Qatar's plan for 'safe havens' welcomed

UN chief plans to address first lady's concerns with Middle East leaders as official says world body is unable to guarantee civilians' safety.

Palestinian demonstrators, one holding a doll, symbolically depicting killed children in Gaza, chant slogans during a protest against Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip.

NEW YORK // United Nations aid officials have welcomed a Gulf state's plan to better protect Gaza civilians from Israeli attacks by turning the war-ravaged territory's schools into "safe havens".

Qatar's first lady, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, castigated Israel for attacking schools in the Gaza Strip and called on the United Nations to use its premises to shelter the growing numbers of displaced civilians. In a letter to the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Sheikha Mozah expressed her "profound condemnation of and concern over the destruction of educational institutions and the targeting of students and teachers" in the coastal Palestinian area.

The Qatari royal was writing in response to Israeli artillery shelling near the Al Fakhura school, in the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City, last week, while an estimated 280 families sheltered inside from the violence. Bodies of the children, who numbered among the 43 killed in the attack, were laid outside the school the next day, some wrapped in the green flag of Hamas, which has run Gaza since June 2007.

Speaking as chairperson of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development and a UN special envoy for education, Sheikha Mozah urged the world's top diplomat to take action. "I should like, through you, to call on the Security Council to develop without delay a plan to identify these schools and institutions and to mark them in a conspicuous manner so that they might serve as safe havens," Sheikha Mozah wrote. "It is also important that humanitarian aid and basic materials should be allowed to enter those schools and institutions and that the sick and injured should be allowed to be transported out of them."

The letter was circulated at UN headquarters on Monday. According to Gaza medics, more than 905 Palestinians have been killed and 4,000 injured since Israel launched its Gaza offensive on Dec 27, saying the military incursion was a response to Hamas rocket attacks. At least 1,419 children and 596 women are believed to be among the injured, officials said on Monday, with the proportion of civilian casualties growing greater each time Israel intensifies its attacks. Israel has suffered 13 fatalities, including 10 soldiers.

Aid officials estimate that 35,000 Palestinians have sought the perceived safety of the blue flag, sheltering in schools operated by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Many more displaced people are holed up with family and friends. Mr Ban responded positively to Sheikha Mozah's plan, which follows a previous initiative from the Qatari royal to protect schools, colleges and their employees in Iraq after those institutions were threatened with destruction during the US-led war.

Michèle Montas, Mr Ban's spokeswoman, said the secretary general's Middle East trip this week would see him address Sheikha Mozah's concerns with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Kuwait. "He will certainly be following up on this. The whole idea of his trip is essentially the civilian population in Gaza," Ms Montas said. "The primary objective is a ceasefire and the protection of civilians in Gaza."

Speaking via video link from his headquarters in Gaza City, the UNRWA's director of operations John Ging said the 38 facilities opened to displaced Palestinians were still being damaged during Israeli attacks. Although there have been no deaths or injuries of sheltering civilians this week, the buildings are being hit because of their "proximity to targeted locations", Mr Ging told reporters. UN officials had previously provided Israeli military planners with global position system locations of UNRWA schools. They are now telling the Israelis how many civilians are sheltering inside each centre.

"So in real time, [we are] constantly updating the Israeli officers of the idea, who are no doubt passing that on in a much more efficient way to the operational troops on the ground," Mr Ging said. But John Holmes, the UN's under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, warned that improving co-ordination with the Israelis did not mean that the world body could guarantee the safety of Palestinians sheltering in Gaza schools.

"Although UNRWA has opened its schools, so that people can take refuge there because they have nowhere else to go, we cannot declare they are safe areas because we have no way of enforcing that," Mr Holmes said. Sheikha Mozah, the consort of Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al Thani, is also president of the International Organisation for the Protection of Educational Institutions and their Employees in Crisis Areas.