Independent Online News
Large parts of the city of Rafah are now a “ghost town”, with UN humanitarians reporting on Tuesday that some 450,000 Gazans have been forcibly displaced from the southernmost city by Israeli evacuation orders in the last week.
Israeli military manoeuvres and shelling continued in and around eastern Rafah in southern Gaza on Wednesday morning as UN humanitarians stressed that “no fuel or aid” is getting into the enclave.
“We’re not receiving any aid, the crossing area has ongoing military operations and is an active war zone,” said Scott Anderson, from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in a post on X.
As El Fasher stands on the ‘precipice of a massacre’, rights groups call for sanctions after new testimony describes atrocities carried out by RSF paramilitaries in Sudan
Gruesome new testimony details one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war – the large-scale massacre of civilians as they desperately tried to flee an ethnic rampage in Darfur last summer.
UN Security Council members on Saturday called on the warring parties in Sudan to immediately halt the military build-up and take steps to de-escalate the situation in El Fasher, the provincial capital of North Darfur.
The call comes amid reports of an imminent offensive by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militia against the city, which could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons currently sheltering there.… Read the rest
Documents show officials were told blood plasma harvested from US convicts was contaminated with viruses
Read more: the true story of the UK infected blood scandal; plus: ‘My mum gave the injections that killed my brothers’
Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Robin McKie
A commercial blood product at the centre of the biggest treatment scandal in the history of the NHS was approved for use after government officials were told convicts were among the paid donors and virus contamination “should be assumed”, corporate filings reveal.… Read the rest