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WASHINGTON: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday said he had spoken with his Israeli counterpart to discuss a range of issues in the region, including the ongoing exchanges of fire on the Israel-Lebanon border and the need to finalize a ceasefire deal.
In a post on X, Austin said he also discussed the risk of escalation from Iran and Iran-backed groups in the call on Thursday and told Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant that the United States is well postured across the region.
LONDON: Britain’s foreign secretary said he feels “appalled” and “sickened” by Israel’s actions in Gaza, and that the UK could launch a new wave of sanctions against Tel Aviv if no ceasefire deal is reached.
It follows a joint statement from 25 countries on Monday — including the UK, France, Canada and Australia — urging Israel to end its restrictions on aid entering the Palestinian enclave, The Independent reported.
David Lammy said that only a “change in behavior” from Israel would cause the British government to abandon its plan to introduce new sanctions against it.
The Israeli military this week launched a new ground operation on Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, which is the primary aid hub for the territory.
Lammy was interviewed on “Good Morning Britain” on Tuesday, a day after releasing the joint statement with his 24 counterparts.
He was asked what steps the government would take should Israel fail to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas.
“Well, we’ve announced a raft of sanctions over the last few months,” he said.
“There will be more, clearly, and we keep all of those options under consideration if we do not see a change in behavior and the suffering that we are seeing come to an end.
“It’s important that we continue to work with international partners if we are to have the maximum result. But what I want to see is a ceasefire and it’s my assessment that once the Knesset rises on July 28, we are more likely to see a ceasefire come into effect.”
Last month, Lammy announced British sanctions against two senior far-right members of the Netanyahu government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom have repeatedly incited violence against Palestinians.
Monday’s 25-nation joint statement condemned Israel and the US’s aid model for Gaza, which was designed to replace much of the existing UN aid system in the enclave.
The organization at the center of the new model, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has faced intense criticism after scores of Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces at its designated aid sites.
Lammy told “BBC Breakfast” about his reaction to events in Gaza: “I feel the same as the British public: appalled, sickened. I described what I saw, yesterday in parliament, as grotesque.”
He added: “These are not words that are usually used by a foreign secretary who is attempting to be diplomatic, but when you see innocent children holding out their hand for food, and you see them shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days, of course Britain must call it out.”
Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
LONDON: Rachael Cummings, the humanitarian director for Save the Children, described the food situation in Gaza as “absolutely desperate” and “the worst it has ever been.”
She spoke to Sky News from Deir Al-Balah on Tuesday, a city in central Gaza where Israeli forces launched a bombing campaign this week and where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought shelter.
“One of my colleagues said to me yesterday: ‘We are all walking together towards death’. And this is the situation now for people in Gaza.
“There is no food for their children; it’s absolutely desperate here,” she said during the video call.
Markets in the territory are devoid of goods, she added, and people with cash are unable to find bread or vegetables to buy.
“My team have said to me: ‘There’s nothing in my house to feed my children, my children are crying all day, every day’.”
Cummings’ remarks came as the UK, along with 24 other nations, issued a joint statement on Monday calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and criticizing the US-Israeli model of aid distribution. In recent weeks, hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed while attempting to obtain food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a controversial organization supported by the US and Israel.
“The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the joint statement said.
The 25 countries also called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of hostages captured by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attacks. Sources informed Reuters that Israel suspects some hostages taken by the armed group may be located near Deir Al-Balah.
Meanwhile, several humanitarian organizations, including UNRWA and the Norwegian Refugee Council, have also warned that some of their staff are starving due to low food and drinking water supplies in the territory.
Since Sunday, 21 children have died in Gaza due to severe malnutrition and hunger-related complications, amid shortages of food and medical supplies.
UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy pledged £40 million ($54 million) for humanitarian assistance in Gaza on Tuesday.
Charity staffer Liz Allcock, who works for Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza, welcomed the announcement, but told Sky News: “There have been (similar) statements in the past 21 months and nothing has changed. In fact, things have only got worse. And every time we think it can’t get worse, it does.
“Without a reversal of the siege, the lack of supplies, the constant bombardment, the forced displacement, the killing and the militarization of aid, we are going to collapse as a humanitarian response,” she said.
“And this would do a grave injustice to the 2.2 million people we’re trying to serve.”
LONDON: It is one of the more extraordinary and unexpected images to have emerged from the chaos and destruction in Gaza.
Two men, wearing high-visibility vests and stepping carefully through the rubble-strewn streets of Khan Younis, are carrying a priceless Roman-era pottery jar, supported between them on a folded carpet serving as a makeshift sling.
The incongruous photograph tells a story of hope and determination — hope that Palestine has a future, and determination that, whatever tomorrow might bring, the heritage of an entire people will not be destroyed.
The photograph was taken during the summer last year, when the men, members of the Heritage Guardians Team from the Khan Younis-based Mayasem Association for Culture and Arts, were taking part in the evacuation of thousands of artifacts from Al-Qarara Museum, which had been severely damaged in the fighting.
Today, thanks to emergency funding supplied by ALIPH, the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage, those artefacts are stored in a relatively safe and secret place, in the hope that one day they can be returned to a restored museum.
The rescue of Palestine’s past is just one of 550 projects in 54 countries that have been funded by ALIPH since 2017.
The alliance was founded by France and the UAE at an international conference on heritage in danger, held in Abu Dhabi in December 2016 in the wake of widespread destruction of monuments, museums and heritage sites in conflict areas. Ƶ was one of ALIPH’s founding members and remains one of its biggest contributors.
This month ALIPH announced additional funding of $16 million for 28 new projects supporting heritage in Gaza, Africa, Syria and Ukraine, bringing the total amount committed worldwide by the organization since 2017 to $116 million.
Much of that money has been spent on major projects, such as ALIPH’s response to the explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020. Since expanded to cover 37 individual projects — 26 of which have been completed — the commitment to Lebanon has reached $5.4 million.
ALIPH’s funding for Iraq, much of it in response to the destruction of multiple heritage sites by Daesh, has seen more than $31 million invested in 49 initiatives.
It began in 2018 with the massive project to rehabilitate the Mosul Museum, in which ALIPH invested $15.8 million in collaboration with the Louvre, the Smithsonian Institution, and the World Monuments Fund, working with local partners and Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.
ALIPH has also spent $3 million on 18 projects in Syria since 2019, working with 11 local operators to protect and restore archaeological sites, monuments, historic neighborhoods, museums and religious buildings.
The new program that ALIPH wants to implement in the coming months includes the rehabilitation of the Palmyra museum and its artifacts, and the stabilization of damaged monuments at the ancient site, where the destruction inflicted there by Daesh in 2015 was one of the key events that led to the alliance’s foundation.
But it is the much smaller sums invested in timely, emergency interventions, such as several funded by ALIPH in Gaza, that often have a disproportionately significant impact.
“We have quite a large number of small projects,” said Elke Selter, ALIPH’s director of programs. “And a lot of these are acute emergencies, when you actually can’t spend large amounts of money and just need to pay for an evacuation, for boxes to move objects, for tarpaulins to cover a hole in a roof, or for wooden panels to put in front of broken windows.”
The cost of such interventions, which can make all the difference to the future of a heritage site, can be just a few thousand dollars.
Larger, general applications for funding can be made through the regular calls for projects that are advertised on ALIPH’s website — the current call, in partnership with the EU, is for projects in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and closes on July 31.
But ALIPH is also open year-round to requests for emergency assistance grants, worth up to $75,000 each, for which applicants must submit a brief, precise proposal for interventions designed “to halt or prevent irremediable heritage degradation that cannot wait until the next call for projects.”
“I believe that our emergency response is one of ALIPH’s main strategic advantages,” said Selter.
“We do very important projects also, before and after emergencies, but there are many others doing that too. In terms of being actively present, and being able to provide funding within 48 hours, if needed, we’re alone.”
Part of the consideration of each emergency application is the risk posed to those on the ground.
With only a couple of dozen staff at headquarters in Geneva, ALIPH is “primarily a financial instrument, and so it’s not ALIPH that puts on its boots and its helmets and goes on site,” said Selter.
“But we work with local operators and provide funding to people on the ground who ask for it, and who are, at that moment, doing whatever they can to save heritage that is clearly important to them.
“These people are going to do it either way, so we can either help them, or not. And if you know that you’re one of the only ones that can help, I think there’s a duty to do so.”
ALIPH takes steps to ensure projects are as safe as possible.
“We try to do whatever we can in our power to make sure that the teams are as safe as they can possibly be, given the situations in which they work,” Selter added.
“In Gaza, for instance, we’ve put them in touch with UNMAS, the UN demining service, so that sites could first be checked.
“We stay in touch throughout a project, and in the particular case of Gaza we also make sure they understand that, for us, things like reporting deadlines are not essential.
“Of course, it’s important that the administration at some point is in order, but we don’t need them to risk their lives in order to send us a report within a deadline.”
In Gaza last year, ALIPH partnered with the Khan Younis-based Mayasem Association for Culture and Arts and teams from Al-Qarara Museum and The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit in the West Bank to inventory and evacuate Al-Qarara’s collection of more than 3,000 artefacts.
• 550 Projects that have been funded by ALIPH since 2017.
• $16m Additional funding for new projects unveiled by ALIPH this month.
• 28 New projects to support heritage in Gaza, Africa, Syria and Ukraine.
In April 2024, ALIPH also supported the urgent rescue from the rubble of surviving artifacts from the Rafah Museum, which, before it was almost completely destroyed by Israeli bombing, housed hundreds of objects related to Palestinian heritage, including a unique collection of traditional thobes.
ALIPH is currently supporting emergency protection and stabilization measures for the historic Qasr Al-Basha in Gaza, being undertaken by the Palestinian Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation.
Once the seat of Mamluk and Ottoman power, the palace became a museum in 2010, housing collections of the Palestinian Antiquities Department, before it was almost completely destroyed in 2023.
Equally devastated was Al-Omari Mosque in the heart of Gaza’s old city, which was built in 1149 and has been repeatedly damaged, most recently in December 2023. Almost all that remains intact is the building’s minaret.
ALIPH is supporting the Ramallah-based Palestinian NGO Riwaq, the Center for Architectural Conservation, which is carrying out emergency stabilization and documenting the destruction to support any future work.
In February this year, ALIPH funded a damage assessment and stabilizing built heritage workshop in Cairo.
Run by the Egyptian Foundation for Heritage Rescue and the Center for Cultural Heritage Preservation of Bethlehem, it has prepared 20 Palestinian heritage professionals to form teams and intervene in Gaza as soon as the situation allows.
More than 60 heritage professionals from Gaza, the West Bank and Cairo also attended an ALIPH-funded online course on risk management and undertaking emergency cultural heritage protection measures.
“We were really surprised that we had more than 60 participants,” said project manager Gala-Alexa Amagat.
“Something we see in every conflict we work in is that people attach such importance to preserving the heritage that they have.
“A lot of the people in Gaza who attended actually walked very far every morning to get to a place where they could get a connection and connect to that training, which was completely beyond what we expected.”
ALIPH relies on the generosity of donors, including nine member countries, public donors such as the EU, and private individuals and philanthropic foundations. Its next donor conference will be held in Abu Dhabi at the end of next year.
“Of course, the funding landscape is under serious pressure,” said Selter.
“But on the other hand, after eight years, ALIPH is becoming better known, which makes funding a bit easier. People know us now, and those who were hesitant at the beginning can see that we have delivered.
“We hope that our donors will remain committed and that they’re happy with the results that we’ve delivered.”
Ultimately, those results stand as a testament to the dedication of thousands of individuals around the world, from South America in the west to Indonesia in the east, many of whom are working in dangerous circumstances.
“The past belongs to all of us, and it is vital to protect our heritage to build a shared future,” said Valery Freland, ALIPH’s executive director.
“We are much more than just a funder. But the real heroes are our partners on the ground, who often face great challenges, but are committed to protecting the world’s heritage.”
LONDON: Rubble in Gaza caused by Israeli bombardment could cause more than 90,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, a study has suggested.
Research using open-source data published in the journal Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability suggested that about 39 million tonnes of concrete debris had been created between the start of the war in October 2023 to December a year later.
It added that 2.1 million truck journeys spanning a total of 29.5 million km would be needed to move it, generating about 66,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Researchers at the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh based their findings on two scenarios, one which assumed 80 percent of the debris was viable for crushing, which with a fleet of 50 industrial machines would take more than half a year and add a further 2,976 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Using the same number of local, smaller crushers could take up to 37 years to complete the task, and generate 25,149 tonnes.
The longer the task took, the researchers said, the more additional emissions would be produced, adding that the model did not account for additional emissions caused by other substances left in the enclave such as asbestos, as well as unexploded ordnance.
It is believed that about 90 percent of homes in Gaza, as well as a significant proportion of its infrastructure, have been destroyed by Israeli strikes.
“The CO2 emissions from clearing and processing the rubble may seem small compared to the total climate cost of the destruction in Gaza, but our micro-focus unpacks the labor and work required to even begin the process of reconstruction,” said Samer Abdelnour, the study’s lead author and senior lecturer in strategic management at the University of Edinburgh Business School.
“While filling the military emissions gap is important, our work can also support Palestinian policymakers, civil engineers, planners and other workers on the ground who are determined to reclaim what was lost, stay on the land and rebuild.”
Nicholas Roy, a statistical science student at Oxford University and co-author of the study, said: “Looking ahead, finer spatial and temporal resolution of satellite images, advances in deep learning for building and damage classification, and methods that integrate information from different perspectives — such as street-level cellphone footage and top-down satellite images — open new opportunities to estimate military emissions across different scopes and better understand the true climate cost of war.”
The carbon footprint of global military activity is estimated at about 5.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — more than civil aviation and international shipping combined. The Gulf region in particular is uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Ben Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London investigating the climate impact of Israeli military activity, told The Guardian: “The methodological focus on debris is cutting-edge work, highlighting often-missed environmental damage left by militaries after the war is over. It provides a fresh look at the daily images of bombed-out buildings and rubble from Gaza, rather than seeing them as longer-term climate impacts of war.”
In June, Neimark’s work estimated that the impacts of Israel’s war in Gaza could release more than 31 million tonnes of CO2.
Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, told The Guardian: “Militaries and war are large and hidden contributors to the climate crisis … it is important to include the full range of activities from production of the military equipment to fuel use during warfighting, from the damage to carbon stores like forests to cleanup efforts and reconstruction following the end of the war. This study adds to this bigger picture of war-related emissions.”
