Meanwhile, Abbas threatens to take Israel to the ICC for withholding the money for unpaid electricity bills in Judea.
(The Guardian) If they are lucky, Ahmad and his family in the Yarmouk refugee camp will have one meal today: two plates of rice cooked with undrinkable water. Others will have to do with less, perhaps a bowl of spiced water that doubles as a form of soup that will do nothing to ease the all-too-familiar hunger pangs.
“We are being killed here, Yarmouk camp is being annihilated,” said Ahmad, a resident of the Palestinian camp just a few miles from the centre of the Syrian capital who was given a pseudonym to protect his identity.
Yarmouk, once a bustling southern suburb of Damascus of 200,000 people, has been starved for two years in a relentless siege by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has also blocked water supplies for months, a tactic that activists say constitutes the use of water as a tool of war.
Now the remaining 18,000 residents, many of whom suffer from ailments ranging from malnourishment to liver disease and illnesses linked to consuming tainted water, are mired on the frontline of the latest offensive by the terror group Islamic State, which has seized the majority of the camp.
“The situation inside the camp is catastrophic,” said Ahmad. “There is no food or electricity or water, Daesh [Arabic acronym for Isis] is killing and looting the camp, there are clashes, there is shelling. Everyone is shelling the camp.
“As soon as Daesh entered the camp they burned the Palestinian flag and beheaded civilians,” he said.
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