Israel’s Netanyahu says hostage deal could be near for hostages in Gaza

Above, a protester at Ben Gurion International Airport holds a phone displaying an image of Israeli hostage Naama Levy taken during her captivity in Gaza on July 21, 2024. (Reuters)

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Updated 23 July 2024

Reuters

July 23, 2024 08:44

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Israel’s Netanyahu says hostage deal could be near for hostages in Gaza

Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington: ‘The conditions (for a deal) are undoubtedly ripening. This is a good sign’
Efforts to reach a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas have gained momentum over the past month

Updated 23 July 2024

Reuters

July 23, 2024 08:44

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JERUSALEM/CAIRO: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told families of hostages held in Gaza that a deal that would secure their release could be near, his office said on Tuesday, as fighting raged in the battered Palestinian enclave.
Israeli forces pressed on with a new raid into Gaza’s southern area of Khan Younis after ordering civilians to evacuate some districts they said had been used for renewed attacks by Palestinian militants.
Thousands of people were fleeing for safer areas as Israeli airstrikes hit, UN officials said.
Netanyahu is currently in Washington and is expected to meet US President Joe Biden later this week after making an address to Congress.
Speaking in the US capital on Monday to families of hostages, he said: “The conditions (for a deal) are undoubtedly ripening. This is a good sign.”
Efforts to reach a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, outlined by Biden in May and mediated by Egypt and Qatar, have gained momentum over the past month.
“Unfortunately, it will not take place all at once; there will be stages. However, I believe that we can advance the deal and leave us in possession of the leverage to bring about the release of the others (hostages not freed in first stage),” Netanyahu said.
Ruby Chen, the father of dual US-Israeli citizen Itai Chen, a soldier whose body is being held in Gaza, was one of the family members who met with Netanyahu.
“He did say that conditions were ripening but I’m taking that with a pinch of salt,” Chen told Israeli Army Radio.
Chen said he hoped Biden, who on Sunday withdrew his bid for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate in November’s US election, would apply more pressure on Netanyahu to secure the deal.
A Palestinian official close to the mediation effort accused Netanyahu of stalling.
“Hamas has shown the flexibility needed for an agreement to be reached and the ball is in his court,” the official said.
An Israeli negotiation team was due on Thursday to resume talks that would include hostages being released in return for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. In a week-long truce in November, 105 hostages were freed in return for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
The hostages were seized in the Hamas raid into southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which about 1,200 people were killed and around and 250 taken captive, according to Israeli tallies.
Hamas and other militants are still holding 120 hostages, around a third of whom have been declared dead in absentia by Israeli authorities.
The death toll among Palestinians in Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has reached more than 39,000, according to Gaza health authorities in the Hamas-run enclave. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and much of the enclave laid to waste by airstrikes and artillery bombardments.
FEAR AND DISPLACEMENT
In Gaza on Tuesday, Israeli air raids hit the southern city of Khan Younis as Israeli troops and Palestinian militants fought in its shattered streets, forcing civilians to flee.
“Thousands of people on the move again, fleeing strikes & military operations. The situation is impossible. The cycle of fear & displacement has gone on too long. Everyone is exhausted,” the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said on X.
The Israeli military said dozens of militants had been killed in Khan Younis by its tanks and warplanes or in close-quarter combat. Weapon caches and tunnels used by the militants had been destroyed, it said.
Palestinian medics said one person was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the area on Tuesday, after dozens were reported killed by Israeli attacks there on Monday. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Health officials have said most those killed have been civilians.
Further north, in Gaza City, Israeli bombing killed 16 people, medics said.
In Rafah, next to the border with Egypt where Israel has said it was stamping out Hamas’ last units, an Israeli airstrike killed two Palestinians.
Hamas said its fighters were combating Israeli soldiers in Rafah. Residents said tanks have operated in most of the city, but have yet to gain full control of the northern and western areas.

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First flight since Assad’s fall takes off from Damascus airport

Updated 5 sec ago

AFP

December 18, 2024 07:34

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First flight since Assad’s fall takes off from Damascus airport

Updated 5 sec ago

AFP

December 18, 2024 07:34

DAMASCUS: The first flight since the ouster of Syria’s president Bashar Assad took off on Wednesday from Damascus airport to Aleppo in the country’s north, AFP journalists saw.
Thirty-two people including journalists were on board the plane. Assad fled Syria as a lightning rebel offensive wrested from his control city after city. His army and security forces abandoned Damascus airport on December 8.

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Topics: Fall of Assad Damascus Airport flight

Syria ex-HTS military chief says to dissolve armed wing

Updated 11 min 23 sec ago

AFP

December 18, 2024 07:17

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Syria ex-HTS military chief says to dissolve armed wing

Updated 11 min 23 sec ago

AFP

December 18, 2024 07:17

LATAKIA: The military chief of Syria’s victorious Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham said on Tuesday it would be “the
first” to dissolve its armed wing and integrate into the armed forces.
“In any state, all military units must be integrated into this institution,” Murhaf Abu Qasra, known by his nom de guerre Abu Hassan Al-Hamawi, said in an interview with AFP, adding that “we will be, God willing, among the first to take the initiative (to dissolve our armed wing).”
He added that Kurdish-held areas of Syria would be integrated under the country’s new leadership, adding that the group rejects federalism and that “Syria will not be divided.”
“The Kurdish people are one of the components of the Syrian people... Syria will not be divided and there will be no federal entities,” he said.
A US-backed, Kurdish-led administration controls swathes of north and northeastern Syria, and has recently been battling Turkish-backed groups which have captured several Kurdish towns.
Abu Qasra also called on the international community to “find a solution” to repeated Israeli strikes and an “incursion” into Syrian territory.
“We view the Israeli strikes on military sites and the incursion into southern Syria as injust... we call on the international community to find a solution to this matter,” he said.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on Syrian military assets in what it says is a bid to prevent them falling into hostile hands.
It has also sent troops into the UN-patrolled buffer zone on the Golan Heights.
Abu Qasra also called on Western governments to lift the “terrorist” designation from HTS and its leader Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed Al-Sharaa.
“We call on the United States and all countries to lift this designation... on his person and the whole group,” he said, describing it as “unjust” and saying that the group “will ultimately be integrated into state institutions.”
The radical Sunni Islamist group has been proscribed as a terrorist organization by Western governments including the United States and Britain.
It has recently sought to moderate its rhetoric and assure the international community that religious and other minorities will be protected.

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Sudan’s doctors bear brunt of war as healthcare falls apart

Women with children wait for medical care at the Italian Paediatric Hospital in Port Sudan on October 8, 2024. (AFP)

Updated 18 December 2024

AFP

December 18, 2024 04:44

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Sudan’s doctors bear brunt of war as healthcare falls apart

The violence has turned the country's hospitals into battlegrounds, placing health workers like Moussa on the frontlines

Updated 18 December 2024

AFP

December 18, 2024 04:44

CAIRO, Egypt: Sudanese doctor Mohamed Moussa has grown so accustomed to the constant sound of gunfire and shelling near his hospital that it no longer startles him. Instead, he simply continues attending to his patients.
"The bombing has numbed us," the 30-year-old general practitioner told AFP by phone from Al-Nao hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in Omdurman, part of greater Khartoum.
Gunfire rattles in the distance, warplanes roar overhead and nearby shelling makes the ground tremble, more than a year and a half into a grinding war between rival Sudanese generals.
Embattled health workers "have no choice but to continue", said Moussa.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a war between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The war has killed tens of thousands and uprooted 12 million people, creating what the International Rescue Committee aid group has called the "biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded".
The violence has turned the country's hospitals into battlegrounds, placing health workers like Moussa on the frontlines.
Inside Al-Nao's overwhelmed wards, the conflict's toll is staggering.
Doctors say they tend to a harrowing array of injuries: gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen, severe burns, shattered bones and amputations -- even among children as young as four months.
The hospital itself has not been spared.
Deadly shelling has repeatedly hit its premises, according to medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) which has supported the Al-Nao hospital.
Elsewhere, the situation is just as dire. In North Darfur, a recent drone attack killed nine at the state capital's main hospital, while shelling forced MSF to evacuate its field hospital in a famine-hit refugee camp.

Sudan's healthcare system, already struggling before the war, has now all but crumbled.
Of the 87 hospitals in Khartoum state, nearly half suffered visible damage between the start of the war and August 26 this year, according to satellite imagery provided and analysed by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab and the Sudanese American Physicians Association.
As of October, the World Health Organization had documented 119 confirmed attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan.
"There is a complete disregard for civilian protection," said Kyle McNally, MSF's humanitarian affairs advisor.
He told AFP that an ongoing "broad-spectrum attack on healthcare" includes "widespread physical destruction, which then reduces services to the floor -- literally and figuratively".
The national doctors' union estimates that in conflict zones across Sudan, up to 90 percent of medical facilities have been forced shut, leaving millions without access to essential care.
Both sides of the conflict have been implicated in attacks on healthcare facilities.
The medical union said that 78 health workers have been killed since the war began, by gunfire or shelling at their workplaces or homes.
"Both sides believe that medical staff are cooperating with the opposing faction, which leads to their targeting," union spokesperson Sayed Mohamed Abdullah told AFP.
"There is no justification for targeting hospitals or medical personnel. Doctors... make no distinction between one patient and another."

According to the doctors' union, the RSF has raided hospitals to treat their wounded or search for enemies, while the army has conducted air strikes on medical facilities across the country.
On November 11, MSF suspended most activities at Bashair Hospital, one of South Khartoum's few functioning hospitals, after fighters stormed the facility and shot dead another fighter being treated there.
MSF officials say they believe the fighters to be RSF combatants.
In addition to the endless stream of war casualties, Sudan's doctors scramble to respond to another threat: mass starvation.
In a paediatric hospital in Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, malnourished children arrive in droves.
Between mid-August and late October, the small hospital was receiving up to 40 children a day, many in critical condition, according to one doctor.
"Every day, three or four of them would die because their cases were very late stage and complicated, or due to a shortage of essential medicines," said the physician, requesting anonymity for safety concerns.
Sudan has for months teetered on the edge of famine, with nearly 26 million people -- more than half the population -- facing acute hunger, according to the UN.
Adnan Hezam, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said there must be "immediate support in terms of supplies and human resources to medical facilities".
Without it, "we fear a rapid deterioration" in already limited services, he told AFP.
To Moussa, the doctor, some days feel "unbearable".
"But we can't stop," he said.
"We owe it to the people who depend on us."

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Topics: Sudan conflict

At first Security Council meeting since Assad’s fall, UN envoy calls for end to Syria sanctions

Geir Pederson, the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, center, listens to a woman who was looking for her missing relative.

Updated 18 December 2024

Ephrem Kossaify

December 17, 2024 15:45

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At first Security Council meeting since Assad’s fall, UN envoy calls for end to Syria sanctions

Geir Pedersen warns that though the regime of former president Bashar Assad has been toppled, the ‘conflict has not ended yet’
Council members denounce Israeli authorities for illegal seizure of parts of Syria, call on them to withdraw forces and respect nation’s sovereignty

Updated 18 December 2024

Ephrem Kossaify

December 17, 2024 15:45

NEW YORK CITY: The UN’s special envoy for Syria has called for “broad support” from the international community for Syria and an end to crippling economic sanctions, to aid the reconstruction of the country after almost 14 years of civil war.

Speaking from Damascus on Tuesday, Geir Pedersen briefed members of the UN Security Council on the current situation in Syria. It was the council’s first open meeting about the country since the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime on Dec. 8.

The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, also appealed to all states to ensure “sanctions and counterterrorism measures do not impede” aid operations in Syria, which continues to suffer the effects of a humanitarian crisis that is one of the most dire in the world.

US, UK, EU and other international authorities imposed severe sanctions on Syria after President Assad’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011 spiraled into civil war.

They also slapped sanctions on Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham — the militant group that spearheaded the takeover of Damascus this month that ousted Assad — more than a decade ago. At the time, HTS was Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria but it broke ties with the terrorist group in 2016. However, it remains on the UN Security Council’s sanctions list, subject to a global assets freeze and arms embargo.

Western countries are now grappling with the question of how best to respond to the evolving situation in Syria now that HTS is in power. Though the group has softened its rhetoric, it is still widely labeled a “terrorist” organization by authorities in the West.

Pedersen said: “Concrete movement on an inclusive political transition will be key in ensuring Syria receives the economic support it needs.”

He noted the steps that are being made to achieve a peaceful and orderly transition of power in the country, including efforts to ensure the former government’s ministers remain safe, and calls for state employees to continue their work.

“This provides a strong first basis but it is not, in itself, enough,” Pedersen told council members. The transition must also be “credible and inclusive, including the broadest spectrum of Syrian society and Syrian parties, so that it inspires public confidence,” he added. He also stressed the need to draft a new constitution, and for free and fair elections.

Although events this month have sparked hopes of a real opportunity for peace, economic stability, accountability and justice in Syria, Pedersen warned that many people remain apprehensive about the “enormous” challenges that lie ahead.

“I worry that if this is not handled right, by both the Syrians and the international community, a turn for the worse again is possible,” he said.

Even though Assad is no longer in power, the “conflict has not ended yet,” Pedersen continued, highlighting as a particular concern the clashes between Turkish-backed and Kurdish groups in the north of the country.

“Although there is stability in many parts, and law and order improved, such stability can be fragile, with many front lines and open hostilities still ongoing in northeast, where civilians are being killed, injured and displaced. Such an escalation could be catastrophic,” he said.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces have carried out more than 350 strikes against military facilities, equipment and supplies across Syria since the fall of the Assad regime and the attacks continue, including a major assault on Tartus.

“Such attacks place a battered civilian population at further risk and undermine the prospects of an orderly political transition,” Pedersen said as he called on Israeli authorities to halt all “illegal” settlement activity in the occupied Syrian Golan.

“Attacks on Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must stop,” he added.

Pedersen said he has held talks with Syria’s new de facto leadership. He also visited the “dungeons” and “torture and execution chambers” of Sednaya prison, which he described as “a testament to the barbarity of the fallen regime towards its own people.”

He said that seeing this firsthand served as a stark reminder of the importance of transitional justice, of clarification of the fates and whereabouts of all those still missing or who were disappeared, and of ensuring due process is followed in criminal prosecutions as a necessary safeguard against acts of revenge.

“Without this, Syria and Syrians will not be able to heal,” Pedersen added.

As an urgent first step, he called for the preservation and protection of all evidence and materials related to alleged crimes, and of the sites of mass graves.

Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, told the Security Council that the humanitarian crisis in Syria remains one of the worst in the world, with 17 million people in need of support, more than 7 million displaced across the country, and millions more living as refugees.

Nearly 13 million people already face acute food insecurity, he added, and recent events have “only added to these needs.” More than a million people were displaced in less than two weeks during the events that culminated in the fall of the Assad regime, he said, and hundreds of civilians were killed or injured, at least 80 of them children.

Health services and water supplies have been interrupted and more than 12,000 schools temporarily closed, affecting millions of students. As borders and commercial routes remain closed, there are shortages of bread and fuel, Fletcher added.

“The flow of humanitarian support was severely disrupted, with most organizations temporarily suspending operations. Several warehouses have been looted. Multiple aid workers lost their lives,” he said.

He lamented the fact that the effort to fund aid for Syria, “the largest country appeal in the world,” is one of the most poorly supported.

“With just two weeks left in 2024, it is less than a third funded, the largest-ever funding gap for the Syria response,” Fletcher said. “Now is the time to invest in the Syrian people.”

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said Syria’s future is “currently quite uncertain given the internal lack of stability and the palpable threats to Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

He warned that there is “a real risk of Syria becoming a number of cantons, broken down by ethnic and religious characteristics,” and called on the Syrian people to make every effort to ensure that an inclusive national dialogue takes place, without separating people into “losers and winners.”

Slovenia’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Ondina Blokar Drobic, told the council that a prosperous future for Syria will depend on a credible and inclusive political transition, and an inclusive Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process. She emphasized the necessity of participation by women in this process.

Drobic also underscored the obligation on all parties to take a stand against terrorism, as she stressed the importance of preventing Daesh and other terrorist groups from reestablishing their capabilities, and of denying them safe haven.

Syria’s caretaker authorities “must also respect Syria’s other international obligations, including the Chemical Weapons Convention,” she added.

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Topics: Fall of Assad Syria Geir Pederson

Turkish rescuers end search of Syria’s Saydnaya prison

Updated 18 December 2024

AFP

December 18, 2024 00:44

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Turkish rescuers end search of Syria’s Saydnaya prison

The prison complex was thoroughly searched by Syria’s White Helmets emergency workers but they wrapped up their operations on Tuesday, saying they were unable to find any more prisoners

Updated 18 December 2024

AFP

December 18, 2024 00:44

ISTANBUL: Turkish rescue workers have ended their search for survivors in Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison, their leader said Tuesday, after finding no detainees languishing in any hidden cells.
Located just north of Damascus, the prison became a symbol of rights abuses under president Bashar Assad, who was ousted by Islamist-led rebels on December 8.
The search by a 120-member team was conducted at the request of Syria’s new authorities, according to Okay Memis, director of Turkiye’s AFAD disaster relief agency.
“The entire building was searched and analyzed with a scanner, and no living person was found,” Memis told journalists at the site.
Prisoners held inside the complex, which was the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, were freed early last week by the Islamist-led rebels.
But the complex is thought to descend several levels underground, fueling suspicions that more prisoners could be held in undiscovered hidden cells.
The Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP), however, believes the rumors about hidden cells are unfounded.
The prison complex was thoroughly searched by Syria’s White Helmets emergency workers but they wrapped up their operations on Tuesday, saying they were unable to find any more prisoners.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 100,000 people have died in Syria’s jails and detention centers since 2011, when Syria’s civil war erupted.

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Topics: Fall of Assad Syria Turkiye AFAD

Israel’s Netanyahu says hostage deal could be near for hostages in Gaza

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Israel’s Netanyahu says hostage deal could be near for hostages in Gaza

Israel’s Netanyahu says hostage deal could be near for hostages in Gaza

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First flight since Assad’s fall takes off from Damascus airport

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