613 killed at Gaza aid distribution sites, near humanitarian covoys, says UN
The GHF previously told Reuters it has delivered more than 52-million meals to hungry Palestinians in five weeks, and said other humanitarian groups had "nearly all of their aid looted".
Israel lifted an 11-week aid blockade on Gaza on May 19.
The UN office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told Reuters that there have been some instances of violent looting and attacks on truck drivers, which it described as unacceptable.
"Israel, as the occupying power, bears responsibility with regards to public order and safety in Gaza. That should include letting in far more essential supplies, through multiple crossings and routes, to meet humanitarian needs," OCHA spokesperson Eri Kaneko said in a statement to Reuters.
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Mail & Guardian
11 hours ago
- Mail & Guardian
The death of satire: What does murder represent today?
Not long ago, the Western media was showing videos of people being ruthlessly killed. They were recordings of beheadings by jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The first of them was posted online in 2014. More followed soon after. They were shown at every news cycle on almost every news channel. Naturally, CNN, the BBC, Euronews and the rest wouldn't show the entire clip. The videos were edited. Still, just enough was shown — enough to get the reaction they wanted to elicit from their audience. The common wisdom is that such clips desensitise the viewer to the loss of a human life. The truth is that they have a hypnotic effect on the mind. You cannot help watching what's unfolding in front of you even though you've watched the video a thousand times and you know exactly what will happen next and the images have made you sick every time. Why is watching someone getting killed so shocking, at times even traumatising? It wasn't always so. I'm not saying that humans were less sensitive to murder in the past because they were more used to it. My point is that a human life represents something else today and that its loss is felt differently as a result. What does murder represent for us today? For the majority of people today, murder represents the desecration of a superlative value. In modern society, a human life is sacrosanct. The belief is that it possesses dignity. If you kill a person, you violate something sacred and eternal. This has been the common opinion in the West since the last quarter of the 18 th century. The 1776 text of the American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen elevate a human life to the rank of something with inviolable rights which must be protected by law and government. The former says that 'all men are created equal'. Article 1 of the latter says that, 'Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.' Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes explicit what remains implicit in the first two texts. 'All human beings are born free and [are] equal in dignity and rights.' Note that it speaks of humanity not as a species but as disunited into citizens and members of a political association. The attribution of sacrality depends on this limitation. It is not as an animal that a human being has dignity, but as a being that secures its rights by instituting government, by forming a political association, i.e. a people or nation. Everything leads us to suppose that the dignity of man derives from the supreme power accorded the nation. Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: 'The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.' The American Declaration of Independence speaks of the powers of government deriving from the consent of the governed. The sovereignty of the people or nation is absolute, indivisible, unconditional. We have a formidable metaphysical predicate in a political text that turns man the citizen into a political monster, a being with unlimited power. Is it any wonder that modernity is the age of man's dominion over the earth, an anthropo-cene? It is in any case why we hear the same refrain from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Immanuel Kant: do not use a human being merely as a means but only as an end in itself. A man is not a thing to be enjoyed but a person that is owed respect. When people see someone being humiliated by having their dignity trampled on, the response is usually swift and violent. The time for talking is over. It is time to act. Let me illustrate this last point with the following example. The latest war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza began on 7 October 2023. The left was outraged by the loss of Palestinian lives at the hands of the Israeli army, but less by the loss of life on the other side, let alone by the kidnapping of 250 Israeli citizens. The left accords full moral status to Palestinians but almost none to Israelis. That is why it felt the loss of the former so much more strongly than the loss of the latter. Students protesting in the US went on marches. They occupied university campuses and put up tents everywhere. They raised blockades on bridges and highways. The time for talking was over. Conversely, the right accords full moral status to Israelis but almost none to Palestinians. It was outraged by the massacre of 1 200 Israelis on 7 October but almost not at all by the loss of Palestinian lives in the months that followed. The left and right share a belief in the dignity of a human life. For both, a human life has value in itself. The reason they are locked in an insurmountable battle to the point that they are incapable of hearing each other out is because of their additional belief that the members of one nation are full-blooded humans, whereas the members of the other are 'humans' in name only. What does this example tell us? Perhaps most strikingly the fact that the moral worth we attribute to people depends on our political leaning and on our identification with the left or right. Our politics dictates our perception of who is and isn't human, whose loss we should mourn and whose loss we can safely ignore. The other thing it demonstrates is the fact that we have an emotive attachment to values and not, as Kant believes, a rational one. Our perception of a murder testifies to the fact that humans are wedded to their values emotively rather than rationally, that they have an unconscious attachment to them instead of being persuaded of their truth. Imagine someone trampling on your values in front of you. The scene would fill you with disdain and horror. The reaction by liberals is the illiberal one where, instead of hearing out what the violator has to say and what his reasons are for doing what he did, the liberal wants to see him crushed. Allow me to cite another example, the violent protests by Muslims around the world at the French weekly Charlie Hebdo 's cartoons of the prophet Mohamed in January 2015, which led to the death of 8 of its staff. The outrage was caused by two factors. First, the cartoons violated a taboo. They depicted the prophet, which is haraam. Second, as is generally the purpose of caricatures, they mocked and ridiculed him. Someone deemed holy by 1.8 billion people was made to look grotesque. The response by the French Muslim protesters made one thing clear. Up until then, the French believed that every citizen, though he may be opposed to others in virtue of his faith, nevertheless has enough in common with the rest to consider himself part of the same national community. The protests showed that this appearance of belonging is just that, an appearance. Satire is an integral part of French political culture. It is unthinkable without it. But it is anathema to Islam. The two are irreconcilable to the point that one has to give way to the other or reprisals follow. This raises two difficult questions. The first is: how can cultures with competing values coexist in the same society? Isn't it necessary for one of them to give way to the other? even in a democracy? Or does this show the impossibility of multiculturalism? The alternative, naturally, is to take one's values less seriously or with a greater dose of irony. But is irony, satire, mockery and the rest possible in an age dominated by sincerity of belief and conviction, i.e. by wokism? I cannot offer an answer to the first question here. As for the second, it is certainly true that were the left and the right capable of taking themselves or their values with a greater dose of irony, that would make for a healthier civilisation. Sadly, the importance they both attach to identity, and to identity politics in particular, makes that impossible. The golden age of satire and mockery — i.e. from the late 1960s to the early 2000s – is long over. Rafael Winkler is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.
Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Daily Maverick
798 people killed while receiving aid in Gaza, says UN human rights office
By Olivia Le Poidevin The GHF uses private U.S. security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a U.N.-led system that Israel says had let militants divert aid. The United Nations has called the plan 'inherently unsafe' and a violation of humanitarian impartiality rules. 'Up until the seventh of July, we've recorded now 798 killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, and 183 presumably on the route of aid convoys,' OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva. The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May and has repeatedly denied that incidents had occurred at its sites.
Mail & Guardian
2 days ago
- Mail & Guardian
Qatar must rethink the US's Al Udeid Military Air Base
US involvement in the Middle East and Israel's attacks on Iran and its retaliation make the US military base in Qatar a target The assassination of one of Iran's highest-ranking generals and commander of Al Quds Force, part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qasem Soleimani, opened an unprecedented form of conflict in the Gulf region. Soleimani was killed in Iraq on 3 January 2020 by an US drone strike while travelling to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi. Iran retaliated by targeting US military facilities in Iraq. Days after the assassination, it fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi air bases housing US forces. According to The Times of Israel, Israel aided the US in that operation. The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed by Israel in the Iranian capital Tehran after attending the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, another violation of the sovereignty of Iran and international law. The killing of Haniyeh in July 2024 came on the heels of the killing of a number of Iranian diplomats at Iran's embassy in Damascus, Syria, on 1 April 2024. Israel — with the support of the US — has continued to assassinate Iranian officials inside Iran at will. Qatar had joint military operations with the US during the Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991. After the operations, Qatar and the US signed a defence cooperation agreement. This was expanded in 1996 to include the building of Al Udeid Military Air Base at a cost of more than $1 billion. It is the largest US military base in the Middle East. Iran attacked Al Udeid in retaliation for the US's attacks on the Iranian nuclear sites in Fordo, Natanz and Esfahan in June 2025. Although the strikes were downplayed by the US and Qatar — indeed they seemed to have been choreographed — they exposed a new fault line in future US-Qatar military cooperation. The question on the minds of many Qataris is: 'What will happen next time the US decides to attack Iran — will Iran retaliate by attacking Qatar again?' Notwithstanding the repeated mantra of 'a friendly, brotherly love and appreciation' between Qatar and Iran, the biggest threat to Qatar's security and political stability now, and in the near future, is a possible Israeli-US war against Iran. The targeting of Iran by Israel and the US presents a new security threat in the region. Al Udeid has served as 'a symbol of protection for the State of Qatar against potential attacks and other forms of hostilities'. However, when put to the test, Al Udeid has failed to meet those expectations. Besides Iran's recent attacks on US military installations in Al Udeid, when Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt led a blockade against Qatar in 2017, there was no forewarning from the US, Al Udeid's touted superior military intelligence notwithstanding. According to Qatar's defence minister Khalid al Attiyah, 'Actually, it was not a mere intention. There was a plan to invade Qatar.' The 'plan was set into two phases, imposing the siege with the aim of creating an overall state of panic, which would have a direct impact on the Qatari street, then executing a military invasion'. Possible future conflicts involving the US and Iran have raised serious concerns about the safety of the US's assets and personnel in the region. It has also triggered a debate, particularly in the US media, about the viability of, and rationale for, the country's continued involvement in Israel's wars in the region. (Graphic: John McCann/M&G) Leading supporters of President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement, such as executive chairperson of Breitbart News Steve Bannon, and right-wing journalist and social media influencer Tucker Carlson, have questioned 'the US's continuing blind support of Israel's wars in the Middle East'. Carlson, a known Trump supporter and right-wing voice, has been the loudest. He has been 'urging the US to stay out of Israel's war with Iran'. Bannon and Carlson are part of a broader effort to overturn the 'GOP's [Grand Old Party] hawkish consensus on Israel'. Despite Trump's unwavering support of Israel, the US president has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's warmongering strategy in the region. Trump has entered into lucrative business relationships with countries in the Persian Gulf region recently and Netanyahu stands to disturb those relationships. The US and the UAE have agreed to turn Abu Dhabi 'to a site of the largest artificial intelligence campus outside the US'. The US will allow 'the UAE to import half a million Nvidia semiconductor chips, considered the most advanced in the world in artificial intelligence products'. According to The Guardian, Saudi Arabia has struck a similar deal for semiconductors, obtaining the promise of the sale of hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell chips to Humain, an AI start-up owned by a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Indeed, given these interests and the strengthening relationship between the US and the Gulf countries, the US has much more to lose if it continues to blindly support Israel's wars. The relationship between Iran and the state of Qatar is very strong — they share gas exploration sites in the South Pars-North Dome area. Located in the Persian Gulf, they are by far the world's largest natural gas fields. There is also a people-to-people relationship between Qatar and Iran dating back to time immemorial. The next attack on Iran by the US or Israel could escalate and spread the war to Qatar. The US managed to move its assets from Al Udeid to other locations in Qatar before Iran's attacks last month. What guarantees does Qatar have that Iran won't go after those locations in future? There is a possibility that, if attacked, Iran will once again retaliate. What will happen then? Retaliatory attacks could go beyond a mere violation of Qatar's airspace and sovereignty — they could cost Qatari lives. The State of Qatar has to take serious decisions regarding Al Udeid if it wants to maintain its future relationship with Iran and other countries in the region. It must close Al Udeid. It has more valid reasons to do that now that the threat in the region has morphed. Consequently, Qatar needs to consider new defence infrastructure. Al Udeid presents more political and diplomatic challenges than opportunities. Thembisa Fakude is a senior research fellow at Africa Asia Dialogues and a director at the Mail & Guardian.
