U.N. Security Secretary General António Guterres: Israel isn’t letting Hamas regroup and launch attacks on Gaza
The United States, standing with Israel, has opposed resolutions in the U.N. Security Council that called for a cease-fire, arguing they would allow Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, to regroup and launch future attacks, like the massacres on Oct. 7 in Israel that sparked the current war.
“The way Israel is conducting its offensive is creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a post on social media on Friday.
Senior U.N. officials and many aid agencies have argued that a full cease-fire is needed to allow the distribution of aid to nearly 1.9 million displaced Palestinians, many of whom face spreading disease, hunger and an overwhelmed health-care systems.
According to a report by the Palestinian Ministry of Health on Saturday morning, about 200 people have been killed and another 368 injured in Israeli military operations since Friday.
United Nations workers, too, have been killed in large numbers. At least 136 workers from UNRWA — the agency that cares for Palestinian refugees and employees around 13,000 people in Gaza — have been killed in the conflict so far. The death toll in the United Nations has never been lower.
A statement by an administrator at the agency said that an Israeli airstrike had killed a man who had worked for the UN for 30 years.
The Hamas Attack Left Many Israeli Farms Abandoned — Some worry forever: “We have no other choice, you know?”
She says that all the sides can learn from this situation. It will take time to rebuild confidence and find a solution. “We have no other choice, you know?”
After all that has happened, she says Israel had no choice — it had to try to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, where more than 20,000 people have died since the start of the conflict.
Ilana Menache, in her 60s, is one of the volunteers — and she is indeed going for the low-hanging avocados. Her voice wavering with emotion as she talks about the future, she is in a thicket of branches.
Flynn says that trees will be less productive next year, and that will lead to higher prices in Europe, where most of the crop is exported.
He said that they could pick some of the avocados in a month or two. “But some of them that we should have picked two months ago, we’ll have to give up on them.”
Source: The Hamas attack left many Israeli farms abandoned — some worry forever
Paul Flynn, the Hamas attacker on a Thai farm: “Italy Gaza Kibbutz-hamas Palestinians-farms”
Before the war, he oversaw about 40 laborers from Thailand. The day Hamas attacked was a Saturday and Flynn was at home. The Thai farm hands were working. As Hamas fighters overran the area, the workers made a panicked retreat to a safe room on the farm grounds. They spent a day there before an Israeli tank arrived and they were able to chase off the attackers.
Four decades after coming to Israel, Paul Flynn still has his native brogue. The seven villages of Israelis who were moved from inside of Gaza in 2005 are collectively operated by a supervisor at the orchards.
Not far from the dairy farm, an all-too-close Israeli howitzer intermittently lobs artillery into Gaza. A road splits rows of apples and oranges that are pregnant.
He isn’t Jewish like Leff. He just saw a need and decided to spend a few weeks in Israel before starting a new job back home. The things that happened were terrible. He said he wanted to help a bit.
Source: The Hamas attack left many Israeli farms abandoned — some worry forever
An old friend of the Gazan dairy farm: Daniel Leff in a refugee’s haystack for the victims of the September 7 terrorist attack
As the cows are herded in for milking, Nathaniel Willemse, 21, confidently taps their hind legs, coaxing each animal into position above milking stations. He is a law student from the Netherlands. He once worked on a dairy farm, so the work here is old hat for him.
Israel is seen as a safe haven for Jews living in troubled world. “Everywhere we seem to call home, at some point in time, we’ve been uprooted from,” he says. We always have somewhere to go in the event of an increase in antisemitism. It’s been Israel for the past 75 years.
Leff wears a traditional Jewish head covering, has blue jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt, and is required to wear tall work boots.
For many here, the decision to help comes from a sense of duty. Gabriel Leff is a young man from Cocoa Beach, Fla. Moved to sympathy by the events of Oct. 7, he arrived in Israel two months ago and since then has been volunteering in various places around the country. He is a new employee at the dairy farm.
“For the people who lived here, it’s a trauma,” Itzhaki explains. “Imagine someone who escaped from Auschwitz and you ask him to go live there? It’s hard.”
Shmulik Itzhaki is a volunteer from central Israel. His day job in satellite communications is seemingly the polar opposite of dairy farming. He says he’s happy to pitch in for as long as he can, but given the horrors the community experienced, he doesn’t think the survivors will ever call it home again.
Eleven weeks since the start of the war, things on this side of the Gaza border are slowly getting better — although no one can yet imagine anything resembling normalcy.
After the October attack, it took Israeli troops five days to regain control of this area. The cows that normally get a daily milk were left unattended. The army let people return and many infections were gone by that time. The animals had to be slaughtered.
According to the Israeli media, 38 of the 400 people in Nir Oz were killed by Hamas and another 75 were seized as hostages. It was one of the hardest-hit kibbutzim. The members of these communities have stated that they do not intend to return.
Stern is one of about a dozen volunteers from Israel and around the world who have been rotating into this farm close to Nir Oz, a communal farm community in Israel known as a kibbutz. She is helping fill a gap left by workers who are no longer here.
Aline has been volunteering at the farm for the better part of the last couple of weeks and has learned how to use modern warfare. Looking up, she points out an Israeli drone flying directly overhead. She noted the whoosh from a volley of Hellfire missiles and explained that the missiles were fired from Apache helicopters. Familiar as it all is, “you never get used to it,” she says.
Since Hamas fighters swept through this area on Oct. 7, killing or kidnapping a total of 1,200 people, Israel says, the bombing has become commonplace — even more so since Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city located nearly due west of here, has become a focus of the conflict.