NPR - President Biden says he will halt the shipment of weapons to Israel if it proceeds with a major ground invasion of Rafah. ”I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” Biden told CNN during an interview yesterday. His comments mark a shift, as the president has previously shown unwavering support for Israel's war on Hamas despite domestic and international concerns over the civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza.
Intercept - The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, is pleading with the Israeli government and its backers to ceasefire and reverse course on plans for a full-scale Rafah invasion. “There’s 600,000 children that are seeking shelter in Rafah and that many of them have been displaced multiple times already,” UNICEF’s Tess Ingram, who recently returned from Gaza, told The Intercept. “They’re exhausted, traumatized, sick, hungry, and their ability to safely evacuate is limited.”
“The area that they’re being directed to evacuate to is not safe. It’s not safe because there aren’t the services there to meet their basic needs, water, toilets, shelter,” she said in an interview. “But it’s also not safe because we know that that area has been subject to strikes despite being a so-called safe zone. So we’re really concerned about that impact of a ground offensive on one of the most densely populated areas in the world.”Prior to the onset of Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza, Rafah was a city of approximately 250,000 people. As a result of Palestinians fleeing Israeli attacks, the population is currently estimated at 1.4 million.
No comments:
Post a Comment