An Al Jazeera journalist was killed and another injured by Israeli missiles in southern Gaza. Cameraman Samer Abudaqa, who had been critically injured, died after paramedics were prevented from rescuing him. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh was wounded in the same strike. The network deems this incident a deliberate attempt to target its correspondents and their families in the Gaza Strip.
Published On 15 Dec 2023
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Media network says it holds Israel accountable for systematically targeting and killing journalists and their families.
Al Jazeera Media Network condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli drone attack on a Gaza school that resulted in the killing of cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa.
The Network holds Israel accountable for systematically targeting and killing Al Jazeera journalists and their families.
In today’s bombing in Khan Younis, Israeli drones fired missiles at a school where civilians sought refuge, resulting in indiscriminate casualties.
Following Samer’s injury, he was left to bleed to death for over 5 hours, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances and rescue workers from reaching him, denying the much-needed emergency treatment.
Al Jazeera Media Network extends its sincere condolences to the family in Gaza and in Belgium of the late colleague Samer Abu Daqqa.
With the killing of Samer Abu Daqqa number of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza reached over 90.
Al Jazeera urges the international community, media freedom organisations, and the International Criminal Court to take immediate action to hold the Israeli government and military accountable for these acts of carnage and crimes against humanity.
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Announcement comes as national security spokesman Jake Sullivan visits the region amid growing international isolation.
Israeli authorities have announced the temporary reopening of the Karem Abu Salem crossing with Gaza, called Kerem Shalom by Israel, acquiescing to US calls to allow more humanitarian aid into the strip as fighting grinds on.
In a statement on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the country’s cabinet had approved the “temporary” measure, which US officials hailed as a positive step.
“The cabinet’s decision determines that only humanitarian aid arriving from Egypt will be transferred into the Gaza Strip this way,” the statement said.
For the last two months, the Rafah crossing with Egypt has been the only point of entry into the strip, where a trickle of assistance has done little to address a humanitarian crisis driven by an Israeli assault that has killed more than 18,000 people and displaced 80 percent of all residents.
As Israel’s campaign in Gaza has continued, the United Nations and other world bodies have warned of severe shortages of food, clean water and medicines.
UN agencies say that as the bombardment has continued, it has become impossible to distribute aid outside Rafah, where the population has been swollen to approximately one million with hundreds of thousands of displaced people coming from areas further north.
The decision comes one day after White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met Israeli officials to discuss the timeframe and style of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, as Israel and its US ally come under growing international pressure to bring the fighting to an end.
“It’s a significant concession, the Israelis would say, because right at the outset of this war Israel said there’ll be no further contact, no further links between Gaza and Israel, while they’re now having to open up that Kerem Shalom crossing for goods under US pressure so that Israel can meet its agreement of [letting in] 200 trucks of aid a day,” Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith reported from Tel Aviv.
“And as an indication, before the war started, there were 500 trucks a day going into Gaza, when there was much less need for emergency aid.”
“President [Joe] Biden raised this issue in recent phone calls with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and it was an important topic of discussion during my visit to Israel over the past two days,” Sullivan said in a statement on Friday, calling the opening a “significant step”.
Sullivan also met on Friday President Mahmoud Abbas, who leads the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, to discuss the future of the PA and increasing violence against Palestinians by Israeli settlers.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that Abbas told Sullivan that the US must “intervene to force Israel to stop its aggression against our people in the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem”.
The US has suggested that the PA could take control of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the Israel-Hamas war, but Abbas and the PA are highly unpopular among the Palestinian population due to the policy of security coordination with Israel.
Many Palestinians see the policy as a form of complicity in Israel’s occupation.
Reporting from the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Al Jazeera correspondent Charles Stratford also noted that many Palestinians have little trust in the words of US officials.
“You speak to any Palestinian on the ground here and there is absolutely zero trust in any kind of rhetoric, any kind of statement, that is coming out from the US administration, whether it be Jake Sullivan or Joe Biden. There is deep, deep, distrust,” said Stratford.
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Two Al Jazeera Arabic journalists have been wounded while covering an Israeli attack on a school in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
Wael Dahdouh, Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic, and cameraperson Samer Abudaqa were covering an earlier air strike at Farhana school in Khan Younis when they were wounded on Friday by shrapnel from an Israeli missile attack.
Dahdouh was hit by shrapnel on his upper arm, and was transferred to Nasser Hospital with minor injuries.
Abudaqa sustained shrapnel injuries and remained near the scene of the incident for about two hours, as paramedics were unable to reach the site due to Israeli fire, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum.
Witnesses said there was heavy shelling in the area around the school.
The ambulance had to receive prior “approval” from Israeli forces before it could reach Abudaqa, Abu Azzoum reported from Rafah.
His medical condition remains unclear at this time.
According to Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh, who was also injured in the attack, Abudaqa was “critically injured”, Abu Azzoum added.
Many Palestinians from the central and northern parts of Gaza have sought shelter in Khan Younis since the war began in October. Many have now been pushed further south towards the strip’s southernmost city of Rafah after Israel intensified its military operations in Khan Younis.
The attack comes amid violent clashes between Palestinian fighters and the Israeli army in locations across Gaza. Residents reported fighting in Shejaya, Sheikh Radwan, Zeitoun, Tuffah, and Beit Hanoun in north Gaza, east of Maghazi in central Gaza and in the centre and northern fringes of Khan Younis, according to the Reuters news service.
In late October, Wael Dahdouh lost four of his family members in an Israeli air raid.
His family had been seeking refuge in Nuseirat camp in the centre of Gaza when their home was bombed by Israeli forces, killing his wife, Um Hamza, his 15-year-old son, Mahmoud, his seven-year-old daughter, Sham, and his grandson, Adam, who died in hospital hours later.
“Despite all the difficulties, despite the death of his family, he rebounded within minutes to do his job again. And now, Wael is the victim,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said it was “shocked” at the attack.
“We condemn the attack and reiterate our demand that journalists’ lives must be safeguarded,” it said in a post on X.
An IFJ report published last week found that 72 percent of journalists who died on the job this year were killed in the Gaza war.
#Palestine🇵🇸: We are deeply shocked to learn that journalist @WaelDahdouh and camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa have been injured while covering an earlier Israeli attack on a school. We condemn the attack and reiterate our demand that journalists’ lives must be safeguarded. https://t.co/mjJvgEXJ3z
— IFJ (@IFJGlobal) December 15, 2023
The two journalists have worked together with Al Jazeera Arabic since before the war.
“[Samer] and Wael make up a very professional, strong team on the ground, documenting everything and bringing all the facts and live pictures of what the Palestinian people have been going through,” Hani Mahmoud said.
“But particularly with this war, given its intensity in scale and magnitude and the sheer amount of destruction, they have been at the forefront of covering every little detail that one might have forgotten about,” he added.
Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Palestinian journalists in Gaza felt abandoned by the international community.
“The role of journalists in such a situation is absolutely vital – particularly in Gaza where we’ve seen the kinds of institutions that traditionally also help with the kinds of documentation about the impact, like the UN officials, have left – so we’re really only left with the Gazan journalists doing this very important documentation work,” she told Al Jazeera.
“The international governments’ failure to push for an end to this conflict is increasingly creating a real sense of abandonment amongst the community and particularly amongst the journalist community in Palestine and the region,” Ginsberg said.
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For more than a decade, architect Julio Ñanco Antilef has campaigned to rewrite Chile’s constitution, a relic from when General Augusto Pinochet ruled the country as a military dictator.
But now, as Chile prepares to vote on a new draft, Ñanco Antilef finds himself in a paradoxical position: hoping to keep the old version in place.
“It’s not that we are defending Pinochet’s constitution. It’s just that this proposal is worse,” he told Al Jazeera in a recent interview.
A member of the Democratic Revolution party, Ñanco Antilef was one of the few left-wing representatives to participate in the Constitutional Council that drafted the new version, which is set to go before voters on Sunday.
Rather, it was Chile’s far-right Republican Party that led the drafting process, holding 22 of the council’s 50 seats.
The result, critics say, is a draft that favours right-wing priorities at the expense of historically marginalised groups, including Chile’s Indigenous peoples.
“It is tied to a business model and favours individual interests rather than collective ones,” said Ñanco Antilef, himself of Indigenous Mapuche descent.
Now, he and other Indigenous Chileans are pushing for voters to reject the draft constitution, even if that means the country will be stuck with the Pinochet-era version for the foreseeable future.
“We are 13 percent of the population,” said Alihuen Antileo Navarette, a Mapuche lawyer elected to represent Chile’s Indigenous peoples on the council.
He argues the draft constitution deliberately “excludes” Indigenous voices from government.
“The text does not ensure that we have institutional representation, neither in Congress nor in the Senate, and it ignores our historical demands to respect our ancestral territories,” Antileo said.
Sunday’s referendum will be the second time in as many years that Chileans have gone to the ballot box to weigh a new version of the country’s constitution.
President Gabriel Boric indicated it would also be the last opportunity to swap out the Pinochet-era constitution for the remainder of his four-year term.
“Whatever the result that the people choose, that process will come to an end,” Boric said at a summit of world leaders last month.
The history of the current constitution stretches back to 1980, when Pinochet — a ruler who oversaw the mass abduction and execution of his left-wing critics — appointed a government commission to draft a legal framework to formalise his authority.
Ñanco Antilef grew up during the dictatorship in the 1980s. “There was a strong repression. We didn’t even go out on the patio of our house because police would throw tear gas. It was a situation of fear. I remember they shot a neighbour dead. These are the memories I have of that time.”
Living in a low-income neighbourhood on the periphery of the capital Santiago, Ñanco Antilef also witnessed inequality that he now credits to Pinochet’s right-wing model of governance.
“It allowed people who had resources to maintain their privileges, and for the people who didn’t, it was difficult to obtain a higher quality of life. I was only able to go to higher education because I won grants and got help from others,” he said, adding: “Pinochet’s constitution generated a very individualistic society.”
The 1980 constitution has been criticised not only for its undemocratic origins but also for enshrining Pinochet’s rigidly conservative values in Chilean law.
Opponents say that, despite numerous amendments, the constitution still curtails social welfare programmes in favour of protecting free-market values. It also fails to acknowledge Chile’s Indigenous groups, which comprise an estimated 2.2 million people.
Concerns over social welfare ultimately simmered into widespread anti-government protests in 2019. Millions of Chileans flooded the streets, voicing a spectrum of demands, including calls for better public healthcare, fairer access to education, abortion rights and pension reform.
Many protesters singled out Pinochet’s constitution as the root cause of the discontent. That prompted Chile’s government to hold a referendum in 2020 to decide whether to ditch the old charter and write a new one.
The voters came back with an overwhelming response: 78 percent approved of the proposal, and a plan to reimagine the constitution was hatched.
But the first attempt floundered. Written by a Constitutional Council comprised mostly of left-wing leaders and independents with no political experience, the 2022 draft was seen as lengthy, confusing and overly progressive. It failed at the ballot box, with 62 percent of voters rejecting it.
In May, another election was held to determine who would write the second draft. This time, voters turned to the conservative right.
“After [the] progressive movement, there was a regression and fear of change,” Claudia Heiss, the head of political science at the University of Chile, said of the swing rightward.
She believes the draft on Sunday’s ballot enshrines values and ideas that “don’t belong in a constitution”, by recognising “patriotic symbols” and protecting “the patriarchal conception of society and traditional gender roles”.
Among the most controversial additions is an article that appears to acknowledge the rights of “life of those who have yet to be born” — language that could tighten Chile’s already restrictive abortion laws.
But Indigenous rights supporters also see Sunday’s draft as a step backwards, after the promise of the first rewrite attempt.
The first draft envisioned Chile as a “plurinational” country, “composed of various nations” that recognised Indigenous rights to autonomy and self-governance.
The second version, however, defines Indigenous groups as “part of the Chilean nation, which is one and undivided”.
The number of Indigenous representatives on the second Constitutional Council was also curtailed. Indigenous candidates had to receive at least 1.5 percent of the total vote to have a seat on the council. Only one, Antileo, qualified.
By contrast, the first council included 17 seats for Indigenous groups, distributed according to population size. The Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous population, were given seven seats, while the Aymara were given two. Eight other Indigenous groups — the Atacameño, Colla, Quechua, Yagán, Kawésqar, Chango, Diaguita and Rapa Nui — were given one seat each.
Experts like Salvador Millaeo, a Mapuche lawyer and academic at the University of Chile, indicated that the new constitutional draft’s shortcomings are part of a long tradition of Indigenous marginalisation.
“Chile has a terrible relationship with its Indigenous people,” Millaeo said. “We need rules that establish an equal distribution of development opportunities where ancestral grounds are recognised, and the cultural patrimony of Indigenous people is protected, respected and guaranteed.”
He explained that Sunday’s constitutional draft only mentions Indigenous rights in an “abstract” way, by saying the law “could” include Indigenous representation in Congress.
The new draft would also strengthen Pinochet’s governance model, upholding neoliberal principles that are at odds with Indigenous values, Millaeo said.
“For example, the idea that nature is not an object but a subject that needs to be cared for — that’s not in the current [constitution], but the new proposal goes even further away from that.”
That Indigenous viewpoint, however, runs contrary to many of Chile’s business interests.
The country is one of the world’s top copper producers, and its economy is hinged on resource extraction. Mining makes up about 58 percent of the country’s total exports.
Fernando Hernandéz, a civil engineer who works in the mining sector, said he plans to vote in favour of the new draft constitution because it protects Chile’s economic interests.
Land should “generate value, jobs and growth”, Hernandéz explained.
But like many Chileans, Hernandéz is sceptical of what a new constitution can achieve. And after nearly three years of constitutional votes and councils, fatigue is setting in.
“Chile won’t transform from one day to another by changing the constitution,” Hernandéz said. “This has been exhausting for Chile and for its people.”
Ñanco Antilef, the architect who participated in the Constitutional Council, agreed that voter enthusiasm is waning. “There’s electoral fatigue and less interest in the process this time around.”
But he insisted that voting was still important, if only to protect the status quo — and hold out hope for a better deal in the future for Indigenous Chileans.
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Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children have been directly affected by Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, ranging from displacement to being wounded or killed.
Since October 7, more than 10,000 children have been killed or are lost under rubble and presumed dead, according to a report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. At least 24,000 children have lost one or both parents in Israeli attacks and about 18,000 have been injured with some in critical condition.
Nearly half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people – 47 percent – are under the age of 18. The majority of them have lived through at least four Israeli offensives during their short lives.
Due to the blockade imposed by Israel on the coastal enclave, children are also facing the prospect of starvation, particularly in northern Gaza, where they eat on average one meal a day. Furthermore, the lack of clean drinking water, overcrowded conditions and lack of sanitation in United Nations-run schools, where many displaced people are seeking shelter, has led to an outbreak of infectious diseases, to which children are particularly vulnerable.
Over the past 68 days, more than 18,700 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, including more than 7,700 children, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. This means that one Palestinian child is killed every 10 minutes, leading the World Health Organisation to describe the situation as “humanity’s darkest hour”.
Nearly 8,000 people are missing and presumed dead under the rubble of their homes, and more than 50,000 have been wounded – the vast majority women and children.
Despite the UN general-secretary saying on October 31 that Gaza has turned into a “graveyard for children, a living hell for everyone else”, the Israeli offensive and ground invasion has continued and shows no sign of slowing down.
“The ongoing Israeli attacks have left over 18,000 Palestinian children injured with many in critical condition,” the Euro-Med monitor said. “Dozens more have suffered amputations, and hundreds more have suffered severe burns to various parts of their bodies.”
At Deir el-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Al Jazeera spoke to several children who had survived Israeli bombardments either directly on their homes or in their neighbourhoods.
I was playing in the street with my cousin outside the house in Maghazi refugee camp. The Israeli planes bombed the building opposite us. I suffered a fractured skull, stitches all around my head, a broken leg and a big wound that doctors said exposed my bone.
My favourite football players are Alaa Attiya and Omar Khamis from the Shujayea Football Club. They score a lot of goals. I’ll play when we go back to our homes, but I don’t have a football. I still want to be a football player when I grow up. I miss my school.
My mother was making supper for us when our next-door neighbour’s house got targeted. The walls of our home fell on top of us, breaking my leg and my arm in two places. Our home is gone.
I like Cristiano Ronaldo, but I want to be a doctor, so I can help children get better. I hope my medical referral sends me to the United Arab Emirates not to Egypt because I don’t want to travel in a car to Egypt. I want to get on a plane and look out the window when I’m in the sky. I want to get better and come back to Gaza.
War is stupid. I want it to end. I’ve saved 1,000 shekels [$270]. My dad is keeping them safe for me. My favourite food is chicken wings, and I want to take my family out to a restaurant after this is over.
We left our home in Shati and went to stay with my grandpa in Nuseirat. My grandfather said we should go down to the yard and bake bread. A missile struck our home, and those inside like my Aunt Tagreed, Uncle Sameh, Uncle Mohammed and my cousin Rital were killed, 11 in total. My sister Sabah was also killed. She was so young, only two years old.
I was playing on the swing in the yard, and when I woke up, I found myself in the hospital. The doctors cut my long hair and I was so upset. They thought I was going to die, but my heart kept beating. They operated on me for four hours and said I have internal bleeding, a fractured skull, broken pelvis and two broken legs.
I have stitches on my hand and stomach, and my legs have titanium parts. I want to be a teacher, and my favourite subject is English.
We were at my grandfather’s house in Nuseirat eating moussaka when the Israelis bombed us. The sound was scary. My mother, grandad, Uncles Mustafa, Sameh and Taiseer, his wife and my cousins Hamoud and Uday were all killed.
Mama was outside. I was injured in my legs. Both of them are broken. My Baba and Aunt May are taking care of me. I was sitting under the window and saw the missile falling. We thought it was heading behind our house. I remember a man rescued me from under the rocks. My legs were stuck. I want to be a dentist, so I can fix my dad’s teeth. I like drawing and playing with my dolls.
I’m the first in my class. Our neighbour’s home in Nuseirat was bombed, and the walls of our house collapsed on us. We were under the rubble. My grandpa pulled me out. I had shrapnel in my stomach and couldn’t eat for 10 days. My legs have more than 50 stitches.
My grandma and cousin were killed. I want to be a doctor, and my favourite subject in school is maths.
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Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown by members of his presidential guard on July 26 and has been detained with his family since then.
A West African court has ruled that the ousted president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, and his family have been arbitrarily detained and called for his reinstatement.
Bazoum was overthrown by members of his presidential guard on July 26 and has been detained at home with his wife and child since.
The coup was widely condemned and prompted sanctions from West Africa’s main political and economic bloc, the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS), amid widespread calls for a return to democratic rule.
On Friday, the ECOWAS Court of Justice sitting in Abuja ordered Niger’s military government to re-establish constitutional order through Bazoum’s reinstatement. The judge, Gberi-Be Ouattara, called for his immediate and unconditional release.
According to his lawyer Seydou Diagne, Bazoum filed a lawsuit before the court on September 16 to free him.
The Nigerien military government also filed a suit before the court in November to order the lifting of the sanctions imposed on the country by ECOWAS. The request was denied.
This is a developing story. More details to come.
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Russian opposition figure has been moved from penal colony and lawyers say they haven’t seen him since last week.
The Kremlin has said it has “no information” about jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, whose lawyers have not seen him since December 6.
Prison authorities moved him from the penal colony where he was serving his sentence for multiple charges including extremism, but have not said where he was transferred to.
Prison officials told a court on Friday that Navalny had left the IK-6 facility in the town of Melekhovo in the Vladimir region, about 230km (140 miles) east of Moscow, according to Vyacheslav Gimadi, the head of the legal department at Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
“We don’t know [where he is] for the 10th day,” the lawyer posted on X.
Navalny, who rose to prominence by lampooning President Vladimir Putin’s elite and alleging extensive corruption, was sentenced in August to an additional 19 years in prison on top of the 11 and a half years he was already serving.
His allies had been preparing for his expected transfer to a “special regime” high-security facility, the harshest grade in Russia’s prison system, before he was moved.
“Where he was taken is not known,” Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, posted on X, saying he was moved on December 11. “Let me remind you that the lawyers have not seen Alexey since December 6.”
When asked on Friday if the Kremlin had any information about what was happening to Navalny, spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “No. I repeat again: we do not have the capacity, or right, or desire, to track the fates of those prisoners who are serving sentences by order of a court.”
Another Navalny ally, Maria Pevchikh, meanwhile, has asked the United Nations Human Rights Committee to help them locate him.
“What is happening with Alexey is, in fact, an enforced disappearance and a flagrant violation of his fundamental rights. Answers must be given,” she said on Thursday.
Rights groups have also weighed in. Amnesty International acknowledged “the possibility that he may be in transit to another prison colony”.
But it added that, “as if attempted poisoning, imprisonment and inhumane conditions of detention were not enough, Alexey Navalny may now have been subjected to an enforced disappearance”.
Navalny earned admiration from Russia’s disparate opposition for voluntarily returning to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated for what Western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent.
Navalny says he was poisoned in Siberia in August 2020. The Kremlin denied trying to kill him and said there was no evidence he was poisoned.
The Kremlin on Tuesday criticised what it called United States “interference” in Navalny’s case, after the US said it was “deeply concerned” by allies saying they had no access to him.
“We are talking about a prisoner who was found guilty by the law and is serving the prison sentence he received. Any interference, including from the US, is unacceptable,” Peskov said then.
This week, the European Union also called for Navalny’s “immediate and unconditional release from politically motivated incarceration”.
“Russia’s political leadership is responsible for his safety and health in prison for which they will be held to account,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell posted on X.
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IEA report says demand is expected to grow in India, China but decline in United States, European Union.
Global coal use is expected to reach a record high in 2023 as demand in emerging and developing economies remains strong, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has said.
The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday.
Coal is the largest energy-related source of the CO2 emissions responsible along with other greenhouse gases for global warming.
Half of the world’s coal use comes from China, the agency said, so the outlook for coal will be significantly affected in the coming years by the pace of clean energy deployment, weather conditions, and structural shifts in the Chinese economy.
Coal use is set to drop by about 20 percent this year in both the European Union and the United States, the report said.
The agency said it was difficult to forecast demand in Russia, currently the fourth-largest coal consumer, because of the continuing conflict in Ukraine.
But the IEA noted that overall coal use is not expected to drop until 2026, when the major expansion of renewable capacity in the next three years should help lower usage by 2.3 percent compared with 2023 levels, even with the absence of stronger clean energy policies.
Global consumption is forecast to remain well over 8 billion tonnes in 2026, the report said. To reach goals set by the Paris climate agreement – reached in 2015 by governments who agreed to phase out fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy in the second half of the century – the use of unabated coal would need to fall significantly faster, it added.
At the United Nations COP28 climate talks in Dubai this week, world leaders agreed to a deal that would, for the first time, push nations to transition away from fossil fuels to avert the worst effects of climate change.
However, the agreement did not go so far as to seek a “phase-out” of fossil fuels, for which more than 100 nations had pleaded. Rather, it called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade”.
“The absence of explicit ‘phase-out’ language in the draft is significant, as it is a more measurable and definitive term, sending a strong message globally about a total shift away from fossil fuels,” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, told Al Jazeera.
“The current terminology – ‘transitioning away’ – is somewhat ambiguous and allows for varying interpretations.”
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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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