UN chief warns against ethnic cleansing, ‘demonization’ of Palestinians

UNITED NATIONS, United States: At least 40 children were killed by bombings over three days in several parts of Sudan, a UNICEF official said Wednesday, calling it a “stark” example of the threats facing young people in the war-torn country.
“Sadly, it is rare that more than a few short days go past without new reports of children being killed and injured,” Annmarie Swai, the UN children agency’s representative in Sudan, said in a statement.
She referred to strikes in the southern city of Kadugli on Monday which killed 21 children and maimed 29 others, as well as reports of at least 11 children killed in the bombing of a livestock market in El-Fasher, the besieged capital of North Darfur state.
Eight more children were reportedly killed in a strike on a market near the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Saturday, Swai said.
“At least 40 children reportedly killed across just three days, in three separate areas of the country. This is a stark illustration of the devastating — and growing — threats to children in Sudan,” she said.
Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been locked in a fierce power struggle since April 2023, with the fighting intensifying this month as the army seeks to reclaim the capital.
Both have been repeatedly accused of targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.
Swai did not say which party was responsible for the deadly bombings on the 40 children.
The conflict has killed tens of thousands and uprooted more than 12 million people.
The United Nations has recorded more than 900 “grave violations” against children between June and December 2024 — mainly children killed or injured in Darfur, Khartoum and Al-Jazira states.
“Children in Sudan are paying the ultimate price of the relentless fighting,” Swai said, calling for all parties to respect international humanitarian law and to cease fighting.

JERUSALEM: Palestinians will mark this year the 77th anniversary of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle.

But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now faced in the Gaza Strip — particularly as President Donald Trump has suggested that displaced Palestinians in Gaza be permanently resettled outside the war-torn territory and that the US take “ownership” of the enclave.

Palestinians refer to their 1948 expulsion as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians — a majority of the prewar population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.

After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. 

Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right of return to their 1948 homes has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago. The refugee camps have always been the main bastions of Palestinian militancy.

Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.

All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to visit their destroyed homes after a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war took hold Jan. 19. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the war — and their march back north on foot — are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948.

Mustafa Al-Gazzar, in his 80s, recalled in 2024 his family’s monthslong flight from their village in what is now central Israel to the southern city of Rafah, when he was 5. At one point they were bombed from the air, at another, they dug holes under a tree to sleep in for warmth.

Al-Gazzar, now a great-grandfather, was forced to flee again in the war, this time to a tent in Muwasi, a barren coastal area where some 450,000 Palestinians live in a squalid camp. 

He said then the conditions are worse than in 1948, when the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was able to regularly provide food and other essentials.

The war in Gaza has forced some 1.7 million Palestinians — around three quarters of the territory’s population — to flee their homes, often multiple times. That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.

Israel has sealed its border. Egypt has only allowed a small number of Palestinians to leave, in part because it fears a mass influx of Palestinians could generate another long-term refugee crisis.

Israel has long called for the refugees of 1948 to be absorbed into host countries, saying that calls for their return are unrealistic and would endanger its existence as a Jewish-majority state. It points to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries during the turmoil following its establishment, though few of them want to return.

Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. One UN estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes.

Yara Asi, a Palestinian professor at the University of Central Florida, says it’s “extremely difficult” to imagine the kind of international effort that would be necessary to rebuild Gaza.