Category: 2. World

Published on: August 18, 2025 4:01 AM

Rescue workers are searching for more than 40 people after a boat accident in Nigeria’s northwestern Sokoto state, the country’s emergency agency said on Sunday.

“About 10 persons have been rescued, while more than 40 passengers remain missing,” the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement.

NEMA said it has deployed its response team to support ongoing rescue operations following a tragic boat mishap in Sokoto State today.

The Director General of NEMA, Zubaida Umar, activated the agency’s response immediately after receiving reports that a boat conveying over 50 passengers to Goronyo Market had capsized.

Umar said, NEMA, in collaboration with local authorities and emergency responders, is intensifying search and rescue operations to locate the missing persons.

 

 

 

Kabul residents have told RFE/RL that they are begging for rice and “ready to accept death,” as the World Food Program (WFP) said it was “turning hundreds of thousands of people away” from nutrition centers.

WFP Country Director John Aylieff said drought, dramatic aid cuts, and the forced return of 1.5 million Afghans from Iran and Pakistan had combined to create “rising acute malnutrition” in the poverty-stricken country.

“We need to do everything we can to avoid famine,” he told RFE/RL. “It could be unprecedented because during the winter, there could be 10 to 15 million people needing food assistance. And at the moment, we have no funding and there will be no response.”

For the coming six months, the WFP in Afghanistan said it requires nearly $539 million for all programs to reach the most vulnerable families across the country.

But multiple donors have slashed contributions. For 2025, the WFP in Afghanistan said it received some $155 million. This compares with nearly $560 million the year before, and nearly $1.6 billion in 2022.

“The US has been a phenomenally generous donor in Afghanistan for decades, providing the lion’s share of humanitarian assistance, along with other generous donors from around the world,” Aylieff said.

“Now is not the moment for anyone to reduce or walk away.”

RFE/RL has asked the White House for comment. In his first few months in office, President Donald Trump cut more than 7,400 foreign aid programs globally worth $80 billion, according to a report published last month by Senate Democrats.

A State Department spokesman told RFE/RL on August 4 that “over the last approximately four years, foreign assistance intended for the people of Afghanistan was systematically diverted and expropriated by the Taliban — a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group.”

Nearly four years since their takeover of Afghanistan, “it is due time that the Taliban provide for the welfare of the Afghan people,” the spokesman added.

‘Ready To Accept Death’

The situation has devastating results for people like 42-year-old Kabul resident Gul Dasta. She used to work as a cleaner at the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry. When the Taliban seized power in August 2021, they announced a ban on women working in government offices, and she was fired.

Dasta’s husband has severe diabetes and cannot work. The couple have a 9-year-old son and two daughters, aged 14 and 16. They have not received an international food aid package for five months.

“There have been days that we had nothing to eat. I have boiled some rice that I begged from the neighbors and fed my children with. Every day in life is so difficult. There have been days that I cried all day,” she told RFE/RL in a phone interview.

Another Kabul resident we spoke to broke down in tears during the call.

Abeda, 54, is a widow who lives with her 15-year-old son, 26-year-old widowed daughter, and two grandchildren. She was a cleaner at a girls’ high school until the Taliban closed it as part of a campaign against education for females.

“Last Thursday I had nothing at home. Not even potatoes or tomatoes. I hated my life. Life is full of pain and trouble. Last Thursday I was even ready to accept death,” she said, during an interview on August 11.

Turning People Away

Aylieff said the situation was even worse in rural areas, where some 400 clinics providing nutrition had closed down due to lack of funds.

“The result of that is that we’re turning hundreds of thousands of people away,” he said.

“Sometimes they would have to walk for five hours to a clinic, the nearest one. Imagine the anguish of showing up and finding the clinic is closed.”

Aylieff added that the WFP was currently able to provide food to around 1 million people, compared to 5 million a year ago. But it will soon run out of money, he said, meaning food assistance will stop “almost completely” by October.

Taliban officials have largely avoided public comment on the hunger crisis, instead making vague remarks blaming foreign actors for the country’s general economic hardships.

For example, a statement by the Economy Ministry back in February said, “In addition to the financial and economic sanctions imposed by the United States, the freezing of assets has affected Afghanistan’s national economy.”

RFE/RL has been unable to operate freely in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power.

Prince William and Kate Middleton’s home in Windsor might mean other families would have to vacate.

The Prince and Princess of Wales, who are set to move at the eight bedroom Forest Lodge towards the end of the year, would need current residents to make space.

“They were told to move out,” one unnamed source told the outlet. “I guess they were given somewhere else, but they were told they had to move.

“They were not expecting it. Those houses are very close to the lodge, so they’re not going to want any Tom, Dick or Harry living in those houses if there are going to be royals there.”

One source told the Mail on Sunday: “This house is much larger than Adelaide Cottage. There is a dining room and drawing room which requires substantial pieces of furniture.”

The new property is said to be “forever home” to the couple.

Another unnamed source said: “How can this be their forever home? It’s not grand enough for a king.”

Rescue workers are searching for more than 40 people after a boat accident in Nigeria´s northwestern Sokoto State, the country´s emergency agency said on Sunday.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said in a statement that the boat, which was carrying more than 50 passengers to a market, capsized on Sunday morning.

“About 10 persons have been rescued, while more than 40 passengers remain missing,” NEMA added.

Boat accidents are common on Nigeria’s poorly regulated waterways due to overcrowding and poor maintenance, particularly during the annual rainy season when rivers and lakes overflow.

At least 16 farmers died in a similar accident in August 2024 when a wooden canoe carrying them across a river to their rice fields capsized in Sokoto state.

On July 29, six girls drowned after a boat taking them home from farm work capsized midstream in northwestern Jigawa State.

Two days earlier, at least 13 people had died in another boat accident in central Niger State.

On the program today

High level talks in Geneva have failed to reach a consensus over a legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution.

Schools shut for another week in Samoa as the country continues to battle a deadly dengue fever outbreak.

The leader of the Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea calls on the government to increase funding to address the sky rocketing number of new HIV AIDS infections.

A traditional double hulled canoe is officially launched in Vava’u, Tonga.

And Lakapi Samoa have no plans to wind up their sevens programme. 

Starvation in Gaza and our global shame

Starvation is the slow, silent unmaking of the body. Deprived of basic sustenance, the body first burns through sugar stores in the liver. Then it melts muscle and fat, breaking down tissue to keep the brain and other vital organs alive.

As these reserves are depleted, the heart loses its strength, the immune system surrenders and the mind begins to fade. The skin tightens over the bones and breathing grows faint. Organs begin to fail in succession, vision fails and the body, now empty, slips away. It is a prolonged, agonizing way to die.

We have all seen the images of emaciated Palestinian babies and children withering away from starvation in their mothers’ arms. Yet now that Israel is intensifying its war — embarking on a new campaign to “conquer” Gaza City — thousands more Palestinian civilians may be killed, either by bombs or by starvation.

“This is no longer a looming hunger crisis,” Ramesh Rajasingham, a senior UN humanitarian official, told the UN Security Council on Aug. 10. “This is starvation, pure and simple.” Alex de Waal, an expert on famine, estimates that thousands of Gazan children are now too weak to eat, even if they had access to food. “They have got to that stage of severe acute malnutrition where their bodies just can’t digest food.”

There is a growing consensus that Israel is committing the most serious of crimes in Gaza, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Palestinian and international human rights groups raised the alarm about this risk within months of the start of the war and it has since been echoed by states on every continent, as well as by many in Israel. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has decried what he describes as war crimes in Gaza and leading Israeli human rights groups say Israel’s actions in the territory amount to genocide.

On Oct. 9, 2023, two days after Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages — itself a serious war crime — then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.” The population of Gaza was dehumanized and no distinction was made between civilians and combatants — a violation of a cardinal rule of international humanitarian law. The siege shut off all supplies into Gaza for 70 days, imposing collective punishment.

This first siege was eased only slightly when Israel allowed supplies to trickle into Gaza in early 2024. By that April, Samantha Power, then the head of the US Agency for International Development, was already warning of famine in parts of Gaza. The following month, Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme, announced “a full-blown famine” in northern Gaza. 

Over the past 21 months, several governments and aid agencies have pleaded with Israel to let them deliver aid.

Binaifer Nowrojee

International law prohibits the use of starvation as a weapon of war. As the occupying power in Gaza, Israel must ensure that the civilian population receives adequate food, water, medical supplies and other essentials. If those supplies cannot be located within Gaza itself, they must be sourced externally — including from Israel.

Over the past 21 months, several governments and aid agencies have pleaded with Israel to let them deliver aid. Granting such permission is also a legal obligation: Israel has a duty to facilitate others’ relief schemes “by all means at its disposal.” But Israel has continuously thwarted these efforts. At this very moment, it is blocking humanitarian organizations from delivering aid.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice, through legally binding decisions, ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” Two months later, it reaffirmed that order and required that the measures be taken “in full cooperation with the United Nations.”

The UN-led humanitarian system was the only one capable of preventing widespread famine in Gaza. During the ceasefire between January and March of this year, the UN and other humanitarian organizations were operating as many as 400 relief distribution sites. But after Israel broke the ceasefire in March, these were shut down and another siege was unlawfully imposed.

Israel justified the new siege by saying that it was cutting off aid to exert greater pressure on Hamas — thus acknowledging its use of starvation as a weapon. When aid resumed in May, the UN was replaced by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private food distribution arrangement organized by Israel. But since then, nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while attempting to obtain food at the foundation’s four distribution sites. 

Although signs of the coming horrors were clear within months of the war’s onset, many governments averted their eyes.

Binaifer Nowrojee

Worse, the scheme was never going to work. According to a report from the Famine Review Committee last month, “our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence.”

Under international law, the war crime of starvation begins at the point of deprivation. When it becomes a more expansive policy undertaken with the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” it becomes genocide. Multiple senior Israeli officials have openly expressed such intent — including Gallant in October 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in August 2024 remarked that “it might be justified and moral” to “cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger,” and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who posted on social media that “food and aid depots should be bombed.”

Palestinians are being intentionally starved to death. Although signs of the coming horrors were clear within months of the war’s onset, many governments averted their eyes. They rationalized the restrictions on aid by arguing that it was going to Hamas — a claim that Israel now says it has no evidence for — and transferred more tonnage in weapons to Israel than they delivered in aid to Gaza. Now, they are failing in their duty to prevent and stop a genocide.

History will forever record this moment of global shame. It will archive the images of skeletal children alongside those from past episodes where the world did nothing. One can only hope that the world will act now to salvage at least a measure of our humanity, before even more children die.

• Binaifer Nowrojee is President of the Open Society Foundations.

Copyright: Project Syndicate

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News’ point of view

Israel’s ‘doomsday settlement’ a test for the world

As the world still tries to grapple with Israel’s Gaza genocide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bluntly declared that he feels a connection to the vision of a “Promised Land” and “Greater Israel.” This offensive statement led to condemnation from several Arab countries. However, Netanyahu has begun a systematic plan to realize this vicious vision.

While media attention is focused on the planned starvation of Gaza and while analysts are busy talking about Netanyahu’s plans to resettle Gazans, the West Bank is being quietly eaten up by settlements and settler violence. The settlers’ terrorism has brutally increased, with cover from the Israeli army, with the clear objective of driving Palestinians away from their homes in a new Nakba.

In addition to the systematic aggression against Palestinians in the West Bank, a new settlement, E1, is set to be approved in the Knesset on Wednesday. It is known as the “doomsday settlement” and will be the final nail in the coffin of the two-state solution. The plan is only one pen stroke away from becoming reality. In an Aug. 6 hearing, the planning committee rejected all the petitions presented by civil rights groups and activists to stop its construction.

E1 is dangerous because of its strategic location. If it comes to fruition, a two-state solution would be practically impossible.

Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib

The plan for the E1 settlement was proposed 29 years ago, but no prime minister — not even Netanyahu — dared to approve it. Successive Israeli governments bowed to the international community’s pressure. Now, however, Israel does not even pay lip service to the international community. It does not even pretend to be willing to allow the Palestinians to have a state of their own, nor it is willing to offer citizenship to those in the Occupied Territories. Its plan is clear ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and genocide if needed.

E1 is dangerous because of its strategic location. If it comes to fruition, a two-state solution would be practically impossible. E1 would drive a wedge between the northern West Bank of Nablus and Ramallah and the southern West Bank of Bethlehem and Hebron, with no connection between the two. The plan allows for the construction of thousands of residential units in a 12.5 sq. km area between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.

It would mean there would be no possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. This would limit the Palestinians’ existence to several isolated camps, Bantustans, human islands or whatever you want to call them, surrounded by Israeli settlements. Basically, it would confine Palestinian existence to a set of open-air prisons inside Israel.

Even though the plan has been frozen for so long, Netanyahu has never given up on it. He has always been waiting for the right moment to realize it. This is not his first attempt to bring it to fruition. In November 2012, Netanyahu retaliated to the UN General Assembly’s decision to recognize the state of Palestine by giving the go-ahead for the plan. After Netanyahu gave the green light, the international community pressured Israel to stop and the plan was put aside. However, since then, the Israeli government has been quietly working toward garnering approval.

The international community should act quickly and take punitive action against Israel. Condemnation alone does not work.

Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib

Advancing the E1 settlement is a sign of Israel’s defiance of the international community, as it comes while Saudi Arabia is using its political and diplomatic weight to push for recognition of a Palestinian state. France, Malta and Australia have announced they will recognize Palestine at September’s UN General Assembly. Canada and the UK have stated they will do the same if Israel fails to meet certain conditions.

In response, Israel hopes that advancing E1 will “bury” the idea of a Palestinian state, as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last week. “After decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem,” Smotrich said. “This is Zionism at its best — building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”

The international community should act quickly and take punitive action against Israel. Condemnation alone does not work. The more statements the international community issues, the more Israel realizes they are just empty threats, the more defiant it becomes and the more it doubles down on its criminal policies. This is a test of the international community’s claim that it is committed to the two-state solution.

Israel is now blatantly rejecting all UN resolutions. It is blatantly saying it wants to conduct ethnic cleansing and drive Palestinians out of their homes. The fig leaf has fallen. In addition to the issue of credibility, Israel’s policies are likely to result in another Nakba. Another Nakba would likely mean another wave of refugees that will ultimately reach European shores. This is why Europe should act now. The EU should suspend its trade agreement with Israel. Only when there are direct consequences will Netanyahu and Israel stop; otherwise, they will continue to act with impunity.

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  Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib is a specialist in US-Arab relations with a focus on lobbying. She is co-founder of the Research Center for Cooperation and Peace Building, a Lebanese nongovernmental organization focused on Track II

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News’ point-of-view