Syria says restoring ties with Ankara depends on Turkish troop withdrawal/node/2549086/middle-east
Syria says restoring ties with Ankara depends on Turkish troop withdrawal
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday announced the imminent end to the Turkish forces' operation against Kurdish PKK fighters in northern Iraq and Syria. (AFP/File)
Syria says restoring ties with Ankara depends on Turkish troop withdrawal
The statement came days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he might invite Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad to Turkiye
Earlier on Saturday Erdogan went further when he announced the imminent end to the Turkish forces’ operation against Kurdish fighters
Updated 13 July 2024
AFP
DAMASCUS: Syria’s foreign ministry said Saturday a normalization of ties with neighboring Turkiye depended on Ankara withdrawing troops from its territory.
The statement came days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he might invite Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad to Turkiye to try and reconcile ties between the two countries that went sour after war broke out in Syria in 2011.
And earlier on Saturday Erdogan went further when he announced the imminent end to the Turkish forces’ operation against Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and Syria.
Turkiye has launched successive offensives across the border in Syria to expel Kurdish forces from border areas in northern Syria, with pro-Turkish forces controlling two vast border areas of northern Syria.
Erdogan supported early rebel efforts to topple Assad at the start of the war in 2011, but reversed course in recent years, with top officials from both countries meeting in Russian-mediated talks.
Earlier this month Erdogan pointed to a possible meeting with Assad in Turkiye “at any moment.”
“Now we have come to such a point that as soon as Bashar Assad takes a step toward improving relations with Turkiye, we will show him the same approach,” Erdogan said Sunday.
The foreign ministry in Damascus, in its statement of Saturday, said that any bid to restore ties between Syria and Turkiye “must be built on clear foundations that ensure the desired results... foremost of which is the withdrawal of illegally present forces from the Syrian territory, and the fight against terrorist groups that threaten not only Syria’s security, but also the security of Turkiye.”
Diplomatic ties between the two countries were severed at the start of the war in Syria, which erupted after a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests.
It has spiralled into a devastating war involving foreign armies and militants, and killed more than half a million people.
Deadly Israeli strike on Gaza school draws global condemnation
UN chief Antonio Guterres branded the strike “totally unacceptable”
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was “outraged” by the deaths
Updated 6 sec ago
AFP
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Israel faced international condemnation Thursday after a strike killed 18 people at a school-turned-shelter for displaced Palestinians in war-torn Gaza, where the Israeli military said it targeted Hamas militants.
The attack flattened part of the UN-run Al-Jawni school in Nuseirat on Wednesday, leaving only a charred heap of rebar and concrete.
“For the fifth time, Israeli forces bombed the UNRWA-run Al-Jawni School, killing 18 citizens,” Gaza civil defense spokesperson Mahmud Bassal wrote on Telegram, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA later said six of its staff had been killed in two Israeli strikes on the school and its surroundings, calling it the highest death toll among its team in a single incident.
“Among those killed was the manager of the UNRWA shelter and other team members providing assistance to displaced people,” it said on X. “Schools and other civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times, they are not a target.”
The Israeli military said it had conducted a “precise strike” on Hamas militants within the school grounds. It did not elaborate on the outcome, but said “numerous steps” were taken to reduce the risk to civilians.
UN chief Antonio Guterres branded the strike “totally unacceptable.”
His condemnation was echoed by Israeli ally Germany, which said “humanitarian aid workers must never be victims of rockets.”
Jordan and the European Union also criticized the attack, while Israel’s main backer the United States called on it to protect humanitarian sites.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was “outraged” by the deaths and that the strikes showed a “disregard of the basic principles” of international humanitarian law.
US Secretary of State Blinken said: “We need to see humanitarian sites protected, and that’s something that we continue to raise with Israel.”
Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said UNRWA had not provided the names of its killed workers, “despite repeated requests.”
He said a military inquiry found that “a significant number of the names (of the dead) that have appeared in the media and on social networks are Hamas terrorist operatives.”
In response, UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma said the agency was “not aware of any such requests,” that it provided Israel each year with a list of its staff and that it “called repeatedly” on Israel and Palestinian militants “to never use civilian facilities for military or fighting purposes.”
She said the agency was “not in a position to determine” if the school had been used by Hamas for military purposes, but UNRWA had “repeatedly called for independent investigations” into “these very serious claims.”
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said the school was “no longer a school” and had become “a legitimate target” as it was used by Hamas to launch attacks.
UNRWA, which coordinates nearly all aid into Gaza, has been in crisis since Israel accused a dozen of its 30,000 employees of being involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks that sparked the war.
The UN immediately fired the implicated staff members, and a probe found some “neutrality related issues” but stressed Israel had not provided evidence for its chief allegations.
Survivors of the strike scrambled to recover bodies and belongings from the rubble, saying they had to step over “shredded limbs.”
“I can hardly stand up,” a man holding a plastic bag of human remains told AFP.
“We’ve been going through hell for 340 days now, what we’ve seen over these days, we haven’t even seen it in Hollywood movies, now we’re seeing it in Gaza.”
UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini said after the school strike that at least 220 members of the agency’s staff had been killed in the war.
“Endless & senseless killing, day after day,” he posted on X.
“Humanitarian staff, premises & operations have been blatantly & unabatedly disregarded since the beginning of the war.”
Across Gaza, many school buildings have been repurposed to shelter displaced families, with the vast majority of the territory’s 2.4 million people repeatedly uprooted by the war.
In Gaza City, civil defense spokesman Bassal said two strikes in the Zeitun neighborhood killed seven people — including two children.
Later, he said two people were killed in the Jabalia camp. Medical sources said five people were killed in strikes on the Khan Yunis area.
The bloodshed shows no signs of abating despite months of ceasefire negotiations mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.
A Hamas delegation met Qatari and Egyptian mediators in Doha on Wednesday, the Palestinian Islamists said, though there was no indication of a breakthrough.
The October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Among the dead included in that count were hostages killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliation has killed at least 41,118 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
As war rages in Gaza, Israel’s crackdown on West Bank insurgency is killing Palestinian youths
More than 150 teens and children 17 or younger have been killed in the embattled territory since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel
Most died in nearly daily raids by the Israeli army that Amnesty International says have used disproportionate and unlawful force
Updated 13 September 2024
AP
JENIN, West Bank: As the world’s attention focuses on the deadly war in Gaza, less than 80 miles away scores of Palestinian teens have been killed, shot and arrested in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has waged a monthslong crackdown.
More than 150 teens and children 17 or younger have been killed in the embattled territory since Hamas’ brutal attack on communities in southern Israel set off the war last October. Most died in nearly daily raids by the Israeli army that Amnesty International says have used disproportionate and unlawful force.
Amjad Hamadneh lost son Mahmoud when the 15-year-old’s school dismissed students at the start of a May raid.
Amjad Hamadneh tapes a photograph to the grave of his son, Mahmoud, who was killed by an Israeli sniper on his way home from school in Jenin, West Bank, on June 5, 2024. (AP)
“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Amjad Hamadneh, whose son, a buzz-cut devotee of computer games, was one of two teens killed that morning by a sniper.
“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he was taken just as easily as water going down your throat. He only had his books and a pencil case.”
It is clear from statements by the Israeli military, insurgents and families in the West Bank that a number of the Palestinian teens killed in recent months were members of militant groups.
Many others were killed during protests or when they or someone nearby threw rocks or homemade explosives at military vehicles. Still others appear to have been random targets. Taken together, the killings raise troubling questions about the devaluation of young lives in pursuit of security and autonomy.
The Israeli army said in a statement to The Associated Press that it has stepped up raids since Oct. 7 to apprehend militants suspected of carrying out attacks in the West Bank and that “the absolute majority of those killed during this period were armed or involved in terrorist activities at the time of the incident.”
On the June afternoon that 17-year-old Issa Jallad was killed, video from a neighbor’s security camera shows, he was on a friend’s motorbike with an Israeli armored vehicle in close pursuit. Days later, a poster outside his family’s home in Jenin showed him cradling an assault rifle and declared him a holy warrior.
But the grainy tape, reviewed by AP days after the raid, and others from nearby cameras do not explain where he fit in the conflict. The Israeli army said that its soldiers had spotted two militants handling a powerful explosive device. When the pair tried to flee, troops opened fire and “neutralized them.”
But an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, says its review of multiple security camera videos showed Jallad and his friend posed no threat.
“We all expected to be in this situation,” said the teen’s brother, Mousa Jallad. “It could happen to any of us.”
Jenin’s refugee camp has long been notorious as a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, raided repeatedly by Israeli forces who have occupied the West Bank since seizing control in their 1967 war with neighboring Arab states.
The embattled territory was already seeing deadly clashes before the war began. But Israeli forces, which police about 3 million Palestinians while assigned to protect 500,000 Jewish settlers, has significantly stepped up raids in the months since.
Youths represent almost a quarter of the nearly 700 Palestinians slain in the West Bank since the war began, the most since the violent uprising known as the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. More than 20 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in the territory since October.
A military spokesman said the Israeli army makes great efforts to avoid harming civilians during raids and “does not target civilians, period.” He said human rights groups focus on a few outlier cases.
Military operations in the West Bank are fraught because forces are pursuing militants, many in their teens, who often hide among the civilian population, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.
“In many cases many of them are 15, 16 years old who are not wearing uniforms and might surprise you with a gun, with a knife,” he said.
Critics say the crackdown is shaped by retribution, not only military strategy.
When sirens erupted at the start of the May raid, Amjad Hamadneh says, he called Mahmoud on his cellphone and was relieved to hear that the brothers had reached their school. But then Mahmoud’s twin brother, Ahmed, called back to say that the principal had dismissed classes. As students poured into the street, the brothers were separated in the chaos.
Young Palestinian refugees walk past a damaged vehicle in the West Bank refugee camp of Tulkarem on Sept. 12, 2024. (AP)
Four bullets hit Mahmoud as he fled, and another pierced his skull. He was the third student from his school killed in a raid since the war began.
A former classmate, Osama Hajjir, who had dropped out of school to work, was also killed, along with a teacher from a nearby school and a doctor from the hospital down the street.
“Now when I hear the sound of sirens I go to my room and stay there,” says Karam Miazneh, another classmate, who was shot during the raid but survived. “I’m still in fear that they will come to shoot me and kill me.”
Immediately after the May raid, a spokesman for the army said it had carried out the operation with Israeli border police and the country’s internal security agency, destroying an explosive device laboratory and other structures used by militants. But police recently declined to comment, and three weeks after the AP asked the military to answer questions about the May raid, an army spokesman said he was unable to comment until he could confer with police.
When Amjad Hamadneh heard his son had been wounded, he sped through Jenin’s twisting streets, drawing gunfire as he neared the hospital. But Mahmoud was already gone.
Nearby, Osama’s father, Muhamad, broke down as he leaned over his son’s body. Months earlier he’d snapped a photo of the smiling teen beside graffiti touting Jenin as “the factory of men,” tirelessly cranking out fighters in the resistance against Israel. Now, he pressed that same, still-smooth face between his hands.
“Oh, my son. Oh, my son,” he sobbed. “My beautiful son.”
Since Mahmoud Hamadneh was killed, his siblings ask frequently to visit his grave. His younger sister now sleeps in his bed so her surviving brother, Ahmed, will not be in the room alone.
“I feel like I cannot breathe. We used to do everything together,” Ahmed says. His father listens closely, despairing later that such grief could drive the teen into militancy. If the risk is so clear to a Palestinian father, he says, why don’t Israeli soldiers see it?
“They think that if they kill us that people will be afraid and not do anything,” he says. “But when the Israelis kill someone, 10 fighters will be created in his place.”
Three police killed in Iran, jihadists claim responsibility
Updated 13 September 2024
AFP
TEHRAN: Three police officers were killed Thursday in southeastern Iran in an attack claimed by a jihadist group that is active in the region, the country’s official news agency said.
“Three members of the police forces were killed and a civilian injured in an attack carried out by armed criminals in Mirjaveh in Sistan and Baluchestan province,” the IRNA news agency said.
Sistan and Baluchestan, one of the poorest regions in Iran, is mostly inhabited by the minority Baloch community, who largely practice Sunni Islam in a country where the theocratic government is staunchly Shiite.
The officers were attacked at a petrol station, IRNA said.
The Pakistani-based Sunni jihadist group Jaish Al-Adl, which means Army of Justice in Arabic, claimed responsibility for the attack in a post on Telegram.
The same group claimed responsibility for an attack last month that killed the head of the criminal investigation department in the city of Khash in Sistan and Baluchestan province.
Jaish Al-Adl also claimed two attacks in April in the region that saw 10 members of the security forces killed.
Israel intelligence unit chief quits over October 7 failure
Israeli army statement: ‘The commander of the 8200 unit, (Brig. General) Yossi Sariel, has informed his commanders and subordinates of his intention to end his position’
Public broadcaster Kan disclosed the existence of an intelligence brief prepared by Unit 8200 in Sept. 2023 that warned military officials of Hamas’s preparations for the attack
Updated 12 September 2024
AFP
JERUSALEM: The Israeli army said on Thursday that the head of an elite intelligence unit will resign over the failure to prevent Hamas’s October 7 attack.
“The commander of the 8200 unit, (Brig. General) Yossi Sariel, has informed his commanders and subordinates of his intention to end his position,” the army said in a statement.
“The officer will conclude his role in the near future.”
The prestigious and secretive Unit 8200 is in charge of decoding and analizing intercepts and other signals intelligence.
In the wake of October 7, Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate was thrown into a crisis that led to its commander, Major General Aharon Haliva, announcing his resignation in April 2024.
The army said then that Haliva had asked to be relieved of his duties for the directorate’s failure to foil the October 7 attack.
Israeli media on Thursday broadcast a copy of Sariel’s resignation letter in which he asked for “forgiveness” for “not fulfilling the mission we were entrusted with” on October 7.
In June, public broadcaster Kan disclosed the existence of an intelligence brief prepared by Unit 8200 in September 2023 that warned military officials of Hamas’s preparations for the attack.
Kan said the Unit 8200 document included details of elite Hamas fighters training for hostage-taking and plans for raids on military positions and Israeli communities in southern Israel.
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Included in that count are hostages who were killed in captivity.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 41,118 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to open an official inquiry into October 7 until the war in Gaza is over.
Libyan factions have not reached final agreement on central bank crisis, UN Libya Mission says
Libya’s two legislative chambers agreed this month to jointly appoint a central bank governor, potentially defusing a battle for control of the country’s oil revenue
Libyan oil exports fell around 81 percent last week as the National Oil Corporation canceled cargoes amid a crisis over control of Libya’s central bank and oil revenue
Updated 12 September 2024
Reuters
TRIPOLI: The UN Libya mission said on Thursday that Libyan factions did not reach a final agreement in the talks aimed at resolving the central bank crisis that has slashed oil output and exports.
The two-day consultations to solve the crisis hosted by UNSMIL were between delegates from the Benghazi-based House of Representatives, the High Council of State and the Presidential Council, which are both based in Tripoli.
However, the Mission statement did not mention the presence of the delegation of the Presidential Council on the second day of the talks.
The Presidential Council, based in Tripoli, had only rarely intervened directly in Libyan politics before its head Mohammed Al-Menfi moved in August to replace veteran central bank Governor Sadiq Al-Kabir, which led eastern factions to order a halt of oil flows across Libyan oilfields in protest.
Libya’s two legislative chambers agreed this month to jointly appoint a central bank governor, potentially defusing a battle for control of the country’s oil revenue.
The Mission welcomed on Thursday the progress made between the two legislative bodies “on the principles and timeline that should govern the interim period leading to the appointment of a new governor and board of directors for the Central Bank.”
Libyan oil exports fell around 81 percent last week, Kpler data showed on Wednesday, as the National Oil Corporation canceled cargoes amid a crisis over control of Libya’s central bank and oil revenue.
