OSLO: Norway on Tuesday said it would ask the UN’s International Court of Justice to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians, a day after Israel banned the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Despite international concerns, Israeli lawmakers on Monday overwhelmingly voted to bar the agency, UNRWA, from operating in Israel and east Jerusalem.
For more than seven decades, UNRWA has provided critical support to Palestinian refugees.
But it has faced mounting criticism from Israeli officials that has escalated since the start of the war in Gaza after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Israel claims that a dozen UNRWA employees were involved in the deadly assault.
Norway said it was “requesting that the ICJ pronounces on Israel’s obligations to facilitate humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population, delivered by international organizations, including the UN and states,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in a statement.
He said Norway would submit a resolution to the UN General Assembly with the request that the ICJ give an advisory opinion on the matter.
Norway angered Israel in May when it recognized the Palestinian state, together with Ireland and Spain.
And, unlike other donors, it increased its aid to UNRWA in June despite the controversy over whether the agency’s employees were involved in the October 7 attack.
“The Israeli government’s policy is making it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to access life-saving assistance and basic services such as health care and education,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in the same statement.
The UNRWA ban would have “severe consequences for millions of civilians already living in the most dire of circumstances,” he said, adding that it “also undermines the stability of the entire Middle East.”
“Israel’s behavior contravenes international law and undermines efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state and the two-state solution,” Barth Eide said.
Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians
https://arab.news/ctzhc
Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians
- For more than seven decades, UNRWA has provided critical support to Palestinian refugees
- Israel claims that a dozen UNRWA employees were involved in Oct. 7 attack
Spanish PM announces $710 million in military aid for Ukraine
- Sanchez says, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “neo-imperialism” aims to “weaken the European project and everything it stands for”
MADRID: Spain will give Ukraine a fresh military aid package worth 615 million euros ($710 million) to help it fight Russia’s invasion, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Tuesday.
Speaking at a Madrid press conference alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Sanchez said around 300 million euros will go toward “new defense equipment.”
“Your fight is ours,” Sanchez said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “neo-imperialism” aims to “weaken the European project and everything it stands for.”
The announcement came after the leaders signed several bilateral agreements, including measures to combat Russian disinformation.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, tens of thousands of people — both civilians and soldiers — have died, and millions have been displaced, leaving large swathes of the country devastated.
Earlier on Tuesday, Sanchez and Zelensky visited Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum to view Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece “Guernica.”
In April 2022, just weeks after Russia’s invasion, Zelensky compared it to the 1937 bombing of Guernica, a small Basque town attacked by Nazi warplanes in support of Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War.
Zelensky, who visited Paris on Monday, is scheduled to travel to Turkiye on Wednesday for renewed peace talks involving Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US envoy Steve Witkoff.
