Tag: In Pictures

Diseases spread in Gaza amid health system collapse, Israeli strikes | Israel-Palestine conflict News

The besieged residents of the Gaza Strip who have so far survived Israel’s bombs and bullets, are increasingly faced with the spread of diseases amid heavy winter rains that have flooded their makeshift shelters, and an acute shortage of food and potable water.

Doctors and aid workers have warned of epidemics given the dire humanitarian situation and with the enclave’s health system on its knees.

From November 29 to December 10, cases of diarrhoea in children under five jumped 66 percent to 59,895, and increased by 55 percent for the rest of the population, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).

The UN health agency cautioned that the figures likely did not provide the full picture because of a lack of complete information with the health system and other services in Gaza near collapse.

Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the paediatric ward at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, said this week that his ward was overrun with children suffering extreme dehydration, causing kidney failure in some cases, while severe diarrhoea was four times higher than normal.

He said he was aware of 15 to 30 cases of hepatitis A in Khan Younis in the past two weeks: “The incubation period of the virus is three weeks to a month, so after a month there will be an explosion in the number of cases of hepatitis A.”

In its latest report on conditions in Gaza, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the WHO has reported cases of meningitis, chickenpox, jaundice and upper respiratory tract infections.

Since the truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on December 1, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to shelter in abandoned buildings, schools and tents. Many more are sleeping in the open with little access to toilets or water to bathe, aid workers said.

Twenty-one of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are closed, 11 are partially functional and four are minimally functional, according to WHO figures from December 10.

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Photos: South Korea island is a field of dreams for young baseball hopefuls | Baseball

Dreaming of making it big in baseball, teenage brothers An Seung-han and An Seung-young travelled hundreds of kilometres away from home to remote Deokjeok Island, where the sport and their team are now the closest thing they have to a family.

The boys are among a few dozen teenagers who have left the bright lights of some of South Korea’s biggest cities to join a specialised sports academy set up by Kim Hak-yong, former manager of the elite Dongguk University team, which has produced scores of players in the national KBO major league.

“If I work hard here, I can be a main player, so I’m working even harder. If I keep doing well, I can also become a professional baseball player,” 16-year-old Seung-young, the younger brother, said during a training session.

In addition to helping the boys achieve their dreams, the sports academy has breathed life into Deokjeok, which was struggling to retain and attract youngsters like many other rural areas in the world’s most rapidly ageing society.

The island has a population of 1,800, the majority of them elderly. Last year, it was on the brink of losing its last school under a nationwide school board guideline that stipulates closures if the number of students falls below 60.

That has now changed, thanks to Kim and his friend Chang Kwang-ho, manager of the Deokjeok High School baseball team.

“The players who come here come with an amazing mindset. You don’t come here unless you’re willing to give up everything,” Chang said.

Although the island is less than two hours away by ferry from the city of Incheon, it remains quite isolated from the mainland and is much less developed.

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‘We are the living dead’: Drought-hit Tunisian villages battle isolation | Climate Crisis

Tunisian villager Ounissa Mazhoud ties two empty jerry cans to a donkey and cautiously descends a stony hill towards the last local source of water.

The North African country, in its fourth year of drought, is grappling with its worst water scarcity in years.

Mazhoud – like other women in the remote village of Ouled Omar, 180km (110 miles) southwest of the capital, Tunis – wakes up every morning with one thing on her mind: finding water.

“We are the living dead … forgotten by everyone,” said Mazhoud, 57, whose region was once one of Tunisia’s most fertile, known for its wheat fields and Aleppo pines.

“We have no roads, no water, no aid, no decent housing, and we own nothing,” she said, adding that the closest source of water is a river about an hour’s arduous walk away.

Providing water for their families, she said, means that “our backs, heads and knees hurt, because we labour from dawn to dusk”.

Some villagers have felt pushed to move to urban areas or abroad.

Ounissa’s cousin, Djamila Mazhoud, 60, said her son and two daughters had all left in search of better lives.

“We educated our children so that when we grow old, they take care of us, but they couldn’t,” she said.

“People are either unemployed or eaten by the fish in the sea,” she added, using a common phrase for migrants who attempt the dangerous sea voyages for Europe.

Entire families have already left the village, said Djamila.

“Their houses remain empty,” she said, explaining that elderly people feel they have no choice but to follow their sons and daughters.

“Can an 80-year-old go to the river to get water?”

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Iraq’s marshes are dying, and so is a civilization | Climate Crisis

Mohammed Hamid Nour is only 23 but is already nostalgic for how Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes once were before drought dried them up, decimating his herd of water buffaloes.

Even at their centre in Chibayish, only a few expanses of the ancient waterways – home to a Marsh Arab culture that goes back millennia – survive, linked by channels that snake through the reeds.

Pull back further and the water gives way to bare, cracked earth.

Mohammed has lost three-quarters of his herd to the drought that is now ravaging the marshes for a fourth consecutive year. The United Nations said it is the worst in 40 years, describing the situation as “alarming”, with “70 percent of the marshes devoid of water”.

“I beg you, Allah, have mercy!” Mohammed implored, keffiyeh on his head as he contemplated the disaster under the unforgiving blue of a cloudless sky.

As the marshes dry out, the water gets salty until it starts killing the buffaloes. Many of Mohammed’s herd died like this, others he was forced to sell before they too perished.

“If the drought continues and the government doesn’t help us, the others will also die,” said the young herder, who has no other income.

In the 1990s, Iraq’s former strongman President Saddam Hussein drained the marshes – which were 20,000sq km (7,700sq miles) – to punish the Marsh Arabs, diverting the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers away from the land.

It was only after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that people began to dismantle the Saddam-era infrastructure, allowing the marshes to refill slightly, but they are still only 4,000sq km (1,500sq miles) by the latest estimates – also choked by dams on the Tigris and Euphrates upstream in Turkey and Syria and soaring temperatures of climate change.

Iconic culture

Marsh buffalo milk is an iconic part of Iraqi cuisine, as is the thick, clotted “geymar” cream Iraqis love to have with honey for breakfast.

The buffaloes are tricky to raise and their milk cannot be mass-produced, and their rearing is tied to the marshes

Both the Mesopotamian marshes and the culture of the Ma’dan – Marsh Arabs – who live in them, have UNESCO World Heritage status. The Ma’dan have hunted and fished there for 5,000 years, building houses from woven reeds on floating reed islands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together before pouring into the Gulf.

Even their beautifully intricate mosques were made of reeds.

Today, only a few thousand of the quarter million Ma’dan who lived in the marshes in the early 1990s remain.

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World condemns Israel’s war on Gaza as it marches for Palestine | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Demonstrators rallied across the world to show their solidarity with Palestinians and to protest against the Israeli army’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip on World Human Rights Day.

Protests were held on Sunday in Istanbul, Copenhagen, The Hague, Tunis, Melbourne, Tokyo, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Karachi, Sanaa, Rabat and elsewhere.

Every year on December 10, the international community observes Human Rights Day to commemorate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.

A large number of people gathered in Istanbul on Sunday to protest against the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Human rights organisations backed the demonstration. Speakers slammed Israel’s military for human rights violations, including the destruction of Gaza’s basic infrastructure, which they said leaves 500,000 people vulnerable due to a lack of water and food.

The rally gathered in Beyazit Square carrying pro-Palestine banners. After marching to the Hagia Sophia Mosque, the Quran was read, followed by prayers.

Thousands also gathered in Western Balkan capitals to show their support for Palestine.

In the Serbian capital Belgrade, Palestinian and Serbian flags were flown at a demonstration in front of the main government building. Banners and placards demanded a “Ceasefire Now” and for Israel to “End the Genocide in Palestine”, while a chant of “Free Palestine” went up.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health spokesperson, about 18,000 Palestinians have been killed and 49,500 wounded in Israeli attacks since October 7.

Israel’s relentless bombardment continues, along with ground operations that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from the northern and central areas to the increasingly overcrowded south.

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‘A hand here, a head there’: Israeli warplanes kill dozens in central Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Central Gaza Strip – In the town of az-Zawayda in central Gaza, neighbours have been working since Sunday morning, collecting the body parts of dozens of people that used to live in the Nisman family home.

At about 4am local time (06:00 GMT), Israeli warplanes bombed the home, destroying it completely.

“This is my uncles’ house,” Fadi Nisman told Al Jazeera. “My two uncles were with their families, three generations of them.”

Only weeks ago, the extended family had fled from the Shati refugee camp in the west of Gaza City following Israeli orders to head south of the enclave and taken refuge with the Nismans.

But in the Gaza Strip, there is no such thing as a safe place.

Fadi described Sunday’s attack as an “atomic bomb”.

“We are collecting body parts from the nearby lands, a hand here, a head there,” he said.

“We haven’t managed to pull out anyone from under the rubble, just those torn bodies that were flung in the air from the force of the bomb.”

His neighbour, Wael al-Mahanna, said the attack was worse than a powerful earthquake.

“There was no warning from the Israelis – they didn’t call or text or tell us to evacuate,” he said, adding that the neighbourhood had civilian residents.

“No one in the house survived. There were about 45 people inside,” he said.

“There was a body flung on one of the posts, and his head was found further on the rooftop. No one can even begin to comprehend what happened.”

At least 15 bodies were transferred to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, local sources said.

The blast damaged the surrounding homes, devastating the residential block.

As the Israeli offensive on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continued for the 65th day, the death toll has reached close to a dizzying 18,000, nearly 8,000 of them children.

More than 48,700 others have been wounded while a further 7,780 Palestinians remain missing, believed to be dead under the rubble of their homes.

Fadi Nisman said people want an end to the bloodshed. “We want an end to this criminality,” he told Al Jazeera.

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Photos: Israel bombs Gaza areas it declared safe zones for Palestinians | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip has hit areas it had told Palestinians to evacuate to in the territory’s south.

The strikes came a day after the United States vetoed a United Nations resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, despite its wide support.

Gaza residents “are being told to move like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council before Friday’s vote.

Two hospitals in central and southern Gaza received 133 bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli bombings over the past 24 hours, health ministry officials in Gaza said on Saturday.

Dozens of people held funeral prayers in the hospital’s courtyard before taking the bodies for burial – a scene that has become routine over the past two months of war.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, which has been the focus of Israel’s military operations over the past week, the Nasser Hospital received the bodies of 62 people, the ministry said.

More than 2,200 Palestinians have been killed since the December 1 collapse of a weeklong truce, about two-thirds of them women and children.

With the war now in its third month, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 17,700.

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Palestinians displaced to south Gaza’s overcrowded areas living on streets | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Desperate Palestinians fleeing Israel’s expanding ground offensive are crowding into an ever-shrinking area of the Gaza Strip as the war enters its third month.

Tens of thousands of people displaced by the fighting have packed into the border city of Rafah, in the far south of the strip, and Muwasi, a nearby patch of barren coastline that Israel has declared a safe zone.

With shelters significantly beyond capacity, many people pitched tents along the side of the road leading from Rafah to Muwasi, living packed into unhealthy shelters without enough food.

The United Nations on Friday warned its aid operation is “in tatters” because no place in the besieged enclave is safe. “We do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore,” the UN’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, warned.

The World Food Programme (WFP) says its ability to supply basic necessities to Gaza is on the verge of collapse. “There’s not enough food. People are starving,” WFP Deputy Director Carl Skau wrote on X, formerly Twitter, following a visit to the coastal strip.

As only a fraction of the necessary food is reaching the Gaza Strip, there is a lack of fuel and no one is safe, Skau continued in a WFP statement, adding: “We cannot do our job.”

Israel has designated al-Mawasi on the besieged territory’s Mediterranean coast as a safe zone. But the UN and relief agencies have called that a poorly planned solution.

Israeli forces have killed more than 17,200 people in Gaza – 70 percent of them women and children – in two months and wounded more than 46,000, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which says many others are trapped under rubble.

Israel has said Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in its October 7 attack and took more than 240 captives. About 130 captives remain in Gaza, mostly soldiers and civilian men, after more than 100 were freed, most during a truce last month.

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Protesters in Arab countries rally in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict

Protesters took to the streets on Friday in several Arab countries in a show of support for the Palestinians against a continuing Israeli military campaign in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

In Jordan, a huge march was staged in the centre of the capital Amman following Friday prayers.

Some protesters chanted: “People want the liberation of Palestine,” “We die and Palestine lives,” Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad reported online.

Thousands of people meanwhile held an anti-US protest near the US embassy in Amman, according to al-Ghad.

Jordan, which maintains diplomatic links with Israel, has a large Palestinian community.

In Lebanon, dozens of people staged a silent sit-in near the French embassy in Beirut, protesting the killing of civilians in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire.

The protesters put ribbons on their mouths on which was written: “Gaza ceasefire”.

They also displayed in front of them body bags representing dead civilians in Gaza.

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