Sustainable Switch: UN rights chief accuses Israel of 'blatant disregard' for law
Sept 10 -By Sharon Kimathi
Energy and ESG Editor, Reuters Digital
sharon.kimathi@thomsonreuters.com
Hello,
Today’s newsletter covers the war in Gaza as dozens of Palestinian families were killed or wounded in a designated safe zone on Tuesday, according to Palestinian officials.
This came as the United Nations human rights chief urged action to end the nearly year-long war in Gaza, condemning Israel's "blatant disregard" for international law in Palestinian territories.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Education Ministry reported that 52,000 Gazan children could not start first grade this week as schools remain closed, with 90% destroyed or damaged due to Israel's 11-month assault and the lack of a ceasefire.
Buried alive
Israeli strikes ripped a huge crater, set tents ablaze and buried Palestinian families alive under sand in a safe zone in southern Gaza before dawn on Tuesday, killing or wounding scores of people, according to Palestinian officials.
Israel said it had struck a command center for Hamas fighters who it said had infiltrated the humanitarian area in al-Mawasi, a vast camp on sandy soil where the military has told hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to shelter since ordering them out of their homes. Hamas denied any fighters were present.
The Gaza civil emergency service said it believed at least 65 people had been killed or wounded, but it could not provide a breakdown of the casualties because many people had been buried and were still missing under the sand. Israel disputed the casualty figures.
Rescuers dug with shovels through the night, searching for bodies and survivors buried where the strike had blasted a crater the size of a small football pitch.
Tents in the surrounding area had been completely incinerated, leaving only their metal frames dusted with ghostly ash in a wasteland littered with debris. A car had been completely buried, only its top visible beneath the sand.
‘Blatant disregard for international law’
The U.N. human rights chief said that ending the nearly year-long war in Gaza is a priority and he asked countries to act on what he called Israel's "blatant disregard" for international law in the occupied Palestinian territories.
"States must not – cannot – accept blatant disregard for international law, including binding decisions of the (U.N.) Security Council and orders of the International Court of Justice, neither in this nor any other situation," the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said in a speech at the start of the five-week U.N. Human Rights Council session in Geneva.
Nearly 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials, since Israel unleashed a military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed and a further 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies. The conflict has also fuelled a surge in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Lost generation
Umm Zaki's son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin tenth grade. Instead, he woke up in their tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometer away.
The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools remained shut and 90% of them had been destroyed or damaged.
The U.N. Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza's schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families.
"The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labour, and recruitment into armed groups," UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma told Reuters.
Talking Points
Femicide: Ugandan athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, who finished 44th in Paris, is the third elite sportswoman to be killed in Kenya since October 2021. Her death has put the spotlight on domestic violence in the East African country, particularly within its running community. Her former partner, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, who is accused of killing her by dousing her in petrol and setting her on fire, also died from burns sustained during the attack.
More than 30,000 protesters gathered in South Korea's capital in broiling heat over the weekend, demanding more aggressive action by the government to combat global warming.
Workers’ rights: Hundreds of employees continued striking for a second day at Samsung Electronics' plant in southern India as the workers’ protest for higher wages, better hours and company recognition for the union.
In Conversation
Aline Napon, World Vision’s national director in the Democratic Republic of Congo, shares her thoughts on ongoing humanitarian and health crisis in the DRC and its effects on children:
“Children are particularly vulnerable to mpox, especially in low and middle-income countries, including those suffering humanitarian crises and where health and social services are weak or non-existent… Children are especially at risk where they are living in refugee camps, overcrowded urban settlements.”
“The level of the disease can increase in camps where displaced people are living, due to high levels of sexual violence…These environments encourage the rapid spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox, where close physical contact is almost inevitable.
“Children living in the DRC, where conflict, displacement and natural disasters are all taking place are at real risk of this serious and rapidly spreading disease.
“World Vision is calling upon the international community to respond immediately, put systems in place to halt the spread of this deadly virus, roll out vaccinations, support the sharing of accurate health messaging to reduce misinformation and stigma and urgently treat those who have been infected.
“We cannot stand by while children die from this deadly but preventable disease.”
ESG Spotlight
Today’s spotlight shines a light on social equity and cultural preservation as a prominent Egyptian archaeologist and former antiquities minister Zahi Hawass has launched a petition for the return to Egypt of the pharaonic bust of Queen Nefertiti from the Neues Museum in Berlin.
Nefertiti's famous painted limestone bust was uncovered at Tell el-Amarna, around 300 km (185 miles) south of Cairo, in 1912 by a German archaeological mission, which shipped it to Berlin the following year.
Hawass said he is not calling for the repatriation of artifacts taken out of Egypt legally, but those taken illegally after discovery. His campaign is focused on repatriating "three main beautiful objects" including the bust of Nefertiti, the Rosetta Stone and the Dendera Zodiac.
Today’s Sustainable Switch was edited by Alexandra Hudson
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