Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

A nurse administers Polio vaccine drops to a young Palestinian patient at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on August 31, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Hamas militant group. (AFP)

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Updated 01 September 2024

AFP

September 01, 2024 09:30

Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

Health ministry officials in the enclave along with the UN and NGOs “are starting today the polio vaccination campaign in the central region”
After beginning in central Gaza, vaccines are set to be administered in southern Gaza and then in northern Gaza

Updated 01 September 2024

AFP

September 01, 2024 09:30

GAZA: A health official said a polio vaccination campaign had begun in Gaza on Saturday after the war-torn territory recorded its first case of the disease in a quarter of a century.
Local health officials along with the UN and NGOs “are starting today the polio vaccination campaign in the central region,” Moussa Abed, director of primary health care at the Gaza health ministry, told AFP.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that Israel had agreed to a series of three-day “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza to facilitate vaccinations, though officials had earlier said the campaign was expected to start on Sunday.
After beginning in central Gaza, vaccines are set to be administered in southern Gaza and then in northern Gaza.
The campaign, which involves two doses, aims to cover more than 640,000 children under 10.
Michael Ryan, WHO deputy director-general, told the UN Security Council this week that 1.26 million doses of the oral vaccine had been delivered in Gaza, with another 400,000 still to arrive
The Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry said earlier this month that tests in Jordan had confirmed polio in an unvaccinated 10-month-old baby from central Gaza.
Poliovirus is highly infectious, and most often spread through sewage and contaminated water — an increasingly common problem in Gaza as the Israel-Hamas war drags on.
The disease mainly affects children under the age of five. It can cause deformities and paralysis, and is potentially fatal.
Bakr Deeb told AFP on Saturday that he brought his three children — all under 10 — to a vaccination point despite some initial doubts about its safety.
“I was hesitant at first and very afraid of the safety of this vaccination,” he said.
“After the assurances of its safety, and with all the families going to the vaccination points, I decided to go with my children as well, to protect them.”
Abed, the health official, stressed on Saturday that the vaccine was “100 percent safe.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on October 7 which resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 40,691 people in Gaza, according to the territory’s health ministry. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
Incessant Israeli bombardment has also caused a major humanitarian crisis and devastated the health system.

Topics: Polio Gaza Children in Gaza

Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention

Updated 9 sec ago

December 30, 2024 16:16

Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention

Updated 9 sec ago

December 30, 2024 16:16

RAMALLAH: The Palestinian Authority’s ministry for detainees and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club announced on Monday that they had received reports of the deaths of five Gazans in Israeli detention.
Amani Sarahna, a spokesperson for the Prisoners’ Club, confirmed to AFP that two of the five died on Sunday, while the remaining three died earlier.
The club said the five prisoners were arrested during the Israel-Hamas war, some of them while fleeing from the north of the Gaza Strip southwards.
According to the two organizations, 54 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war in Gaza, which was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Thirty-five of the dead have been from the Gaza Strip, with the rest from the occupied West Bank.
The detainees ministry is an arm of the Palestinian Authority responsible for the welfare of Palestinians in Israeli jails and their families.
The two organizations named four of the dead prisoners as Mohammad Rashid Okka, 44, Samir Mahmoud Al-Kahlout, 52, Zuhair Omar Al-Sharif, 58, and Mohammad Anwar Labad, 57.
An additional prisoner, Ashraf Mohammad Abu Warda, 51, died in Israel’s Soroka Hospital on Sunday, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club said.
They did not provide details of how the prisoners died.
In a joint statement, the two organizations accused Israel of “liquidation operations against prisoners and detainees.”
They said the number of prisoners killed in Israeli jails was at a historic high, calling it “the most bloody phase.” According to the statement, 291 Palestinian prisoners have died in custody since 1967, when Israel began occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Currently, more than 10,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails, including 89 women, at least 345 children and 3,428 administrative detainees who are held without trial.
The Israel Prisons Service did not immediately respond to an AFP request for confirmation of the deaths.

For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics

Ahmad Kozorosh, owner of Damascus’ Al-Rawda coffee shop, looks on as he stands among customers on December 28, 2024. (AFP)

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 14:32

For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics

For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 14:32

DAMASCUS: For decades, any Syrian daring to broach political topics got used to speaking in hushed tones and with a watchful eye trained for a listener among the crowd.
“There were spies everywhere,” Mohannad Al-Katee said in Al-Rawda cafe in Damascus, adding almost in disbelief: “It’s the first time that I sit in a cafe and I can talk about politics.
“It was a dream for Syrians,” said Katee, 42, a researcher in political and social history.
Until now, he like thousands of others had grown accustomed to watching for the proverbial flies on the walls of Damascus’s renowned cafes.
Today, those same cafes are alive and buzzing with the voices of patrons speaking freely about their country for the first time.
Such discussions “were banned under the previous regime, then there was a relative opening during the Damascus Spring,” Katee said.
He was referring to the year 2000, when Bashar Assad took over from his late father Hafez and slightly loosened the reins on political life in Syria.
Initially, the young Assad had opened up an unprecedented space, allowing for political salons to flourish alongside calls for reform in a country that had long grown accustomed to fear and silence.
“But it didn’t last,” said Katee.
A few months after his succession, Assad rolled back those gains, putting an end to the short-lived “Damascus Spring.”
In the subsequent years, according to Katee, informants were ubiquitous, from “the hookah waiter to the man at the till, it could have been anyone.”
“Political life consisted of secret meetings,” he said. “We were always taught that the walls have ears.”
Today, “Syrians can never go back to obscurantism and dictatorship, to accepting single-party rule,” he said.
A little further on, in the Havana cafe once known as a meeting point for intellectuals and activists in a distant past, Fuad Obeid is chatting with a friend.
Himself a former owner of a cafe he had to shut down, the 64-year-old said: “The intelligence services spent their time at my place. They drank for free as though they owned the place.”
For over 50 years, the Assads maintained their vice grip on society, in large part through the countless informants that walked among the population.
On Saturday, Syria’s new intelligence chief, Anas Khattab, announced that the service’s various branches would be dissolved.
Obeid said: “I used to keep a low profile so they wouldn’t know I was the owner. I told customers not to talk politics for fear of reprisals.”
Now, he noted, in Havana cafe as in others, the difference is like “night and day.”
Back in Al-Rawda, discussions are in full swing over hookahs and games of backgammon.
The owner Ahmad Kozorosh still can’t believe his eyes, having himself witnessed numerous arrests in his own cafe over the years.
“I am now seeing almost exclusively new faces,” he said. “People who had been sentenced to death, imprisoned.”
To celebrate the new era, he is holding weekly symposiums in the cafe, and will even launch a new political party to be named after it.
Real estate agent Nesrine Shouban, 42, had spent three years in prison for carrying US dollars, a punishable offense in Assad’s Syria.
Alongside thousands of others who found freedom when the doors of prisons were flung open, she was released on December 8 from the notorious Adra prison.
“They had dangled in front of us the possibility of an amnesty” from Assad’s administration, she said. “Thankfully, the amnesty came from God.”
“At cafes, we didn’t dare say anything. We were even afraid that our phones were bugged,” she said.
Now, for the first time, she said she felt “truly free.”
Despite concerns over the extremist background of Syria’s new rulers, a breath of freedom has washed over the country for the first time, with public demonstrations being organized — an unthinkable prospect just one month earlier.
“We are not afraid anymore,” said Shouban. “If Jolani makes mistakes, we will denounce them,” she added, referring to Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani.
“In all cases, it can’t be worse than Bashar Assad.”

Topics: Fall of Assad Syria politics

Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 10:20

Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that seven pro-Turkish fighters were killed in clashes Monday in the northeastern Manbij region

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 10:20

BEIRUT: A Syria war monitor said 31 combatants had been killed since Sunday in ongoing battles between Turkiye-backed groups and Kurdish-led forces.
Swathes of northern Syria are controlled by a Kurdish-led administration whose de facto army, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), spearheaded the fight that helped defeat the Daesh group in the country in 2019 with US backing.
Turkiye accuses the main component of the SDF, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), of being affiliated with the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which both Washington and Ankara consider a terrorist group.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that seven pro-Turkish fighters were killed in clashes Monday in the northeastern Manbij region, in Aleppo province.
SDF fighters had infiltrated the city of the same name after it was retaken by Ankara-backed groups earlier this month, the monitor said.
Six other pro-Turkish fighters and three members of the SDF were killed the day before in the same part of Aleppo province, it said.
The SDF said Monday that it had carried out attacks elsewhere in the province that destroyed “two radars, a jamming system and a tank of the Turkish occupation” near a strategic bridge over the Euphrates.
According to the Observatory, 13 members of the pro-Turkiye factions and two members of the SDF “were killed as a result of flaring battles” near the bridge and the Tishreen Dam.
The Britain-based Observatory said clashes in the area had been going on for around three weeks “as both sides seek to advance.”
Turkiye has staged multiple operations in SDF areas since 2016, and Ankara-backed groups have captured several Kurdish-held towns in northern Syria in recent weeks.
The fighting has continued since rebels led by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad from power on December 8.
New Syrian leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, whose HTS group has long had ties with Turkiye, told Al Arabiya TV on Sunday that the Kurdish-led forces should be integrated into the national army.
“Weapons must be in the hands of the state alone. Whoever is armed and qualified to join the defense ministry, we will welcome them,” he said.
“Under these terms and conditions, we will open a negotiations dialogue with the SDF... to perhaps find an appropriate solution.”

Topics: Syria

WHO demands Israel release Gaza hospital director

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 10:20

WHO demands Israel release Gaza hospital director

Assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients
Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced Israeli attacks and both are damaged

Updated 30 December 2024

AFP

December 30, 2024 10:20

GENEVA: The WHO chief called Monday for the immediate release of Hossam Abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who is being held by Israel’s military following a major raid on the facility.
The Friday-Saturday assault on Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia left northern Gaza’s last major health facility out of service and emptied of patients, the World Health Organization said.
“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
“Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza is out of service following the raid, forced patient and staff evacuation and the detention of its director. His whereabouts are unknown. We call for his immediate release.”
Israel’s military said Sunday that its forces had killed approximately 20 Palestinian militants and apprehended “240 terrorists” in the raid, calling it one of its “largest operations” conducted in the territory.
The military also said had detained Abu Safiyeh, suspecting him of being a Hamas militant. When asked if he had been transferred to Israeli territory for further questioning, the military did not offer an immediate comment.
Tedros said the patients in critical condition at Kamal Adwan had been moved to the Indonesian Hospital, “which is itself out of function.”
“Amid ongoing chaos in northern Gaza, WHO and partners today delivered basic medical and hygiene supplies, food and water to Indonesian Hospital and transferred 10 critical patients to Al-Shifa Hospital,” he said.
“We urge Israel to ensure their health care needs and rights are upheld.”
He said seven patients along with 15 caregivers and health workers remained at the “severely damaged” Indonesian Hospital, “which has no ability to provide care.”
“Al-Ahli Hospital and Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City also faced attacks today and both are damaged,” Tedros added.
“We repeat: stop attacks on hospitals. People in Gaza need access to health care. Humanitarians need access to provide health aid.”
Since October 6 this year, Israeli operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.

Topics: War on Gaza Gaza Israel WHO Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments

Updated 30 December 2024

Reuters

December 30, 2024 08:44

Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments

Kyiv moves to build ties with the new leadership in Damascus

Updated 30 December 2024

Reuters

December 30, 2024 08:44

DAMASCUS: Syria hopes for “strategic partnerships” with Ukraine, its new foreign minister told his Ukrainian counterpart on Monday, as Kyiv moves to build ties with the new Islamist rulers in Damascus amid waning Russian influence.
Russia was a staunch ally of ousted President Bashar Assad and has given him political asylum. Moscow has said it is in contact with the new administration in Damascus, including over the fate of Russian military facilities in Syria.
“There will be strategic partnerships between us and Ukraine on the political, economic and social levels, and scientific partnerships,” Syria’s newly appointed foreign minister, Asaad Hassan Al-Shibani, told Ukraine’s Andrii Sybiha.
“Certainly the Syrian people and the Ukrainian people have the same experience and the same suffering that we endured over 14 years,” he added, apparently drawing a parallel between Syria’s brutal 2011-24 civil war and Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory culminating in its full-scale 2022 invasion.
Sybiha, who also met Syria’s new de facto ruler Ahmed Al-Sharaa in Damascus on Monday, said Ukraine would send more food aid shipments to Syria after the expected arrival of 20 shipments of flour on Tuesday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced last Friday the
dispatch
of Ukraine’s first batch of food aid to Syria comprising 500 metric tons of wheat flour as part of Kyiv’s humanitarian “Grain from Ukraine” initiative in cooperation with the United Nations World Food Programme.

RUSSIAN INFLUENCE SQUEEZED
Ukraine, a global producer and exporter of grain and oilseeds, traditionally exports wheat and corn to countries in the Middle East, but not to Syria, which in the Assad era imported food from Russia.
Russian wheat supplies to Syria have been
suspended
because of uncertainty about the new government in Damascus and payment delays, Russian and Syrian sources told Reuters in early December. Russia had supplied wheat to Syria using complex financial and logistical arrangements to circumvent Western sanctions imposed on both Moscow and Damascus.
The ousting of Assad by Al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, has thrown the future of Russia’s military bases in Syria — the Hmeimim air base in Latakia and the Tartous naval facility — into question.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the status of Russia’s military bases would be the subject of negotiations with the new leadership in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa said this month that Syria’s relations with Russia should serve common interests. In an interview published on Sunday, he said Syria
shared
strategic interests with Russia, striking a conciliatory tone, though he did not elaborate.

Topics: Fall of Assad Syria Ahmed Al-Sharaa Ukraine

Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention

Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention

For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics

For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics

Syrian FM Al-Shibani receives invitation to visit Saudi Arabia

Now Syria’s long-ruling Baath party is collapsing, too

Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria

Monitor says 31 Kurdish, Turkish-backed fighters killed in Syria

WHO demands Israel release Gaza hospital director

WHO demands Israel release Gaza hospital director

Gaza hospital director detained after Israeli raid

Israeli troops burn north Gaza hospital after forcibly removing staff and patients

Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments

Syria eyes ‘strategic’ ties with Ukraine, Kyiv vows more food aid shipments

Now Syria’s long-ruling Baath party is collapsing, too

Israeli airstrike near Syrian capital kills 11, war monitor says

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Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

Health official says polio vaccine campaign begins in war-torn Gaza

Palestinian Authority says five more Gazans die in Israeli detention

For the first time, Syrians ‘not afraid’ to talk politics

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