A US Army vessel carrying equipment for building a temporary pier in Gaza was on its way to the Mediterranean yesterday, three days after US President Joe Biden announced plans to ramp up aid deliveries by sea to the besieged enclave where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been going hungry.
The opening of the sea corridor, along with airdrops by the US, Jordan and others, showed increasing alarm over Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and a new willingness to bypass Israeli control over land shipments.
Israel said it welcomed the sea deliveries and would inspect Gaza-bound cargo before it leaves a staging area in nearby Cyprus. The daily number of aid trucks entering Gaza by land over the past five months has been far below the 500 that entered before the war because of Israeli restrictions and security issues.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Biden has stepped up his public criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he believes Netanyahu is “hurting Israel more than helping Israel” in how he is approaching its war against Hamas in Gaza, now in its sixth month.
Speaking Saturday to MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, the president expressed support for Israel’s right to pursue Hamas after the militants’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year, but said that Netanyahu “must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”
“You cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead,” he added.
Photo: US Central Command via X / handout via Reuters
In Gaza, Palestinian casualties continued to rise.
At least nine Palestinians, including children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Gaza City late on Saturday, Palestinian Civil Defense said.
Footage shared by the agency showed first responders pulling out the dead and injured trapped in the collapsed house. One rescuer was seen holding a dead infant, before placing the limp body on a sofa amid the wreckage.
Elsewhere, the bodies of 15 people, including women and children, were taken to the main hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah yesterday, an Associated Press journalist said.
Relatives said they were killed by Israeli artillery fire toward a large tent camp for displaced Palestinians in the coastal area east of the southern city of Khan Younis.
The Hamas-run health ministry yesterday said that at least 31,045 Palestinians have been killed since the war began.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
A registered sex offender from the US who went missing after entering Taiwan has been found and would be deported in light of the risk he poses to the public, the National Immigration Agency (NIA) said yesterday. The agency launched a search for Levi Forrest Wallace, 43, after it was informed by the American Institute of Taiwan (AIT) that he had entered Taiwan on Oct. 2 on a tourist visa. He was not on the US government’s wanted list. Wallace was sentenced to 90 days in jail with a two-year probation in 2001 after he was convicted of sexual delinquency of
RSS