Libya has become the global epicenter for military drones, with foreign powers deploying ever-more stealthy killers and fueling a conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives, the United Nations warned on Monday.

Jordan Has Now Deployed Drones To Libya

Speaking recently with reporters in New York, Yacoub El Hillo, the UN’s resident and humanitarian coordinator for Libya, said that Jordan was the latest nation to deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to try and break a stalemate in Libya’s grinding conflict.

As the costs of drones go down and their ranges increase, military commanders across the region have deployed ever-more UAVs in surveillance and assassination operations that are viewed as less risky than missions involving personnel.

Libya “is the world’s largest theater for the use of drones,” El Hillo told reporters in New York, via a video connection from the capital, Tripoli. “Everybody has something flying in the Libyan sky, it seems” he added.

Khalifa Haftar’s Drone Army

El Hillo cited reports about Jordan selling six, Chinese-made CH-4 drones to renegade commander Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), which dominates the east of the war-ravaged nation.

Haftar’s LNA already had access to drones, including Chinese-made Wing Loongs and other UAVs supplied by the United Arab Emirates, as well as devices from the Russian-backed mercenaries operating in Libya.

Meanwhile, the UN-backed, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), which has been besieged by LNA forces since last April, has received Bayraktar TB2 drones alongside a recently-dispatched Turkish deployment.

“It’s clear that Turkey has moved in a very heavy way, militarily speaking, to support the GNA and to create, as they claim, a balance in power so that the capital does not fall. So Turkey is definitely supporting and Turkey has drones flying,” said El Hillo.

Libya’s Post-2011 Civil War

Since the ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, two seats of power have emerged in Libya: Haftar’s LNA in the east supported by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and others and the Tripoli-based GNA, in the west, which is backed by Turkey and the UN.

Khalifa’s LNA launched an offensive to take Tripoli last April, which led to chaos and bloodshed but stalled on the outskirts of the city – meaning commanders have turned to air power to gain a tactical advantage and break the deadlock.

Drones have been used to launch assassination hits on enemy commanders, spy over large areas of territory and to spot enemy positions and guide conventional weapons, like mortars, so they can better hit their targets.

For commanders, there are few downsides to drones. UAVs expose personnel to fewer risks, and the cost of drones has fallen massively since Middle Eastern militias like Hezbollah started getting their hands on them in the early 2000s.

Last month, the GNA said it had downed a Russian-made reconnaissance drone over Tripoli as well as a UAE-owned armed UAV in the skies above Misrata, a northwestern coastal city almost 200km east of Tripoli.

Last August, UAE-operated Chinese drones fighting for Haftar’s forces were blamed for a double strike operation that devastated a town hall meeting in south-western Libya that killed at least 45 people.

UN: Foreign Powers Should Stop Contributing to the Libya Conflict with Drones

According to El Hillo, foreign powers need to make good on pledges made in Berlin last month by bolstering an often-violated ceasefire deal, abiding by a UN arms embargo and stop sending UAVs and other hardware to Libya.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas called for a European Union mission to enforce Libya’s arms embargo, including by better monitoring shipment routes into Libya.

On February 12, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Libya and tasked UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres with devising an “effective ceasefire monitoring” mechanism in what could be a precursor to a blue-helmet deployment.

According to the UN, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the clashes between Haftar’s forces and the GNA since the offensive began in April, while another 140,000 have been forced to flee their homes.

This week, El Hillo announced an appeal for $115 million to get food, medicine and other forms of support to the 900,000 Libyans who need handouts, including the 345,000 of them who are extremely vulnerable.

UN: Libyan Civilians ‘Endure Appalling Hardship and Suffering’

“We are witnessing a protracted conflict severely impacting civilians in all parts of the country on a scale that Libya has never seen before,” said El Hillo. “Tens of thousands of Libyans, in addition to an increasing number of vulnerable migrants and refugees, continue to endure appalling hardship and suffering,” he added.

As well as a large and growing number of UAVs, Libya’s armed groups also possess the “world’s largest uncontrolled ammunition stockpile ever” with between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes of uncontrolled munitions across the country, said El Hillo.

“The increasing use of explosive weapons has resulted in unnecessary loss of life, displacement, destruction, and damage to vital civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools,” said El Hillo.

L'articolo Libya “World’s Largest Theater” for Drone Warfare: UN proviene da InsideOver.

Libya is headed towards a “more dangerous conflagration” as foreign governments renege on their promises and send more guns and soldiers to both sides in the North African country’s civil war, a United Nations peace envoy warned on Thursday.

Troops And Weapons Pouring In: Salame

Addressing the UN Security Council, head of the United Nations Support Mission In Libya (UNSMIL) Ghassan Salame described a “notable increase in heavy cargo flights” delivering “advanced equipment” to militants in eastern Libya and reinforcements to a UN-backed government being “flown into Tripoli by the thousands.”

This was despite Turkey, Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and other foreign governments—which have been accused of arming Libyan militias—agreeing to abide by an arms embargo agreed to at the summit in Berlin earlier this month, Salame said.

“There are unscrupulous actors inside and outside Libya who cynically nod and wink towards efforts to promote peace and piously affirm their support for the UN,” said Salame, a Lebanese academic who represents UN chief Antonio Guterres in Libya.

“Meanwhile, they continue to double down on a military solution, raising the frightening specter of a full-scale conflict and further misery for the Libyan people,” Salame added.

Libya’s Descent Into Chaos

After Libya’s strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, the oil-exporting nation spiraled into chaos, with a patchwork of militias across the country and two rival administrations—one in the capital, Tripoli, and another in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Turkey supports the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, which is headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, while the UAE and Egypt back renegade commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libyan National Army (LNA) controls much of the south and east of the country.

“The warring parties have continued to receive a sizeable amount of advanced equipment, fighters and advisors from foreign sponsors, in brazen violation of the arms embargo as well as of the pledges made by representatives of these countries in Berlin,” said Salame.

Salame described an uptick in cargo planes touching down at Benina Airport and Al-Khadim Airbase in eastern Libya and unloading weapons for Haftar’s LNA forces. Turkey is also understood to have sent thousands of Syrian mercenaries to bolster GNA troops around Tripoli, deployed warships in the seas around the capital and set up advanced air defense systems across the west.

Salame addressed the 15-nation body from Brazzaville, in the Republic of the Congo, where African Union leaders were meeting in an effort to play a bigger role in a conflict that is driving up tensions between world powers.

US Denounces ‘Toxic Foreign Interference’ In Libya

Kelly Craft, Washington’s ambassador to the world body, blasted the “toxic foreign interference” that is seeing the deployment of foreign fighters and mercenaries and the “delivery of weapons, ammunition, and advanced systems.” Council members met against a backdrop of mounting violence in Libya, where Haftar’s military offensive to wrest control of Tripoli has forced some 149,000 civilians to flee their homes since it began last April. In recent days, dozens of soldiers were killed during clashes between LNA and GNA forces around Abu Grain, south of the northwestern city of Misrata—a battle that saw a rebel drone shot out of the skies, according to reports.

‘Silence The Guns’

Speaking with journalists in New York, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric described worrying numbers of civilians being killed by shelling around Tripoli, warned that “things are not going in the right direction” and urged both sides to “silence the guns”.

In Libya, the UN’s refugee agency UNHCR on Thursday said it was suspending operations at a refugee center in Tripoli for fear that it would become a target in a war that has already seen migrant lockups being hit in deadly airstrikes. UNHCR’s Libya head Jean-Paul Cavalieri said the troubled Gathering and Departure Facility (GDF), which housed and protected some 1,000 migrants who were otherwise vulnerable to torture and forced labor, had been forced to close.

“Unfortunately UNHCR was left with no choice but to suspend work at the (GDF) after learning that training exercises, involving police and military personnel, are taking place just a few meters away from units housing asylum seekers and refugees,” Cavalieri said in a statement. “We fear that the entire area could become a military target, further endangering the lives of refugees, asylum seekers, and other civilians,” the statement added.

The closure of the facility, combined with the military buildup and the increase in violence on the ground, add pressure to an already-tense situation that in recent days saw France and Turkey fight out a war of words over Libya. French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday accused his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of breaking promises he made in Berlin on January 19, by sending warships and Syrian mercenaries to Syria. Ankara retaliated, with Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy accusing France of being chiefly responsible for Libya’s woes by giving “unconditional support to Haftar in order to have a say regarding natural resources.”

L'articolo Libya Military Buildup Increasing Despite Berlin Promises proviene da InsideOver.

Alaa Salah shot to online fame earlier this year when clips of her dressed in flowing white robes went viral on social media and made her an immediate icon of the revolution against strongman President Omar al-Bashir.

This week, the 22-year-old took her message to the world. Al-Bashir is now in jail, but the transitional government that replaced him is not delivering for the women who drove the revolution against his decades-long rule, she said.

Addressing the United Nations Security Council in New York, Salah said that women made up 70 per cent of the protestors in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, earlier this year, but they have since been denied real power under the new system.

“Women-led resistance committees and sit-ins, planned protest routes, and disobeyed curfews,” Salah said in New York on Tuesday.

“Despite their courage and their leadership, women have been side-lined in the formal political process in the months following the revolution.”

Al-Bashir came to power in an Islamist-backed military coup in 1989, adopting strict interpretations of religious law that reduced the ability of women to participate meaningfully in public life, according to Human Rights Watch, a campaign group.

Women had to cover their hair and follow austere Islamic dress codes, could not freely post their thoughts on social media and were restricted from travelling and, if unmarried, from dining out with male friends, Salah told diplomats.

Al-Bashir was toppled in a coup in April after months of protests and is being held in a Khartoum prison cell on corruption charges. Opposition groups struck a power-sharing deal with the military in September for a three-year transition to democracy.

Women rallied against al-Bashir in huge numbers despite being “teargassed, threatened, assaulted, and thrown in jail,” said Salah. Rape was widespread amid the revolutionary chaos, and, back in their homes, women protestors “faced retaliation from their own families,” she said.

Salah, then an engineering student, was “chanting, singing and walking with my fellow citizens through the streets”, she said. She was dubbed the “woman in white” after standing on a car, swaddled in white cloth, pointing a finger upwards in a gesture of hope and defiance that was captured by a sea of mobile phone cameras.

Campaigners note gains under the post-revolution government. For the first time, women head Sudan’s judiciary and its foreign office. Two women sit on the country’s 11-member sovereign council. In recent weeks, a women’s soccer league kicked off in Khartoum.

According to Salah, these gains are fragile and cannot be taken for granted. In 2018, women made up 31 per cent of Sudan’s parliamentarians, but they were “often without real influence and left out of decision-making circles”.

“Now, unsurprisingly, women’s representation in the current governance structure falls far below our demand of 50 per cent parity and we are sceptical that the 40 per cent quota of the still-to-be formed legislative council will be met,” she added.

Salah and other Sudanese women campaigners say there is much work to be done. Safaa Ayoub, secretary-general of the Community Development Association for Sudan, said many hinterlands of Sudan remain perilous for women.

Ayoub, based in the Western province of Daruf, said security forces in the turbulent Jebel Marrah region have repeatedly used mass rape to terrorize women and girls amid a conflict between Khartoum and non-Arab tribal groups.

Women also struggle in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains regions along the border with breakaway South Sudan, where a simmering conflict, security restrictions, and bureaucratic red tape stalls progress, UN diplomats heard.

“We want to make sure that women in conflict zones are protected, that women can move freely, and reach their farms without fear of rape or violence, that they can watch their children go to school safely,” Ayoub said in a statement.

“We want more space and participation and the chance to be dignified as human beings.”

Salah, Ayoub and other campaigners met decision-makers in the United States this week, hoping to pressure Khartoum for speedier progress. Still, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has many pressing financial and security threats that likely rank higher on his agenda.

The activists’ claim that women made up some two-thirds of the protestors appears to be exaggerated, and they can appear unclear on how they want to get women in half of Sudan’s government jobs. Still, Salah said, that is the target.

“If we are not represented at the peace table, and if we don’t have a meaningful voice in parliament, our rights will not be guaranteed, and discriminatory and restrictive laws will remain unchanged, continuing the cycle of instability and violence,” said Salah.

L'articolo Sudan Protest Icon Says Revolution Cannot Forget Women proviene da InsideOver.

Ordinary Iranians are struggling to access medicine, find jobs and are facing a worsening human rights situation in part thanks to the reimposition of biting sanctions by the United States on Tehran last year, a United Nations official said this week.

Speaking with reporters in New York, Javaid Rehman, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, said Washington’s sanctions on hundreds of Iranian banks and other institutions had strangled the national economy.

Iranian officials have frequently complained that the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran was hurting ordinary Iranians, but confirmation of this by a UN official reinforces concerns over the US policy.

“Access to medicine has been a big concern and that impacts on the right to health issues,” Rehman, a British-Pakistani law professor at Brunel University London, said at UN headquarters in Manhattan on Tuesday.

“There are also issues, inflation, lack of employment, a restriction on economic development. So many of the labourers we’ve come across, ordinary people, are also being affected.”

President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 multi-nation nuclear deal with Iran last year, saying it did not do enough to deter Iran’s weapons testing and support for armed Middle Eastern groups. The US reimposed full sanctions on Tehran in November.

The trade curbs have seen Iranian oil exports collapse by 80 per cent and the Iranian economy contract by 6 per cent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment rates and inflation have also soared.

The US says the sanctions are designed to change the behaviour of Iran’s hardline clerical elite — chiefly by stopping ballistic missile tests and backing Hezbollah and other proxy militias, but also by granting Iranians greater personal freedom.

While food and medical imports are exempt from sanctions, lack of access to global markets has led to shortages of some medical supplies. European nations have tried to create a barter system to skirt US sanctions, but it has so far failed to gain traction.

According to Rehman, US sanctions on 700 Iranian entities, including 50 banks and financial institutions, have made it harder for Iranian businesses to trade with the outside world. He did not specify which medicines were unavailable or how many Iranians were affected.

Sanctions have disproportionately hurt Iranians who already struggled against hardship and the country’s deteriorating human rights situation, particularly members of Iran’s marginalised ethnic and religious groups, said Rehman.

“Sanctions is one element of the human rights situation. I have several concerns, for example — death penalty, the execution of children, dual and foreign nationals, the situation of human rights defenders, ethnic and religious minorities,” said Rehman.

“This is a disturbing picture. We cannot say that sanctions are the only reason why we have human rights violations … There have been very serious human rights violations taking place before the sanctions being put in place.”

Speaking in Tehran earlier this month, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani blasted the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and the reimposition of sanctions, saying that Iran’s healthcare system had been hit.

Rouhani reportedly told delegates to a regional World Health Organization meet that US sanctions were restricting trade in food, medicine and other humanitarian goods and were “economic terrorism” and a “crime against humanity”.

“However, it does not mean that the Iranian nation has been brought to its knees because our scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs and manufacturers have redoubled their efforts,” Rouhani told delegates, according to a government news agency.

Iran was moving “toward full self-sufficiency despite unprecedented economic pressure and unjust sanctions”, said Rouhani, with domestic Iranian firms making 95 per cent of medicines required by the Iranian market.

While Washington’s “maximum pressure” policy against Iran has sent the country into recession and devalued its national currency, Tehran remains defiant in the face of US efforts to deter its regional ambitions.

Iranian officials and businesspeople have devised a range of techniques to circumvent US sanctions, including by stepping up exports of non-oil goods, boosting tax revenues as well as smuggling, bartering and back-room deals.

L'articolo US Sanctions Deny Ordinary Iranians Medicine and Jobs proviene da InsideOver.

The way the United States tells it, launching devastating airstrikes on drug-making labs across western Afghanistan is needed to staunch a harmful trade that funds the Taliban’s rebellion against a weak central government.

Think again, says the United Nations. A study released this week says the Taliban only raises a small amount of cash from the drug trade, and US airstrikes on narcotics labs kill more innocent civilians than they do militants.

The alarming, 21-page report found that a blitz of American strikes on May 5 killed or wounded at least 39 civilians, including 14 children, and broke international humanitarian rules as the victims were factory workers and civilians – not fighters.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, UN spokesman Farhan Haq described carnage after US forces hit 60 “alleged drug-processing facilities” in and around the remote Bakwa district of Farah province in western Afghanistan.

The UN is investigating “credible reports” of a further 37 civilian casualties, mostly women and children, said Haq. The “report concludes that drug facilities and associated workers may not be lawfully made the target of attacks and should be protected,” he added.

Researchers from the UN mission in Afghanistan, known as UNAMA, spent four months probing the incident, including face-to-face interviews with those affected to assess claims that US forces also hit homes, shops, a fuel station and vehicles.

Drug labs in Bakwa district were run by local crooks with connections to international narcotics dealers and were not operated exclusively by the Taliban, UNAMA said. As such, the labs were not “legitimate military objectives”.

While the folks working in the drug labs were engaged in “illicit drug activity”, they were not enemy combatants, UNAMA said. Like the women and children also killed in the strikes, the workers deserved protection.

“While the report fully acknowledges that the illicit drug industry in Afghanistan causes extensive harm to the civilian population in the country and beyond, it concludes that the appropriate – and legal – response to illicit drug activity is through law enforcement, not military, operations,” the report said.

The US has long sought to wipe out Afghanistan’s poppy-growing fields, heroin production centers and, more recently, the methamphetamine labs that have sprung up in the west to mass-produce the highly addictive stimulant.

The US says intelligence reports show that drug labs are run exclusively by the Taliban to fund a conflict that has ravaged Afghanistan since the US invaded soon after the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

As such, drug labs are a legitimate military target because they finance the war, the Pentagon says.

US forces “took extraordinary measures to avoid the deaths or injuries of non-combatants” in the May 5 attacks, US military spokesman Col Sonny Leggett said via Twitter in response to the UN report.

Col Leggett was “deeply concerned by UNAMA’s methods and findings” because the world body’s researchers had relied on “sources with limited information, conflicted motives and violent agendas” who “are not credible.”

The US is “fighting in a complex environment against those who intentionally kill and hide behind civilians, as well as use dishonest claims of non-combatant casualties as propaganda weapons,” Col Leggett added.

Afghanistan, long a center for opium production, has witnessed a boom in methamphetamine drug production these past five years, according to a report in August from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Annual seizures of the drug were no more than a few kilos earlier in the decade, but reached 180kg in 2018 and went “off the scale” with 650kg of seizures in the first half of 2019, the UN says.

Taliban insurgents, who were already fuelling their insurgency with tens of millions of dollars annually from opium, are now understood to be taxing meth-making gangs in the barren western regions.

The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, weeks after the 9/11 attacks, to topple the Taliban. The hardliners regrouped and have waged a fierce insurgency for years against the government, US forces and other Western allies in Afghanistan.

The Taliban control more of Afghanistan than at any time since its regime was toppled in 2001, and government security forces are struggling to contain the militants even as negotiators have been hammering out a peace deal in the Gulf state of Qatar.

L'articolo US Criticized for Strikes on Afghan Meth Labs proviene da InsideOver.

Violent clashes at a refugee camp for migrants in Greece and the looming spectre of another tragedy in Libya this week served as potent reminders that European policy chiefs will be grappling with the continent’s migration crisis for many years to come.

On Sunday in Greece, a woman was killed after a fire broke out at the sprawling and overcrowded Moria camp on Lesbos island, where violent clashes between asylum seekers and police escalated and left more than a dozen people injured.

Some 1,400km away in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, the United Nations declared a warning that migrants were being forced back into the Tajoura detention centre. This came three months after an airstrike aimed at the city had claimed dozens of lives.

Speaking at a press conference alongside United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington on Wednesday, Italian foreign minister Luigi Di Maio said the “crisis in the Mediterranean” was at the “very core of our concerns”.

Di Maio described a “special focus on Libya … an essential dossier as far as we’re concerned”. Italian fears went far beyond migration, he said, with the North African country’s proximity to Sicily offering up a “possible terrorist risk”.

Libya has long been a transit route for sub-Saharan African migrants seeking to build new lives in the European Union, but people flows grew ever-larger as the country spiralled into chaos after president Muammar Gaddafi’s ouster and death in 2011.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency, is also concerned. On July 2, a detention centre on a military base at Tajoura, a suburb of Tripoli, the capital, was hit in a double military strike that left 53 detainees dead and more than 130 others injured.

Three months later, and Tajoura remains open, with Libya’s coastguard apprehending migrants aboard vessels on the Mediterranean, returning them to land and locking them up in the bombed-out facility, the IOM says.

After the disaster, Libyan officials promised to shutter Tajoura and two other lockups, but “this plan needs to be transformed immediately into action to avoid further tragedies like Tajoura from recurring,” said Federico Soda, IOM mission chief in Libya.

Soda also issued an “urgent call for the end of arbitrary detention in Libya, in a gradual orderly manner, that guarantees the safety of all detainees.” The IOM says that some migrants can be supported in Libya’s towns and cities while their status is determined.

Officials were also raising concerns in Greece, where the Moria camp has ballooned into the size of a small town of some 12,000 people, four times its capacity, and where outbreaks of rioting are a common occurrence.

It remains unclear what started the fire that sent smoke billowing above Moria’s collection of flimsy tents and containers on Sunday, but the blaze added to what Lefteris Economou, Greece’s deputy citizen’s protection minister, called a “national crisis”.

On Monday, the Greek government announced plans to deport 10,000 migrants by the end of 2020 and to tighten the country’s borders following a spike in the numbers of migrants arriving and requesting asylum in August.

On October 8, EU interior ministers are set to discuss plans to “fast-track” arriving asylum seekers at talks in Luxembourg. The scheme would involve screening and returns of rejected migrants, while those granted asylum could be distributed throughout the Euro-bloc.

The talks are aimed at resolving tensions, which have seen Italy and Malta row with neighbours over whether they were obliged to admit migrants picked up by humanitarian ships. The deaths in Greece and Libya show that these talks cannot come soon enough.

L'articolo Amid Tensions From Libya to Lesbos, Will Fast-Tracking Migrants Help? proviene da InsideOver.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took a swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu during his address to the United Nations on Thursday, saying the Israeli prime minister was a roadblock to peace between their two peoples.

Abbas used his UN General Assembly speech to bash Netanyahu, who could not attend the diplomatic gabfest in New York after he failed to secure a win in this month’s elections and was left trying to cobble together a coalition government.

“Mister Netanyahu, has he ever agreed to negotiations, behind closed doors, on a bilateral basis, multilateral basis? He never accepted any negotiations,” Abbas told the annual talking shop of presidents, prime ministers, and princes.

“We have both received several invitations from several countries to meet to start the negotiation process, he has rejected that. The latest three invitations from the Russian Federation, and he has rejected those.”

Abbas has frequently bashed Netanyahu’s stance on the Palestinians, saying the Israeli leader’s increasingly hardline policies have served to undermine the chances of a two-state solution to end decades of hostilities.

But these latest comments came as Netenyahu was fighting for his political survival, after an inconclusive ballot result on September 17 that left him weakened and his right-wing Likud party holding a second-place trophy.

Likud secured 32 seats in the 120-member Knesset — one seat less than the 33 won by former armed forces boss Benny Gantz’s centrist Blue and White party, which takes a softer tone on relations with Palestinians.

Abbas made no mention of Gantz in his remarks but dangled the prospect of negotiating with an Israeli leader other than Netanyahu, who has weeks to forge a coalition or the opportunity will be granted to another.

“They say Palestine doesn’t want peace or negotiations. We say we always extend our hand to peace because we are convinced that peace will only be achieved through negotiations,” Abbas told the 193-nation domed chamber.

Despite Likud gaining fewer seats than Blue and White, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday gave Netanyahu the first shot at forming a government, saying he had a better chance of bringing together right-wing, religious groups.

Palestinians aim to make the West Bank part of a future state that would include the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel seized those areas in a 1967 war and moved troops and settlers out of Gaza in 2005.

Responding to Abbas’ comments, Israel’s ambassador to the world body, Danny Danon, poured scorn on the Palestinian leader’s rhetoric.

“The Palestinian Authority [PA] chairman refuses to understand that recycled speeches in New York will not lead to solutions in Ramallah”, the Palestinian capital, Danon said in a statement emailed to journalists.

“Abbas prefers to invest more in the PA’s efforts against Israel at the UN than in the fight against incitement and terrorism in the PA under his leadership.”

Abbas’ 22-minute UN address also targeted United States President Donald Trump, whose so-called ‘deal of the century’ between Israelis and Palestinians has been widely criticized among Arabs.

“What is unfortunate and shocking is that the US administration … is supporting the Israeli aggression against us, reneging on its international political, legal and moral obligations,” Abbas told the assembled dignitaries.

The Palestinians have refused to speak with US negotiators since Trump decided to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and cut funding for Palestinian refugees.

Washington “speaks of the so-called deal of the century, and peddles deceptive and elusive economic solutions, after it destroyed by its policies and measures all possibilities to achieve peace,” Abbas added.

Speaking with reporters later on Thursday, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, warned that “hope is being lost” after months of stalled peace-making efforts in one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes.

“If despair digs deeper roots then were all in trouble,” Safadi said in answer to a question from Inside Over.

“The situation has been very dire and frustrating over the last years because of the lack of progress on the peace track, but we will continue to work with everybody and remain aware that the stakes are very high and the need for action is urgent.”

L'articolo Netanyahu Is A Roadblock To Peace, Abbas Tells UN proviene da InsideOver.

United Nations aid chief Mark Lowcock was able to breathe a sigh of relief this week as he announced that Saudi Arabia was finally going big on a multimillion-dollar pledge to tackle Yemen’s humanitarian crisis.

For weeks, Lowcock had complained that Saudi and the United Arab Emirates, who head a military coalition fighting in Yemen’s civil war, had only paid a fraction of the combined $1.5 billion they promised for the turbulent country in February.

On Monday, Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator said a recent UAE payment of $200m and a pending Saudi transfer of $500m would help fight cholera and provide food, water and other supplies to some 24m aid-dependent Yemenis.

While the new funds will keep life-saving aid schemes running a few more months, humanitarian experts told Inside Over that Saudi and UAE pledges and payments should be seen in the context of their military operations in Yemen.

Jeremy Konyndyk, an Obama-era US aid chief, and Aisha Jumaan, a Yemen aid coordinator, said that by over-pledging funding and then under-delivering the cash had helped push millions of Yemenis closer to the brink of famine.

Abu Dhabi and Riyadh launched military operations in Yemen in 2015, hoping for a quick victory over the Iran-aligned Houthi rebels and to restore the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Konyndyk, who headed USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration, told Inside Over that “pledging bait and switch” by Saudi and the UAE undercuts UN aid projects in Yemen.

By failing to deliver on funding promises, the UN is “left in the lurch” and has to abandon life-saving schemes, said Konyndyk, now a policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, a think tank.

“The Saudi strategy isn’t explicitly designed to make the Yemeni population suffer, but the suffering of the Yemeni population is a byproduct of the strategy that they are completely willing to accept,” said Konyndyk.

“The idea is to choke off enough of the economy to weaken the Houthis and strengthen the hand of the coalition. And, if the Houthis are put under enough pressure, they will buckle.”

Konyndyk did not accuse Riyadh of malice but described a “Byzantine bureaucracy” with competing political, military and humanitarian agendas that result in more “capricious and politicised” decision-making than is found with traditional Western donors.

“The Saudi government really wants to get good PR from the aid that it provides for Yemen. At certain levels of their government, there is more interest in the PR bump they get than from the actual good” of aid work undertaken, said Konyndyk.

Jumaan, founder and president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, an aid group, went further, describing a Saudi-UAE strategy to deliberately hurt ordinary Yemenis in rebel-held areas in a hope that they rise against the Houthis.

“It’s a war tactic; it’s not accidental. Its part of their starvation warfare on Yemeni people,” Jumaan told Inside Over. “The Saudis pledge for Yemen but they never pay up. By pledging, they deter other countries from make pledges themselves.”

At the pledging meet in February, the two Gulf monarchies each promised $750 million to Yemen. In July, a UN tracking system showed that Saudi had paid only $121.7m while the UAE had handed over about $195m of that sum.

“Yemen should get unconditional funds. They also should get it promptly with UN agencies having to beg for it. It should come without strings attached or favours. Better yet, the coalition blockade on Yemen should be lifted,” added Jumaan.

Neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia’s mission to the UN answered Inside Over’s interview requests. Previously, both Gulf governments have rowed with the UN over how much money they routed through the world body.

The long-running war, widely seen as a proxy battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has left more than two-thirds of Yemenis needing aid, forced millions of people from their homes, and killed tens of thousands more.

Pre-dawn strikes on Saudi oil facilities on Saturday, to which the Houthis claimed responsibility but which the United States blamed on Iran, have raised tensions in an already-turbulent region and raised the prospects of a broader conflict.

Iran has repeatedly denied organising the September 14 raids, which hit the world’s biggest crude oil processing facility and initially knocked out half of the output from Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil exporter.

L'articolo Saudi and UAE Aid Delays A ‘War Tactic’ in Yemen proviene da InsideOver.

Attacks over the weekend on two Saudi Arabian oil sites raise the “terrifying” prospect of Yemen getting sucked into a regional war, United Nations peace envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths said Monday.

While Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebel group has claimed responsibility for hitting the Saudi oil facilities, US officials have blamed Tehran and President Donald Trump has said Washington is “locked and loaded” for a potential response.

“At a minimum, this kind of action carries the risk of dragging Yemen into a regional conflagration,” Griffiths told the UN Security Council via a video-link on Monday.

“Because of one thing we can be certain, and that is that this very serious incident makes the chances of a regional conflict that much higher. With Yemen in some way linked. None of that is good for Yemen.”

Yemen’s Houthi rebel group claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities on Saturday, which shut down more than 5 percent of global supply and sent oil prices surging up by 20 percent.

But US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ruled out Yemeni involvement and accused Iran of leading the attacks, without offering any evidence. Tehran denied that claim, saying the allegations were meant to justify actions against it.

“This is frankly terrifying,” said Griffiths.

“It is not entirely clear who was behind the attack, but the fact that [the Houthis] claimed responsibility is bad enough. And whatever we will discover of the attack, it is a sure sign that Yemen seems to be moving even further away from the peace we all seek.”

The attacks have revived fears of an outbreak of fighting between Iranian and American forces in the Gulf and appear to have dashed prospects of talks between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, at the upcoming UN General Assembly.

Relations between Washington and Tehran were already tense due to a long-running row between the two governments over Iran’s nuclear program, which saw the US pull out of a 2015 multi-nation deal and impose crippling sanctions.

Washington’s new ambassador the UN, Kelly Craft, said the US was “standing firmly with our Saudi friends” following the strikes on facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.

“We must all be clear-eyed about this event – a direct assault on the world energy supply,” Craft told the diplomats in New York.

“Claims of responsibility have been made. But … there is no evidence that the attacks came from Yemen. Emerging information indicates that responsibility lies with Iran.”

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been locked in a war with a Saudi-UAE-led coalition since 2015. The coalition seeks to restore President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to power after he was driven out of the capital Sanaa by the Houthis.

L'articolo Saudi Oil Strikes Could Drag Yemen into Regional War: UN Envoy proviene da InsideOver.

The United Nations is held to high standards and is perpetually scrutinised over its partnerships with authoritarian governments, but a recent scandal involving Saudi Arabia has truly irked human rights groups.

The world body has faced a barrage of criticism over its decision to co-host an event with the foundation of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is better known as MBS, only days before the anniversary of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other campaign groups have bashed the UN over the tie-up, saying it serves to rehabilitate MBS despite his connections to Khashoggi’s death and a war in Yemen that has pushed the country to the brink of famine.

“Why is the UN helping the Saudi crown prince whitewash his record by co-hosting a conference with a foundation he leads just a year after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?” HRW’s executive director Ken Roth said in a tweet. Sunjeev Bery, director of Freedom Forward, another campaign group, blasted the UN for partnering with the “brutal crown prince”; while Mandeep Tiwana, from Civicus, a rights group, called the link-up “disturbing”.

“The UN is indeed expected to act as the conscience of the world,” Tiwana told InsideOver. “Repressive governments and leaders who brutally suppress the media and civil society should be shunned rather than  feted through joint events and opportunistic partnerships.”

The event, known as the Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum, is a partnership between the UN’s youth envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, and the Misk Foundation, a youth education and culture foundation chaired by MBS. Nicholas Ceolin, a spokesman for the UN youth envoy, declined to comment on the controversy. Instead, the office released a statement saying the forum would “bring together young leaders, creators and thinkers with global innovators”.

Saudi Arabia’s mission to the UN declined to comment. The workshop will take place in New York on September 23 — only 10 days before the first anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder on October 2 last year, when Saudi government agents killed and dismembered the journalist inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul.

The CIA later assessed that MBS had personally ordered the assassination. Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the building alive, now say the journalist was killed in a rogue operation that did not involve MBS.

The workshop for 300 young people at the New York Public Library will occur on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, when United States President Donald Trump and other leaders converge on the city for an annual diplomatic gabfest. The forum is designed to encourage young people to launch enterprises that benefit the community while promoting environmental issues and other parts of a UN agenda known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Speakers will include Bart Houlahan, an entrepreneur who advocates for sustainable business practices, and Alexandra Cousteau, an environmentalist and granddaughter of acclaimed French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

Other speakers include Ann Rosenberg, a self-styled UN technology expert, Andrew Corbett, a scholar of entrepreneurship at Babson College, and Paul Polman, a former CEO of consumer products firm Unilever.

Dr Reem Bint Mansour Al-Saud, a Saudi princess and diplomat, will also speak at the workshop. Houlahan, Rosenberg, Corbett and Cousteau did not reply to Inside Over’s requests for comment. Khashoggi, a US-based Washington Post journalist who frequently derided the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding.

Agnes Callamard, a UN rapporteur, issued a study earlier this year that described the assassination as a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for an investigation into MBS and other top Saudi officials. Saudi Arabia has also been in the spotlight over its four-year-old war in neighbouring Yemen, where Riyadh has been accused of war crimes while it leads a military coalition against the country’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed what was already Arabia’s poorest nation to the verge of famine and what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

L'articolo New Khashoggi Scandal Over UN Ties With Saudi Prince MbS proviene da InsideOver.