World press on Israeli operation in Gaza and civil war in Syria (August 2-3, 2014)

The Jerusalem Post published an article by Michael Wilner devoted to the ongoing Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. "The United States came out with its harshest criticism to date of Israel's military operation in Gaza, calling the shelling of a United Nations Relief and Works Agency facility in Gaza on Sunday "disgraceful," the article begins

"The United States is appalled," the author quoted State Department's spokeswoman Jen Psaki as saying in a statement on Sunday. "The coordinates of the school, like all UN facilities in Gaza, have been repeatedly communicated to the Israeli Defense Forces."

"Israel must do more to meet its own standards and avoid civilian casualties," Psaki said. "The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians."

"The Israeli government has initiated an investigation into the incident. Sunday's shelling marks the third such strike in as many weeks on a school, and in at least one past incident, the Israel Defense Forces said that militants had been using the facility as a launching pad for attacks," the author writes.

According to the newspaper, Psaki also said that the US would seek a "full and prompt investigation" into the event, and underscored the need for "all parties" to "comply with international humanitarian law."

Earlier Sunday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the attack "a moral outrage and a criminal act," the Jerusalem Post reports.

"Syria’s war has started to shake Turkey badly," an article with such a headline was published by Hurriyet Daily News. "According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, the number of Syrians that have come to Turkey since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 has reached 1.385 million. This is a figure close to 2 percent of Turkey’s population," the author of the article, Murat Yetkin, writes.

"When the number reached 65,000 in 2012, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said that if the number reached the 100,000-person threshold, security zones could be established on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey," he writes.

"Now the figure is more than 13 times that critical threshold Davutoğlu mentioned and the government is after temporary solutions to establish special camps for Syrian beggars that have set up shop on the streets of Turkey’s urban areas. Syrian beggars are particularly a problem for touristic districts of Istanbul, but it’s not only beggars: The number of Syrians in the city of 14 million is estimated at 330,000 by the Interior Ministry," the article reads.

"In the southern province of Kahramanmaraş, where the first street fights between locals and Syrian refugees started three weeks ago (which were later repeated in some other cities near the Syrian border), the number of refugees is 49,000, more than 10 percent of the city’s population of 420,000," the author informs.

"From the fate of the Turkish captives at the hands of Islamist militants to Syrian refugees to the Kurdish problem, and from regression in the economy to diplomacy, all these developments are related to too much Turkish involvement in the civil war in Syria, something that has really started to affect the Turkish system," he concludes.