender reassignment” would later change their minds.
Soon after, I wrote about Vancouver Rape Relief (VRR), in Canada. In August 1995, two VRR employees had asked Kimberly Nixon (a trans-identified male) to leave its counsellor training, which prepared attendees to offer face-to-face support to women traumatised as a result of male violence. The following day, Nixon filed a human rights complaint, initiating a lengthy legal battle.
The publication of this article in Guardian Weekend on January 30, 2004, headed “Gender Benders, Beware”, led directly to me being cast out by trans activists.
Invitations to prestigious events were withdrawn. I was shortlisted for awards, only to be un-shortlisted when the organisers found themselves under pressure.
Refusing to bow down to these efforts, I and a small number of other feminists continued to speak out – as did some valiant whistle-blowers. These were people working within gender clinics, horrified by the creeping normalisation of transitioning “gender-distressed” children.
In September 2017, Woman’s Place UK (WPUK) was founded by a group of feminists in response to planned new legislation by Miller, and everything changed as groups of women began to organise. Resistance to gender ideology was now driving feminist activism.
These efforts, however, did not immediately put a stop to institutional capture. There was a spike in the number of children, overwhelmingly girls, presenting with gender dysphoria and being referred to gender clinics, but this did not concern trans activists and their supporters in positions of power. More than 5,000 referrals were made to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in London in 2021-22, compared to just 500 hundred a decade earlier. Almost two-thirds of referrals in recent years were teenage girls. Still, people continued to dismiss our concerns over gender ideology and its medicalisation of children as hyperbole and bigotry.
By July 2023, the situation in schools in some parts of the country had become so urgent that concerned parents started to take matters into their own hands.
In the Brighton and Hove area, where a number of children were being allowed to “socially transition” at school, for example, concerned parents set up PSHE Brighton to assess the delivery of Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education (PSHE) and Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) in local schools.
So far, more than 20 local families contacted them and voiced their worry that their children may be being transitioned “from the classroom to the clinic”.
One such family was 16-year-old Catherine’s.
Catherine is autistic and, in less than two years, has gone from being a feminist and a proud lesbian to identifying as a boy. Now fixated on medical and surgical transition, she appears to have experienced rapid onset gender dysphoria after accessing material from trans-affirming charities like Mermaids online.
Her parents say she forced her school into making a social work referral by self-harming and reporting false information about her family. They explain that they had secured agreement from both Catherine’s headteacher and a private counselling service that social transition would be inappropriate for her before a full assessment of her needs had been carried out. Nevertheless, her parents say that “an unholy alliance of well-meaning teachers and social workers, misguided by potentially unlawful policies, practices, procedures, and training, have led to Catherine transitioning – first socially and then medically”.
Today, Catherine is estranged from both of her parents.
There are many, many more families going through this hell, and many children like Catherine who are exposed to experimental treatments with permanent side effects, as a result of an almost blind acceptance by individuals and institutions of gender ideology.
For years, those of us who tried to put a stop to this have been accused of being bigoted, unkind, and motivated by a dislike of trans people. For years, it has been claimed that it was not feminists and concerned parents, but ideological charities like Mermaids who were doing what is best for “trans children”. Women lost their jobs, reputations and, often, sanity for speaking up against gender ideology, and its medicalisation of vulnerable children. Thankfully, Hilary Cass has finally exposed the truth, proved that it was not us who were being “unkind” but those unnecessarily medicalising children, and brought us one step closer to throwing the harmful delusion that is gender ideology into the dustbin of history.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Lagos, Nigeria – In the decade since the armed group Boko Haram kidnapped nearly 300 students at an all-girls school in the town of Chibok, abductions have become a recurrent fixture in Nigeria, especially in the restive northern regions.
Just last month, on March 7, a criminal gang kidnapped 287 pupils at the government secondary school in Kuriga, a town in Kaduna state. Two days later, another armed group broke into the dorm of a boarding school in Gidan Bakuso, Sokoto state, kidnapping 17 students.
The Sokoto victims and more than 130 of the victims from Kaduna have since been released, but there is no word yet about the remaining abductees.
Meanwhile, out of the hundreds taken in Chibok in April 2014, more than 90 are still missing, according to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.
“I cannot believe that it is 10 years and we have not really done anything about [stopping] it,” said Aisha Yesufu, the co-convener of the #BringBackOurGirls movement pressing for the release of the kidnapped Chibok students.
Nigeria is plagued by insecurity. In the northeast, Boko Haram has waged a violent insurgency since 2009; in the north-central region clashes between farmers and herders have escalated in recent years; and acts of banditry by gunmen in the northwest are terrorising citizens.
Across the country, the targeting of vulnerable populations has been widespread, including kidnappings for ransom or to pressure the government to meet the aggressors’ demands. Experts also say that worsening economic conditions have led to an increase in abductions for ransom over the last four years.
But as Africa’s largest economy and a country with one of the strongest military forces on the continent, many have questioned why Nigeria has been unable to nip the spiralling insecurity crisis in the bud.
“At the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that there is no political will,” Yesufu said.
Bring back our girls campaigners chant slogans during a protest calling on the government to rescue the remaining kidnapped Chibok girls who were abducted in 2014 [File: Sunday Alamba/AP]
A booming industry
Last year, charity Save The Children reported that more than 1,680 students have been abducted in Nigeria since 2014. This has significantly contributed to deteriorating absentee statistics, with one in three Nigerian children not in school according to UNICEF.
But students are not the only ones bearing the burden of the crisis as travellers, businesspeople, priests, and those perceived as being well-off are also often targets. Kidnappings have become a sub-economy of sorts, as abductors rake in millions of naira in ransom payments. Social media is also littered with public requests from people soliciting funds to buy the freedom of their abducted relatives and friends.
Since 2019, there have been 735 mass abductions in Nigeria, according to socio-political risk consultancy firm, SBM Intelligence. It said between July 2022 and June 2023, 3,620 people were abducted in 582 kidnapping cases with about 5 billion naira ($3,878,390) paid in ransoms.
This year alone SBM Intelligence said there have already been 68 mass abductions.
The abductions are not confined to the north, where banditry and armed religious groups are prevalent, but have also been seen in the south and the southeast. Even Abuja, Nigeria’s capital territory, has not been spared, and in Emure Ekiti in the relatively peaceful southwest region, five students, three teachers and a driver were kidnapped on January 29.
The roots of hostage-taking in Nigeria can be traced back to the 1990s in the Niger Delta, where the country gets most of its oil; at the time, armed groups started abducting foreign oil executives as a way to pressure the government to address their concerns about oil pollution in their communities.
But in recent times, hostage-taking has become a booming industry, said Olajumoke (Jumo) Ayandele, Nigeria’s senior adviser at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). Perpetrators now mostly target socially classified vulnerable groups such as children and women, she said, to elicit public anger and press their demands for ransom payments or the release of their arrested gang members.
When a ransom is demanded, the payment is expected to be made by the victims’ relatives, or in some cases the government – and delays or non-payment can sometimes be deadly. One of five sisters kidnapped in Abuja in January was brutally killed after a ransom deadline passed, sparking a national outcry.
“The groups that have used this strategy are able to gain local and international attention to really show their strength and amplify what they want to state authorities,” Ayandele told Al Jazeera.
Although the Nigerian government has said it does not negotiate with terrorists in dealing with the spiralling security crisis, experts say this may not be true.
“We have heard and we have seen some state governments negotiating with some of these groups and some of these bandits,” said Ayandele. In many cases, this has only emboldened the criminals.
A member of the security forces holds a weapon as people wait for the arrival of rescued schoolgirls who were kidnapped in Jangebe, Zamfara [File: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters]
Why can’t Nigeria stop the abduction of pupils?
Experts say that complex, multilayered issues are at the heart of the worsening insecurity crisis. These include socioeconomic factors, corruption and a lack of cohesiveness in the security structure – where there is no rapid response to attacks and ineffective collaboration between the police and the military.
Over the last decade, Nigeria’s economic situation has all but nosedived as the country grapples with high inflation, rising youth unemployment, and the loss of currency valuation. The fortunes of citizens have hardly improved, and 63 percent of people are in multidimensional poverty. Experts say this has pushed many into criminality.
“The economic hardship during this period has only increased and different policies drive different dimensions. As a result, this has led to kidnapping being seen as a viable and profitable endeavour,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, a research analyst at the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development.
The security architecture in Nigeria is also centralised, with authority concentrated in the hands of the federal government and no real state or regional policing independent of that. Experts say this has hindered the ease with which security agents can operate. It has also led to calls for state policing, especially amid criticisms that security agencies do not collaborate effectively.
At an army level, soldiers have complained about low remuneration and substandard weapons. The Nigerian military has been dogged with accusations of corruption, sabotage, connivance and brutality in the past, and this has fractured relationships with communities and potential sources of intelligence.
“This inability is not down to the military alone – there is a cross-government failing in security response,” Adekaiyaoja told Al Jazeera.
“There needs to be a stronger synergy in communal buy-in in securing facilities and also escalating necessary intelligence … There should be a renewed focus on necessary and frankly overdue police reform and a stronger synergy between intelligence and security agencies.”
Nigeria’s insecurity plagues all six of the country’s geopolitical zones, with each facing one or more of the following: armed fighters, farmer-herder clashes, bandits or unknown gunmen, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) separatists, oil bunkering and piracy. This has kept the armed forces busy.
“Our security forces are spread thin. We have six geopolitical zones in Nigeria and there is something that is always happening,” said ACLED’s Ayandele.
Nigerian students and staff who were kidnapped in March arrive in Kaduna after they were freed [File: Abdullahi Alhassan/Reuters]
What is the toll of the crisis?
Abduction victims who have been released have reported harrowing conditions while in captivity. They are often threatened with death and barely fed as they endure unhygienic, unsavoury living conditions, including sleeping out in the open and trekking long distances into forests where they are kept.
The girls especially are vulnerable to rape and even forced marriages. Adults’ testimonies claim they are routinely beaten and tortured until the captors’ demands have been met.
Experts say the experiences leave victims with serious psychological wounds and trauma.
The fear of their children being abducted has led many parents in hot zones in the northeast and northwest to pull their children out of school entirely to avoid the risk. This is despite the government’s introduction of free and compulsory basic education in schools.
According to UNICEF, 66 percent of all out-of-school children in Nigeria are from the northeast and northwest, which also represent the poorest regions in the country.
“No parent should be put in a situation where they have to make a choice between the lives of their children and getting their children educated,” said #BringBackOurGirls movement’s Yesufu, adding that education is under attack in Nigeria.
As a result, she said illiteracy is then weaponised by the political class, who use people’s lack of information and knowledge to manipulate voters during elections.
But for some girls, the consequences may be even more dire than just losing an education, Yesufu said, as some parents decide to marry their daughters off early to avoid them getting kidnapped or worse. More than half of the girls in Nigeria are currently not attending school at a basic level, and 48 percent of that figure are from the northeast and northwest.
Education is crucial to national growth and development. But Nigeria’s continuing abduction crisis is posing serious challenges to schooling in the worst-affected regions of the northeast and northwest – and experts worry it may have broader implications for the country in the near future.
“This is just a ticking time bomb because when you don’t have a populace that is educated, they can be easily radicalised or recruited into these non-state armed groups,” Ayandele said.
“We don’t know what can happen in the next 20 years if we don’t address this education problem as soon as possible.”
Children who were kidnapped in two separate abductions in northern Nigeria have been freed. On Friday the army rescued one group taken from Sokoto, while more than 130 students from Kaduna were released early on Sunday.
Rafah, Gaza – The loss of nine-year-old Yazan, or Yazouna as his mother called him, hangs like a dark cloud over the el-Kafarna family’s tiny living space.
They huddle together in a shelter that Sharif el-Kafarna rigged up out of bits of wood, cardboard and sheeting in front of the third-floor door to the elevator in an UNRWA school in Rafah.
It is tidy inside and a string of Ramadan bunting hangs on one wall, but nothing can hide the fact that the family of five sleeps, prays, eats and spends all day in a space about eight metres square (80 feet square).
Breaking down, his mother wept: “This is our first Ramadan without Yazan, God has ordained this for us and we cannot complain, we can only praise him and have faith.”
Yazan died on March 4 at the Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, hooked up to breathing machines and IV drips, his body having wasted away to nothing during five months of relentless war during which his family ran from one supposed “safe place” to another, terrified, destitute and hungry.
He would have turned 10 on June 4.
Yazan’s family spend all their time in the cramped shelter his father was able to build in front of an elevator door on a school landing [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]
A protected childhood
Yazan was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a month-old infant, amid an earlier Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014.
His parents took great pains to structure his life in Beit Hanoon where they lived before the war so he had the food, supplements and healthcare he needed.
“Yazan needed special vitamin mixes for his mental acuity and these injections to keep his body strong, as well as physiotherapy which he needed regularly.”
“He needed healthy food as well, eggs, vegetables, fruits, dairy. He would also eat baby cereal and we would puree foods for him so he could eat,” his father, Sharif said.
He also received physiotherapy at home by therapists from various associations who would visit the family home regularly. There were also therapists who worked with him to provide psychological support and some basic learning.
“He enjoyed his sessions, you could see it in his eyes. He would smile, sometimes he’d clap, too, and his eyes would follow what was happening, like the trainers talking to him or shows on a screen that we’d show him,” his father said.
The little boy was thriving, and his parents celebrated him as much as they protected him.
Yazan’s mother broke down as she spoke to Al Jazeera about the loss of Yazan [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]
“We’d have birthday parties for Yazan. He would smile, he would clap when he heard music, he was moving well, thank God.
“We’d do the whole thing, with a birthday cake and party food, just like we did for the other kids,” his mother said.
Understanding and love
The couple has three surviving children, eight-year-old Mouin, four-year-old Wael and four-month-old Mohamed, who was born weeks after Israel began its assault on Gaza on October 7.
Mouin was the closest of the brothers to Yazan, his mother told Al Jazeera.
“He would sit with him and watch him for me when I had to be in another room. He didn’t change his diapers or anything like that, but he would spend hours with him just watching something or chattering,” she said.
Because Yazan could not speak, he made different sounds depending on what he needed, his father said.
“I couldn’t understand what he wanted to, well, his mum was the one who knew what he wanted based on the sound he was making,” he said.
Yazan’s mother smiled fondly at the memory of her relationship with her eldest.
“He was closer to me … such a good kid, our relationship was great and I always understood him. He’d make a particular noise when he was hungry, another one if he was startled.
Yazan’s father, Sharif, is still devastated at what happened to Yazan [Screengrab/Sanad/Al Jazeera]
“I took him with me everywhere, to market, to my family’s places, he just came along. We went to the beach, too, but I didn’t put him in the sea because I always worried he’d get too cold, I’d just bathe him in the tub.”
Memories of that past life bring fleeting smiles to her face as she describes their two-bedroom home with its big living room and kitchen where the children had space to play – now they huddle with their parents in a tiny space all day.
“Fridays we’d have a big family meal, then take our afternoon siestas and go out to visit our families, either we’d go to my family or to my in-laws’,” she said.
Sharif used to work as a driver, earning enough money to provide everything the family needed, especially Yazan.
“I tried to do the same here,” he said. “We’re from Beit Hanoon, we were displaced to Jabalia, then Nuseirat, then Deir el-Balah, and when we got here, I made sure we had our own space, so Yazan would be as comfortable as I could manage for my son,” Sharif continued.
War brings the beginning of the end
“I was so happy when I was watching my son growing day by day when he had the food and medicines he needed. But then when the war started, he couldn’t get the treatment or the right food any more,” Sharif said.
Yazan was alert and thriving before the war, thanks to his family’s efforts to take care of him [Courtesy of the el-Kafarna family]
They tried, he continued, as hard they could to secure what Yazan needed to survive – soft, nutritious food that could be eaten by the little boy – but first, the supplies dwindled, then the black market prices rose alarmingly, then finally, there was no more of the food to be found.
Yazan’s health began to deteriorate in front of his parents’ horrified eyes as they carried him in their arms from one supposed “safe” place of displacement to another.
No amount of softened bread scraps they gathered for him could help keep him alert and strong, and his already thin frame began to waste away.
“He started to deteriorate day after day. We didn’t have enough medicine so I’d try to skip days to make what we had stretch further,” his father said sadly.
“We took him to the hospital and he lived his last days on life support at Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital. By then he was no longer able to respond to anything, not even his mother.”
Yazan spent 11 days in the hospital before he died on March 4.
“I can never forget Yazan,” his mother said, in tears.
“He’s in my heart and mind every minute of every day. Look at what’s happening to our children!”
Israel says it will send a delegation to Qatar for more talks with mediators after Hamas presented a new truce proposal.
The main United Nations aid agency operating in Gaza has said that acute malnutrition was accelerating in the north of the Palestinian enclave as Israel prepared to send a delegation to Qatar for new truce talks on a hostage deal with Hamas.
On Saturday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said one in three children under the age of two in northern Gaza are now acutely malnourished, putting more pressure on Israel over the looming famine.
“Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said in a social media post.
On Friday, Israel said it would send a delegation to Qatar for more talks with mediators after Hamas presented a new proposal for a ceasefire with an exchange of hostages and prisoners.
A source familiar with the talks told the Reuters news agency that the delegation will be led by the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, David Barnea. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to convene the security cabinet to discuss the proposal before the talks start.
Netanyahu’s office has said the Hamas offer was still based on “unrealistic demands”.
Repeated efforts failed to secure a ceasefire before the holy month of Ramadan, which started a week ago, with Israel saying it plans to launch a new offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, starting a two-day visit to the region, voiced concerns about an assault on Rafah, where more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are sheltering, saying there was a danger it would result “in many terrible civilian casualties”.
On Friday, Netanyahu’s office said he had approved an attack plan on Rafah and that the civilian population would be evacuated.
It gave no timeframe, and there was no immediate evidence of extra preparations on the ground.
Humanitarian crisis
Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 31,553 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the strip.
The assault has also devastated the enclave, forcing nearly all the inhabitants from their homes, leaving much of the territory in rubble and triggering a massive hunger crisis.
“Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said in a social media post. Hospitals in Gaza have reported some children dying of malnutrition and dehydration.
Western countries have called on Israel to do more to allow in aid, with the UN saying it faced “overwhelming obstacles” including crossing closures, onerous vetting, restrictions on movement and unrest inside Gaza.
A first delivery into Gaza by the World Central Kitchen, pioneering a new sea route via Cyprus, arrived on Friday and was off-loaded, the charity said.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides said a second cargo of food aid was ready to depart by sea from Cyprus on Saturday, while the United States and Jordan said they carried out an airdrop of humanitarian aid.
In a CNN interview, Queen Rania of Jordan called the airdrops “literally just drops in the ocean of unmet needs” and accused Israel of “cutting off everything that is required to sustain a human life: food, fuel, medicine, water”.
Humanitarian aid for Gaza is loaded on a cargo ship in the port of Larnaca, Cyprus [Yiannis Kourtoglou/Reuters]
South Korea’s low birthrate has been declared a national emergency despite its government’s efforts to incentivise people into parenthood by paying 2 million won ($1,510) on the birth of each child as well as providing a host of other benefits to parents.
The country is one of several in East and Southeast Asia where birthrates have declined rapidly in recent years. Indeed, all five of the countries with the world’s lowest birthrates (stripping out Ukraine, which is undergoing a war) are in East Asia, according to a 2023 CIA report.
What is causing this, and why does it matter so much?
Which countries have the lowest birthrates?
South Korea, which already had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has experienced yet another drop in its birthrate.
Last month, Statistics Korea published data showing that the country’s birthrate has dropped by 8 percent in 2023 to 0.72 compared with 2022 when it was 0.78. The birthrate refers to the number of children the average woman will have during her lifetime.
Experts are warning that South Korea’s population of 51 million people may halve by 2100 if this rate of decline continues.
According to the 2023 CIA publication comparing fertility rates around the world, the birthrate decline is much sharper in East Asia than any other region.
The CIA’s report puts South Korea’s birthrate a little higher than the country’s own estimate – at 1.11. However, this is still the second-lowest in the world.
According to the CIA report, the birthrate in self-governed Taiwan is the lowest in the world at just 1.09 while in Singapore and Hong Kong, the birthrates are 1.17 and 1.23, respectively.
China, where a strict one-child policy was in place from 1980 to 2015, has a birthrate of 1.45. Japan, which has been facing the issue of an ageing population for some time, has a birthrate of 1.39.
These figures are in stark contrast to other parts of the world. The 10 countries with the highest birthrates are all in Africa. Niger is the highest at 6.73, followed by Angola at 5.76.
In the West, birthrates are much lower than this but still higher than East Asia. In the United States, it is 1.84 while it is 1.58 in Germany.
Why are birthrates in East Asia dropping?
While demographers refer to the birthrate as the fertility rate, this term encompasses those who choose not to have children as well as those who are unable to have children.
There are several reasons for the decline in Asia.
Economic growth and improving living conditions have reduced child mortality rates, and since more children are expected to live into adulthood, this has led to couples having fewer children, said analysts at the East-West Center, an international research organisation.
The analysts explained in an article in Time magazine that economic growth and educational opportunities for women have also led them to resist traditional roles, such as housewife and mother. As a result, they may “choose to avoid marriage and childbearing altogether”.
However, Ayo Wahlberg, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Copenhagen, told Al Jazeera that this explanation is an “incomplete description of what’s going on”. While there may be a correlation between more women being employed and lower birthrates, Wahlberg said both men and women are working longer hours than they did in the past, giving them less time and energy to dedicate to childcare.
He cited the example of China’s “996 working hour system”, under which some companies expect people to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Wahlberg added that in South Korea, the working conditions are similarly stringent. “When are you going to have the time to look after a child in such cases?” he asked.
He also pointed out that in many countries, the burden of housework and childcare falls more heavily on women than men. Additionally, women experience pregnancy-based discrimination in the workplace if companies decide to avoid hiring an employee who will need to take maternity leave.
Women in East Asia face some of the worst gender pay gaps among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Additionally, they are aware that taking maternity leave could harm their chances of promotion and progression in their careers. Therefore, they decide not have children despite family or societal pressures to do so, he said.
“Is that selfish? I think it’s more being very rational about a very unacceptable situation,” Wahlberg said.
Both women and men are also deciding not to have children as part of an emerging movement that has deep concerns about climate change.
Why is a declining birthrate a problem?
Low birthrates will ultimately lead to population declines. Wahlberg said, to replace and maintain current populations, a birthrate of 2.1 is required.
A declining birthrate could have disastrous economic consequences.
Many countries are facing labour shortages and are struggling under the demands of an ageing population. With improvements and developments in health and science in recent decades, life expectancy has risen sharply, which raises concerns about people growing into old age in a society that does not have enough young people to take care of them.
The burden on younger people to support a much larger, aged population who are no longer working could also become intolerable, according to a 2023 report by the Pew Research Center in the United States, which concluded that income and sales taxes could have to rise steeply in the future to compensate.
An abandoned school swimming pool at Shijimi Junior High School in Miki, Japan, which closed three years ago due to a lack of demand. Japan’s birthrate is falling faster than expected, and school closings have accelerated, especially in rural areas [Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images]
What is the solution in East Asia?
East Asian countries are trying to increase fertility rates by incentivising women to have more children.
In Japan, where schools have been closing at a rate of more than 475 per year since 2002 due to a lack of students, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made the sliding birthrate a priority. “The youth population will start decreasing drastically in the 2030s. The period of time until then is our last chance to reverse the trend of dwindling births,” he said while visiting a daycare facility in June.
Despite high levels of debt, his government has announced plans to spend 3.5 trillion yen ($25bn) a year on childcare and other measures to support parents and encourage people towards parenthood.
In South Korea, more than 360 trillion won ($270bn) has been spent in areas such as childcare subsidies since 2006.
China has done away with its one-child policy. From 2016 to 2021, the country moved to a two-child policy. Now, a three-child policy is in place.
Reversing the one-child rule has so far been unsuccessful in China, where the birthrate continues to fall.
Due to the unequal burden of childcare placed on women, most women in China do not want a third child, according to research by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Furthermore, in a survey conducted by the job search website Zhilian Zhaopin in 2022, only 0.8 percent of respondents said they wanted to have three children.
A potential solution other than increasing the birthrate is for Asian countries to open up to more immigration to end or reduce labour shortages. Japan, the only major developed nation that has historically kept its doors closed to immigrants, did this in 2018 when its parliament approved a new law under which up to 300,000 foreigners could be granted one of two new visas depending on their labour skills and proficiency in Japanese.
There were angry scenes outside a court in South Africa where a mother was charged with kidnapping and trafficking her own 6-year-old daughter, whose disappearance has made headlines across the country.
‘I relive it every single day.’ A Palestinian father and UNRWA photographer returns to the place where Israeli forces killed his four-year-old daughter while following evacuation orders to flee to south Gaza.
Six children have died from dehydration and malnutrition at hospitals in northern Gaza, the Health Ministry in the besieged Palestinian territory has said, as the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the besieged enclave worsens.
Two children died at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the ministry said on Wednesday. Earlier it reported that four children died at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, while seven others remained in critical condition.
“We ask international agencies to intervene immediately to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in northern Gaza,” Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra said in a statement, as Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue.
“The international community is facing a moral and humanitarian test to stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Kamal Adwan Hospital’s Director Ahmed al-Kahlout said that the hospital had gone out of service due to a lack of fuel to run its generators. On Tuesday, Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia also went out of service for the same reason.
In a video posted on Instagram and verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification unit, journalist Ebrahem Musalam shows an infant on a bed inside the pediatric department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, as power comes in and out.
Musalam said the children in the department are suffering from malnutrition and a lack of infant formula, and that necessary devices have stopped working due to the constant power outages as a result of fuel shortages.
Palestinian group Hamas on Wednesday said that the closure of Kamal Adwan Hospital would exacerbate the health and humanitarian crisis in Northern Gaza, which is already teetering on the brink of famine as Israel continues to block or disrupt aid missions there.
‘Killing and starvation’
On Wednesday, Israel said a convoy of 31 trucks carrying food had entered northern Gaza. The Israeli military office that oversees Palestinian civilian affairs, the Coordination of Government Activity in the Territories (COGAT), also said nearly 20 other trucks entered the north on Monday and Tuesday.
These were the first major aid deliveries in a month to the devastated, isolated area, where the United Nations has warned of worsening starvation.
Israel has held up the entry of aid into Gaza for weeks, with Israeli protesters taking part in demonstrations calling for no aid to be allowed into the territory, even as hunger and disease spread.
UN officials say Israel’s months-long war, which has killed nearly 30,000 people in Gaza, has also pushed a quarter of the population of 2.3 million to the brink of famine.
Project Hope, a humanitarian group operating a clinic in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, has said that 21 percent of the pregnant women and 11 percent of the children under the age of five it has treated in the last three weeks are suffering from malnutrition.
“People have reported eating nothing but white bread as fruit, vegetables, and other nutrient-dense foods are nearly impossible to find or too expensive,” Project Hope said.
Qatar, France Reaffirm in Joint Communique Depth, Breadth of Their Strategic Partnership
— Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Qatar (@MofaQatar_EN) February 28, 2024
In a joint communique on Wednesday, Qatar and France stressed their opposition to an Israeli military offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza and underlined their “rejection of the killing and starvation suffered by the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip”.
They called for the opening of all crossings into Gaza, including in the north, “to allow for humanitarian actors to resume their activities and notably the delivery of food supply and pledged jointly $200m effort in support of the Palestinian population”.
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, also said Israel must allow aid trucks into Gaza in order to address the dire humanitarian crisis.
“Hundreds of aid trucks wait in line to cross into Gaza at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom [Karem Abu Salem] crossings to a starving civilian population,” Egeland said in a social media post, with a video showing scores of aid trucks lined up.
“There has not been a single day we have gotten the needed 500 trucks across. The system is broken and Israel could fix it for the sake of the innocent.”
Hundreds of aid trucks wait in line to cross into Gaza at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings to a starving civilian population. There has not been a single day we have gotten the needed 500 trucks across. The system is broken and Israel could fix it for the sake of the innocent pic.twitter.com/dMb9gTbchJ
Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has meanwhile said that medical workers are struggling to serve hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Gaza who are living in dire conditions with nowhere to go.
“Healthcare has been attacked, it’s collapsing. The whole system is collapsing. We are working from tents trying to do what we can. We treat the wounded. With the displacements, people’s wounds have been infected. And I’m not even talking about the mental wounds. People are desperate. They don’t know anymore what to do,” MSF’s Meinie Nicolai said.
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