Egypt, Syrian leaders discuss Gaza developments during call
Updated 06 July 2024
Arab News
LONDON: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi on Saturday received a phone call from Syrian President Bashar Assad, during which the two leaders discussed the latest regional developments.
They “exchanged views on the dangers of escalation in the region, and emphasized the vital necessity to prevent the widening of the conflict zone and to preserve regional security and stability,” Ahmed Fahmy, the Egyptian presidential spokesman, said in a statement.
The two leaders stressed their rejection of attempts “to liquidate the Palestinian issue or displace” the Palestinian people.
El-Sisi said that his country will continue to push for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and ensure the sustainable delivery of humanitarian aid to meet the needs of the Palestinians, while “pursuing its efforts toward reinforcing the two-state solution and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” Fahmy added.
Fear of ‘lost generation’ as Gaza school year begins with all classes shut
Updated 5 sec ago
CAIRO: The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire. As fighting continued, Israel announced new orders to residents of the north Gaza Strip to leave their homes, in response to rockets fired into Israel. Umm Zaki’s son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin 10th grade. Instead he woke up in their tent in Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometer away. “Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration, seeing the children in the new uniform, going to school, and dreaming of becoming doctors and engineers. Today all we hope is that the war ends before we lose any of them,” the mother of five told Reuters by text message. The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were shut and 90 percent of them had been destroyed or damaged in Israel’s assault on the territory, launched after Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli towns in October last year. The UN Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza’s schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families. “The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labor, and recruitment into armed groups,” UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma told Reuters. In addition to the 625,000 Gazans already registered for school who would be missing classes, another 58,000 six-year-olds should have registered to start first grade this year, the education ministry said. Last month, UNRWA launched a back-to-learning program in 45 of its shelters, with teachers setting up games, drama, arts, music and sports activities to help with children’s mental health.
’THE SPECIFIED AREA HAS BEEN WARNED’ Nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times. In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip they must leave their homes, following the firing of rockets into southern Israel the previous day. “To all those in the specified area. Terrorist organizations are once again firing rockets at the State of Israel and carrying out terrorist acts from this area. The specified area has been warned many times in the past. The specified area is considered a dangerous combat zone,” an Israeli military spokesperson said in Arabic on X. The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio. Limited pauses in fighting have been held to allow the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory’s first polio case in around 25 years. UN officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the drops. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first. Later on Monday, Touma said 450,000 of the children targeted with the campaign were vaccinated. “Tuesday is the hardest part when we roll out the campaign in the north. Hopefully, that will work so we complete the first stage of the campaign The second and final stage is planned for the end of the month when we have to do all of this all over again,” said Touma. Health officials said on Monday two separate Israeli airstrikes had killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike killed one man in Khan Younis further south. The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they fought against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire. The Israeli military said forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and killed dozens of militants in the past days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders. The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when the Hamas group that ran Gaza attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s health ministry. The two warring sides each blame the other for the failure so far to reach a ceasefire that would end the fighting and see the release of hostages.
RSF paramilitaries kill 31 in Sudanese city of Sennar, activists say
Updated 09 September 2024
Reuters
DUBAI/CAIRO: At least 31 people have been killed and 100 wounded since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces renewed an assault on the city of Sennar in southeastern Sudan on Sunday, a legal activist group said.
Several parts of the city including the main market have been targeted by RSF artillery fire, said Emergency Lawyers, which has monitored civilian deaths and other humanitarian violations.
The progress of the RSF, which already controls most of Sennar and at least half of the country, has slowed in the southeast as heavy rains have made movement difficult.
Its war with Sudan’s army has created the world’s largest hunger and internal displacement crises, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying most of Sudan’s infrastructure and economy.
Emergency Lawyers said the army had killed at least four people in Al-Souki, a town near Sennar, during airstrikes. The RSF killed one person and wounded 17 in artillery strikes on el-Obeid, another town it has struggled to assert full control of.
Both sides in Sudan’s 18-month-old civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, a UN-mandated mission said on Friday, calling for peacekeepers and a country-wide arms embargo.
On Saturday, Sudan’s army-aligned foreign ministry rejected both recommendations, calling the idea of international peacekeepers “the wish of Sudan’s enemies and it will not be fulfilled.”
UN rights chief calls on states to challenge Israel over occupation
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza
Updated 09 September 2024
Reuters
GENEVA: The UN human rights chief said on Monday that ending the nearly year-long war in Gaza is a priority and he asked countries to act on what he called Israel’s “blatant disregard” for international law in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials, since Israel unleashed a military campaign in response to cross-border attacks by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023 in which 1,200 people were killed and a further 250 taken hostage.
“Ending that war and averting a full-blown regional conflict is an absolute and urgent priority,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a speech at the opening of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“States must not – cannot – accept blatant disregard for international law, including binding decisions of the (UN) Security Council and orders of the International Court of Justice, neither in this nor any other situation.”
He cited an opinion released by the UN top court in July that called Israel’s occupation illegal and said this situation must be “comprehensively addressed.” Israel has rejected the opinion and called it one-sided.
Turk’s comments were given in a broad speech marking the mid-way point of his four-year term as UN rights chief where he described massive challenges around the world and a crisis of political leadership.
“In every region around the world, we see deep-seated power dynamics at play to grab or hold on to power, at the expense of universal human rights,” he said at the start of the five-week session where rights violations in Sudan, Afghanistan and Ukraine will also be debated.
Lebanon judge orders warrant of ex-central bank boss Salameh: judicial official
Salameh was long feted as a financial wizard in Lebanon but left office with his reputation shredded by corruption charges at home and abroad
Updated 09 September 2024
Reuters AFP
BEIRUT: A Lebanese judge on Monday issued a formal arrest warrant for former central bank governor Riad Salameh, days after he was taken into custody over alleged embezzlement, a judicial official said.
The investigating judge finished questioning Salameh and “issued an arrest warrant against him,” the official told AFP, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to brief the media.
Salameh ran the central bank for three decades until July 2023.
If the prosecution continues, it would mark a rare case of a serving or retired senior Lebanese official facing accountability in a system which critics say has long shielded the elite.
Salameh was long feted as a financial wizard in Lebanon but left office with his reputation shredded by corruption charges at home and abroad and the catastrophic collapse of Lebanon’s financial system in 2019.
Salameh’s media office has said he will not comment publicly on the case, in line with the law. It said in a statement he had cooperated in the past with more than 20 criminal probes in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, and was cooperating with the investigation after his detention.
Salameh has denied previous corruption charges.
Turkey says its air strikes hit PKK targets in northern Iraq
Updated 09 September 2024
Reuters
ISTANBUL: Turkish air strikes in northern Iraq destroyed 21 targets of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on Monday, Turkey's Defence Ministry said, adding many militants had been "neutralised" in the attack.
Ankara typically uses the term "neutralised" to mean killed.
The operations targeted PKK bases in Gara, Hakurk, Metina and Qandil, the ministry statement said.
