China, Egypt stress resolve to continue joint economic development projects
President El-Sisi welcomes Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Cairo
Egypt was the first stop of Wang’s tour of Africa and will be followed by visits to Tunisia, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire
Updated 14 January 2024
Gobran Mohamed
CAIRO: Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi received Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Cairo on Sunday.
Also in attendance were Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, and senior Chinese officials.
Egypt was the first stop of Wang’s tour of Africa and will be followed by visits to Tunisia, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire.
The meeting touched on ways to strengthen frameworks of cooperation.
Both sides stressed their resolve to continue joint economic development projects at bilateral level and within the framework of their membership of the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa bloc of countries, as well as China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Presidential spokesman Ahmed Fahmy said China’s foreign minister conveyed a letter from President Xi Jinping to President El-Sisi, congratulating him on his re-election.
Xi “confirmed China’s commitment to advancing the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries and valued Egypt’s role in consolidating security, stability and development in the Middle East,” Fahmy added.
During the meeting, El-Sisi highlighted Egypt’s pride in its relations with China. He stressed Egypt’s ongoing support for the one-China principle and commitment to fostering closer coordination to reinforce international peace and stability.
El-Sisi and Wang exchanged views on regional and international developments, notably the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
The Egyptian president underlined the need for a ceasefire in Gaza to protect civilians and provide them with relief, as well as to defuse regional tensions. Wang concurred with Egypt’s position.
Fahmy said the two sides reviewed the historical and humanitarian responsibility taken by Egypt in mobilizing, receiving and assembling humanitarian assistance worldwide.
The country’s efforts to surmount the challenges of delivering aid to the people of Gaza — taking place in full coordination with the UN and the international community — featured in the talks.
The critical importance of the international community to enforce the delivery of relief into the Gaza Strip, in line with the relevant UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, was emphasized.
During the talks, Egypt and China each underlined their positions concerning the need to comply with international law. They reiterated their vehement and categorical rejection of individual and collective forced transfer or displacement of Palestinians.
Fahmy said the two sides also agreed on the need to address the root causes of the crisis through a just and comprehensive settlement based on the two-state solution, and to establish an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the resolutions of international legitimacy.
For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics
For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population
Updated 58 min 26 sec ago
AFP
DAMASCUS: For decades, any Syrian daring to broach political topics got used to speaking in hushed tones and with a watchful eye trained for a listener among the crowd.
“There were spies everywhere,” Mohannad Al-Katee said in Al-Rawda cafe in Damascus, adding almost in disbelief: “It’s the first time that I sit in a cafe and I can talk about politics.
“It was a dream for Syrians,” said Katee, 42, a researcher in political and social history.
Until now, he like thousands of others had grown accustomed to watching for the proverbial flies on the walls of Damascus’s renowned cafes.
Today, those same cafes are alive and buzzing with the voices of patrons speaking freely about their country for the first time.
Such discussions “were banned under the previous regime, then there was a relative opening during the Damascus Spring,” Katee said.
He was referring to the year 2000, when Bashar Assad took over from his late father Hafez and slightly loosened the reins on political life in Syria.
Initially, the young Assad had opened up an unprecedented space, allowing for political salons to flourish alongside calls for reform in a country that had long grown accustomed to fear and silence.
“But it didn’t last,” said Katee.
A few months after his succession, Assad rolled back those gains, putting an end to the short-lived “Damascus Spring.”
In the subsequent years, according to Katee, informants were ubiquitous, from “the hookah waiter to the man at the till, it could have been anyone.”
“Political life consisted of secret meetings,” he said. “We were always taught that the walls have ears.”
Today, “Syrians can never go back to obscurantism and dictatorship, to accepting single-party rule,” he said.
A little further on, in the Havana cafe once known as a meeting point for intellectuals and activists in a distant past, Fuad Obeid is chatting with a friend.
Himself a former owner of a cafe he had to shut down, the 64-year-old said: “The intelligence services spent their time at my place. They drank for free as though they owned the place.”
For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population.
On Saturday, Syria’s new intelligence chief, Anas Khattab, announced that the service’s various branches would be dissolved.
Obeid said: “I used to keep a low profile so they wouldn’t know I was the owner. I told customers not to talk politics for fear of reprisals.”
Now, he noted, in Havana cafe as in others, the difference is like “night and day.”
Back in Al-Rawda, discussions are in full swing over hookahs and games of backgammon.
The owner Ahmad Kozorosh still can’t believe his eyes, having himself witnessed numerous arrests in his own cafe over the years.
“I am now seeing almost exclusively new faces,” he said. “People who had been sentenced to death, imprisoned.”
To celebrate the new era, he is holding weekly symposiums in the cafe, and will even launch a new political party to be named after it.
Real estate agent Nesrine Shouban, 42, had spent three years in prison for carrying US dollars, a punishable offense in Assad’s Syria.
Alongside thousands of others who found freedom when the doors of prisons were flung open, she was released on December 8 from the notorious Adra prison.
“They had dangled in front of us the possibility of an amnesty” from Assad’s administration, she said. “Thankfully, the amnesty came from God.”
“At cafes, we didn’t dare say anything. We were even afraid that our phones were bugged,” she said.
Now, for the first time, she said she felt “truly free.”
Despite concerns over the extremist background of Syria’s new rulers, a breath of freedom has washed over the country for the first time, with public demonstrations being organized — an unthinkable prospect just one month earlier.
“We are not afraid anymore,” said Shouban. “If Jolani makes mistakes, we will denounce them,” she added, referring to Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani.
“In all cases, it can’t be worse than Bashar Assad.”
Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that seven pro-Turkish fighters were killed in clashes Monday in the northeastern Manbij region
Updated 30 December 2024
AFP
BEIRUT: A Syria war monitor said 31 combatants had been killed since Sunday in ongoing battles between Turkiye-backed groups and Kurdish-led forces.
Swathes of northern Syria are controlled by a Kurdish-led administration whose de facto army, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), spearheaded the fight that helped defeat the Daesh group in the country in 2019 with US backing.
Turkiye accuses the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), of being affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which both Washington and Ankara consider a terrorist group.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that seven pro-Turkish fighters were killed in clashes Monday in the northeastern Manbij region, in Aleppo province.
SDF fighters had infiltrated the city of the same name after it was retaken by Ankara-backed groups earlier this month, the monitor said.
Six other pro-Turkish fighters and three members of the SDF were killed the day before in the same part of Aleppo province, it said.
The SDF said Monday that it had carried out attacks elsewhere in the province that destroyed “two radars, a jamming system and a tank of the Turkish occupation” near a strategic bridge over the Euphrates.
According to the Observatory, 13 members of the pro-Turkiye factions and two members of the SDF “were killed as a result of flaring battles” near the bridge and the Tishreen Dam.
The Britain-based Observatory said clashes in the area had been going on for around three weeks “as both sides seek to advance.”
Turkiye has staged multiple operations in SDF areas since 2016, and Ankara-backed groups have captured several Kurdish-held towns in northern Syria in recent weeks.
The fighting has continued since rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad from power on December 8.
New Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose HTS group has long had ties with Turkiye, told Al Arabiya TV on Sunday that the Kurdish-led forces should be integrated into the national army.
“Weapons must be in the hands of the state alone. Whoever is armed and qualified to join the defense ministry, we will welcome them,” he said.
“Under these terms and conditions, we will open a negotiations dialogue with the SDF... to perhaps find an appropriate solution.”
Assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients
Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced Israeli attacks and both are damaged
Updated 30 December 2024
AFP
GENEVA: The WHO chief called Monday for the immediate release of Hossam Abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who is being held by Israel’s military following a major raid on the facility.
The Friday-Saturday assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients, the World Health Organization said.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is out of service following the raid, forced patient and staff evacuation and the detention of its director. His whereabouts are unknown. We call for his immediate release.”
Israel’s military said Sunday that its forces had killed approximately 20 Palestinian militants and apprehended “240 terrorists” in the raid, calling it one of its “largest operations” conducted in the territory.
The military also said had detained Abu Safiyeh, suspecting him of being a Hamas militant. When asked if he had been transferred to Israeli territory for further questioning, the military did not offer an immediate comment.
Tedros said the patients in critical condition at Kamal Adwan had been moved to the Indonesian Hospital, “which is itself out of function.”
“Amid ongoing chaos in northern Gaza, WHO and partners today delivered basic medical and hygiene supplies, food and water to Indonesian Hospital and transferred 10 critical patients to Al-Shifa Hospital,” he said.
“We urge Israel to ensure their health care needs and rights are upheld.”
He said seven patients along with 15 caregivers and health workers remained at the “severely damaged” Indonesian Hospital, “which has no ability to provide care.”
“Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced attacks today and both are damaged,” Tedros added.
“We repeat: stop attacks on hospitals. People in Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid.”
Since October 6 this year, Israeli operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments
Kyiv moves to build ties with the new leadership in Damascus
Updated 30 December 2024
Reuters
DAMASCUS: Syria hopes for “strategic partnerships” with Ukraine, its new foreign minister told his Ukrainian counterpart on Monday, as Kyiv moves to build ties with the new Islamist rulers in Damascus amid waning Russian influence.
Russia was a staunch ally of ousted President Bashar Assad and has given him political asylum. Moscow has said it is in contact with the new administration in Damascus, including over the fate of Russian military facilities in Syria.
“There will be strategic partnerships between us and Ukraine on the political, economic and social levels, and scientific partnerships,” Syria’s newly appointed foreign minister, Asaad Hassan Al-Shibani, told Ukraine’s Andrii Sybiha.
“Certainly the Syrian people and the Ukrainian people have the same experience and the same suffering that we endured over 14 years,” he added, apparently drawing a parallel between Syria’s brutal 2011-24 civil war and Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory culminating in its full-scale 2022 invasion.
Sybiha, who also met Syria’s new de facto ruler Ahmed Al-Sharaa in Damascus on Monday, said Ukraine would send more food aid shipments to Syria after the expected arrival of 20 shipments of flour on Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last Friday the
dispatch
of Ukraine’s first batch of food aid to Syria comprising 500 metric tons of wheat flour as part of Kyiv’s humanitarian “Grain from Ukraine” initiative in cooperation with the United Nations World Food Programme.
RUSSIAN INFLUENCE SQUEEZED
Ukraine, a global producer and exporter of grain and oilseeds, traditionally exports wheat and corn to countries in the Middle East, but not to Syria, which in the Assad era imported food from Russia.
Russian wheat supplies to Syria have been
suspended
because of uncertainty about the new government in Damascus and payment delays, Russian and Syrian sources told Reuters in early December. Russia had supplied wheat to Syria using complex financial and logistical arrangements to circumvent Western sanctions imposed on both Moscow and Damascus.
The ousting of Assad by Al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, has thrown the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria — the Hmeimim air base in Latakia and the Tartous naval facility — into question.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the status of Russia’s military bases would be the subject of negotiations with the new leadership in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa said this month that Syria’s relations with Russia should serve common interests. In an interview published on Sunday, he said Syria
shared
strategic interests with Russia, striking a conciliatory tone, though he did not elaborate.
In Gaza’s crowded tent camps, women wrestle with a life stripped of privacy
Updated 30 December 2024
AP
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza City: For Gaza’s women, the hardships of life in the territory’s sprawling tent camps are compounded by the daily humiliation of never having privacy.
Women struggle to dress modestly while crowded into tents with extended family members, including men, and with strangers only steps away in neighboring tents. Access to menstrual products is limited, so they cut up sheets or old clothes to use as pads. Makeshift toilets usually consist of only a hole in the sand surrounded by sheets dangling from a line, and these must be shared with dozens of other people.
Alaa Hamami has dealt with the modesty issue by constantly wearing her prayer shawl, a black cloth that covers her head and upper body.
“Our whole lives have become prayer clothes, even to the market we wear it,” said the young mother of three. “Dignity is gone.”
Normally, she would wear the shawl only when performing her daily Muslim prayers. But with so many men around, she keeps it on all the time, even when sleeping — just in case an Israeli strike hits nearby in the night and she has to flee quickly, she said.
Women wait to receive donated food at a distribution center for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)
Israel’s 14-month-old campaign in Gaza has driven more than 90 percent of its 2.3 million Palestinians from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of them are now living in squalid camps of tents packed close together over large areas.
Sewage runs into the streets, and food and water are hard to obtain. Winter is setting in. Families often wear the same clothes for weeks because they left clothing and many other belongings behind as they fled.
Everyone in the camps searches daily for food, clean water and firewood. Women feel constantly exposed.
Gaza has always been a conservative society. Most women wear the hijab, or head scarf, in the presence of men who are not immediate family. Matters of women’s health — pregnancy, menstruation and contraception — tend not to be discussed publicly.
“Before we had a roof. Here it does not exist,” said Hamami, whose prayer shawl is torn and smudged with ash from cooking fires. “Here our entire lives have become exposed to the public. There is no privacy for women.”
Even simple needs are hard to meet
Wafaa Nasrallah, a displaced mother of two, says life in the camps makes even the simplest needs difficult, like getting period pads, which she cannot afford. She tried using pieces of cloth and even diapers, which have also increased in price.
For a bathroom, she has a hole in the ground, surrounded by blankets propped up by sticks.
Wafaa Nasrallah shows her sanitary pads at her tent in a camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Saturday Dec. 28, 2024. (AP)
The UN says more than 690,000 women and girls in Gaza require menstrual hygiene products, as well as clean water and toilets. Aid workers have been unable to meet demand, with supplies piling up at crossings from Israel. Stocks of hygiene kits have run out, and prices are exorbitant. Many women have to choose between buying pads and buying food and water.
Doaa Hellis, a mother of three living in a camp, said she has torn up her old clothes to use for menstrual pads. “Wherever we find fabric, we tear it up and use it.”
A packet of pads costs 45 shekels ($12), “and there is not even five shekels in the whole tent,” she said.
Anera, a rights group active in Gaza, says some women use birth control pills to halt their periods. Others have experienced disruptions in their cycles because of the stress and trauma of repeated displacement.
The terrible conditions pose real risks to women’s health, said Amal Seyam, the director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza, which provides supplies for women and surveys them about their experiences.
She said some women have not changed clothes for 40 days. That and improvised cloth pads “will certainly create” skin diseases, diseases related to reproductive health and psychological conditions, she said.
“Imagine what a woman in Gaza feels like, if she’s unable to control conditions related to hygiene and menstrual cycles,” Seyam said.
Alaa Hamami shows some of her deteriorated clothes inside her tent at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Nov. 9, 2024. (AP)
‘Everything is destroyed’
Hellis remembered a time not so long ago, when being a woman felt more like a joy and less like a burden.
“Women are now deprived of everything, no clothes, no bathroom. Their psychology is completely destroyed,” she said.
Seyam said the center has tracked cases where girls have been married younger, before the age of 18, to escape the suffocating environment of their family’s tents. The war will “continue to cause a humanitarian disaster in every sense of the word. And women always pay the biggest price,” she said.
Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, over half of them women and children, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Its count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
Israel launched its assault in retaliation for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on southern Israel, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and abducted around 250 others.
With large swaths of Gaza’s cities and towns leveled, women wrestle with reduced lives in their tents.
Hamami can walk the length of her small tent in a few strides. She shares it with 13 other people from her extended family. During the war, she gave birth to a son, Ahmed, who is now 8 months old. Between caring for him and her two other children, washing her family’s laundry, cooking and waiting in line for water, she says there’s no time to care for herself.
She has a few objects that remind her of what her life once was, including a powder compact she brought with her when she fled her home in the Shati camp of Gaza City. The makeup is now caked and crumbling. She managed to keep hold of a small mirror through four different displacements over the past year. It’s broken into two shards that she holds together every so often to catch a glimpse of her reflection.
“Previously, I had a wardrobe that contained everything I could wish for,” she said. “We used to go out for a walk every day, go to wedding parties, go to parks, to malls, to buy everything we wanted.”
Women “lost their being and everything in this war,” she said. “Women used to take care of themselves before the war. Now everything is destroyed.”
