LEBANON – Nearly 230 health workers have been killed in Lebanon since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza following the October 7 attacks last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday. In total, the UN health agency said there had been 187 attacks on healthcare in Lebanon in the more than 13 months of cross-border fire between Israel and Hezbollah over the Gaza conflict. Between October 7, 2023 and November 18 this year, “we have 226 deaths and 199 injuries in total,” Abdinasir Abubakar, the WHO representative in Lebanon, said via video link from Beirut. He said “almost 70 per cent” of these had occurred since the tensions escalated into all-out war in September. Saying this was “an extremely worrying pattern,” he stressed that “depriving civilians of access to lifesaving care and targeting health providers is a breach of international humanitarian law”. Abubakar said “a hallmark of the conflict in Lebanon is how destructive it has been to health care”, highlighting that 47 per cent of these attacks “have proven fatal to at least one health worker or patient” — the highest percentage of any active conflict today.

By comparison, Abubakar said that only 13.3 per cent of attacks on healthcare globally had fatal outcomes during the same period, pointing to data from a range of conflict situations, including Ukraine, Sudan and the occupied Palestinian territory. He suggested the high percentage of fatal attacks on healthcare in Lebanon might be due to the fact that “more ambulances have been targeted”.  “And whenever the ambulance is targeted, actually, then you will have three, four or five paramedics … killed”. The conflict has dealt a harsh blow to overall healthcare in Lebanon, which was already reeling from a string of dire crises in recent years. The WHO warned that 15 of Lebanon’s 153 hospitals have now ceased to operate or are only partially functioning. (Jamaicaobserver)

Photo: Rescuers evacuate an injured person from a building heavily damaged by an Israeli airstrike in the neighbourhood of Shayyah in Beirut’s southern suburbs on November 22, 2024. (AFP)

RUSSIA – Russia is estimated to have supplied North Korea with more than a million barrels of oil since March this year, according to satellite imagery analysis from the Open Source Centre, a non-profit research group based in the UK. The oil is payment for the weapons and troops Pyongyang has sent Moscow to fuel its war in Ukraine, leading experts and UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have told the BBC.

These transfers violate UN sanctions, which ban countries from selling oil to North Korea, except in small quantities, in an attempt to stifle its economy to prevent it from further developing nuclear weapons. The satellite images, shared exclusively with the BBC, show more than a dozen different North Korean oil tankers arriving at an oil terminal in Russia’s Far East a total of 43 times over the past eight months. Further pictures, taken of the ships at sea, appear to show the tankers arriving empty, and leaving almost full. North Korea is the only country in the world not allowed to buy oil on the open market. The number of barrels of refined petroleum it can receive is capped by the United Nations at 500,000 annually, well below the amount it needs. Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to our request for comment. (BBC)

Photo: The latest of 43 journeys made by North Korean oil tankers to Russia. (BBC)