Israel will stop working with the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, a government spokesperson said yesterday, accusing the aid agency of “perpetuating conflict”, Reuters reported.

Israel has long sought to have UNRWA closed as it is the only UN agency to have a specific mandate to look after the basic needs of Palestinian refugees. If the agency no longer exists, argues Israel, then the refugee issue must no longer exist, and the legitimate right for Palestinian refugees to return to their land will be unnecessary. Israel has denied that right of return since the late 1940s, even though its own membership of the UN was made conditional upon Palestinian refugees being allowed to return to their homes and land.

  • NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    even though its own membership of the UN was made conditional upon Palestinian refugees being allowed to return to their homes and land.

    Did anyone actually try to enforce that condition?

    • Land_Strider@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      “Resolution to enforce the condition is promptly vetoed by the US for the 16th time.” Or something very similar would be your answer, probably.

    • bfg9k@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Does anyone expect the UN to have a spine?

      “we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are”

      • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Until the UN doesn’t start unifying the earth nations under one single flag by conquest, no, they are all spineless politicians.

      • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        “After three letters, you will receive an official condemnation! 3 of those and you can’t come to our super cool private beach anymore!”

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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        9 months ago

        Actually it’s all Palestinians’ fault that this war drags on. Just accept your deaths and ee can end this! So selfish.

        • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It is. They are beaten in every sense. Hamas’s cities are under siege, they didn’t plan for enough food when they started the war, and even though the Hamas bigwhigs have plenty of food and luxury underneath Rafah and in Qatar or Iran, and their loyal citizens are paying the full price, they are literally happy when civilians die, or as they call it Hamas® brand Martyrdom™.

          Hamas and their allies want to genocide all Jews and Christians in the middle east and then have a far right religious caliphate. It’s not going to happen.

            • DdCno1@kbin.social
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              9 months ago

              Wait, are you seriously denying things Hamas have repeatedly and openly stated?

            • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              You don’t have to agree but it’s my opinion on the matter and borne out by facts. There would be a ceasefire today if Hamas surrendered the hostages and the tunnels. But they won’t because Israeli hostages and dead Palestinians is their leverage. Also, I don’t find claims of genocide to be credible. They don’t call you on the phone and tell you to evacuate before killing you, in a genocide. The daily casualties increase month over month, in a genocide. The mass famine hasn’t happened. Aid has been flowing. There been plenty of war crimes on both sides. The ones by Israelis might actually be punished. The ones by Hamas get rewarded.

              • Milk_Sheikh@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                I keep seeing you roll into these discussions acting like “it’s just the facts, dreamer” makes you the only adult in the conversation, and you repeatedly fail to recognize the non-kinetic impacts and repercussions of Israel’s/IDF’s/Likud-Coalition’s/Netanyahu’s course of action.

                The US is very publicly putting Israeli leadership/Netanyahu on notice that they are evaluating the scope and depth of the relationship - that is huge. A US non-veto was played off as a ‘stab in the back’ despite Bibi and crew being well aware of US red lines over their shitshow of a war and the total absence of plans for after the war. Israel’s duplicity over aid inspections and crossings has worn down diplomats and NGOs across the world, the UN special rapporteur has directly stated that any famine that occurs is a direct result of Israeli policy.

                You also keep pushing this idea that Palestinians want/accept death as a political tool to gain freedom, and that somehow frees us from trying to avoid their deaths? That speaks far more to the depth of humanity and how you value human life, than anything else. Accepting your base realpolitik approach, if they want martyrdom deaths to made Israel look bad, why grant them their wish? Why play into it?

                • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Hamas needs to be destroyed. They’ve absolutely ruined Gaza since taking power. They cancelled all elections and have continued their suicidal violence.

                  Palestinian people ought to rebel against Hamas, but Hamas is as popular as ever, at least they were until October 7. Not sure how the public feels, now.

                  Hamas, ISIS, Jihad, Houthis, it’s all the same shit with slightly different flavors.

                  I disagree with the UN reporter. Any famine in Gaza is the fault of Gaza’s leadership (Hamas) which led Gaza and its people directly into a seige without having adequately prepared. Well, Hamas prepared for themselves. They have plenty of food and are hiding in tunnels. They’re just leaving the public to suffer and die while they go hide and retweet Al Jazeera articles, which is par for the course for Hamas, which uses entire cities as human shields. They had their chance to grow up and they utterly failed.

              • apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                You are puppeting IOF propaganda about hostages, tunnels, and “fair” warnings about exiting hospitals and buildings before bombing the hospitals and people evacuating. Gaza is an open air prison, where people are guilty merely due of living there before 1948, they cannot leave, cannot get access to water, get sniped if they have a peaceful protest at the walls, constantly under threat and action of military incursion, against a US funded military, in a place where the UN has repeatedly said that Israel is committing not just war crimes, but definitional ongoing perpetual genocide, and you want to talk about facts. Hamas is elected officials of a caged people without a country, who can’t “live” where they live and cannot flea to live elsewhere, even if they want to. Most want to stay and fight for what the UN states is theirs, as Israel takes more and more against the UN treaties. How can you not expect a group of people so oppressed to not try and break free with violence? We collectively view the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as heroic and understandable, but many somehow cannot and will not see Palestinians as people deserving to fight for their lives. That somehow the decades of genocide will stop if they stop fighting and take the scraps that Israel gives them, knowing that they will always demand more. Settlers gobble up the shelled remains of Northern Gaza RIGHT NOW and you want to talk about facts. Ok genocidal sympathizer.

                • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  There’s plenty of room in Gaza to force out Hamas. But the people there love Hamas. If 100 of them want to pile into a building to be shields for a Hamas commander, ignoring the evacuation order, ignoring the warnings, then they’ve chosen their fate. I don’t have sympathy for them. I also don’t have sympathy for people that approach troops or borders and get shot. Everyone knows not to do that. It was the first thing Israel said after October 7, ya know, when Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel and approached the wall 1,000 soldiers strong and crossed the border to do a bunch of mass shootings of civilians, police, and EMS. You know, when there was actual indiscriminate targeting of civilians. No sympathy for that. Fuck them and anyone that helps them. They had their chance. Chance after chance. What did they do? They chose far right religious terrorism and hard-line Sharia law. It’s incompatible with modern life.

                  And it would be fine, if they want to live like it’s the dark ages. But they want to participate in international financing of murdering Jews. That is the goal of Hamas and their foreign financiers: to genocide every Jew and Christian in the middle east and have their own fascist ethnostate of religious law.

                  How many chance would you give Hamas? How many suicide bombings would you let them do in your town?

              • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                You use IDF propaganda as your ‘facts’ to form your opinion on justifying ethnic cleansing and genocide.

                Hamas began twenty years into an Occupation enforced with direct and systemic violence, with the goal of ending the occupation. Collective punishment has been a deliberate Israeli tactic for decades with the Dahiya doctrine. Violence such as suicide bombings and rockets escalated in response to Israeli enforcement of the occupation and apartheid.

                Hamas in its early days, according to former Israeli officials, was seen by the government of Israel as a counterweight to the PLO. Israel supported Hamas as a way to break the PLO’s hold on the region. Retired official Avner Cohen, who worked in Gaza in the 1990s and oversaw religious affairs in the region, told the WSJ in 2009, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation."

                And in the backdrop of the 2006 election were geographic and political divides between Gaza and the West Bank. Contrary to what Bennett claimed, Israel restricted Palestinians from moving in and out of Gaza, as well as between the strip and the West Bank, since at least the 1990s, after the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, according to Al Jazeera. In addition to Gaza’s borders, the Israeli government controlled its coastline and airspace, allowing for military incursions into the territory, and, in 2007, established the blockade on goods and people that still exists as of this writing.

                People Claim a Majority of Palestinians in Gaza Elected Hamas — Here’s Why It Isn’t That Simple

                Hamas founding charter and Revised charter 2017

                This is a brutal occupation that is an apartheid regime, uses martial law, and military courts, the theft and extortion of water, the exploitation of Palestinians as a workforce without rights, state-backed settler violence, the deprivation of human rights for Palestinians, the destruction of schools, the destruction of hospitals, the destruction of homes, the starvation of children, the execution of women and children, the inhuman torture and abuse of Palestinians and yes even children in Israeli prisons.

                • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Hamas is an ideology that’s hundreds of years old. It’s called Islamism and it’s nothing new. It’s a far right religious order in search of an empire. And they actually will genocide all the Jews and Christians if they get the chance. Does that even register with you? If Israel wanted to do a genocide it would carpet bomb Gaza into a pile of rocks in about 30 minutes. Instead we are five months in and the daily death tolls keep dropping. The aid keeps flowing. The catastrophic famine that’s been imminent for three months hasn’t happened. And 1.3 million people evacuated safely to the 30,000 did not. Some genocide that is. It’s a fucking insult to everyone that caught actual Nazis, that fought actual genocide. You got tricked by fake news from Al Jazeera.

                  In Myanmar they were using helicopter gun ships and just stafing crowds of refugees with machine guns. Zero distinction. No excuses given. Just straight murder.

                  In Gaza the IDF strikes military targets and sometimes gets a little loose with weighing the lives of people who refuse to evacuate versus the military value of their targets, after warning the civilians to evacuate.

                  Stop citing Al Jazeera articles like a fool. Stop repeating unfounded “reports” by people whose job it is to lie about Israel. Do better with your life. They are actual accomplices to terrorism.

          • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Top tier IDF mental gymnastics to justify israel committing Genocide and blaming it on Hamas.

  • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    This is going poorly for Israel. They don’t seem to detect a tide of opinion rising against them, slowly but surely. Maybe they plan to smash-and-grab, get as much done as they can before they are truly forced to ease up.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      They don’t care.

      Actually, they may want to be the villains. Nothing gets the persecution complex up like everyone saying Israel is the bad guy.

      Combine that with the inevitable increase in legitimate antisemitism- hate speech, attacks, etc- and it’s going to convince people.

      especially at home. It may even bring more Jews to Israel, which… might boost their economy or something.

      • Maxnmy's@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Israel is in the unique position where no matter how many atrocities they commit, they can cry anti-Semitism and the world will eat it up. People lose their jobs or prestigious positions when they speak out in support of Palestine.

      • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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        9 months ago

        Trenchant point here that doesn’t get brought up often enough— the state of Israel faces a demographic crisis, as birthrates and aliyah decline. It may not be able to maintain a Jewish majority in several decades.

        Rising antisemitism around the world is actually in its interest, to maybe compel more Jewish people to immigrate.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            22% of the Jews in Israel are reportedly orthodox. Keep in mind orthodoxy isn’t a specific sect or denomination the way, say, Ukrainian Orthodox is in Christianity.

            Even if true (and I have no idea,) that’s not enough.

            In any case, there is a certain agency in this brutality. They’re not just incompetent or blundering through it. Israel’s attacks on Gaza are considered and planned. So either they don’t care about foreign perception or the current perception is what they want.