Lebanon has right to defend its land amid systematic Israeli escalation, Mikati tells army officers
Hezbollah artillery breaks silence, targets Israeli military sites
Israeli airstrike kills mother and 3 children
Updated 02 August 2024
NAJIA HOUSSARI
BEIRUT: Lebanon is determined to defend its land and sovereignty, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said on Friday.
“We will not hesitate to do so, no matter the sacrifices,” he said.
Mikati described the regional developments as “worrisome,” signaling increased danger levels.
He said that “nothing indicates that Israeli arrogance will stop.”
Mikati met with senior officers in the Lebanese army command and cautioned that “the regional developments are concerning.”
He stressed that the army “remains the firm guarantee for the unity of Lebanon, its territory, people, and establishments, making it a national obligation for everyone to unite around the army institution.”
Mikati said that in response to the ongoing and severe Israeli escalation, “we affirm our right to defend our land, sovereignty, and dignity using all available means.”
He stated that he had informed “friendly and brotherly countries that we are advocates of peace, not war.
“We seek permanent stability through Israel’s commitment to implementing UN Resolution 1701 in all its provisions. No Israeli aggression will deter us from that.”
Mikati emphasized the importance of deploying the army in cooperation with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon to prevent violations of “our internationally recognized borders. This is essential for ensuring stability and security for the people in the south.”
He added: “Our right to utilize the resources in our waters is absolute and not open to negotiation.”
Mikati also met with the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, France, the UK, China, and Russia) and the representatives of the non-permanent member states present in Lebanon (Algeria, Japan, Switzerland, and South Korea).
The meeting came against the backdrop of escalating confrontations between Israel and Hezbollah, which reached their peak on Tuesday with the assassination of senior Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in the heart of the southern suburb of Beirut.
Mikati’s media office stated that the assembled ambassadors affirmed Lebanon’s “commitment to implementing UN resolutions, especially Resolution 1701, as a top priority in the region.”
Lebanon has also filed a complaint with the UN Security Council against Israel for its aggression against the southern suburb of Beirut.
It said Israel’s dangerous escalation affected a densely populated residential area in violation of international law and the UN Charter.
In the southern town of Shamaa, a funeral procession was held for a Syrian mother and her three children — Fatima Al-Raja Al-Hajj and her sons Suleiman, Mohammed, and Ahmed Al-Hajj — who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home on Thursday night.
The death toll of Syrian civilians who have been killed during the confrontations in the south since Oct. 8 has risen to 18.
The airstrike coincided with Hezbollah holding the funeral procession for Shukr in the southern suburb of Beirut.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Thursday evening during Shukr’s funeral to respond to his assassination.
He said that Israel “should expect the revenge of the honorable” and that “we have entered a new phase on all support fronts (for Hamas in the Gaza Strip).”
He said Israel “has crossed red lines and has no idea of the kind of aggression it has committed.”
The Israeli army on Friday launched airstrikes and targeted border towns with artillery fire, including Rab El-Thalathine, Dhayra, and Blida, as well as the outskirts of Naqoura and Tayr Harfa.
Hezbollah announced a series of targets that were within the rules of engagement.
It targeted the deployment of Israeli soldiers in the Dhayra site, the Al-Sammaqa site in the occupied Lebanese Kfarchouba Hills and the Bayad Blida site with artillery shells.
The party launched dozens of Katyusha rockets on the Matzuva settlement in the wake of the Israeli attack on Shamaa.
Hezbollah leader calls on government to work harder to end Israel’s attacks on Lebanon
Naim Kassem's comments came as the Israeli military said it carried out more than 50 strikes in Lebanon this month
He said the priority should be for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, an end to Israeli strikes in the country and the release of Lebanese held in Israel
Updated 28 April 2025
AP
BEIRUT: The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group called on the government Monday to work harder to end Israel’s attacks in the country a day after an Israeli airstrike hit a suburb of Beirut.
Naim Kassem said in a televised speech that Hezbollah implemented the ceasefire deal that ended the 14-month Israel-Hezbollah war in late November. But despite that, Israel is continuing with near-daily airstrikes.
Kassem’s comments came as the Israeli military said it carried out more than 50 strikes in Lebanon this month saying they came after Hezbollah violated the US-brokered ceasefire.
On Sunday, Israeli warplanes struck Beirut’s southern suburbs after issuing a warning about an hour earlier, marking the third Israeli strike on the area since a ceasefire took effect in late November. The Israeli military said it struck a precision-guided missiles facility.
“The resistance complied 100 percent with the (ceasefire) deal and I tell state officials that it’s your duty to guarantee protection,” Kassem said, adding that Lebanese officials should contact sponsors of the ceasefire so that they pressure Israel to cease its attacks.
“Put pressure on America and make it understand that Lebanon cannot rise if the aggression doesn’t stop,” Kassem said, pointing to Lebanese officials. He added that the US has interests in Lebanon and “stability achieves these interests.”
Kassem said the priority should be for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, an end to Israeli strikes in the country and the release of Lebanese held in Israel since the war that ended on Nov. 27.
Hezbollah began launching rockets, drones and missiles into Israel the day after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel by its Hamas allies ignited the Israel-Hamas war. Palestinian militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251 others during the 2023 attack.
The Israel-Hezbollah conflict exploded into all-out war last September when Israel carried out waves of airstrikes and killed most of the militant group’s senior leaders. The fighting killed over 4,000 people.
The Lebanese government said earlier this month that 190 people have been killed and 485 injured in Lebanon by Israeli strikes since the ceasefire took effect.
Why Darfur is now the center of Sudan’s power struggle and humanitarian crisis
In Al-Fasher, women are dying in childbirth, children collapse from thirst, and supplies have all but vanished
Two decades after the world pledged “never again” in Darfur, survivors of latest violence say history is repeating itself
Updated 28 April 2025
ROBERT BOCIAGA
LONDON: A haze of red dust hangs over the cracked roads of Al-Fasher. Children stumble through the rubble-strewn outskirts, barefoot and silent, their faces taut with exhaustion. A woman collapses beside a water container, her two toddlers clinging to her scarf.
Nearby, a man holds a torn piece of cardboard with the word “Zamzam” scrawled in charcoal — a word that no longer means refuge. The camp it refers to, once one of the largest displacement sites in Sudan’s North Darfur, has been ravaged by violence.
On April 11, armed groups reportedly linked to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces launched a deadly assault on the city of Al-Fasher, Zamzam, and another displacement camp called Abu Shouk, forcing tens of thousands to flee.
According to preliminary reports from the UN and humanitarian agencies, more than 400 civilians — including women, children, and up to a dozen aid workers — may have been killed in the space of three days, in attacks that also struck the nearby town of Um Kadadah.
The RSF said the camps in question were being used as bases by what it called “mercenary factions.” It also denied targeting civilians and accused its rivals of orchestrating a media campaign, using actors and staged scenes within the camp to falsely incriminate it.
Preliminary reports from the UN and humanitarian agencies said over 400 civilians — including women, children, and up to a dozen aid workers — may have been killed in the space of three days, in attacks that also struck the nearby town of Um Kadadah. (AFP)
The assault sent shockwaves throughout the region. More than 400,000 people fled, many of them to already overwhelmed towns like Tawila. Others disappeared into the hills of Jebel Marra, carrying only what they could hold. Zamzam is now under RSF control.
“It has been completely overrun — killing, raping, burning, and taking people hostage. No one remains unless they are prisoners,” Altahir Hashim, a human rights advocate who once lived in Zamzam, told Arab News.
Now based in the UK, Hashim monitors desperate voice messages sent by survivors still in hiding. “Every morning I hear names of the dead, pleas for food, calls for medicine,” he said. “But no one is listening.”
For many in Darfur, the violence echoes a familiar pattern — and a painful reminder of promises unkept. This April marked 20 years since the UN Security Council referred atrocities in the region to the International Criminal Court.
But for those displaced today, the anniversary feels hollow. “The killers are still free. The victims are still forgotten,” said Hashim, referring to the genocide perpetrated by the RSF’s forerunner, the Janjaweed. “We are reliving what the world said would never happen again.
IN NUMBERS
13m Displaced persons in Sudan, including 4m who have fled abroad.
150k Estimated death toll since the conflict began on April 15, 2023.
30m People in need of humanitarian assistance.
“The people arriving in Al-Fasher have nothing. No shoes, no food, no blankets. Famine was already creeping through Zamzam before the attack — now it’s an open wound.”
Although the Sudanese Armed Forces have recently made headway against their RSF rivals, retaking the capital, Khartoum, in March, the center of the conflict has shifted elsewhere since erupting suddenly on April 15, 2023.
Al-Fasher itself has become the last major stronghold of the Sudanese state in Darfur region. Here, tens of thousands of newly displaced civilians crowd into schools, mosques, and courtyards.
The city, once a lifeline for aid distribution across the wider region, is now itself under siege. Forces reportedly affiliated to the RSF surround it, choking off humanitarian access and isolating the population within.
More than 400,000 people fled following the RSF assault, many of them to already overwhelmed towns like Tawila. Others disappeared into the hills of Jebel Marra, carrying only what they could hold. (AFP)
Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah Khatir, director general of North Darfur’s Ministry of Health, is among the few officials still coordinating medical efforts in the city. He described conditions as “beyond collapse.”
Khatir told Arab News: “Even pregnant women needing cesarean sections are being turned away.”
He added: “We have received reports of mothers dying in labor because there are no doctors, no medicine, no way out.”
Fuel has all but vanished from the city. Diesel prices have quintupled, halting the trucks that once delivered drinking water to outer neighborhoods. The city’s main water stations are out of service.
“Children are collapsing from dehydration,” Khatir said. “And now, our staff can’t even get to the clinics.”
Al-Fasher was never untouched by conflict, but it was a place where aid agencies could still operate and displaced people could seek help. Now, with RSF fighters reportedly deploying drones and artillery in surrounding areas, even that fragile space is crumbling.
Survivors describe the flight from Zamzam as a gauntlet of fear. Amina, a mother of four, arrived in Al-Fasher after walking for three days.
“We hid in dry riverbeds and behind trees,” she said. “My youngest is sick now — he hasn’t eaten properly in a week. There is no milk, no clean water. We are waiting for help that hasn’t come.”
Others, like 14-year-old Abdulrahman, came alone. “I lost my parents in the crowd. I don’t know if they made it,” he said, huddled beneath a tarp shared with strangers. “I just walked with people who were running.”
People who fled Zamzam camp rest in a makeshift encampment in an open field near the town of Tawila in Sudan’s western Darfur region on April 13, 2025. (AFP)
The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, has warned that more than 825,000 children around Al-Fasher are at daily risk of death due to malnutrition and a lack of clean water.
Humanitarian organizations are mobilizing aid — including 1,800 metric tons of food and 9,000 non-food kits — but with road access cut off and security deteriorating, deliveries have stalled. Several agencies say their staff remain trapped inside the city with no safe evacuation routes.
Medecins Sans Frontieres suspended operations in Zamzam earlier this year due to insecurity. Other groups have pulled back or reduced staff due to threats and attacks.
One international aid worker in Al-Fasher, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Arab News: “We’ve gone from emergency mode to survival mode. There’s nothing left to distribute. And no guarantee we’re even safe.”
UNICEF has warned that more than 825,000 children around Al-Fasher are at daily risk of death due to malnutrition and a lack of clean water. (AFP)
The violence has once again drawn attention to Darfur’s long and bloody history of displacement, exclusion, and impunity.
In the early 2000s, the region was the site of mass killings and systematic ethnic targeting. Today, many Darfuris say the same patterns are playing out again.
“This isn’t just war,” Hashim said. “This is designed to erase entire communities. To remove them, not just physically, but from the map of Sudan.”
Fatima, a local nurse working in a makeshift clinic near Al-Fasher’s central mosque, said she sees the emotional toll every day. “We don’t have proper medicine, so we clean wounds with salt water. But it’s the look in people’s eyes that haunts me. They are afraid to hope.”
The violence has once again drawn attention to Darfur’s long and bloody history of displacement, exclusion, and impunity. (AFP)
Despite urgent appeals from the UN and Sudan’s humanitarian coordinator, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, little progress has been made to secure humanitarian corridors or even a temporary ceasefire to allow aid in.
“Time is running out,” Dr. Khatir said. “We are out of water. Out of food. Out of medicine. And soon, out of time.”
Al-Fasher holds more than just strategic value; it is the historical and cultural heart of Darfur. For many here, it represents the last place left to defend human dignity.
“If Al-Fasher is lost,” Dr. Khatir said, “then the hope for Darfur is lost too.”
Syria FM says wants to ‘strengthen relations’ with China
Foreign ministry statement said that Shaibani met with the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, at UN headquarters in New York
Updated 28 April 2025
AFP
DAMASCUS: Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani expressed on Monday his government’s willingness to build a “strategic partnership” with China, a key backer of ousted ruler Bashar Assad.
A foreign ministry statement said that Shaibani met with the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Fu Cong, at UN headquarters in New York, where he had been representing Syria at a session of the Security Council.
In the meeting with Beijing’s envoy, Shaibani said Syria’s new government was seeking to “strengthen relations with China” and that the two countries “will work together to build a long-term strategic partnership in the near future,” according to the statement.
This was not the first high-level meeting between the two governments since militants toppled Assad in December, capping years of civil war. In late February, interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa met with the Chinese ambassador to Damascus.
Fighter jet slips off the hangar deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, one minor injury
Crew members who were in the pilot seat of the Super Hornet and on the small towing tractor jumped out before the jet and the tug went into the Red Sea
Updated 28 April 2025
AP
WASHINGTON: An F/A-18 fighter jet slipped off the hanger deck of an aircraft carrier deployed to the Middle East, as sailors were towing the aircraft into place in the hangar bay of the USS Harry S. Truman on Monday, the Navy said.
The crew members who were in the pilot seat of the Super Hornet and on the small towing tractor jumped out before the jet and the tug went into the Red Sea. One sailor sustained a minor injury, the Navy said.
“The F/A-18E was actively under tow in the hangar bay when the move crew lost control of the aircraft. The aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the Navy said in a statement. The jet was part of Strike Fighter Squadron 136.
Fighter jets are routinely towed around the hangar deck to park them where they are needed for any flight operations or other work. It is unclear whether there will be an effort to recover the jet, which costs about $60 million. The incident is under investigation.
The Truman has been deployed to the Middle East for months and recently has been involved in stepped-up military operations against the Houthis. US Central Command has said that the military has conducted daily strikes, which have been done by fighter jets, bombers, ships and drones.
The Truman’s deployment has already been extended once by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by about a month.
Gazans fear a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground
Updated 28 April 2025
Reuters
CAIRO: Israel’s army is flattening the remaining ruins of the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, residents say, in what they fear is a part of a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground.
No food or medical supplies have reached the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip in nearly two months, since Israel imposed what has since become its longest ever total blockade of the territory, following the collapse of a six-week ceasefire.
Israel relaunched its ground campaign in mid-March and has since seized swaths of land and ordered residents out of what it says are “buffer zones” around Gaza’s edges, including all of Rafah, which comprises around 20 percent of the Strip.
Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported on Saturday that the military was setting up a new “humanitarian zone” in Rafah, to which civilians would be moved after security checks to keep out Hamas fighters. Private companies would distribute aid.
Residents said massive explosions could now be heard unceasingly from the dead zone where Rafah had once stood as a city of 300,000 people.
“Explosions never stop, day and night, whenever the ground shakes, we know they are destroying more homes in Rafah. Rafah is gone,” Tamer, a Gaza City man displaced in Deir Al-Balah, further north, told Reuters by text message.
He said he was getting phone calls from friends as far away as across the border in Egypt whose children were being kept awake by the explosions.
Abu Mohammed, another displaced man in Gaza, stated by text: “We are terrified that they could force us into Rafah, which is going to be like a cage of a concentration camp, completely sealed off from the world.”
Israel imposed its total blockade on Gaza on March 2.
UN agencies say Gazans are on the precipice of mass hunger and disease, with conditions now at their worst since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023.
Gaza health officials said on Monday that at least 23 people had been killed in the latest Israeli strikes across the Strip.
At least 10, some of them children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia in the north and six were killed in an airstrike on a cafe in the south.
Footage circulating on social media showed some victims critically injured as they sat around a table at the cafe.
Talks have so far failed to extend the ceasefire, during which Hamas released 38 hostages and Israel released hundreds of prisoners and detainees.
Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in Gaza, fewer than half of them believed to be alive. Hamas says it would free them only under a deal that ended the war; Israel says it will agree only to temporary pauses in fighting unless Hamas is completely disarmed, which the fighters reject.
On Friday, the World Food Programme said it had run out of food stocks in Gaza after the longest closure the Gaza Strip had ever faced.
Some residents toured the streets looking for weeds that grow naturally on the ground.
Others picked up dry leaves from trees.
Desperate enough, fishermen turned to catching turtles, skinning them, and selling their meat.
“I went to the doctor the other day, and he said I had some stones in my kidney and I needed surgery that would cost me around $300. I told him I would rather use a painkiller and use the money to buy food for my children,” one Gaza City woman said.
“There is no meat, no cooking gas, no flour, and no life. This is Gaza in simple but painful terms.”
Since October 2023, Israel’s offensive on the enclave has killed more than 51,400, according to Palestinian health officials.
