GENEVA: The UN’s health agency said Wednesday its workers will remain in Gaza City despite calls from Israel’s military for people to flee an assault it is mounting there.
“To civilians in Gaza: WHO and partners remain in Gaza City,” the World Health Organization said on its X account.
Israel’s army is intensifying its attacks on Gaza City — the main urban center in the besieged Gaza Strip — with the goal of seizing the city. This week, it warned civilians there to leave.
The UN estimates that around one million Palestinians live in and around Gaza City.
“WHO is appalled by the latest evacuation order,” the head of the UN agency, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on X.
He said the Israeli demand that the city’s one million people go to what Israel was calling a “humanitarian zone” in the south of the Gaza Strip was unfeasible.
“The zone has neither the size nor scale of services to support those already there, let alone new arrivals,” he said.
Tedros pointed out that half of the functioning hospitals left in the Gaza Strip were in Gaza City, and the territory’s “crippled health system cannot afford to lose any of these remaining facilities.”
He urged the international community to “act,” saying that, in Gaza, “this catastrophe is human-made, and the responsibility rests with us all.”
Israel has been waging offensive operations in Gaza since October 2023, following a deadly attack launched from there by Hamas that resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.
The UN has declared famine in parts of Gaza, which Israel contests.
WHO says to remain in Gaza City despite Israel’s call to leave
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WHO says to remain in Gaza City despite Israel’s call to leave
- “To civilians in Gaza: WHO and partners remain in Gaza City,” the World Health Organization said on its X account
In major policy shift on Syria, UN Security Council lifts sanctions on Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham
- Move reflects evolving Syrian political landscape in the post-Assad era, ending a global freeze on assets, travel ban and arms embargo
NEW YORK CITY: The UN Security Council on Friday removed Al-Nusra Front, the militant group that evolved into Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, from its so-called Daesh and Al-Qaeda Sanctions List.
The move signals a major shift in international policy toward Syria’s evolving political landscape in the post-Assad era, and ends a global freeze on assets, travel ban and arms embargo that have been imposed on the group since 2014.
Al-Nusra Front and Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham were led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammed Al-Julani, who is now Syria’s president and was a leading figure in the offensive that toppled the Assad regime.
The consensus decision by the Security Council’s sanctions committee was announced by the UK, which holds the presidency of the Security Council this month and was acting in the absence of the chair of the committee. It followed a request by the new Syrian authorities to delist “Al-Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant.”
The decision means measures that were applied to Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham under Security Council Resolution 2734, adopted in 2024, no longer apply. As a result, UN member states are notrequired to freeze the group’s funds, restrict the movement of its representatives, or block the supply or transfer of arms and related materiel.
Al-Nusra Front was added to the sanctions list for its ties to Al-Qaeda and involvement in the financing and execution of militant activities during the war in Syria. The UN initially continued to treat the group’s successor organization, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, as a listed alias.
Al-Sharaa has said the group severed all prior transnational jihadist links and is now solely focused on local Syrian matters.
