Journalist in hospital says younger men interrogated as situation remains tense
Rushdi Abu Alouf
Reporting from Khan Younis
The Israeli operation inside Al-Shifa hospital is still going on some 15 hours after tanks and soldiers were sent in.
I spoke to a contact inside in the hospital who said Israeli troops were investigating and talking to hundreds of people at the facility.
He told me the soldiers made an order over a loudspeaker in Arabic for any men aged between 16 and 40 to leave all hospital buildings and go into the courtyard.
Medical teams, patients and women were not told to leave.
Soldiers asked some of those who left the buildings were to strip down to their underwear, before being interrogated, he told me.
- A journalist inside the hospital tells the BBC that soldiers are going room to room and interrogating people but there is no shooting taking place
- He said commandos had entered the main emergency department, with tanks also in the hospital area
- Israel accuses Hamas of running a command centre in tunnels under the hospital and the US says it has intelligence that supports this
- Hamas denies this and says the raid on the hospital is a war crime – hundreds of civilians have been sheltering there, alongside patients and staff
Russia and Israel lead global surge in attacks on civilian water supplies
Exclusive: at least 228 water conflicts were recorded in 2022 – an 87% rise on the year before, Pacific Institute database shows
Water-related violence surged to an all-time high in 2022 – driven in large part by Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israeli attacks against Palestinian water resources in the West Bank.
At least 228 water conflicts were documented in 2022 – an 87% rise since 2021, according to research by the Pacific Institute shared exclusively with the Guardian.
The incidents include Israeli settlers sabotaging wells in the occupied West Bank, state violence against protesters demanding safe drinking water in Iran, nomadic pastoralists and farmers fighting over scarce supplies in sub-Saharan Africa, and Russia bombarding dams and water treatment plants in Ukraine.
Rwanda migration plan ‘unlawful,’ UK top court rules
The British government’s plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive by irregular means to Rwanda is not lawful, the UK Supreme Court has ruled. The government says it “takes issue” with the ruling.
The UK Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a controversial British government plan to send asylum-seekers who arrive in the country as stowaways or in boats to Rwandais unlawful.
Five justices on the country’s top court said asylum-seekers would be “at real risk of ill-treatment” because they could be sent back to their home countries once they were in Rwanda.
The government appealed to the Supreme Court after a lower court had already ruled that the removal policy to the East African country was unlawful because Rwanda could not be considered a safe third country.
Mali: How junta and Wagner forces seized control of rebel stronghold Kidal
Mali’s army has recaptured the strategic northern town of Kidal, a stronghold of Tuareg-dominated separatist groups that has long posed a major sovereignty issue for the ruling junta. The capture is a significant symbolic success for Mali’s military leaders, who seized power in 2020. France 24’s Wassim Nasr takes a look at how the army were able to take back the city, including with the help of Wagner troops.
Fossil fuel interests have large, yet often murky, presence at climate talks
The badges said they were there to participate in negotiations to curb climate change. They stated affiliations like the government of Brazil, Indigenous organizations of the Amazon, the Climate Registry. But in reality, the livelihoods of these participants were more aligned with what’s keeping the problem going: fossil fuels.
Close to 400 people connected in some way or another to fossil fuel industries attended last year’s United Nations’ climate talks in Egypt, a grouping that was larger than all but two of the national delegations sent by countries, according to a data analysis of the more than 24,000 participants by The Associated Press.
As United Nations leaders, scientists and others called for an eventual elimination of coal, oil and natural gas, various delegations included attendees who in some way owed part or all of their paychecks to fossil fuel burning. Many of these same people, and possibly even more connected to fossil fuels, will likely be at this year’s official climate talks, known as Conference of Parties or COP, being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a major oil producing country.
US and China pledge to ramp up renewables in place of planet-warming fossil fuels ahead of Biden-Xi summit
The United States and China have agreed to resume a working group on climate cooperation and pledged a major ramp-up of renewable energy, the two sides announced Wednesday ahead of a leaders’ summit in San Francisco, as the world’s two largest polluters seek to overcome their geopolitical tensions to tackle the climate crisis.The announcement came hours before US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are set to sit down on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit for their first talk in a year – a highly anticipated meeting aimed at stabilizing rocky relations.Cooperation on climate change has long been seen as a rare bright spot in an otherwise difficult US-China relationship strained by tensions over trade, technology, human rights and geopolitics. But even that bright spot had dimmed over the past year, with Beijing cutting off climate talks with Washington in retaliation for a high-level US visit to Taiwan last summer.
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