Pro-Palestinian activists preparing to set sail from Spain on Sunday for Gaza in dozens of boats carrying aid have called on governments to pressure Israel to allow their flotilla — the largest to date — through the naval blockade.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Portuguese left-wing politician Mariana Mortagua were among hundreds of people from 44 countries due to depart from several ports to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Sumud means “perseverance” in Arabic.
Israel has scuppered numerous attempts over the 15 years of the blockade, including a 2010 boarding by its special forces in which at least nine Turkish activists were killed.
The ball was in the politicians’ court to put pressure on Israel to let the flotilla through, said Saif Abukeshek, one of the organisers.
“They need to act to defend human rights and to guarantee a safe passage for this flotilla,” the Palestinian, who is resident in Spain, told Reuters on Thursday in Barcelona.
In June, Israeli naval forces boarded and seized a British-flagged yacht carrying Thunberg, among others. Israel dismissed the aid ship as a propaganda stunt in support of Hamas.
It has imposed a naval blockade on the coastal enclave since Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, saying it aims to stop weapons from reaching the militant group.
The blockade has remained in place through conflicts, including the current war, which began when Hamas-led fighters rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 prisoners, by Israeli tallies.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has since killed almost 63,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Hamas-run Gaza, while a global hunger monitor says part of it is suffering from famine.
In early March, Israel also sealed off Gaza by land, letting in no supplies for three months, arguing that Hamas was diverting aid.
China will stage an elaborate military parade next Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Topping the guest list will be the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. While dozens of world leaders are expected to attend the event, President Trump is not one of them.
FADEL: To help us preview the big event, NPR’s Anthony Kuhn joins us from Seoul. Good morning, Anthony.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Morning, Leila.
FADEL: OK, so this is the first time ever the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea will meet. What can we expect from the meeting?
KUHN: Yeah. It’s not only the first meeting of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. It’s a meeting of the three nations’ leaders that we didn’t even see during the Cold War. So I think we can expect some pretty striking images of these three men atop the rostrum in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
In terms of concrete cooperation, there’s been some. Russia and China have, for example, helped North Korea defeat international sanctions. China and North Korea have helped Russia to differing degrees in its war in Ukraine. But they don’t have three-way military drills. They don’t have any three-way offices or institutions. It’s a loose coalition and this parade will tighten it somewhat. Also, all three of these nations fought fascist powers in World War II. Russia now claims it’s once again fighting fascists in Ukraine, and North Korea agrees with them, so they’re at least trying to link the past and present in some sort of narrative.
FADEL: OK. So President Trump won’t be in attendance. Who will be?
KUHN: There’ll be heads of state and government from 26 nations. Many are aligned with North Korea and China and Russia, such as Iran, Cuba, Vietnam and Myanmar. The Serbian president and the Slovak prime minister are the only Western leaders there. Also, South Korea’s president will be notably absent, but I guess if Kim wants to reach out to South Korea, their parliamentary speaker will be there for him to speak to.
FADEL: Now, this is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s first big multilateral event. How will he approach it?
KUHN: Well, historically, North Korea’s main ally has been China, but Kim Jong Un has recently drawn closer to Vladimir Putin, signing a mutual defense treaty last year with Russia, sending some 12,000 troops to help them fight Ukraine. But with peace talks now beginning, Kim may be starting to look past Ukraine. I spoke about this with Asia Society senior fellow John Delury, and here’s what he said.
JOHN DELURY: We can certainly read this as Kim Jong Un realizing, OK, I can’t put all my eggs in the Russian basket and, again, need to kind of improve the ties with China, but also looking beyond China at Donald Trump and see what may be in play with the Americans.
KUHN: Remember that Trump met with Kim three times in 2018 to 2019. He says he’d like to meet with Kim again this year, and if that happens, Kim will be in a stronger position with Moscow and Beijing’s backing.
FADEL: OK, what message is China looking to send at this event?
KUHN: Well, they’re positioning themselves as leader of a multipolar alternative to the U.S.-led order. They’ll be rolling a lot of military hardware through Tiananmen Square, and they’ll be highlighting their contribution as being on the right side and the winning side of World War II, where they suffered 35 million people killed and wounded. And that’s a message they can send both domestically and internationally.
FADEL: That’s NPR’s Anthony Kuhn. Thank you for your reporting, Anthony.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
Turkiye has decided to bar Israeli vessels from using its ports, forbid Turkish ships from using Israeli ports and impose restrictions on planes entering Turkish airspace, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Friday.
He provided few details in comments to parliament, which appeared to summarise steps that Turkiye has already taken against Israel over the conflict in Gaza or has started to implement.
Turkiye on Friday fiercely criticised Israel’s offensive in Gaza and accused it of committing genocide in the Palestinian enclave and halted all trade with Tel Aviv, called for international measures against it and urged world powers to stop their support.
Sources told Reuters last week that Turkish port authorities had also started informally requiring shipping agents to provide letters declaring that vessels are not linked to Israel and not carrying military or hazardous cargo bound for the country.
A source had also said that Turkish-flagged ships would be prohibited from calling at Israeli ports.
“We have totally cut our trade with Israel, we have closed off our ports to Israeli ships and we are not allowing Turkish vessels to go to Israel’s ports,” Fidan told an extraordinary parliamentary session on Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
“We are not allowing container ships carrying weapons and ammunition to Israel to enter our ports, and aeroplanes to go into our airspace,” he added, without giving details.
The Israeli government did not immediately comment on his remarks.
At least 69 people have died and many more are missing after a boat capsized off the coast of Mauritania, coastguards in the north-west African country have said.
Seventeen people have been rescued and a search is continuing for other passengers who were aboard the dugout canoe that was heading towards Spain’s Canary Islands.
According to survivors, the boat left The Gambia six days before Tuesday’s accident, carrying around 160 people on board, mainly Gambian and Senegalese nationals.
The perilous journey over the Atlantic Ocean has become an increasingly common route for African migrants trying to reach Europe.
Nearly 47,000 people reached the Canary Islands last year and the Spanish non-government organisation Caminando Fronteras estimates more than 9,000 migrants died trying.
Coastguard sources told Spanish news agency EFE that search efforts were ongoing off the coast around 60km (37 miles) north of the capital, Nouakchott – and rescue teams were preparing to dive and inspect the sunken vessel.
The migrants spotted the lights of a coastal town late on Tuesday night and “moved to one side, causing it to capsize”, a senior coastguard official told the AFP news agency.
Caminando Fronteras spokesperson Helen Maleno urged the coastguard to keep up the search, describing the accident to Spanish media as one of the most significant “tragedies of this summer”.
Earlier this week, the Mauritanian security forces were accused of systematically abusing migrants from other African countries.
The Human Rights Watch report alleged the violations had been exacerbated by a deal with the European Union and Spain, which aims to curb the dangerous sea crossings to the Canary Islands.
“Let’s sleep early so we don’t feel the hunger” – humanitarian workers in Gaza struggling in midst of famine | IFRC ReliefWeb
Famine confirmed for first time in Gaza World Health Organization (WHO)
Updates: Israel kills 61 in Gaza, UN chief slams ‘deliberate’ famine Al Jazeera
Famine is absolutely ravaging Gaza City: Unicef Dawn
WFP chief visits Palestine and Israel, calls for immediate surge of aid into Gaza and safe access to reach the most vulnerable families UN World Food Programme
Hundreds of employees of the United Nations’ leading human rights agency have backed an internal letter telling its leadership to declare Israel’s offensive in Gaza a genocide and to call on UN member states to suspend arms sales to Israel.
The 1,100-word letter, signed by about a quarter of the 2,000 staff of the Geneva- and New York-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), says the Israeli offensive in Gaza meets the legal threshold of genocide and that this means “arms sales, transfers and related logistical or financial support to Israeli authorities” constitutes a clear breach of international law by all those involved.
OHCHR employees told the Guardian they were frustrated with the failure of agency’s head, Volker Türk, to “move beyond condemning Israel”.
“The messaging has been the same for almost two years. Criticising Israel is not enough. He needs to be saying exactly what steps member states need to take to meet their obligations to prevent genocide and very firmly pointing out the legal consequences for leaders, officials and private businesses if they don’t,” said one staff member who signed the letter.
Another praised Türk’s criticism of Israel for grave breaches of international law and apparent war crimes but charged that the decision to avoid clearer public statements about genocide was “a political not a legal choice”.
The letter, seen by the Guardian, says that based on the “available evidence and authoritative assessments by the UN-appointed experts, as well as legal and [international humanitarian law] professionals, the legal threshold [for genocide] has been met. [We] therefore urge the Office to state the legal characterization publicly.”
The OHCHR “has a strong legal and moral responsibility to denounce acts of genocide” and that “failing to denounce an unfolding genocide undermines the credibility of the UN and the human rights system itself”, the letter adds.
UN officials have said that only an international court can declare a genocide – a process that can take many years. Experts on the international court of justice (ICJ) said in July that a judgment on whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza was unlikely before the end of 2027 at the earliest.
Many international human rights groups have already said a genocide is under way in Gaza, where the Israeli offensive has killed more than 63,000 people, mostly civilians, injured 150,000 and displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population. UN-backed experts declared a famine in parts of the devastated territory earlier this month.
Israeli officials reject the charge of genocide as “outrageous and false”, and say the country is acting in self-defence after Hamas’s surprise raid in October 2023 that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and resulted in 251 hostages being taken.
In January last year, the ICJ ruled that the claim of genocide was “plausible” and ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to stop acts of genocide, and incitement to genocide from being committed and take “immediate and effective measures” to allow aid into Gaza.
One OHCHR employee said Türk was failing his mandate to prevent as well as report human rights abuses around the world and that his high-profile post offered an opportunity to make a much greater difference.
“People take notice of what we say, and he says. He could be telling member states and officials working for them that they could face really serious legal consequences. At least that would make them think and put down a marker. No one could claim later that they didn’t know,” said one signatory to the letter.
In his response to the letter, also seen by the Guardian, Türk said signatories had raised “important concerns” and pledged to continue to “demand accountability regarding arms transfers facilitating violations”.
“I know we all share a feeling of moral indignation at the horrors we are witnessing, as well as frustration in the face of the international community’s inability to bring this situation to an end,” wrote Türk, a human rights lawyer and veteran UN official, .
A spokesperson for the OHCHR said the agency had been working in very difficult circumstances “in the face of vilification and accusations of bias, complicity, antisemitism, double standards and more” to try to document the facts on the ground and raise the alarm. The spokesperson added that Türk had warned repeatedly of the “high and increasing risk that atrocity crimes”, which include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, “are being committed in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
In November, Türk called on UN member states to assess arms sales or transfers to Israel and any other actors in the conflict, “with a view to ending such support if this risks serious violations of international law.”
“As the igh commissioner has said, since 7 October 2023, parties to this conflict have paid little heed to international law that protects human rights and governs the conduct of hostilities. This has been a stain on the collective conscience of humanity … The international community needs to come together to bring this unbearable horror to an end,” the spokesperson said.
Israel’s foreign ministry told Reuters it did not respond to internal UN employees’ letters “even if they are false, baseless, and blinded by obsessive hatred towards Israel”.
The Trump administration aims to tighten the duration of visas for students, cultural exchange visitors and members of the media, according to a proposed government regulation issued on Wednesday, part of a broader crackdown on legal immigration.
Donald Trump, a Republican, kicked off a wide-ranging immigration crackdown after taking office in January. The latest move would create new hurdles for international students, exchange workers and foreign journalists who would have to apply to extend their stay in the US rather than maintain a more flexible legal status.
The proposed regulation would create a fixed time period for F-visas for international students, J-visas that allow visitors on cultural exchange programs to work in the US, and I-visas for members of the media. Those visas are currently available for the duration of the program or US-based employment.
There were about 1.6 million international students on F-visas in the US in 2024, according to US government data. The US granted visas to about 355,000 exchange visitors and 13,000 members of the media in fiscal year 2024, which began on 1 October 2023.
The student and exchange visa periods would be no longer than four years, the proposed regulation said. The visa for journalists – which currently can last years – would be up to 240 days or, in the case of Chinese nationals, 90 days. The visa holders could apply for extensions, the proposal said.
China’s foreign ministry, asked about the proposed new rule for Chinese journalists on Thursday, said it opposed “the discriminatory practices adopted by the US against specific countries”.
The Trump administration said in the proposed regulation that the change was needed to better “monitor and oversee” the visa holders while they were in the United States.
The public will have 30 days to comment on the measure, which mirrors a proposal put forward in 2020 at the end of Trump’s first term in office.
NAFSA, a non-profit organization representing international educators at more than 4,300 institutions worldwide, opposed the 2020 proposal and called on the Trump administration to scrap it. The Democratic administration of then president Joe Biden withdrew it in 2021.
The Trump administration has increased scrutiny of legal immigration, revoking student visas and green cards of university students over their ideological views and stripping legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrants.
In a 22 August memo, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said it would resume long-dormant visits to citizenship applicants’ neighborhoods to check what it termed residency, moral character and commitment to American ideals.
The UN security council has voted to extend the body’s peacekeeping mission in Lebanon for a further 16 months, but ordered it finished at the end of 2026 under Israeli and US pressure.
UNSC members voted unanimously on Thursday to extend the mandate for the UN interim force in Lebanon (Unifil) ahead of its expiration on Sunday, prompting relief from Lebanese officials who rely on it. The approved resolution said Unifil would begin an “orderly and safe withdrawal” of its 10,800 peacekeepers from Lebanon in December 2026.
The planned withdrawal will end the more than 47-year-long peacekeeping mission. Initially created in 1978 to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli troops from south Lebanon, Unifil’s soldiers patrol the shared border between Israel and Lebanon.
The force has been tasked with monitoring and reporting violations of the November ceasefire between Hezbollah and Lebanon, so the Lebanese army can enforce the terms of the agreement.
Unifil troops patrol a position formerly held by Hezbollah in the Khraibeh valley, southern Lebanon. Photograph: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images
Thursday’s UN resolution said it aimed to make the Lebanese government “the sole provider of security” in south Lebanon, and called for Israel to withdraw its forces. Israel has continued to occupy at least five points in south Lebanon and carry out hundreds of airstrikes in violation of the ceasefire, which it said were done to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its military infrastructure.
The vote came after months of pressure by the Israeli and US governments, who have made ending the Unifil mission a priority.
After the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Dorothy Shea, said it was the last time the US would extend the Unifil mission. “The United States notes that the first ‘i’ in Unifil stands for ‘interim’. The time has come for Unifil’s mission to end,” she said.
The decision was also praised by the Israeli representative to the UN, Danny Danon, who said: “For a change, we have some good news coming from the UN.”
Under the presidency of Donald Trump, the US has moved closer to Israel’s position on Unifil. Israel has long considered Unifil to provide political cover to Hezbollah by failing to adequately disarm the militia in southern Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war, and has pushed for the mission to be disbanded.
Israel attacked Unifil positions throughout the war with Hezbollah, injuring peacekeepers as a result. Unifil’s mandate means it is only a monitoring force and cannot use force except in self-defence. Instead, violations are reported to the Lebanese army, which is leading the disarmament of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Unifil peacekeepers stand at a position formerly held by Hezbollah in the Khraibeh valley in southern Lebanon. Photograph: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images
Peacekeepers have also come under pressure from Hezbollah, with residents loyal to the group in south Lebanon frequently stopping patrols, throwing stones at military vehicles and on one occasion, slapping a peacekeeper.
The Lebanese state has relied on Unifil to help create a buffer with Israel and support its under-equipped army to reassert state control over south Lebanon. The prime minister, Nawaf Salam, praised the UN resolution, saying it “reiterates the call for Israel to withdraw its forces from the five sites it continues to occupy, and affirms the necessity of extending state authority over all its territory”.
Other nations involved, such as France and Italy, objected to the eventual withdrawal of peacekeepers, saying it could hamstring the Lebanese army’s ability to establish itself in south Lebanon.
The army will next week present a plan to disarm Hezbollah. It wants to do so in a way that does not provoke a confrontation with the well-armed group and preserves civil peace in Lebanon.
Pakistan voices strong Gaza support: Foreign minister Ishaq Dar – Daily Times
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
