Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque receives record number of worshipers
The surge of worshippers came in anticipation of Laylat Al-Qadr
Updated 07 April 2024
Arab News
DUBAI: The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi witnessed a record-breaking attendance on the 27th night of Ramadan (Saturday), attracting 70,000 worshippers for prayers, Emirates News Agency reported.
The surge of worshippers came in anticipation of Laylat Al-Qadr, a sacred night in the Islamic calendar, which commemorates the night on which the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
Although its exact date is not known, it is believed to fall on one of the odd-numbered nights of the last 10 days of Ramadan.
To accommodate the influx of people, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Center implemented extensive preparations, collaborating with various governmental bodies.
Among the services provided were 33,500 iftar meals and an increase in the availability of water bottles.
It also introduced more than 70 electric vehicles for transporting worshippers from parking areas to prayer spaces and arranged special prayer sections for women, with the mosque’s courtyard also being carpeted for the occasion.
Anticipating a high turnout, the center also increased the parking capacity by 1,800 spots, totaling 8,379 spaces.
A shuttle bus service, coordinated with the Integrated Transport Center, was established to ease the flow of traffic around the mosque and its access points.
The volunteer workforce was significantly expanded to more than 580 people, encompassing members of the Emirates Red Crescent, the “Absher Ya Watan” volunteer team, police, paramedics, civil defense staff, and additional support personnel.
The surge of worshippers also extended beyond the capital, with the Sheikh Khalifa Grand Mosque in Al-Ain and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Fujairah also receiving 28,850 and 13,634 worshippers, respectively.
Israeli military says sirens sound in central Israel
Updated 02 November 2024
CAIRO: The Israeli military said in the early hours of Saturday that sirens sound in a number of areas in central Israel following launches that crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory.
Deaths of 10 newborns shake millions’ trust in Turkiye’s health care system
Turkish prosecutors have accused 47 doctors and other medical workers of neglect or malpractice in the deaths of 10 newborns since last year
Prosecutors say that the evidence clearly shows medical fraud for profit, although they haven’t said how much the defendants allegedly earned
Updated 02 November 2024
AP
ANKARA, Turkiye: The mother thought her baby looked healthy when he was born 1.5 months early, but staff swiftly whisked him to the neonatal intensive care unit.
It was the last time Burcu Gokdeniz would see her baby alive. The doctor in charge told her that Umut Ali’s heart stopped after his health deteriorated unexpectedly.
Seeing her son wrapped in a shroud 10 days after he was born was the “worst moment” of her life, the 32-year-old e-commerce specialist told The Associated Press.
Gokdeniz is among hundreds of parents who have come forward seeking an investigation into the deaths of their children or other loved ones since Turkish prosecutors accused 47 doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers and other medical workers of neglect or malpractice in the deaths of 10 newborns since last year.
Turkiye guarantees all citizens health care through a system that includes both private and state institutions: The government reimburses private hospitals that treat eligible patients when the public system is overwhelmed.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party, in power since 2002, has promoted the expansion of private health care facilities to improve access in the country of 85 million people. The case of the newborn deaths has put for-profit health care for the country’s most vulnerable — newborns — into the most horrifying light imaginable.
The medical workers say they made the best possible decisions while caring for the most delicate patients imaginable, and now face criminal penalties for unavoidable unwanted outcomes.
Shattered parents say they have lost trust in the system and the cases have prompted so much outrage that demonstrators staged protests in October outside hospitals where some of the deaths occurred, hurling stones at the buildings.
After the scandal emerged, at least 350 families petitioned prosecutors, the Health Ministry or the president’s office seeking an investigation into the deaths of their loved ones, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.
In this photo provided by the Eskici family, Eymen, the newborn son of Ozan Eskici and Ebru Eskici, lays in an incubator in the now closed Istanbul's Reyap Hospital neonatal intensive care unit in April 2019. (Eskici family via AP)
The prosecution’s case
Prosecutors are demanding up to 583 years in prison for the main defendant, Dr. Firat Sari, who operated the neonatal intensive care units of several hospitals in Istanbul. Sari is charged with “establishing an organization with the aim of committing a crime,” “defrauding public institutions,” “forgery of official documents” and “homicide by negligence.”
Prosecutors say that the evidence clearly shows medical fraud for profit, although they haven’t said how much the defendants allegedly earned. An indictment issued this month accused the defendants of falsifying records, and placing patients in the neonatal care units of some private hospitals for prolonged and sometimes unnecessary treatments in facilities unprepared to treat them.
The indictment and the testimonies of nurses who have come forward suggest that the newborns were sometimes transferred to hospitals that were understaffed and had outdated equipment or insufficient medicine.
The indictment and testimonies also claim that the defendants withheld treatment and gave false reports to parents in order to keep hospital stays long as possible and to embezzle the social security system out of more money. The indictment alleges that the long-term stays coupled with patient mistreatment resulted in babies’ deaths.
The prosecutor’s office included hundreds of pages of transcripts of audio recordings in the indictment but the recordings themselves were not made available to the public.
In one of the transcripts, a nurse and a doctor talk about how they mishandled the treatement of a baby and agree to fake the the hospital record. The transcript describes the nurse as saying: “Let me write in the file the situation worsened, and the baby was intubated.”
Suspect Hakan Dogukan Tasci — a male nurse — is described as accusing Sari of compromising patient care by leaving just him in charge at the hospital instead of having a doctor present in the intensive care unit.
Tasci is also described as accusing an ambulance driver, who is among the 47 who have been charged in the scandal, of transferring babies to some hospitals for “profit.”
“He does not check whether the hospital is suitable for these newborn babies or not, he risks the lives of the babies and sends them to hospitals just to make money,” the indictment quotes the male nurse as saying.
In an interview with the Turkish newspaper BirGun, Dr. Esin Koc, president of the Turkiye Neonatology Association, said that the private hospitals in the indictment most likely had “insufficient staff.”
“They made it seem like there were doctors who didn’t exist,” she told BirGun.
She said that her association conducted inspections of the neonatal intensive care units of private, state and university hospitals in about 40 hospitals in 2017 and while university and state hospitals were good, “there were problems in private hospitals at that time.” Years without a family, then a death
After years of fertility treatment, Ozan Eskici and his wife welcomed twins — a boy and a girl — to one of Sari’s hospitals in 2019. Although the babies initially appeared to be healthy, both were admitted to intensive care. The girl was discharged after 11 days, but the boy died 24 days later.
During questioning by prosecutors, Sari denied accusations that the babies were not given the proper care, that the neonatal units were understaffed or that his employees were not appropriately qualified, according to a 1,400-page indictment.
He told prosecutors: “Everything is in accordance with procedures.”
This week, a court in Istanbul approved the indictment and scheduled the trial date for Nov. 18 in a case that whose defendants are increasingly isolated.
Lawyer Ali Karaoglan said he and two other attorneys who represented Sari during the investigation have recently withdrawn from the case. And authorities have since revoked the licenses and closed nine of the 19 hospitals implicated in the scandal, including one owned by a former health minister.
The scandal has led main opposition party leader Ozgur Ozel to call for all hospitals involved to be seized by the state and nationalized. Erdogan said those responsible for the deaths would be severely punished but warned against placing all blame on the country’s health care system.
“We will not allow our health care community to be battered because of a few rotten apples,” Erdogan said, calling the alleged culprits “a gang of people devoid of humanity.”
“This gang ... committed such despicable atrocities by exploiting the facilities provided by our state to ensure citizens with higher quality and more accessible, affordable health care,” Erdogan said. No more trust in the system
Gokdeniz, who gave birth in 2020, said she trusted Sari and accepted her son’s death as natural until she watched the scandal unfold in TV news and on social media.
“It all started to fall into place like dominoes,” she said.
Eskici, too, had placed complete trust in Sari, whose assurances he now views as cruel deceptions.
“The sentences he told me are in front of my eyes like it was yesterday,” he said.
Sibel Kosal, who lost her baby daughter Zeynep at a private hospital in 2017, is also seeking answers. She says the scandal has shattered her trust in the health care system and left her in constant fear for her surviving children.
“They have ruined a dad and a mom,” she said.
Kosal pleaded to the authorities to take immediate action.
“Don’t let babies die, don’t let mothers cry,” she said. “We want a livable world, one where our children are safe.”
Head of UN-backed team of experts cites RSF paramilitaries in Sudan for sexual violence as war rages
The fact-finding mission on Tuesday released a more comprehensive version of its report presented in September to the rights council
Earlier this week, the UN migration agency said 14 million people have been displaced either within Sudan or abroad because of the conflict
Updated 02 November 2024
AP
GENEVA: The head of a UN-backed fact-finding team looking into human rights violations and abuses in Sudan said Friday it found the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces responsible for large-scale sexual violence in areas that it controls.
Mohamed Chande Othman has denounced “staggering violence” in Sudan since war broke out more than 18 months ago between the Sudanese military and the RSF, starting with open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, that later spread across the country.
“We said in our report that we attribute sexual gender-based violence to RSF in West Darfur, in Darfur, in greater Khartoum, and in Al-Gezira (state),” the Tanzanian lawyer said Friday by phone from Zimbabwe, where he was attending a conference.
However, Othman said a renewed mandate from the UN Human Rights Council would allow his team of independent experts to investigate “credible” allegations of sexual exploitation by the Sudanese armed forces as well.
Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions including western Darfur. The war has killed more than 24,000 people so far, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a group monitoring the conflict since it started.
Infographic courtesy of UN International Migration Office
The fact-finding mission on Tuesday released a more comprehensive version of its report presented in September to the rights council, which has 47 member countries. The broader report cited gang rapes, sexual slavery and the abduction of victims in areas the RSF controls.
“It’s important to highlight the horrendous nature and the widespread nature — the patterns of violence — that were committed,” Othman said.
His team found the sexual violence and allegations of enforced marriages and human trafficking across borders for sexual purposes took place mostly during invasions of towns and cities.
“Victims and witnesses consistently reported that perpetrators threatened them with weapons, including firearms, knives and whips to intimidate and coerce them,” the latest report said, citing violence like punching, beatings with sticks, and lashing before and during rape.
“Men and boys were also reportedly targeted while in detention with sexual violence, including rape, threats of rape, forced nudity and beating on the genitals, requiring further investigation,” it added.
The violence in Sudan has been unrelenting. On Sunday, a doctors group and the United Nations reported that RSF fighters in east central Sudan’s Jazirah state carried out a multi-day attack that killed more than 120 people in one town.
On Tuesday, the UN migration agency said 14 million people — or over 30 percent of the country’s population — have been displaced either within Sudan or abroad because of the conflict, making it the world’s largest displacement crisis.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the RSF attacks in Jazirah and the appalling reports of a large number of killings, detentions and acts of sexual violence against women and girls as well as the looting of homes and markets, and the burning of farms, his spokesman said.
“Such acts may constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. “Perpetrators of such serious violations must be held accountable.”
The UN chief reiterated his call for a ceasefire, expressed alarm at the worsening humanitarian situation in Sudan and demanded that all parties facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid, Dujarric said.
UN chief condemns Sudan’s RSF, Britain to push for Security Council action
The current war has produced waves of ethnically driven violence blamed largely on RSF paramilitaries
Activists accused the RSF of killing at least 124 people in a village in El Gezira State last month
Updated 02 November 2024
Reuters AFP
UNITED NATIONS: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned on Friday reported attacks on civilians by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces as Britain said it would push for a UN Security Council resolution on the more than 18-month long conflict.
War erupted in mid-April 2023 from a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule, and triggered the world’s largest displacement crisis.
The current war has produced waves of ethnically driven violence blamed largely on the RSF. The RSF has allegedly killed at least 124 people in a village in El Gezira State last month, activists said, in one of the conflict’s deadliest incidents.
The RSF has accused the army of arming civilians in Gezira. The RSF has previously denied harming civilians in Sudan and attributed the activity to rogue actors.
Guterres was appalled by “reports of large numbers of civilians being killed, detained and displaced, acts of sexual violence against women and girls, the looting of homes and markets and the burning of farms,” said a UN spokesperson.
“Such acts may constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Perpetrators of such serious violations must be held accountable,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.
Sudanese people fleeing the Jazirah district arrive at a camp for the displaced in the eastern city of Gedaref on October 31, 2024. (AFP)
ritain, which assumed the presidency on Friday of the Security Council for November, said the 15-member body would meet on Sudan on Nov. 12 to discuss “scaling up aid delivery and ensuring greater protection of civilians by all sides.”
“We will be shortly introducing a draft Security Council resolution ... to drive forward progress on this,” Britain’s UN Ambassador Barbara Woodward told a press conference.
She said the draft would focus on “developing a compliance mechanism for the warring parties commitments they made on the protection of civilians in Jeddah over a year ago in 2023 and ways to support mediation efforts to deliver a ceasefire, even if we start local ceasefires before moving to a national one.”
A resolution needs at least 9 votes in favor and no vetoes by the US, France, Britain, Russia or China to be adopted.
The move comes as a three-month approval given by Sudanese authorities for the UN and aid groups to use the Adre border crossing with Chad to reach Darfur with humanitarian assistance is due to expire in mid-November.
The Sudanese army-backed government is committed to facilitate aid deliveries across the country, including in areas controlled by the RSF, Sudan’s UN Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith Mohamed said on Monday.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said on Monday that it was up to the Sudanese government to decide on whether the Adre crossing would remain open beyond mid-November and that it would be “inappropriate to put pressure on” the government.
“We’re categorically opposed to the politicization of humanitarian assistance,” he said. “We believe that any humanitarian assistance should be conducted and delivered solely with the central authorities in the loop.”
The UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs said more than 119,000 people had fled from the recent surge of violence in El Gezira state. The Rapid Support Forces launched their latest attacks there after a high-ranking officer from the area switched sides to the army.
War has raged in Sudan since April 2023 between the army under Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and paramilitary forces led by his former deputy Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo.
The conflict has killed up to 150,000 people, displaced nearly eight million and caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than half the population face acute hunger.
Israel is falling far short of a US ultimatum to surge aid to Gaza
In a letter earlier, US officials demanded that Israel allow in a minimum of 350 trucks a day carrying desperately needed food and other supplies
By the end of October, an average of just 71 trucks a day were entering Gaza, according to the latest UN figures
Updated 02 November 2024
AP
WASHINGTON: Halfway through the Biden administration’s 30-day ultimatum for Israel to surge the level of humanitarian assistance allowed into Gaza or risk possible restrictions on US military funding, Israel is falling far short, an Associated Press review of UN and Israeli data shows.
Israel also has missed some other deadlines and demands outlined in a Oct. 13 letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The mid-November deadline — following the US election — may serve as a final test of President Joe Biden ‘s willingness to check a close ally that has shrugged off repeated US appeals to protect Palestinian civilians during the war against Hamas.
In their letter, Blinken and Austin demanded improvements to the deteriorating humanitarian condition in Gaza, saying that Israel must allow in a minimum of 350 trucks a day carrying desperately needed food and other supplies. By the end of October, an average of just 71 trucks a day were entering Gaza, according to the latest UN figures.
Blinken said the State Department and Pentagon were closely following Israel’s response to the letter, including speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top aide on Friday.
“There’s been progress, but it’s insufficient, and we’re working on a daily basis to make sure Israel does what it must do to ensure that this assistance gets to people who need it inside of Gaza,” Blinken told reporters Thursday.
“It’s not enough to get trucks to Gaza. It’s vital that what they bring with them can get distributed effectively inside of Gaza,” he added.
Blinken and Austin’s letter marked one of the toughest stands the Biden administration has taken in a year of appeals and warnings to Israel to lessen the harm to Palestinian civilians.
Support for Israel is a bedrock issue for many Republican voters and some Democrats. That makes any Biden administration decision on restricting military funding a fraught one for the tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
In hard-hit north Gaza in particular, an escalated Israeli military campaign and restrictions on aid have kept all food and other care from reaching populated areas since mid-October, aid organizations say. It could set the stage for famine in coming weeks or months, international monitors say.
Leaders of 15 UN and humanitarian groups, including the World Food Program and World Health Organization, warned Friday that “the situation unfolding in north Gaza is apocalyptic.”
And despite US objections, Israeli lawmakers this week voted effectively to ban the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. Governments worldwide, the UN and aid organizations say cutting off UNRWA would shatter the aid networks struggling to get food and other supplies to people in Gaza.
“Catastrophic,” Amber Alayyan, a medical program manager for Gaza at Doctors Without Borders, said of the move.
Humanitarian officials are deeply skeptical Israel will significantly improve assistance to Gaza’s civilians even with the US warning — or that the Biden administration will do anything if it doesn’t.
At this point in the war, “neither of those has happened,” said Scott Paul, an associate director of the Oxfam humanitarian organization.
“Over and over and again, we’ve been told” by Biden administration officials “that there are processes to evaluate the situation on the ground” in Gaza “and some movement’s been made to implement US law, and time and again that has not happened,” Paul said.
Before the war, an average of 500 trucks daily brought aid into the territory. Relief groups have said that’s the minimum needed for Gaza’s 2.3 million people, most of whom have since been uprooted from their homes, often multiple times.
There has never been a month where Israel came close to meeting that figure since the conflict began, peaking in April at 225 trucks a day, according to Israeli government figures.
By the time Blinken and Austin sent their letter this month, concerns were rising that aid restrictions were starving civilians. The number of aid trucks that Israel has allowed into Gaza has plunged since last spring and summer, falling to a daily average of just 13 a day by the beginning of October, according to UN figures.
By the end of the month, it rose to an average of 71 trucks a day, the UN figures show.
Once supplies get to Gaza, groups still face obstacles distributing the aid to warehouses and then to people in need, organizations and the State Department said this week. That includes slow Israeli processing, Israeli restrictions on shipments, lawlessness and other obstacles, aid groups said.
Data from COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of humanitarian aid to Gaza, shows aid has fallen to under a third of its levels in September and August. In September, 87,446 tons of aid entered the Gaza Strip. In October, 26,399 tons got in.
Elad Goren, a senior COGAT official, said last week that aid delivery and distribution in the north have been mainly confined to Gaza City.
When asked why aid was not being delivered to other parts of the north — like Jabaliya, a crowded urban refugee camp where Israel is staging an offensive — he said the population there was being evacuated and those who remained had “enough assistance” from previous months.
In other areas like Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, Goren claimed falsely there was “no population” left.
COGAT declined to comment on the standard in the US letter. It said it was complying with government directives on aid to Gaza. Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon blamed Hamas for plundering aid.
Paul of Oxfam said no aid at all was reaching populated areas in northern Gaza and only small amounts were getting to Gaza City.
“No way” has Israel made progress in getting humanitarian support to the hundreds of thousands of people in north Gaza in particular since the US ultimatum, said Alayyan of Doctors Without Borders.
Israel’s government appeared to blow past another deadline set in Austin and Blinken’s letter. It called for Israel to set up a senior-level channel for US officials to raise concerns about reported harm to Palestinian civilians and hold a first meeting by the end of October.
No such channel — requested repeatedly by the US during the war — had been created by the final day of the month.
The US is by far the biggest provider of arms and other military aid to Israel, including nearly $18 billion during the war in Gaza, according to a study for Brown University’s Costs of War project.
The Biden administration paused a planned shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel last spring, citing concerns for civilians in an Israeli offensive.
In a formal review in May, the administration concluded that Israel’s use of US-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law but said wartime conditions prevented officials from determining that for certain in specific strikes.
