Tag: General News

UNRWA, the largest aid provider in the Gaza Strip, will have to start scaling back its operations in the enclave as soon as March if funding freezes by key donors aren’t reversed or if new funders don’t step forward, according to the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini. 

“The situation is already a total disaster in the Gaza Strip,” Lazzarini told The New Humanitarian in a wide-ranging 16 February interview, amid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza he said was of “staggering” proportions.

“We should not forget that UNRWA remains, at least among the UN agencies, the main provider, and all the other agencies also, in reality, rely on the logistical platforms and support that UNRWA is providing in the Gaza Strip. So, [if funding isn’t restored], it would make the already miserable even more tragic, if that’s even possible.”

Around 20 countries – including UNRWA’s top three donors: the US, Germany, and the EU – suspended funding for the agency three weeks ago. This followed Israeli allegations that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza were involved in Hamas’ 7 October attacks on Israel, which killed around 1,140 people – the majority civilians – according to Israeli authorities. 

Israel has yet to provide conclusive evidence to substantiate the claims, and the UN has launched an investigation. The funding that is being withheld amounts to nearly half of UNRWA’s operating budget, and Israel and some of its supporters are calling on UNRWA to be dismantled and replaced due to what they say are concerns about the agency’s ability to maintain neutrality. Other experts, however, argue that the challenges UNRWA faces when it comes to maintaining neutrality are the same as any other UN agency or international organisation. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli military campaign and siege of Gaza launched following the 7 October attacks have devastated the enclave. More than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed – including nearly 21,000 women and children – nearly 70,000 have been wounded, and thousands more are missing and believed to be dead beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings, according to health authorities in Gaza. 

Only a trickle of humanitarian assistance is being allowed to enter, and aid operations in the enclave face major barriers. The funding freeze is further threatening UNRWA’s ability to respond to needs within Gaza. Also at risk are the agency’s operations in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, where it provides education, healthcare, humanitarian support, and other services to millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants. 

The New Humanitarian sat down with Lazzarini to discuss the impact of the funding freeze, the campaign to dismantle UNRWA, the agency’s future, the high number of UNRWA employees killed in Gaza, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The New Humanitarian: When do you expect the full effects of funding freezes to hit?

Philippe Lazzarini: If all the money in the pipeline is frozen, we would start to go into negative cash flow in March and we will be in deep, deep, deep, deep red in April. But it depends on a number of factors. It’s a moving target right now. It all depends on what kind of new money we might get; what kind of temporary pause of frozen money is unfrozen or being processed. But let’s assume absolutely nothing is provided to the agency, our operations would start to be compromised as from March.

The New Humanitarian: What would this look like in practice for people in Gaza?

Lazzarini: The situation is already a total disaster in the Gaza Strip. It’s a place where people have lost absolutely everything. They are living in extraordinarily miserable conditions. We know that food insecurity is very widespread, that we have pockets of starvation – if not famine – looming in the Gaza Strip. We are struggling and running behind when it comes to health services. We’re running behind when it comes to providing clean water. We’re running behind when it comes to providing critical items to confront the harsh weather conditions right now because we are in winter. So, basically, it would make it even more difficult, more miserable.

The New Humanitarian: What is the plan B right now in the short term?

Lazzarini: You should ask all those who want to weaken UNRWA. We have to put this now in the broader context: Beyond the funding issue, you keep hearing calls for UNRWA to be dismantled, for UNRWA to be replaced… I also think it is extraordinarily short-sighted. 

Once the military operation comes to an end, we will enter a very long, protracted transition phase where we will have a deep, humanitarian need. It would be a period of misery and pain. It would be a period where the international community will not be ready to invest massively in the absence of a serious and time-bound political package. It will be the time where there might be an emerging and new Palestinian operation in authority, but clearly this authority will not be able to provide, at scale, critical services to the population.

One of them, for example, is education. We have more than half a million girls and boys deeply traumatised in the Gaza Strip that we have to bring back in a formal and informal education framework. A new administration would not be in a position at the beginning to provide it at scale, and there is absolutely no other UN entity or INGOs which provides education to such a large number of people the way UNRWA has done it. 

You also have the political dimension of liquidating UNRWA. This would be felt by the Palestinian community as the international community turning its back… It would also weaken their aspiration for self-determination, because by liquidating UNRWA, basically it’s also an indication that we might not be so generally committed to promoting a fair and lasting political solution [to the conflict]. 

So what I’m trying to say here is that the implications are huge and vast. And they are not only focused on Gaza, but they’re also focused on the lifeline we are providing to the Palestinian refugees across the region: in Jordan, in Syria, in Lebanon, and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

So that is the reason why I keep cautioning about this short-sighted temptation, that, “Oh yes, okay, if UNRWA is now in this trouble, let’s find alternatives”. But there is no lasting alternative. [There] might be a very punctual alternative – and I don’t believe that it can be put in place so quickly and it would be a mistake to try to do it during the acute humanitarian response – but even if we would succeed, the medium-term, longer-term implications are also huge, and the regional implications should definitely not be underestimated.

The New Humanitarian: So how do you foresee UNRWA’s role in the future? You’re warning that it can’t simply be dismantled, but the pressures are there – from Israeli authorities, from your donors.

Lazzarini: Listen, UNRWA is a temporary organisation which unfortunately has now lasted for 75 years. And these 75 years are nothing else than the expression of the international community’s failure to have promoted a fair and lasting political solution. 

Now the only alternative today – and I really hope that after this seismic transformation and tragic transformation which has hit the region: Palestine and Israel, but also beyond – that this will be the wake-up call to finally be genuinely committed to promote a political solution. We can start to talk after that about the phasing out of UNRWA, because the agency, through its vast number of civil servants, has always been geared towards handing over its services to a state and an administration, which would be the outcome of this political solution. 

But I don’t see any alternative during the transition or the trajectory leading to this political solution. The raison d’etre of UNRWA is to provide, in fact, the lifeline to one of the most destitute and under-privileged communities in the region – the Palestinian refugees – until there is a state responsible for them in the future.

The New Humanitarian: Let’s shift to the number of UNRWA staff killed since the 7th of October. It’s a huge number. Why have so many staff been killed? 

Lazzarini: As of today, it’s 158. It’s a huge number. It’s a number which is also proportionate to the number of people reported killed in Gaza compared to the overall population. Many of our staff have been killed with relatives, at home, under bombardment. 

If we look at the huge toll the population has paid, and our staff are part of the social fabric of the Gaza Strip, the numbers are absolutely staggering. We’re talking about 100,000 people in four months having been either killed, injured, or are missing. This is 5% of the population in four months. We’re talking about 17,000 children being completely orphaned having no known relatives around them.

The New Humanitarian: Given that the attacks have also been on aid targets and UNRWA installations, do you feel that UNRWA staff in particular are being targeted?

Lazzarini: What I know is that far too many UN premises sheltering thousands of people have been hit. We had more than 350 people killed in our shelters, thousands have been injured. We know that some of the UN premises have been used for military operations, either by Hamas or by the Israeli army, that the UN flag – despite that we were sharing all our coordinates – has been disregarded and did not provide the protection people would have expected. 

I truly believe that we need, after the war, an independent board of inquiry to establish the facts of what happened with all these UN premises [that] were supposed to shelter or provide protection – what happened and who is responsible and who should be made accountable.

The New Humanitarian: I understand that UNRWA has not been shown the evidence regarding the accusations that 12 UNRWA staff were allegedly involved in the 7 October attacks in Israel. Why did you take the measures you did – why fire the staff without this evidence?

Lazzarini: That’s a good question, because I believe that not only the reputation of the agency was completely at stake, but also our ability to provide critical humanitarian assistance or our ability to provide the services to millions of Palestinian refugees. So this is the primary reason why I have taken the decision to terminate the contracts based on allegations.

At the same time, there is an ongoing investigation, for which we are also calling for full cooperation, and somehow, it’s kind of a reverse due process. This commission of investigation will establish the facts and basically tell us what kind of answers should be given. But I felt that I had no other choice than to try to protect and to shield the ability of the agency to continue and pursue its critical work.

I would say traditional suspension would have conveyed the message that these extraordinarily serious allegations are dealt [with just like] any other type of allegation. In reality, an allegation of having participated in the horrible October 7 massacre – it’s an unprecedented type of allegation, and this has also triggered an exceptional internal decision.

Edited by Andrew Gully.

By Nick Valencia, Zachary Cohen and Jason Morris, CNN

(CNN) — A key witness in the push to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from the Georgia election case against Donald Trump had a much deeper involvement in the effort than was previously known, according to hundreds of text messages obtained by CNN.

The 413 texts between Terrence Bradley and Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney for one of Trump’s co-defendants, reveal months of communications between the two, underscoring the extent to which Bradley assisted Merchant’s pursuit of evidence to back up claims Willis and her top prosecutor, Nathan Wade, engaged in an improper romantic relationship.

On Tuesday, Bradley reluctantly testified for more than two hours about the romantic relationship between Willis and Wade, Bradley’s former law partner and one-time client.

The text messages raise questions about Bradley’s credibility, and the degree to which Merchant appeared to rely on his claims that she was then unable to substantiate elsewhere. They also shed new light on his testimony and how it failed to meet the expectations of defense attorneys who had billed Bradley as the star witness in their bid to disqualify Willis.

Megyn Kelly first reported the texts Wednesday afternoon on her Sirius XM show.

Wade and Willis have admitted to being romantically involved, but both have testified their relationship started after Willis appointed Wade lead prosecutor in the Trump case. Merchant has alleged their relationship amounts to a conflict of interest and that there is evidence they lied about when it began.

Citing financial statements turned up in Wade’s divorce proceeding, Merchant has claimed Willis financially benefited when Wade took her on lavish vacations after she hired him as special prosecutor. Willis has denied there was anything improper about their relationship.

However, potentially conflicting information about when exactly the romance started remains a central issue that could still derail Willis’s prosecution against Trump.

Bradley was supposed to clear up that point. Merchant had said that he would contradict testimony from Willis and Wade once he took the stand. But instead, Bradley said he couldn’t remember certain details and that he had been speculating over text message with Merchant when he told her the relationship “absolutely” started before Wade’s appointment.

That remark from Bradley on Tuesday led to several heated exchanges with defense attorneys including Trump’s lead counsel Steve Sadow.

“Why would you speculate when she was asking you a direct question about when the relationship started?” Sadow pushed.

“I have no answer for that,” Bradley responded.

“Except for the fact that you do in fact, know when it started and you don’t want to testify to that in court,” Sadow shot back. “That’s the best explanation.”

Bradley’s testimony on Tuesday, when he frequently couldn’t remember details and seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, stands in stark contrast to the tone of his prior text messages with Merchant.

The additional text messages show Bradley calling Merchant his “friend,” offering unsolicited advice, and also bashing Willis and Wade, Bradley’s former law partner.

Bradley left their law firm in 2022 after allegations surfaced that Bradley sexually assaulted an employee at the firm. Bradley denied those allegations while testifying at an earlier hearing over Willis’s potential disqualification.

Over months of texts, Bradley on a number of occasions disparaged Wade and Willis, calling them “arrogant as f” in one January text to Merchant.

Bradley also indicated that he didn’t want to be directly connected to the allegations and expressed a desire not to be named as the initial source of the information.

“I protected you completely,” Merchant told Bradley about the draft of her motion to disqualify. “Not that you need protection,” Merchant texted. “But I kept you out of it.”

“I really appreciate you keeping me out of,” Bradley replied.

Despite his desire to remain behind the scenes, Bradley provided Merchant with the names of several people he believed to have first-hand knowledge of when Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship began.

“Subpoena them all,” Bradley says in a text to Merchant on January 7, 2024, referring to a list of names that included other prosecutors in the DA’s office, members of Willis’ security detail and others close to her.

At one point Bradley and Merchant even discussed subpoenaing Willis’s children to confirm the existence of a romantic relationship between Willis and Wade.

But Merchant ultimately failed to secure testimony that the relationship began before Wade’s appointment from more than one of the witnesses she discussed with Bradley and subsequently subpoenaed.

That appears to have forced Merchant to call Bradley, himself, to take the stand despite her previous assurances.

CNN legal analyst and former US attorney Michael Moore said it will be up to Judge Scott McAfee to decide how much weight to place on the newly filed text messages versus what Bradley said in open court on Tuesday.

“I do think the judge can certainly give that a certain amount of credence,” Moore said about how the texts would factor into his ultimate decision of whether or not to disqualify Willis from the case.

This story has been updated to reflect that Megyn Kelly first reported the texts on Wednesday afternoon.

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Myanmar’s February 2021 military coup sparked a humanitarian, economic, and human rights crisis across the country. Peaceful protests soon evolved into an armed uprising, to which the military has retaliated with a scorched-earth campaign targeting not only armed combatants but also their civilian support base.

Sagaing, a formerly peaceful region in the country’s agricultural heartlands, has borne the brunt of the military’s violence. Since the coup, the region has been a hotbed of armed resistance, and the junta has retaliated with airstrikes, arson, and mass killings. Nearly half of the roughly two million people internally displaced across Myanmar since the coup are from Sagaing, according to the UN, which found that Sagaing also faces some of the country’s most acute food insecurity.

Even for those who manage to flee, there is little respite. As the military works to cut off the movement of supplies and personnel to the armed resistance, it has subjected people from Sagaing to particular scrutiny, leaving host communities afraid to associate with them and making it difficult for them to find jobs or housing.

Then last week, the junta – facing an unprecedented battlefield challenge from armed opposition forces – announced a mandatory conscription law for young men and women across the country.

The New Humanitarian spoke recently with three young men from Sagaing. All were teachers in the state school system before the coup and joined the countrywide Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) soon after. Now scattered domestically and abroad, they are still struggling to find safety and a means of survival. Due to the risks of military reprisals, they have been given pseudonyms.

‘I used to only hold chalk, and now I have to go up and down the mining site’ – Aung, aged 36

When the coup happened, Aung was living with his wife and two children in his native Kanbalu township and working as a middle school principal. He joined the CDM four days later and returned to his village soon after.

Within months, war was at his doorstep. “Heavy weapons were falling and homes were burning,” he said. “We had to flee into the forest and live in a tent.”  As the fighting continued to intensify, the family fled the village altogether and began staying with friends and relatives in towns across the region. In August 2022 they moved in with Aung’s in-laws.

There, they were able to escape the fighting, but Aung struggled to find work. After three months, he headed north to Hpakant, Kachin State, to try his luck in the world’s most lucrative jade mines.

It took him six days to get there. Armed clashes left him camping by the side of the road. He also had to pass through military checkpoints. “I was the only one male among the passengers, so they looked through all my belongings and inspected me in many ways, including by taking off my clothes,” he said.

When they noticed the prefix “5/”, which signifies a Sagaing native, on his National Registration Card, he faced further problems. “Because I am ‘5/’, they really checked me thoroughly for a long time,” he said.

Finally reaching Hpakant, he moved into a roadside tent with other migrants from Sagaing and began working as a yemase. The term, which translates literally to “unwashed”, refers to the muddy stones for which informal miners clamber, with the hope of claiming a share of the wealth from mines that generate billions of dollars annually.

But while the mines have lured hundreds of thousands of people over the past two decades, nearly all of the wealth has ended up in the hands of business elites with close ties to the military and armed groups, while yemase like Aung are left scavenging through waste heaps prone to deadly collapse.

The situation has become even more desperate since the coup, which not only drove a collapse in the country’s formal economy, but also in its rule of law. Migration from Sagaing has particularly increased, according to local media, which also found that these newcomers are especially vulnerable. When a mining site collapsed during the rainy season last August, the largest population among the 42 people left missing was from Sagaing.

Although Aung has managed to stay safe, he said he is barely getting by. Inexperienced at searching for jade, he only found three big rocks in his first nine months. He sold them for a million kyats ($477) in total but had to give half the profits to his boss in exchange for food and accommodation.

“It’s really difficult living like this because I used to only hold chalk, and now I have to go up and down the mining site and sometimes even run to escape landslides,” he said. “If I tried to explain all of my difficulties, there would be no end.”

Fighting has at times broken out between the military and resistance forces, leaving him hiding inside his tent until the sounds of gunfire subside. Once, he narrowly escaped being crushed when a mining company vehicle drove into his tent. Not knowing who he can trust, he also rarely leaves his mining site. “Because my ID says 5/, I don’t travel anywhere and it’s even difficult to greet people I don’t know,” he said. 

Still, he feels better off than back home, where a military airstrike in his township last April killed at least 145 people. “It is Myanmar, so nowhere is safe,” he said. “But compared with Sagaing, at least I have a place to live and food to eat.”

He also maintains his commitment to the CDM. “I’m really struggling, but I will be satisfied if I have made this sacrifice for the people. My difficulties will be worth it.”

‘When I said I was from Sagaing, people wouldn’t accept me’ – Thet, aged 32

When the coup happened, Thet, a former government school teacher, was living with his parents in Sagaing region’s Taze township and working on his master’s thesis, with a plan to become a college tutor after completing his degree.

Instead, he joined the CDM and participated in street demonstrations, until the military started shooting protesters across the country. “The situation gradually deteriorated, and the youth started gathering, collecting weapons, and taking up arms,” he recalled.

Over the following months, the military scaled up its surveillance and arrests, at times abetted by local informants. In one incident, they killed four civilians in Thet’s village and burnt down homes and property, including his family’s rice mill.

By the end of the year, village raids and arson attacks had become frequent occurrences. “Soldiers were coming into the village early in the morning and at night, and we had to flee. I fled my village eight times because of soldiers coming in,” said Thet. “I didn’t have peace of mind, because they were burning houses, and we could see it from a distance… but we couldn’t do anything.”

With Thet being a young man and a member of the CDM, his parents became increasingly worried about his safety and encouraged him to flee. So when a family he knew in Tachileik, a bustling town on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, offered him a place to stay, he decided to go.

He completed the 600-mile trip without incident, but couldn’t find a job when he arrived, even when responding to vacancies posted on Facebook (Meta) that called for workers in Tachileik. “When I said I was from Sagaing, people wouldn’t accept me,” he said.

And although he felt uncomfortable staying with his host family for so long, he faced the same issue when looking for a room to rent. “Wherever I went, when I said I was from Sagaing, people didn’t want to rent to me, because they knew that it could bring some problems on them to be associated with me.”

Still, he initially avoided one of the main industries in Tachileik: its online gaming businesses and casinos. Since the coup, many of these facilities have become fronts for industrial-scale scams whereby fraudulent online identities are used to lure people around the world into romantic relationships and then convince them to invest in fake cryptocurrencies.

The industry, reportedly worth billions of dollars, relies heavily on both domestic and transnational human trafficking. A UN report published last August found that around 120,000 people had been trafficked into the industry in Myanmar alone, many of them subjected to torture, beatings, and sexual violence while being forced to scam victims.

“When I was searching here and there for work, I was really worried,” said Thet. “I had heard about human trafficking and cryptocurrency scams, and I didn’t want to do that kind of work.” But after more than six months of searching for other options, desperate for an income, he finally conceded and applied for a job with an online gaming company.

Luckily for Thet, he wasn’t trafficked. His job, as a customer service agent, came through as advertised. But after a few months, he was sent to Kawthaung, a coastal city nearly 1,000 miles away on Myanmar’s southernmost point. There, he worked 12-hour shifts – sometimes all day and sometimes all night – helping customers from the Philippines to deposit and withdraw money from their gaming accounts.

Fourteen months later, he was reassigned to Tachileik, where he observed that the pattern in new workers has followed the pattern in conflict and displacement across the country.

“At first, when there was a lot of fighting in Sagaing and Magway… there were many young people from Sagaing and Magway at the worksites,” he said. “Later on, there were more crises across the country, so many people started coming here from various areas, backgrounds and communities.”

Although he is unhappy at his current job and worries constantly about his family, he knows he cannot go back. “All the shops were closed and the roads were destroyed,” he said. “It’s like a completely broken town.”

JC is the artist name for an illustrator from Myanmar’s Kayin community. Edited by Ali M. Latifi and Andrew Gully.