All 22 Doctors Without Borders staff leave Gaza through Rafah crossing into Egypt, organization says
From CNN’s David Wilkinson and Radina Gigova in London
All 22 staff members of Doctors Without Borders International, who were unable to leave Gaza since October 7, have successfully entered Egypt via the Rafah border crossing, the organization said Wednesday.
"A new team of international staff, including a specialised medical team, has already been identified and is ready to enter Gaza as soon as the situation allows, to support the humanitarian and medical response," the charity organization said.
The charity added that many of their Palestinian colleagues “continue to work and provide lifesaving care in hospitals and across the Gaza Strip, while the most basic protections for hospitals and medical personnel are not guaranteed.”
“Those who wish to leave Gaza must be allowed to do so without further delay. They must also be allowed the right to return,” it said
The charity also reiterated their calls for an immediate ceasefire. “Critically needed humanitarian supplies and staff must be allowed into Gaza where hospitals are overwhelmed and the healthcare system is facing total collapse,” it said.
(Argh the excerpter didn’t excerpt. Short article, so…)
Egypt has stationed tanks and armored vehicles near the Rafah border crossing into Gaza.
Pictures show dozens of the vehicles stationed near the border.
Egypt fears an influx of tens of thousands of refugees from the fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and has so far kept the border largely closed, only allowing aid trucks into Gaza.
Egypt is limited by its 1979 peace treaty with Israel as to the number of forces it is allowed to station in the Sinai Peninsula, although Israel has in the past approved Egypt breaching those numbers to battle an Islamic insurgency in the area.
No - this not the case. At all. Again, if you know anything about what’s happening in the region more generally, Egypt, which has had a long-standing peace treaty with Israel (since the 70s, during the Carter administration), has no desire to go to war with their neighbors. They are not in an economic situation to do so, anyway. The ruling military has long worked to keep their relationship with Israel intact and working well, because it benefits them domestically to keep up the status quo.
I don’t know what video that USA Today article is referring to and haven’t heard anything about them fighting with Hamas.
The article I posted is just about Egypt stationing some tanks to the Sinai Peninsula. I updated it to just include the article since it’s short. It’s the first I’ve seen mentioning tanks on the Egyptian side.
The only other reference I could find to Egyptian tanks is a NYT article from today which has a throw-away line about army tanks (and aid trucks) lining the road to the crossing:
Actually, the Economist mentions it in an article from the 29th:
Meanwhile Egypt is reinforcing the border area with tanks and troops, determined to keep Palestinians out. “Palestinians and Arabs would not experience a second naqba,” said Ahmed Aboul-Gheit, a former Egyptian foreign minister and secretary-general of the Arab League, referring to the Palestinian exodus that accompanied Israel’s war of independence in 1948.
UN criticised for failing to stop ‘genocide’ in Gaza
A senior UN official strongly criticised the UN in a retirement letter for not stopping what he called “a genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Gaza.
Craig Mokhiber, a US human rights lawyer, claimed “the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people” is rooted in decades of persecution by Israel “based entirely upon their status as Arabs and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military.”
Mokhiber left his job heading the New York office of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on 31 October.
His four-page letter to UN human rights chief Volker Türk makes no mention of Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on 7 October, which killed 1,400 people.
Mokhiber had informed the UN in March he was going to retire.
In the letter, Mokhiber accused the US, UK and much of Europe of being “wholly complicit in the horrific assault” on Gaza by Israeli forces.
Mokhiber, who joined the UN in 1992 and said he has investigated Palestinian human rights since the 1990s, also wrote that a two-state solution for the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an impossibility.
He called for the dismantling of Israel and the establishment of “a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews.”
Excerpt from an Times of Israel article referencing the use of AI to determine Gaza targets:
The IDF said it has continued to strike Hamas sites in the Gaza Strip, including weapons manufacturing and storage facilities, anti-tank missile launching positions, and drone launching positions.
Later Thursday, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate said its so-called “targets center” had identified some 1,200 new Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing ground offensive that began last week.
The Military Intelligence Directorate is using artificial intelligence and automated tools to “produce reliable targets quickly and accurately,” the IDF said.
The IDF said hundreds of soldiers were working to produce new targets “on a large scale.”
The upshot of this article is not to establish that the Israeli response to the brutal Oct. 7 attack by Hamas is lawful or unlawful under international law – this remains to be assessed from a variety of perspectives. And the more information on targeting decisions, means, and methods deployed, and anticipated humanitarian harm becomes available, the more informed such an assessment will be. Our claim is rather that an evaluation of the IDF response depends also on the evaluation of background legal assumptions, and that ignoring these dimensions of the analysis would render such an evaluation vulnerable to legal criticism and ultimately unpersuasive. In the same vein, the use by politicians and media commentators of terms that also have specific legal meaning does not relieve international lawyers from examining such terms’ actual manner of application to the complex, dynamic, and tragic situation in the Gaza Strip and Israel.
Targeting decisions made by AI enters into legal analysis.
