Gaza is at “critical risk of famine”, with 22 percent of the population facing an imminent humanitarian “catastrophe” after more than two months of an aid blockade by Israel, a food security monitor warned Monday.Gaza’s entire population of around 2.4 million people is at risk of a food crisis “or worse” by September, the UN- and NGO-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report.”Nineteen months into the conflict, the Gaza Strip is still confronted with a critical risk of famine,” the IPC said.It said there had been a “major deterioration” in the food security situation since its last assessment in October 2024.”Goods indispensable for people’s survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people — one in five — facing starvation,” it said.The consortium, which has developed a five-level famine warning system, found that from April 1 to May 10, 244,000 people in Gaza were in the most critical food security situation — level five, or “catastrophe/famine”.It classified another 925,000 as level four, or “emergency”.The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization warned that Gaza faced “imminent risk of famine”, saying agriculture was “on the brink of total collapse”.It called for the “immediate” lifting of the blockade, saying aid like animal feed and veterinary supplies was urgently needed to maintain precious production of items such as milk and eggs, often the last remaining food.Israel, which launched its Gaza offensive after the October 7, 2023 attacks led by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, imposed its current aid blockade on March 2.Last week, the Israeli security cabinet approved plans to expand the military operation, including the “conquest” of Gaza and the displacement of its population.”Families in Gaza are starving while the food they need is sitting at the border,” said the UN World Food Programme’s executive director, Cindy McCain.”It’s imperative that the international community acts urgently to get aid flowing into Gaza again. If we wait until after a famine is confirmed, it will already be too late for many people.”

Saada Arbane has lived without a voice since her throat was slit during the Algerian civil war. But now, the 31-year-old woman has vowed to make herself heard after she said a best-selling novel plagiarised her life.Kamel Daoud’s novel “Houris” — banned in Algeria and awarded France’s top literary prize Prix Goncourt last year — tells the story of a child who loses her voice when an Islamist cuts her throat during the 1990s war.Last November, Arbane took the literary world by storm when she announced on Algerian television, using a speech aid, that the novel’s main character was based on her experiences without her consent.She said the book’s details were too similar to the personal stories she had narrated during years of treatment with her psychotherapist, Aicha Dahdouh — who is Daoud’s wife.Daoud, 54, has denied his novel is based on Arbane’s life, but the woman who is suing him both in France and Algeria has vowed to “defend (her) integrity”.Court hearings have begun in the French case, while according to Paris’s foreign ministry, Algerian authorities have issued two arrest warrants against Daoud following Arbane’s complaint.Speaking through a breathing tube, Arbane was barely audible in a video call with AFP from Algeria. She later answered questions in written responses.She said she had been a victim as a child when she lost relatives, including both of her parents, during the attack in 2000.”But now, I am an adult, a woman, a mother who knows how to say stop, even if I no longer have a voice,” she wrote.- ‘Betrayed’ -“The novel draws directly from the most intimate parts of my life, which I shared in a medical setting,” she said.”I felt betrayed, humiliated,” she added. “Clearly, what I read in that novel amounts to a violation of medical confidentiality and of my privacy.”Now married and a mother, she said her therapy sessions had been “highjacked to become literary material”.”It’s not just a mistake,” she added. “It’s a professional, legal, human and ethical failing.”Filed complaints outlined several alleged similarities between Arbane and Aube, the novel’s protagonist: the breathing tube, a slashed throat, identical scar and tattoos, and a hair salon both she and Aube owned.Daoud has denied modelling the novel on the content of her therapy sessions. He said in December “everyone” knew the story in Algeria. “It’s public knowledge.”But she disagrees.For him to say that, Arbane told AFP, “amounts to dispossessing me a second time of my truth and voice. This is an attempt to make light of something very serious.””My story has never been public,” she said.- ‘Terrible dispossession’ -Daoud also suggested that Arbane was being manipulated by the Algerian government in what his publisher described as “violent defamatory campaigns” against him.”To say I’m being used by the Algerian authorities is just a cowardly attempt to discredit my words by politicising them,” she responded.Arbane said her main ordeal now was “reawakened traumas”.”I felt a terrible sense of dispossession, the impression that what I had lived through was banal, that I was at the mercy of anyone — a killer, like the first time, or a man, an author,” she said.She said Daoud’s wife, with whom she later developed a friendship, had repeatedly approached her asking if she would allow the author to write about her life — and each time, she said, she turned down the proposal.”I launched these legal proceedings in France and Algeria to defend my integrity and to say that… forgotten stories deserve respect,” she said.”I’m not trying to censor a writer. I’m trying to have a real and very serious harm acknowledged.”

The Israeli and German presidents hailed the enduring friendship between their countries on Monday, 60 years after the launch of bilateral relations, but also acknowledged differences over the war in Gaza.Israel’s president, Issac Herzog, was visiting Berlin before he and the German head of state, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, were due to tour Israel on Tuesday and Wednesday along with their wives.Steinmeier, receiving Herzog with full honours at Bellevue Palace, said that the establishment of relations in 1965 was “a gift that we Germans could not have expected after the horrors of the Second World War”.Standing alongside him at a joint press conference, Herzog said that the “process of dialogue and reconciliation” between the two nations over the past six decades was “a source of hope”.Herzog praised Germany’s contribution to Israel’s security and prosperity and its steadfast backing after the Hamas attack in Israel of October 7, 2023, a stance which he said had demonstrated “moral clarity”.Steinmeier stressed that Israel must “defend itself against Islamist terrorism” but also said he feared that “the suffering experienced by the people in Gaza is deepening the divide, and that worries me, like many others”. He added that “everything must be done to prevent an even greater humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”.Later on Monday, the two heads of state were meeting participants in bilateral youth exchanges and visiting a memorial at a Berlin railway station from which the Nazis sent trains to concentration camps.The two presidents were on Tuesday to embark on their unprecedented joint tour of Israel to highlight a friendship that a grateful Berlin often labels “a miracle”, and meet young people, politicians and kibbutz residents.While Berlin, now led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, says support for Israel remains a core principle, relations have come under strain in recent years, over the Gaza war and other issues.- ‘Humanitarian obligations’ -Israel’s devastating war in Gaza following the October 7 attack has sparked charges from many countries and rights groups that its response has been disproportionate.The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on May 12 the Israeli military offensive on the besieged territory had killed at least 52,862 people there, most of them civilians.The International Criminal Court last year issued warrants for alleged war crimes for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif. Germany meanwhile has seen the surge of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, whose leading figures have questioned the country’s “remembrance culture” to atone for Nazi crimes.Germany has also voiced deep concern about a rise in anti-Semitism, be it from the far right, the far left or immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries.As the Gaza war has drawn increasing international condemnation, Germany has been at pains to carefully calibrate its response.It has insisted that Israel has the right to defend itself but has also called for it to lift its total blockade of Gaza, a Palestinian territory whose occupation by Israel the United Nations says is illegal under international law.Aid groups say the Israeli blockade has led to severe shortages of food, clean water, fuel and medicine.Last Tuesday, the day he took power, Merz said “Israel has the right to defend itself against the brutal attack by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and everything that followed”.”But Israel must also remain a country that lives up to its humanitarian obligations, especially as this terrible war is raging in the Gaza Strip,” he said.- Netanyahu arrest warrant -Herzog said on Tuesday that Israel acts as a “protective wall of freedom, democracy, humanity and humaneness” and a “bulwark of the West”, especially against its arch foe Iran.During his visit to Israel, Steinmeier is also expected to meet Netanyahu.Merz, before his inauguration, suggested he was open to a Netanyahu visit to Germany, despite the ICC arrest warrant.This would present Germany with a dilemma, a former president of Germany’s Constitutional Court, Andreas Vosskuhle, told the Handelsblatt daily. “Normally, he would have to be arrested,” Vosskuhle said.But he added: “It should be obvious that the Germans, given their own history, are reluctant to arrest the Israeli prime minister.” “I therefore hope that Netanyahu will be wise enough not to come here and spare himself and us this situation.”When asked about the issue, Steinmeier said: “I assume and hope that both sides are clever enough to ensure that a decision never has to be taken on whether to enforce an international arrest warrant against an Israeli prime minister in Germany”.

US President Donald Trump’s Gulf tour this week will take him to Saudi Arabia, which he would like to see recognise Israel, and the neighbouring UAE which has benefitted from Israeli ties but also paid a price.During his first term, Trump oversaw a series of normalisation deals between close ally Israel and several Arab countries, stunning public opinion in the Arab world and breaking with the long-held convention that a just resolution to the plight of Palestinians must precede relations with Israel.Nearly five years since the UAE joined the US-brokered Abraham Accords, along with Gulf neighbour Bahrain and North African kingdom Morocco, these relations have endured despite outrage in the region over the devastating Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.”If the Gaza war did not put an end to that, nothing will,” said Emirati analyst Abdulkhaleq Abdulla.While recognising Israel brought economic and strategic windfalls for the UAE, its standing in the Middle East took a hit, experts said.And although the UAE and Saudi Arabia are both oil-rich Gulf states, reputational risks at home and across the Arab and Muslim worlds weigh heavier on Riyadh as Trump seeks to persuade it to take the epochal step of normalising ties with Israel.- Trade boost -The Abraham Accords of 2020 gave the UAE “significant political capital in Washington”, said Karim Bitar, a lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Paris’s Sciences Po university.But since the Gaza war began in October 2023, “what the UAE won in terms of leverage in the United States… it lost in the Arab world” where ties with Israel have become “extraordinarily unpopular”, Bitar added.Trade has grown consistently, rising 43 percent last year to $3.24 billion, said Israel’s consul general in Dubai, Liron Zaslansky, noting that the figure excludes software and services.Nearly 600 Israeli companies have set up in the UAE, while around one million Israeli tourists visited the country in 2024, Zaslansky told AFP.The number of Emirati tourists in Israel is “much lower,” according to Zaslansky, “especially since October 7”, when Hamas’s 2023 attack started the war.Cooperation in technology and intelligence sharing have helped the UAE counter the influence of regional rivals like Iran — Israel’s sworn enemy — or Islamist movements that are deemed a threat.The biggest win for the UAE was the special attention and support of the United States, Israel’s staunch ally.The UAE was made a major US defence partner last year, even though the sale of cutting-edge weaponry announced in the wake of the Abraham Accords, including 50 F-35 stealth fighters, has never been finalised.Today, the Emiratis are “more interested in AI and technology” said Abdulla, topics that are expected to be central to Trump’s stop in Abu Dhabi.- ‘Think twice’ -Riyadh is keenly aware that recognising Israel has affected the UAE’s reputation in the Arab world, where many remain hostile to normalisation.A public opinion poll published by US think tank the Arab Center Washington DC in January 2024, about three months into the Gaza war, suggested that a majority of Saudis opposed recognising Israel.In a similar survey in 2022, only 38 percent expressed an objection.The UAE, accused of “treason” by the Palestinians at the time, claimed that in return for normalisation it had obtained an Israeli pledge to freeze plans to annex the occupied West Bank.However Israel’s actions during the Gaza war have demonstrated the UAE’s limited influence over its new ally.Abu Dhabi says normalisation has helped it get aid into Gaza throughout the war, and according to Abdulla, nearly all Emiraties “trust the government” to promote national interests even as the vast majority of Arabs, including in the UAE, “hate what Israel is doing in Gaza”.Before the war, Saudi Arabia had engaged in preliminary discussions with Washington about establishing ties with Israel in exchange for a security agreement and support for a civilian nuclear programme.But the kingdom has since clarified its position, saying it would not agree to normalisation without a Palestinian state.Sanam Vakil of the Chatham House think tank said the Abraham Accords are “a case study for Saudi Arabia”, showing benefits in trade, investment and US ties but “limitations” on the Palestinian issue and people-to-people links.Unlike Saudi Arabia, the vast majority of people in the UAE are foreigners, minimising the risk of destabilisation through popular discontent.Saudi Arabia’s status as the custodian of Islam’s holiest sites also raises the stakes and “makes normalisation far more politically sensitive,” said Bitar.”I think Saudi Arabia will probably think twice before following the path of the UAE.”