Month: January 2024

KHAN YOUNIS (TIP): Bombed-out neighbourhoods, mass graves dug in the sand, spreading hunger and disease — as the bloodiest ever Gaza war nears 100 days, besieged Palestinians have endured ever new horrors.
More than three months of relentless Israeli bombardment since the October 7 Hamas attack have taken a gruelling toll on Gaza’s 2.4 million people, most of whom have had to flee their homes.
“It has felt like 100 years,” said Abdul Aziz Saadat, who is among the flood of displaced Palestinians whose number the UN puts at 1.9 million, and who now lives in the densely crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah.
“Some are living in schools, some on the streets, on the floors, others are sleeping on benches,” Saadat said in the city where many families now shelter in makeshift tents against the winter cold.
“The war has not spared anyone.”
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, the Islamist group that rules Gaza, after its militants broke through a high-tech security barrier and launched the worst-ever attack on Israel.
The bloody onslaught of October 7 left about 1,140 dead in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures, and saw 250 hostages dragged back into Gaza.
Israel’s relentless military response has caused massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, even by the grim standards of its four previous wars, fuelling anger across the Middle East and beyond.
At least 23,357 people have been killed in the fighting, the majority of them women and children, according to the Hamas health ministry — or almost one per cent of the population.
The war will reach the 100-day mark on Sunday, with no end in sight.
Many thousands of strikes have rained down on the long-blockaded and densely populated Mediterranean coastal strip, cratering crowded urban areas and pancaking multi-storey residential buildings.
Much of northern Gaza has been reduced to a dusty wasteland and largely depopulated as Israeli troops and tanks have churned through it in a ground invasion from October 27 in which 186 soldiers have been killed.
Gaza hospitals, schools, universities and places of worship have been hit, as Israel has argued Hamas fighters are hiding among civilians and in a vast tunnel network below civilian infrastructure.
Entire neighbourhoods that once bustled with people, cars and donkey-drawn carts have been devastated in large-scale bombing starkly revealed in aerial photography.
“It’s just so widespread,” said Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor at Oregon State University who has been mapping the impact through satellite radar.
“It’s really unprecedented in the speed of the damage.”
Between 45 and 56 percent of Gaza’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed by January 5, according to research he has conducted with Corey Scher at the City University of New York.
“The extent of damage that we’ve recovered or detected in Gaza only compares to the most severely hit areas in Ukraine,” said Scher.
The researchers said their figures may be higher than data from satellite imagery, as radar can pick up not just a bird’s eye view but also damage to the sides of buildings.
A United Nations Satellite Center assessment, which covered just the first 50 days of the war, found around 18 per cent of Gaza structures had already been destroyed or damaged.
The war has also taken a toll on Gaza’s ancient heritage, including centuries-old buildings in its historic centre, a web of narrow lanes which thrived with market traders and gold merchants before the war.
UNESCO said it was “gravely concerned” and stressed that “cultural property is civilian infrastructure, and as such must neither be targeted nor used for military purposes”.
‘Blood, chaos and mayhem’
now, the main battle for Gazans is just to survive.
AFP journalists have seen mass graves dug in orchards, hospital yards and even a football field.
Corpses retrieved from collapsed buildings have been transported by bulldozers and piled up in hospital morgues.
Gazans have spoken of being unable to retrieve decomposing bodies from the streets for fear of being killed themselves.
Hospitals are places of “blood on the floor, chaos and mayhem”, said Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s representative for the Palestinian territories.
Surgeons have operated without anaesthetic and by the light of smartphones.
Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 15 are still partially functioning, the latest UN figures show. Some have been raided by Israeli forces. (AFP)

TAIPEI (TIP): With Taiwan’s high-stakes presidential election just days away, a nonconformist candidate has been resonating with the island’s youth, seemingly more concerned with the dearth of good jobs and affordable housing than the looming threat from China.
First-time voters are overwhelmingly drawn to Ko Wen-je, an outspoken surgeon-turned-politician who previously served as the mayor of Taipei, the island’s capital.
The 64-year-old has emerged as the third most popular candidate ahead of January 8 vote, behind those from Taiwan’s traditional opposing parties — the governing Democratic Progressive Party and the main opposition Nationalists, known as the Kuomintang or KMT.
The DPP and the KMT have dominated Taiwan’s politics for decades and have largely taken turns governing since the 1990s, after decades of martial law following Taiwan’s 1949 civil war split from China.
Beijing still claims Taiwan as its territory and threatens to take control over it by force, if necessary. In the face of that pressure, DPP has positioned itself as more independence-leaning while KMT has traditionally favored closer ties with Beijing.
Ko, meanwhile, has promoted himself as the alternative, seeking a middle ground and advocating patience with China. He founded the Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, in 2019 and talks about more economy and pragmatic issues, including the cost and quality of education.
In a survey of its undergraduate students published last month, Soochow University in Taipei found that 33.9% of the respondents said they intended to vote for Ko, while 22.1% preferred William Lai, the DPP candidate and Taiwan’s vice president who is seen as the overall front-runner in the vote. About 5% favored KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih. The university said 12,119 students were polled from Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, though it did not say how the survey was conducted. No margin of error was given.
Generational fault lines
Part of Ko’s attraction to young voters is their perspective, analysts say.
There is a generational gap between first-time voters and older residents in the way they see the island’s political landscape, according to Liu Wen, a researcher at Academia Sinica, a Taipei-based research institute.
Older voters may remember the DPP as an up-and-coming party that challenged the once-entrenched KMT, Liu said. But those in their early 20s have come of age while the DPP was in power and see it as part of the political establishment.
Ko has emerged as an alternative to the “blue-green” divide, Liu said, referring to KMT’s and DPP’s official colours.
And having that third option “can be exciting for young people who want a more anti-establishment platform,” she said.
Ko himself attributes his popularity among Taiwan’s youth to the generational divide. Older voters, he told The Associated Press in an interview last week, have supported the KMT or DPP for 30 years.
“It is difficult for them to change,” Ko said. “But young voters are different.”
“It is not because I appeared (on the political scene) that Taiwan has a third party,” Ko also said. “It is because young people in Taiwan were already sick of these two parties that I have had the opportunity to form a third.”
Henry Su, a 19-year-old economics student at National Taiwan University in Taipei, said many of his friends are very pro-Ko and “they think he’s pretty good,” though he personally leans toward supporting Lai.
However, Su said he is “disappointed” by the DPP’s emphasis on upholding Taiwan’s sovereignty in the face of China’s threats — as opposed to addressing young people’s more immediate concerns, such as housing and education.
Fang Kai-hao, a 22-year-old studying biomechanical engineering at the same university, said he favours Ko for being more straightforward than the other candidates. Ko graduated from the medical school at the same university, “so the student community trusts him more,” Fang said.
The China threat
Beijing has described the election in Taiwan as a choice between war and peace and has blasted front-runner Lai as a separatist and a “destroyer of peace.” Chinese warships and military aircraft approach the island almost daily, despite Taiwan’s protests. Taipei accuses China of seeking to influence the vote through an array of pressures, from military harassment to politically motivated trade curbs. (AP)