‘Female staff are key to every aspect of the humanitarian response in Afghanistan,’ UN agencies and aid groups said.
The United Nations has announced that some “time-critical” programmes in Afghanistan have temporarily stopped and warned many other activities will also likely be paused following the taliban’s ban on female aid workers.
The UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths, as well as the heads of key UN agencies and international aid groups, called on Wednesday for Taliban authorities to reverse their ban on women working in the humanitarian sector and to overturn “all directives banning women from schools, universities and public life”.
“Female staff are key to every aspect of the humanitarian response in Afghanistan,” the UN representatives and aid agencies said in a joint statement.
“Banning women from humanitarian work has immediate life-threatening consequences for all Afghans. Already, some time-critical programmes have had to stop temporarily due to lack of female staff,” according to the statement.
“We cannot ignore the operational constraints now facing us as a humanitarian community,” the statement continued.
“We will endeavour to continue lifesaving, time-critical activities … But we foresee that many activities will need to be paused as we cannot deliver principled humanitarian assistance without female aid workers.”
The Taliban-led administration announced the ban on female aid workers on Saturday. It follows a ban imposed last week on women attending universities. The Taliban also stopped girls from attending high school in March.
“No country can afford to exclude half of its population from contributing to society,” said the statement, which was also signed by the heads of UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization, the UN Development Programme, and the UN high commissioners for refugees and human rights.
“We urge the de facto authorities to reconsider and reverse this directive, and all directives banning women from schools, universities and public life,” the statement added.
Separately, 12 countries and the European Union jointly called on the Taliban to reverse the ban on female aid workers and allow women and girls to return to school.
The statement was issued by the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, United States and the EU.
The ban on female aid workers “puts at risk millions of Afghans who depend on humanitarian assistance for their survival”, the statement said.
Four leading global groups, whose humanitarian aid has reached millions of Afghans, said on Sunday they were suspending operations because they were unable to run their programmes without female staff.
The UN statement also said the ban on female aid workers “comes at a time when more than 28 million people in Afghanistan … require assistance to survive as the country grapples with the risk of famine conditions, economic decline, entrenched poverty and a brutal winter”.
The UN agencies and aid groups – which included World Vision International, CARE International, Save the Children US, Mercy Corps and InterAction – pledged to “remain resolute in our commitment to deliver independent, principled, lifesaving assistance to all the women, men and children who need it.”
The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August last year. They largely banned education for girls when last in power two decades ago but had said their policies had changed.
An air raid alert was issued across Ukraine early on Thursday morning, as a fresh wave of Russian missiles targeted major cities.
Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said more than 120 missiles had been launched at civilian infrastructure.
At least three people – including a 14-year-old girl – were taken to hospital after explosions hit the capital Kyiv, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
Blasts were also heard in the cities of Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv and Zhytomyr.
The air raid lasted for close to five hours and the regional leader of the southern province of Odesa, Maksym Marchenko, spoke of a “massive missile attack on Ukraine”.
The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia attacked the country from “various directions with air and sea-based cruise missiles”. It added that a number of Kamikaze drones had also been used.
Air raid alerts sounded in all regions of the country on Thursday morning. Presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych urged civilians to seek shelter and said the country’s air defences were operating.
In Kyiv, two homes were damaged by debris from intercepted missiles, according to the city military administration. Mr Klitschko said 16 missiles were destroyed over the city by air defences.
In the southern region of Mykolaiv, Governor Vitaly Kim wrote that five missiles were intercepted by air defences.
Mr Marchenko said 21 missiles were shot down in the Odesa region. He added that missile fragments had hit a residential building but no casualties were reported.
And in the Western city of Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy said several explosions had been reported.
Mr Podolyak accused Moscow of seeking “to destroy critical infrastructure and kill civilians en masse”.
In a village in the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said a missile had crashed into a resident’s home but did not explode. The BBC cannot independently verify the report.This unexploded missile struck a house in the western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, according to presidential official Kyrylo Tymoshenko
Dozens of Russian attacks have pounded Ukraine in recent weeks, causing repeated power cuts across the country. Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said the attacks had damaged power generating facilities and said the situation was “difficult” in the Odesa and Kyiv regions.
The mayor of Lviv said on Thursday that 90% of his city was without power, while Mr Klitschko said that 40% of Kyiv had been left without power.
Power were also reported in the Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the Military Administration in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, said missiles fired at his city had been launched from Russian “ships and planes from the Black Sea”. Power in the city had been switched off as a “precaution”, he added.
Ukraine’s southern command had already issued a warning that Russian force were preparing to launch up to 20 missiles from positions in the Black Sea.
In one barrage earlier this month, Ukraine shot down 60 of more than 70 missiles fired by Russian forces.
Moscow has repeatedly denied targeting civilians in its missile strikes. However, President Vladimir Putin has recently admitted that Russian troops have been hitting Ukraine’s critical energy facilities.
The admission followed allegations from some international leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, that targeting energy facilities could amount to a war crime.
The government in Kyiv has pleaded with Western leaders to provide it with additional air defences, and US President Joe Biden recently agreed to supply its Patriot system
Palestinians fear a continuing Israeli plan to resolve property ownership claims will evict them from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem.
Occupied East Jerusalem – Mahmoud Haj Mahmoud, 56, spent a whole morning removing hundreds of rocks that carpeted the grounds of the courtyard of his modest, cement home in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
The night before, stone-pelting Israelis had attacked his home as tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers exploded in the neighbourhood. “We are suffering so much here,” said Mahmoud, a father of six children whose 19-year-old son is currently imprisoned by Israel.
Mahmoud wandered into his home in the Um Haroun section of Sheikh Jarrah and took a seat on a couch. “The Israelis are just waiting for the right moment to come to our door and throw us out,” Mahmoud said, his eyes appearing exhausted. Heightened tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the area have kept Mahmoud from getting much sleep. “They want Sheikh Jarrah to be a neighbourhood only for Jewish people.”
While periodic confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli settlers are the most visible aspect of settler groups’ attempts to transform Sheikh Jarrah into a Jewish neighbourhood, the actual dispossession of Palestinians from their properties occurs in the shadows of quiet and sterile Israeli courtrooms.
Now, Palestinian and Israeli rights groups have sounded the alarm about what Mounir Marjieh, international advocacy officer at Al-Quds University’s Community Action Center, told Al Jazeera is the “biggest Jewish settlement campaign in East Jerusalem’s history”.
Israel has begun the process of resolving conflicting ownership claims, known as a settlement of title process, in various Palestinian neighbourhoods, including Sheikh Jarrah.
In light of Israeli laws that eased the transfer of Palestinian property to Israeli ownership, such as the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law and the Legal and Administrative Matters Law of 1970, rights groups have said the current legal process is more than just a neutral way of settling a dispute, and will result in the mass dispossession of Palestinians from their lands and properties and their removal from the occupied city.
“The manner in which the settlement of title process is being implemented, alongside the existing legislative framework, clearly turns it into a mechanism that places entire Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem in danger of displacement,” Ir Amim, an Israeli rights organisation, has warned.
Following 1948, when Israel was established upon the displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians – including 60,000 Palestinians from the western side of Jerusalem, Israel deemed the approximately 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem whose owners fled or were expelled by Zionist militias as “absentee property”.
The Absentees’ Property Law regulated properties belonging to Palestinians, comprising about 70 percent of the overall land, who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war.
The state confiscated Palestinian properties and “these houses were given to Jewish immigrants”, Marjieh told Al Jazeera. “Israel carried out a final settlement of land title very quickly to ensure Jewish immigrants that moved to the Palestinian houses would have full ownership over the properties.”
More than 95 percent of the land on the Israeli side of the Green Line, or the 1949 border between Israel and its Arab neighbours, has undergone a settlement of title procedure.
However, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and subsequently annexed the territory, these proceedings were frozen by Israeli authorities, who feared backlash from the international community that viewed East Jerusalem as part of the occupied Palestinian territory. According to international humanitarian law, as an occupying power, it is illegal for Israel to conduct a final settlement of land title in the eastern half of the city.
That is now changing.
Israeli authorities have stated that the land title settlement process would benefit Palestinians by buttressing and affirming their land ownership rights through formal registration. The decision aims to “create a better future for East Jerusalem residents”, Israeli authorities have claimed.
After 1967, the Absentees’ Property Law was applied to the eastern part of the city. Properties of Palestinians who were outside East Jerusalem at the time – including many Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank that held property in East Jerusalem – were transferred to the Israeli Custodian for Absentees’ Property and the Palestinian owners lost their rights to use them.
Throughout the decades, Israeli settler organisations, whose stated goal is to create a Jewish majority demographic in East Jerusalem, have worked together with the Custodian to identify these “absentee properties” and take them over, according to Marjieh. A spokesperson for Israel’s Ministry of Justice, however, denied these allegations.
This, Marjieh said, is “one of the scariest parts of the land title settlement in East Jerusalem”, as all these properties, which some have estimated to be about 60 percent of properties in the eastern part of the city, would be officially registered under a different owner, while the Palestinian owners outside East Jerusalem would have no rights to object to this transfer of ownership.
In Um Haroun, a different statute, the 1970 Legal and Administrative Law, has also become a way of forcing Palestinians from their homes.
The law gave Israelis the right to claim properties believed to have been owned by Jews in East Jerusalem before 1948, a right not extended to Palestinians who owned property inside Israel before 1948.
According to Muhammad Dahleh, a prominent Palestinian lawyer in Jerusalem, most of the land in Um Haroun was managed as a Palestinian family’s waqf property – a legal trusteeship that ensures the property remains in the family for future generations – during the Ottoman period (pre-1917).
Before 1948, thousands of Jews lived in East Jerusalem and many Jewish families had been granted leases for plots of land in Um Haroun owned by the waqf, to whom they paid rent.
Owing to a massive influx of Palestinian refugees after 1948, the Jordanian government, the new rulers of East Jerusalem, signed lease contracts with Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in what became Israel, allowing them to live in homes where Jews had formerly resided.
This was how Mahmoud, who is a 1948 refugee, moved into his current home in 1963, signing a lease contract with the Jordanian government. After Israel’s military takeover of East Jerusalem in 1967, these properties were transferred to the Israeli General Custodian, to which the Palestinian families continued to pay rent.
Following the passage of the Legal and Administrative Matters Law in 1970, the Israeli government applied a broad interpretation of ownership within the Ottoman, British, and Jordanian legal systems, permitting Jews to claim ownership rights to all properties managed by the Israeli General Custodian.
The 1970 law set in motion the creation of various Jewish settler organisations with the stated aim of locating these properties and dragging Palestinian families into decades-long court proceedings in an attempt to evict them and replace them with Jewish residents.
According to Marjieh, this process has often involved collusion between private settler groups and the Israeli General Custodian. The Israeli justice ministry’s spokesperson, however, told Al Jazeera that these allegations were “not true”.
“These settler associations find the descendants of Jews that left their homes pre-1948,” Marjieh explains. “Then, they purchase the property rights from them and open legal cases against the Palestinians to dispossess them from the homes they are living in.”
‘Won’t leave without a fight’
One of the most notable figures in this settler movement is the right-wing Israeli activist Aryeh King, who is now serving as the deputy mayor of Jerusalem. Mahmoud said he was approached by King to part with his home in 2005.
According to Mahmoud, King visited his home in Sheikh Jarrah, and told him: “I want you to leave this house in 45 days”, adding that if he did not part with his property and leave, he would be thrown out.
A few weeks later, Mahmoud says, King returned with a $6m offer for Mahmoud to part with his home.
According to residents, other families in Um Haroun were also approached by King at this time; however, all the families say they refused his offers.
“[King] said to my face that he doesn’t want Arabs in Jerusalem and that’s why he wants our homes so bad,” Mahmoud added.
King, the former director and founder of the non-profit Israel Land Fund – which works to buy land in Palestinian neighbourhoods to sell to Jewish settlers, has made similar remarks in public in the past, even running for local office with a campaign slogan promising to “Judaise Jerusalem”.
In 2010, he was quoted by McClatchy Newspapers telling a room full of local city officials and development experts: “Jerusalem is for the Jews, and we need to stop apologising about this.”
Previously, in 2005, the same year residents in Um Haroun were approached to sell their homes, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that King worked with Jewish-American millionaire Irving Moskowitz to buy land from Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Since 2008, three Palestinian families have been forcibly evicted from Sheikh Jarrah and replaced by Israeli settlers. The most recent case, when the Shamasneh family was evicted in 2017, involved King buying the property from the granddaughter of one of the Jewish owners pre-1948, Haim Ben Sulimani; King then filed an eviction case against the family in 2009.
After he refused King’s offer, Mahmoud was soon pulled into court proceedings for decades with an obscure company believed to be backed by King.
“It is hard to know who actually stands behind [these companies] because they are registered in places that offer some confidentiality regarding the shareholders,” Dahleh explained.
Al Jazeera reached out to King multiple times for comment on the allegations raised about him in this story, but he did not respond.
Mahmoud and the other Palestinian residents of Um Haroun lost the legal battle about a decade ago, as Israeli courts ruled that “al-hikr”, or Ottoman-era long-term lease agreements that were historically used to develop waqf properties, were considered permanent sales of these properties to Jewish families.
According to Dahleh, the only thing now delaying these families’ evictions is convincing the Israeli courts that they are “protected tenants”, a status originating from an Ottoman-era law that guards against arbitrary evictions and establishes rent controls. After 1967, Israel abolished this right, but for those who had obtained it beforehand, Israel issued the Third Generation Law, which strips Palestinians of the right of protected tenancy after three generations.
This legal strategy therefore has its limits, and will only postpone the inevitable since “eventually the protection will end and they [Israelis] will take over the entire neighbourhood”, Dahleh told Al Jazeera.
Now, almost all the residents of Um Haroun, which includes about 45 Palestinian families, are facing forced evictions, along with approximately 35 more families in the adjacent Kerem Alajoni section. According to Ir Amim, approximately 200 Palestinian families in East Jerusalem are under threat of eviction.
But even if they were not already stripped of legal rights to their homes, they would have likely still had their properties transferred to Jewish owners, as they had not been told that the settlement of title process was taking place, according to Ir Amim.
Mahmoud says he only found out that his property was officially registered in the name of a Jewish family after the 60-day window for objections had already passed. Once land is registered through the land title settlement process, it is nearly impossible to challenge those ownership claims.
Ratib Abu Hamza, 53, was Mahmoud’s neighbour. He also found out that his home had already been registered under the name of a Jewish family in the land title settlement process two years ago. “I was devastated when I found this out,” said Hamza, a father of five children, one of whom is also currently imprisoned by Israel. “They took our home from us without us even knowing. It’s like they don’t even consider us as existing.”
Next to him is a home shielded by a tall grey gate with an Israeli flag fluttering from the top. On an adjacent telephone pole, a camera is pointed directly at Hamza’s home. After an elderly Palestinian couple who had lived there since the Ottoman times passed away, a Jewish family moved in.
“We have no privacy because of these cameras,” Hamza said. “Every time I want to come inside my house, these settlers step in front of me and try to prevent me from entering my own home. I can’t touch them because they have the Israeli police here to protect them.”
Several Israeli settlers sauntered past Hamza and a group of Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists who had congregated around his home to launch a protest in support of Palestinians and against Israeli settlements in Sheikh Jarrah.
Soon enough, a group of Israeli police approached the small crowd and demanded that anyone not from Sheikh Jarrah leave immediately. One of the Palestinian residents responded, “They are the ones who are not from here,” frustratingly pointing to their Israeli neighbours.
Despite properties in Um Haroun already being registered in the land title settlement process under the names of Jewish families, giving the Palestinian residents no legal recourse to challenge the ownership claims, they have continued to refuse the imminent forced evictions.
“I was born here,” Mahmoud said. “All my memories are here. With what the Israelis are offering me, I could buy a place in one of the wealthiest areas of Jerusalem. But I would never trade this house for even the best house in the world.”
“We’re close to the Old City and Al-Aqsa Mosque. We are in the heart of Jerusalem. We are living like family here with all our neighbours. We will not leave without a fight.”
Billionaire Pavel Antov’s death came two days after another member of his party was found dead at the same hotel in Odisha state.
Indian police are investigating the sudden death of a wealthy Russian politician who reportedly criticised Moscow’s war in Ukraine as well as the unexpected death of one of his travelling companions, authorities said.
The body of Pavel Antov, 65, was found on Saturday in a pool of blood outside his lodgings at a luxury hotel in India’s eastern state of Odisha, where he was on holiday with three other Russian nationals.
The sausage tycoon died two days after another member of the travel party, Vladimir Bidenov, was found unconscious after suffering an apparent heart attack at the same hotel and could not be revived.
Police on Tuesday said they were reviewing security camera footage, questioning hotel staff and waiting on autopsy reports but, so far, there was no sign of foul play.
“All possible angles as regards to the deaths of two Russian nationals are being verified,” regional police chief Rajesh Pandit told the AFP news agency.
Bidenov’s death had likely been caused by binge drinking and a possible drug overdose, he said.
“So far, it seems that Antov accidentally fell from the hotel terrace,” he said.
“He was probably disturbed by the death of his friend and went to the hotel terrace and likely fell to his death from there,” the police chief said.
The officer said Antov and his friends had arrived in Odisha this month and visited several locations before arriving at their hotel in the southern district of Rayagada at the start of last week.
Two local travel agents accompanying the party have also been questioned along with the other two Russian members of the group.
Odisha police said in a statement the police chief “has ordered CID (Criminal Investigation Department) to take over the inquiry” into the two deaths.
Antov was a politician in Vladimir, a city 150km (90 miles) east of Moscow, where his meat-processing company is located.
Antov’s death was announced in Russia by the deputy head of the Vladimir Legislative Assembly, Vyacheslav Kartukhin, on Telegram.
“As a result of tragic circumstances, our colleague, a successful entrepreneur, and philanthropist Pavel Genrihovich Antov, passed away,” his post said. “On behalf of the deputies of the United Russia faction, I express my deep condolences to the family and friends.”
Antov had been a member of the regional parliament since 2018 and represented President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party.
Before entering politics, he founded the Vladimirskiy Standard company. In 2019, he was ranked the richest of all parliamentarians and senior officials in the country by the Russian edition of Forbes magazine.
In June, Russian media published a WhatsApp message attributed to Antov that called a Kremlin missile bombardment of Ukraine “terrorism”.
Antov used the Russian social media network VK to deny writing the message, insisting he supported Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Experts say the phenomenon is relatively new in South Africa but has been experiencing explosive growth since 2016.
From an eight-year-old girl snatched on her way to school to a wealthy businessman who was abducted and murdered, South Africa is experiencing a surge in kidnappings for money.
During the festive season, police have been warning parents to be vigilant around beaches and shopping malls – potential hotspots for child abduction.
“They should take extra care of their children,” said Robert Netshiunda, a police spokesman in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.
“Children go missing and a crime of kidnapping is a reality,” he told the AFP news agency.
South Africa has long had a reputation for violent crime and is often described as one of the most dangerous countries in the world outside a war zone. But kidnapping for ransom or extortion “is comparatively new”, noted Jean-Pierre Smith, a Cape Town municipal security councillor.
The phenomenon started to rise in 2016 and is now experiencing explosive growth, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC), a non-profit organisation.
Police recorded more than 4,000 cases between July and September, a twofold increase in the same period last year.
The number of kidnappings today is “the highest ever in the history of South Africa,” anti-crime activist Yusuf Abramjee told AFP.
“It has become an established and lucrative criminal practice,” GI-TOC said in a report in September.
Last month, the country was stunned when eight-year-old Abirah Dekhta was kidnapped on her way to school near Cape Town by five gunmen in two cars.
Missing-person posters showed her wearing a pink dress and matching headscarf. She was freed during a spectacular police raid following a tip-off.
Dekhta had been held in a shack in the impoverished township of Khayelitsha, one of the largest in the country, guarded by seven men, police said. Her captors recently appeared in court, seeking bail.
Most cases of kidnapping in South Africa are a side-effect of carjacking, robberies and rapes but crime experts say an increasing number of victims are now being singled out directly.
In one of the most high-profile cases, four sons of a South African businessman, aged between six and 15 years, were kidnapped in a Hollywood-movie manner while on their way to school.
In such cases, ransom demands can run into the millions of rand (tens of thousands of dollars).
Kidnappers sometimes brazenly demand that the ransom be paid into “foreign bank accounts via Bitcoin or via money exchanges in Dubai,” said Abramjee.
But in other cases, the victim is simply killed after his bank account has been emptied.
One such death was Kevin Soal, a businessman in his late 60s with a passion for horse racing. His luxury car was found abandoned in a township on the outskirts of Pretoria days later.
Soal’s body was discovered afterwards in a nearby area with gun wounds police investigators reportedly say were consistent with targeted killing. Large amounts of money had been withdrawn from his account, said a police source.
Police and private detectives are investigating the case.
On November 23, at a press conference where he unveiled the country’s dismal crime figures for 2022, Police Minister Bheki Cele singled out kidnapping as a priority for the forces.
Sporting a fedora hat almost echoing the fashion style of 1920s US crimebuster Eliot Ness, Cele ordered his force to “deal decisively with these most feared crimes”.
Analysts say kidnappings have been fuelled by locals working with foreign crime groups suspected to be operating from Mozambique and Pakistan and other countries.
Indian business people, Pakistani, Somali and Ethiopians are among those increasingly becoming victims of such campaigns, according to Abramjee.
A Somali businessman was recently snatched from a Johannesburg hotel lobby, he said.
Muslim families of Indian origin, who are rumoured to hold large funds abroad, are especially at risk, said a police source.
Police last year set up a special unit and officials recently said they were “closing in on several syndicates” responsible for kidnapping for ransom cases.
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