‘Enough is enough’: UN diplomats visit Rafah crossing amid concerns over dwindling Gaza aid
UN envoys from the security council have made a whirlwind trip to Egypt’s Rafah Crossing into Gaza in what is being seen as a urgent attempt to try to halt the war.
The trip went ahead under heavy security as there were further signs of a deterioration in law and order – with starving Gazans becoming more and more desperate to find food and water.
Camera teams inside the Gaza Strip filmed yet more frantic scenes, showing crowds scavenging around water bottles which appeared to have fallen off an aid truck.
Israel-Gaza latest: UN aid boss has ‘no words’ to describe scenes in Gaza
The truck was filmed moving at speed with a number of men, one armed, sitting on top of the aid as if they were guarding the cargo.
The UN trip to the border was hastily organised by the United Arab Emirates, the sole Arab representative on the Security Council, in the wake of the failure to agree on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
We were part of the entourage that accompanied the diplomats, which included representatives from Russia, China, Brazil, Albania, Japan, Slovenia and the UK- but did not include the US.
All 15 members of the security council were invited, including some of the incoming rotating non-permanent members.
The US and France were the only two of the five permanent members to not take up the invitation.
The diplomats had the chance to see the situation at Rafah first hand
In a heavily embargoed visit due to security concerns, the group was whisked around key areas, as well as the border crossing, to give them first-hand experience of the difficulties in delivering aid and the size of the problem facing agencies.
With the truce collapsing about a week ago, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has dwindled to sometimes not more than 50 a day.
Nearly 90% of the 2.3 million citizens of Gaza are displaced, thousands are dead and wounded, and the number of operating hospitals reduced to a fraction compared to before the Hamas attack on Israel.
‘Israel not holding up aid’
But even as the trip went ahead, Israeli spokespeople insisted they were not to blame for the log-jam of aid trucks on the roads leading to the border crossing.
Eylon Levy, speaking on behalf of the Israeli government, said they’d opened a second crossing to ease aid delivery through Kareem Shalom – the only other Israeli border with Gaza in the south.
“There’s no hold up on the Israeli side,” Mr Levy insisted. He hinted the paucity of aid reaching Gazans was down to poor coordination by the organisational bodies responsible on the other side of the border.
“The problem is the bottleneck at the Rafah crossing, and the problem is that international agencies are not keeping pace. Israel is not placing any restrictions on humanitarian necessities in the Strip,” he added.
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Sky News has not been able to independently confirm whether the Kareem Shalom border is fully open or how it is operating.
The UAE’s UN ambassador, Lana Nusseibeh, said it is still only being used to scan and check aid trucks before they enter Gaza – but the trucks are then re-routed to the nearby Rafah crossing – which before the war was intended only as a pedestrian crossing.
She told Sky News: “There’s a lot of blame going round. There are over 17,000 dead Palestinians from this conflict from Israel’s attack on Gaza, and 60% of them, 70% of them, are woman and children – so there’s a dire situation on the ground in Gaza that we have to address.
Palestinian children queue to collect water in Rafah
The UAE ambassador says Kareem Shalom is still only being used to scan and check aid
“More broadly, on humanitarian aid, I think we need some kind of monitoring mechanism that is efficient,” she added.
“What we are seeing here, with trucks lining up the border on the way in, is not efficient on that scale. Kareem Shalom has to be opened and it should become a crossing point, as much as a scanning point for aid to go in.
“Palestinians are the future neighbours of the state of Israel. How you treat your neighbours is going to define what happens for decades to come and the kind of peace we want in the region.”
‘Let down by the UN’
The UN diplomats were driven in buses past lengthy lines of aid trucks parked up along the road leading to the border crossing, as well as parked in nearby Arish town, waiting to be checked before getting permission to go inside Gaza.
Accompanied by Egyptian police escorts and a van flying a prominent white flag, the convoy was also taken to Arish hospital to see injured and wounded Palestinians, as well as shown a Red Crescent warehouse stacked full of essentials including food, medicines, water purifiers and cold weather clothing.
When the group reached the Rafah crossing, Sarah Badr, a young woman from the World Youth Forum, interrupted the visit to urge them to use their influence to stop the war.
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Alex Crawford: ‘Streets’ of backed-up aid for Gaza
A Red Crescent warehouse full of aid
“When I visited the United Nations when I was much younger I was so proud because of the declaration of human rights and what it represented,” she said.
“We just want peace, peace on both sides.”
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Security council members who voted for a ceasefire were frustrated by the failure because of the US veto.
The ambassador for China, Zhang Jun, told Sky News: “This is really a tragic event, not just for the Palestinians, but for the whole world. We should not allow it to continue. It has been too long.”
Smoke could be side from over the Gaza side of the wall
‘We should not allow it to continue’, said China’s envoy
But like many of the other ambassadors, they vowed to continue the battle for a ceasefire and a lasting peace.
“This is clearly the will of the international community,” the UAE’s ambassador to the UN said. “And we have to look at a two-state solution and how to create peace in the region.”
The diplomatic group was also able to interact virtually via screens with doctors and patients at the new UAE field hospital inside Gaza in Rafah – and was taken to the opening of a new desalination plant that will pump fresh water to 300,000 people.
As the diplomatic group was being driven by the heavily fortified wall separating Egypt from Gaza, the ambassadors could see smoke from bombings on the other side and what appeared to be rocket fire – as well as Palestinians waving to them and standing on ridges on the Gaza side.
“Enough is enough,” Zhang Jun said.
At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.
A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.
Two people remain in a critical condition following the blaze. Pic: AP
They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.
Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.
Several residents were treated for smoke inhalation. Pic: AP
Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.
The residence is home to 82 elderly residents.
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The blaze started in one of the rooms, Fernando Beltran, the national government’s top official in the region, told reporters.
All of the victims were elderly residents, he added.
Relatives wait for news outside the care home. Pic: AP
Fire crews, paramedics and police officers remain on site, said a spokesperson for the regional government of Aragon who confirmed the fatalities.
It took firefighters several hours to extinguish the blaze, they said.
The cause of the fire is unknown and is being investigated.
UN climate talks are “no longer fit for purpose” and should only be hosted by countries who are trying to give up fossil fuels, veterans of the process have said.
An open letter to the United Nations, signed by former UN chief Ban Ki-moon, made a dramatic intervention in the 29th COP climate summit, under way in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Frustration over petrostate hosts – following last year’s summit in UAE – as well as the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists, prohibitive costs, and slow progress have been mounting in recent years.
The letter acknowledges the strides COPs have made on ramping up climate policies.
“But it is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose,” the authors said.
“Its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”
The letter’s 22 signatories also include former Ireland President Mary Robinson and Christiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate body (UNFCCC) that runs the annual COP summits.
It called for the process to be streamlined and for countries to be held accountable for their promises.
Sky News analysis has found only “marginal” progress has been made since the “historic” pledge from COP28 last year to transition away from fossil fuels.
Pic: AP Photo/Peter Dejong
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The letter also called for “strict eligibility criteria” for host countries to exclude those “who do not support the phase out/transition away from fossil energy”.
This year’s host country, petrostate Azerbaijan, has been engulfed in controversy.
Its authoritarian president Ilham Aliyev used his opening address to criticise western hypocrisy and praise oil and gas as a “gift” from God. His criticism of France, with whom relations have long been tense, drove the French minister to cancel a trip to the summit.
While the government and its COP team run separate operations, host countries are supposed to smooth over disagreements and find consensus between the almost 200 countries gathered.
COP presidencies are also nominating themselves to be climate leaders and throwing their own countries under the spotlight.
Azerbaijan is a small developing country that relies significantly on oil and gas revenues. But it has made slow progress on building out clean power – getting just 1.5% of its energy from clean sources – and led a harsh crackdown on critics in the run up to the COP.
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Azerbaijan team ‘optimistic’ about talks
In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, its lead negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev was unable to say whether Azerbaijan preferred to extract all its oil and gas or seek another, cleaner economic pathway – hard though that would be.
In a news conference yesterday, Mr Rafiyev said the president had been “quite clear” and he would not comment further.
“We have opened our doors to everybody,” he added.
Some diplomats here have hinted that Azerbaijan’s presidency team mean well but might be a little out of their depth. They have never been out in front at previous COPs, but they also only had a year to prepare for their turn hosting the mighty summit.
“My sense of this is that they’re a little underprepared, a little overwhelmed and a little bit short,” said one, speaking anonymously, as is customary for diplomats trying to maintain good relations.
“But I’m not sure that that’s politics. It might just be bandwidth and preparation and things like that.”
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Different regions in the world take turns to host a COP. This year it was up to Eastern Europe, but the selection process took longer than usual due to tensions over Russia’s war in Ukraine and between Azerbaijan and rival Armenia.
Achim Steiner of the UN Development Programme, called it “troubling” that some countries face questions over their host roles.
“Are there countries that are by definition good hosts and others are bad hosts?” he asked.
“In the United Nations, we maintain the principle of every nation, first of all, should have a right to be heard.
“Labels are not always the fairest way of describing a nation. Some of the largest oil producers have hosted this COP in the past, and seemingly this seemed to be a perfectly acceptable phenomenon.”
COP stands for “conference of the parties” and refers to countries (“parties”) who have signed the underlying climate treaty.
Azerbaijan’s COP29 team and the UN’s climate body have been contacted with a request to comment.
World
Body pulled from mine after police cut off supplies to ‘smoke out’ thousands of illegal miners
A body has been recovered from a South African mine after police cut off basic supplies in an effort to force around 4,000 illegal miners to resurface.
The body has emerged from the closed gold mine in the northwest town of Stilfontein a day after South Africa’s government said it would not help the illegal miners.
Around 20 people have surfaced from the mineshaft this week as police wait nearby to arrest all those appearing from underground.
It comes a day after a cabinet minister said the government was trying to “smoke them [the miners] out”.
The move is part of the police’s “Close the Hole” operation, whereby officers cut off supplies of food, water and other basic necessities to get those who have entered illegally to come out.
Local reports suggest the supply routes were cut off at the mine around two months ago, with relatives of the miners seen in the area as the stand-off continues.
Relatives of miners and community members wait at the mine shaft. Pic: AP
A decomposed body was brought up on Thursday, with pathologists on the scene, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said.
It comes after South African cabinet minister Khumbudzo Ntshavheni told reporters on Wednesday that the government would not send any help to the illegal miners, known in the country as zama zamas, because they are involved in a criminal act.
“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted. We didn’t send them there,” Ms Ntshavheni said.
An aerial view of a mineshaft. Pic: AP
Senior police and defence officials are expected to visit the area on Friday to “reinforce the government’s commitment to bringing this operation to a safe and lawful conclusion”, according to a media advisory from the police.
In the last few weeks, over 1,000 miners have surfaced at various mines in South Africa’s North West province, where police have cut off supplies.
Many of the miners were reported to be weak, hungry and sickly after going for weeks without basic supplies.
Illegal mining remains common in South Africa’s old gold-mining areas, with miners going into closed shafts to dig for any possible remaining deposits.
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Relatives of miners and community members wait near the mine shaft. Pic: AP
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The illegal miners are often from neighbouring countries, and police say the illegal operations involve larger syndicates that employ the miners.
Their presence in closed mines has also created problems with nearby communities, which complain that the illegal miners commit crimes ranging from robberies to rape.
Illegal mining groups are known to be heavily armed and disputes between rival groups sometimes result in fatal confrontations.
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