DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said Sunday it is halting aid deliveries through the main cargo crossing into the war-ravaged Gaza Strip because of the threat of armed gangs who have looted convoys. It blamed the breakdown of law and order in large part on Israeli policies.
Asma Al-Kharobi, 16, feeds her 10-month-old sister bread mixed with water at a camp for displaced Palestinians on Sunday in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip.
In Israel, a former defense minister and fierce critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and a hard-liner on the Palestinians — accused the government of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, where a military offensive continues.
The U.N. agency’s decision could worsen Gaza’s humanitarian crisis as a second cold, rainy winter sets in, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in squalid tent camps and reliant on international aid. Experts already warned of famine in the north, which Israeli forces have almost completely isolated since early October.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, the main aid provider in Gaza, said the route leading to the Kerem Shalom crossing is too dangerous on the Armed men looted nearly 100 trucks on the route in mid-November.
Kerem Shalom is the only crossing between Israel and Gaza that is designed for cargo shipments and has been the main artery for aid since the Rafah crossing with Egypt was shut in May. Last month, nearly two-thirds of aid entering Gaza came through Kerem Shalom, and in previous months it accounted for even more, according to Israeli figures.
A Palestinian boy walks past a destroyed building Sunday in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip.
In an X post, Lazzarini largely blamed Israel for the breakdown of humanitarian operations in Gaza, citing “political decisions to restrict the amounts of aid,” lack of safety on routes and Israel’s targeting of the Hamas-run police force, which previously provided public security.
“Yesterday we had assurances aid would be fine. We tried to move five trucks and they were all taken,” Scott Anderson, director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza, told The Associated Press. “So we’ve kind of reached a point where it makes no sense to continue to try to move aid if it’s just gonna be looted.” When asked whether UNRWA has seen evidence supporting Israeli claims that Hamas has been behind aid looting, he emphasized that there’s no systemic diversion of aid in Gaza.
A spokesman for UNICEF, Ammar Ammar, confirmed the security situation was “unacceptable” and said it was evaluating its operations at the crossing.
The Israeli military body in charge of humanitarian aid to Gaza said on X that it will continue to work with the international community to increase aid into Gaza through Kerem Shalom and other crossings, and said UNRWA coordinated less than 10% of the aid that entered Gaza in November.
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The Israeli military accuses UNRWA of having allowed Hamas to infiltrate its ranks — allegations the agency denies — and passed legislation to sever ties with it last month.
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least six people overnight, including two children, ages 6 and 8, in their family’s tent, medical officials said Sunday.
The strike in the Muwasi area, a sprawling coastal camp housing hundreds of thousands of displaced people, also wounded their mother and 8-month-old sister, according to nearby Nasser Hospital. An Associated Press reporter saw the bodies, which were buried in the sand.
A separate strike in the southern city of Rafah, on the border with Egypt, killed four men, according to hospital records.
The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in either location. Israel says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians, but its daily strikes across Gaza often kill women and children.
Close relatives of combat engineer squad commander Staff Sgt. Zamir Burke, 20, from Beit Shemesh, mourn during his funeral at Mount Herzl military cemetery Sunday in Jerusalem.
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostage. Some 100 captives are still held inside Gaza, around two-thirds believed to be alive.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 44,429 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were combatants. Israel says it has killed over 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
The war has destroyed vast areas of the coastal enclave and displaced 90% of the population of 2.3 million, often multiple times.
Israel reached a ceasefire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants last week that has largely held, but that agreement did not address the war in Gaza.
Gaza ceasefire efforts have stalled as Israel rejected Hamas’ demand for a complete withdrawal from the territory. The Biden administration has said it will make another push for a deal.
“There are negotiations taking place behind the scenes, and it can be done,” Israel’s mostly ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, said Sunday after meeting with the mother of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, who appeared in a video released Saturday by Hamas.
Also on Sunday, Israeli jets launched an airstrike over a southern Lebanese border village, while troops shelled other border towns and villages still under Israeli control, Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported.
The attacks come days after a US-brokered ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike in the village of Yaroun, nor did the Hezbollah militant group. Israel continues to call on displaced Lebanese not to return to dozens of southern villages in this current stage of the ceasefire. It also continues to impose a daily curfew for people moving across the Litani River between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m.
How to archive your photos in the digital age
How to archive your photos in the digital age
Updated
Taking photographs used to be a careful, conscious act. Photos were selective, frozen moments in time carefully archived in albums and frames. Now, taking a photograph is almost as effortless and common as breathing—it's something that people do all the time in the age of smartphone cameras with seemingly endless digital film.
But the downside to capturing every moment is that it creates a mountain of those moments to save for the future. Those photos can be easily lost if they're not archived properly. All it can take is one accidental dip in the toilet for your phone, and all that data is lost forever.
So what's a practical backup strategy for the average person? Writing for The Conversation, Quinnipiac University journalism professor Wasim Ahmad shares a few ways to make sure memories are never lost.
Cloud Storage
The simplest way to archive your photos is cloud storage. For Apple users, there's iCloud, which starts at US$0.99 per month for 50 gigabytes all the way to $59.99 per month for 12 terabytes with various tiers in between. With an average iPhone photo clocking in at 3 megabytes, that's a little over 16,000 photos for the cheap plan and 4 million or so for the largest plan. Google's Google One cloud storage is most cost-effective for yearly plans, with 2TB going for $99.99 per year and 5TB going for $249.99 per year.
The actual amount you can store in that space does vary greatly with how a file is shot. Video has larger file sizes than photos. HEIF files, a newer format on Apple phones, compresses files into smaller packages, but long-term compatibility is unknown since the format hasn't been in use for as long as the standard JPG file, which has been around since 1992.
While cloud services from big providers generally provide the easiest way for most average folks to back up their photos and operate with little to no intervention via apps that are already on the phone constantly uploading every photo taken, there are risks involved.
Big companies often change their policies about how photos are saved. For instance, depending on what phone and when it was bought, Google's cloud storage may have saved photos in a "storage saver" format that lowers the quality of images by sizing them down or compressing them differently. This affects your ability to make high-quality prints or view the photos on high-resolution screens down the road. Unless someone is astute enough to notice small text here and there that mentions it, most users won't even realize it's happening.
And what happens to cloud services when things go badly wrong? Users of photo backup service Digital Railroad found out the hard way. In 2008, the company abruptly shut down and gave its users 24 hours to download everything before the servers were shut down. Photographers rushed for the exits, trying to grab their photos on the way out, only to strain the servers to the point where few were able to recover anything at all. If this was the only way photos were backed up, it's a lost cause.
So while the cloud is easy, costs can add up and terms of service can change at a moment's notice. What are some ways for photographers to control their own fate?
Hard Drives and Network-Attached Storage
Manually taking photos off a phone may take some extra time, but the approach offers peace of mind that cloud services can't necessarily match.
Almost all phones can plug into a computer's USB port and use the built-in Photos app on both Windows and MacOS to download photos to a computer. Apple users can use a method called AirDrop to send photos wirelessly to other Apple devices as well, including laptop and desktop computers.
Loading photos onto a local hard drive built into the machine can fill it up quickly, but there is a cost-effective way to get around that—namely, external hard drives. These are storage devices that you can plug into your computer as needed. They can be of the older and less expensive type with spinning platters or more modern solid-state drives that can survive a drop and greater temperature changes than the older drives can.
These are different than flash drives, more commonly known as thumb drives because of their small size, that are designed as temporary storage to shuffle photos from one place to another.
It's easy to buy more than one hard drive to have duplicate backups in case of failure or catastrophe, but the downside is that there's no easy access from the internet to your photos, and backup is generally a process that users must remember to do.
Network-attached storage is one way to solve the cloud storage problem while retaining the ability to access photos from the internet. These are essentially hard drives—sometimes multiple hard drives linked together for even greater or faster storage—that are connected to a router that allows for access to the internet through specialized software.
While not as easy as most third-party cloud storage services, once it's set up, a network-attached storage unit is a flexible way to store your photos safely and accessibly. There are even companies that specialize in fireproof and waterproof units for extra insurance in case of disaster.
Printing Photos
If cloud storage and hard drives seem too complicated, there's always the old-fashioned approach of printing. There's still something magical about seeing a photo on a wall or in an album, and thankfully there are ways to print professional-quality archival prints without having to go to a drugstore.
The easiest and most cost-efficient types of printers are dedicated 4x6 printers using a technology similar to professional labs called dye-sublimation. These yield high-quality, waterproof prints that cost about the same as what one would pay to develop photos at a drugstore. HP makes its popular Sprocket line of printers, though those require a phone and an app to print from, which makes plugging in a memory card from a professional camera out of the question. However, Canon's Selphy lineup includes many models with screens and a card slot to make that possible.
The rabbit hole goes very deep, and there are many professional printers that can print even larger sizes. Canon and Epson dominate this space, marketing a range of pigment- and dye-based printers that can emphasize archival needs or color saturation, respectively.
Another option is ordering a photo book, which, as the name suggests, is a physical bound book of your photos. However, photo books are probably more appropriate for memorializing an event—a trip, wedding, or project—than general archiving, given the typical costs and number of photos involved.
There's little reason not to make some sort of backup of photos in 2024, whether that's on printed media, hard drives, or in the cloud. The important thing is not which method to use, but to do it at all.
This story was produced by The Conversation and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
