Displaced pack Gaza hospitals, others flee as Israelis and Hamas clash

Displaced pack Gaza hospitals, others flee as Israelis and Hamas clash
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Smoke rises as displaced Palestinians take shelter at Al Shifa hospital, amid the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel, in Gaza City, on Nov. 8, 2023. (Reuters)
Displaced pack Gaza hospitals, others flee as Israelis and Hamas clash
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Displaced Palestinians gather at Al Shifa hospital where they take shelter, amid the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel, in Gaza City, on Nov. 8, 2023. (Reuters)
Displaced pack Gaza hospitals, others flee as Israelis and Hamas clash
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A displaced Palestinian woman, who fled her house due to Israeli strikes, sits with her grandchildren in a makeshift shelter at Shifa hospital, in Gaza City on Nov. 5, 2023. (Reuters)
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Updated 09 November 2023
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Displaced pack Gaza hospitals, others flee as Israelis and Hamas clash

A girl carries a bag, as Palestinians fleeing north Gaza head towards the south on November 9, 2023. (Reuters)
  • Many are staying in the north, packed into the Al Shifa Hospital and Al-Quds Hospital as ground battles rage around them
  • Israel says its Hamas foes have command centers embedded in the hospitals

GAZA/JERUSALEM: Israeli forces fought Hamas militants among ruined buildings in the north of the Gaza Strip on Thursday, inching their way closer to two big hospitals as the plight of civilians in the besieged Palestinian territory worsened.
Thousands more Palestinians were fleeing from the embattled north to the south along a perilous frontline path after Israel told them to evacuate, residents say.
But many are staying in the north, packed into the Al Shifa Hospital and Al-Quds Hospital as ground battles rage around them and more Israeli air strikes rain down from above.
Israel says its Hamas foes have command centers embedded in the hospitals.
In Paris, officials from about 80 countries and organizations were meeting to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza and find ways to help wounded civilians escape the siege, now in its second month.
“Without a cease-fire, lifting of siege and indiscriminate bombarding and warfare, the haemorrhage of human lives will continue,” said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, calling Israel’s actions collective punishment.
The United Nations and the International Red Cross also called for a ceasefire. Israel and its main backer the United States say a full ceasefire would benefit Hamas, but limited pauses are possible.
Israel unleashed its assault on Gaza in response to a cross-border Hamas raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which gunmen killed 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
It was the single worst day of bloodshed in Israel’s 75-year history and drew international condemnation of Hamas and sympathy and support for Israel.
But Israel’s retaliation in the Hamas-ruled enclave has caused great concern as a humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded.
Palestinian officials said 10,812 Gaza residents had been killed as of Thursday, about 40 percent of them children, in air and artillery strikes while basic supplies are running out and areas laid waste by unrelenting Israeli bombardments.
Residents in Gaza City, a Hamas stronghold, said Israeli tanks were stationed around the area. Both sides reported inflicting heavy casualties on one another in intense street battles.
Israel, which has vowed to wipe out Hamas, says 33 of its soldiers have been killed in its ground operation as they advanced into the heart of Gaza City.
Israeli troops had secured a Hamas military stronghold called Compound 17 in Jabalya in northern Gaza after 10 hours of combat with Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants above and below the ground, the Israeli military said on Wednesday.
It said troops killed dozens of militants, seized weapons, exposed tunnel shafts and discovered a Hamas weapons manufacturing site in a residential building in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood.
Israeli military footage showed soldiers walking through rubble into a building where one wall had been blasted away, finding weapons-manufacturing equipment, instruction manuals and a tunnel shaft.
Nearby was a girl’s bedroom with pink walls, pink wardrobes and three little beds.
The armed wing of Hamas said it had killed a greater number of Israeli soldiers than the military has announced, and had destroyed dozens of tanks, bulldozers and other vehicles. It released footage of fighters firing anti-tank rockets and scoring direct hits to vehicles.

NOWHERE TO RUN TO
Thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge at Al Shifa hospital inside Gaza City despite Israel’s orders to evacuate the area it has encircled. They are sheltering in tents in the hospital grounds and say they have nowhere else to go.
The UN humanitarian office OCHA said Israeli had again told residents of the north to move southwards, opening a four-hour corridor for the fifth consecutive day. About 50,000 people left the area on Wednesday, it said.
Clashes and shelling around the main road continued, OCHA said, endangering evacuees. Corpses lay alongside the road, while most evacuees were moving on foot as the Israeli military had told them to leave vehicles, it said.
One resident, who asked not to be named, said he had crossed with his wife and six children after having initially taken shelter in Gaza City from their home in Beit Hanoun close to the frontier with Israel.
“There are no taxis and you can only take a small amount with you. You have to hold your ID card in your hand and raise it as you go past the Israeli tanks and then walk several more kilometers searching for a lift,” he said.
Huge numbers of displaced people from among Gaza’s 2.3 million population are already crammed into schools, hospitals and other sites in the south.
Southern areas have also come under regular attack. In Khan Younis, Gaza’s main southern city, residents picked through the rubble and twisted debris of a building destroyed by an Israeli air strike, hoping to find survivors, on Thursday morning, witnesses said.
On another front, Lebanese group Hezbollah said it fired missiles over the border into Israel, and Israel’s military said it responded with artillery fire.

CEASEFIRE CALLS
The conference in Paris, attended by Arab nations, Western powers, G20 members and NGO groups such as Doctors Without Borders, was discussing measures to alleviate the suffering in Gaza, but without a pause in the fighting expectations are low.
President Emmanuel Macron, opened the conference calling for a humanitarian pause: “The situation is serious and getting worse each day,” he said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, whose Palestinian Authority has limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but was driven out of Gaza by Hamas in 2007, was present at the conference. Israel was not invited.
“How many Palestinians must be killed for the war to stop,” Shtayyeh asked. “Is killing 10,000 people in 30 days enough?“


At least 5 killed in air strike on Tubas in the West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent reports

At least 5 killed in air strike on Tubas in the West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent reports
Updated 6 sec ago
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At least 5 killed in air strike on Tubas in the West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent reports

At least 5 killed in air strike on Tubas in the West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent reports

CAIRO: At least 5 people were killed in an Israeli air strike on Tubas in the West Bank, Palestinian Red Crescent reported on Wednesday.

– Developing


Iraq security officials report explosion at US-led coalition airport base

Iraq security officials report explosion at US-led coalition airport base
Updated 45 min 7 sec ago
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Iraq security officials report explosion at US-led coalition airport base

Iraq security officials report explosion at US-led coalition airport base
  • Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was expected in Iraq on Wednesday in his first trip abroad since taking office in July

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces said an explosion was heard at a US-led coalition’s military base at the Baghdad international airport late Tuesday, a day before Iran’s president was due to visit.
“At 23:00 (2000 GMT) an explosion was heard inside Baghdad International Airport in the area occupied by international coalition advisers,” according to a statement posted on social media platform X by the spokesman for the Joint Operations Command, Iraqi Major General Tahseen Al Khafaji.
“Iraqi security forces were unable ... to determine the origin of the explosion, which has not been claimed,” according to the statement, which was attributed to Iraqi security forces and also published by state news agency INA.
Air traffic was unaffected and no flights were interrupted, it added.
A senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that “two Katyusha-type rockets” had caused the explosion.
“One fell on the wall of the Iraqi anti-terrorist forces compound. The second was inside the base hosting the international anti-jihadist coalition led by Washington,” said the official.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was expected in Iraq on Wednesday in his first trip abroad since taking office in July.
Relations between Iran and Iraq, both Shiite-majority countries, have grown closer over the past two decades.
Tehran is one of Iraq’s leading trade partners and wields considerable political influence in Baghdad where its Iraqi allies dominate parliament and the current government.
A spokesperson for the Iranian-backed Ketaeb Hezbollah (Hezbollah Brigades) armed group in Iraq slammed what he called “an attack” that aimed to “disrupt the Iranian president’s visit to Baghdad.”
In a post on X, the spokesperson Jaafar Al-Husseini called on the Iraqi security services to identify the perpetrators.
Over the past year, US-led coalition forces have been targeted dozens of times with drones and rocket fire in both Iraq and Syria as violence related to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has drawn in Iran-backed armed groups across the Middle East.
US forces have carried out multiple retaliatory strikes against these groups in both countries.
To defuse the situation and spare Iraq from the fallout of regional tensions, the United States and Iraq have been negotiating a phased pull-out of US-led anti-jihadist forces.
The United States has deployed around 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria as part of the international coalition against the Daesh group.
Iraqi security forces say they are capable of tackling IS remnants unassisted, as the group poses no significant threat.
 

 


EU fears Israeli-occupied West Bank becoming a ‘new Gaza’

EU fears Israeli-occupied West Bank becoming a ‘new Gaza’
Updated 11 September 2024
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EU fears Israeli-occupied West Bank becoming a ‘new Gaza’

EU fears Israeli-occupied West Bank becoming a ‘new Gaza’
  • Borrell said Israel was opening “a new front... with a clear objective: to turn the West Bank into a new Gaza — in rising violence, delegitimising the Palestinian Authority and stimulating provocations to react forcefully”

CAIRO: The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell warned on Tuesday that increased violence in the occupied West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war erupted meant it risked becoming “a new Gaza.”
Violence in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and is separated from the Gaza Strip by Israeli territory, has flared alongside the war that began after Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
Borrell said Israel was opening “a new front... with a clear objective: to turn the West Bank into a new Gaza — in rising violence, delegitimising the Palestinian Authority and stimulating provocations to react forcefully.”
Israel was also “not shying away from saying to the face of the world that the only way to reach a peaceful settlement is to annex the West Bank and Gaza,” Borrell added at a ministerial meeting of the Arab League in Cairo.
He accused “radical members of the Israeli government” of trying to make it “impossible to create a future Palestinian state,” which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several cabinet members have painted as a threat to Israel.
Some Israeli ministers have recently called to increase military operations in the West Bank.
“Without action, the West Bank will become a new Gaza,” Borrell said.
“And Gaza will become a new West Bank, as settlers’ movements are preparing new settlements,” he told the meeting.
“The international community deplores, feels, and condemns, but finds it hard to act.”
Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank hit a record in 2023, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, and the European Union has said last year saw the most settlement building permits issued in decades.
Some 490,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, in settlements which are illegal under international law, alongside three million Palestinians.
Since the Gaza war began on October 7, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 23 Israelis, including members of the security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank during the same period, Israeli officials say.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military said it was “highly likely” that its forces “unintentionally” shot dead a US-Turkish activist last week, during a protest in the West Bank against settlement expansion.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was killed on Friday in the town of Beita, the site of weekly demonstrations against Israeli settlements.

 


Parched Iraqi Kurdistan town navigates regional water diplomacy

Parched Iraqi Kurdistan town navigates regional water diplomacy
Updated 11 September 2024
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Parched Iraqi Kurdistan town navigates regional water diplomacy

Parched Iraqi Kurdistan town navigates regional water diplomacy
  • To ensure Qaladiza residents have potable water, a small makeshift dam has been constructed near the town to ensure it retains more of the river’s water

QALADIZA:  A river flowing through Iraq’s northern Kurdistan has all but dried up, prompting warnings of an “environmental catastrophe” for the water-stressed border city as it tussles for the resource with neighboring Iran.
The Little Zab originates in neighboring Iran and flows through the outskirts of Qaladiza, a hillside town of 90,000 residents around 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Iranian border, which uses its water for drinking as well as irrigating crops and farmland along its path.
But the effects of climate change and dam building across the border have left it greatly diminished.
A tributary of the mighty Tigris, the river used to carry seven billion cubic meters of water a year, yet the volume has shrunk dramatically in recent years, said Marf Karim, director of a water treatment facility serving Qaladiza.
He pinned much of the blame on the Kolsa dam, built on the Iranian stretch of the Little Zab in 2017.
“We monitor water levels every day,” Karim told AFP. “With the naked eye we can see a decrease of about 80 percent.”
The plummeting river levels have exposed the river’s grey, rocky bed to the scorching summer sun.
“It’s an environmental catastrophe” affecting the entire region, including its water wells and groundwater reserves, said Karim.
To ensure Qaladiza residents have potable water, a small makeshift dam has been constructed near the town to ensure it retains more of the river’s water. But it does little to solve “the problem of water quality” in the shrinking waterway, he said.
“We need more products to filter out impurities,” he said.
Beset by climate change, Iraq has endured years of drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
But in Qaladiza’s case, resource diplomacy is also at play, exacerbating geopolitical fault lines and regional tensions as growing populations place increasing demands on a dwindling supply of water.

Iran itself is also enduring the effects of worsening conditions.
In June 2023, the meteorological department of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, which borders Iraq, said “about 56 percent” of its territory was “affected by very severe drought.”
Several dams have been built since the 1990s, but “in 2017 Iran realized that it was still losing some two-thirds of its waters into Iraq, which could then lead into a problem of water shortage inside Iran by 2036,” said Banafsheh Keynoush, a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute at US university Notre Dame.
Tehran then moved to construct more than 100 dams “to redirect this extra water flow into Iraq, into its own dam reservoirs,” she told AFP.
Iraq, too, has been building dams and trying to reduce demand, including by encouraging farmers to abandon traditional irrigation methods deemed wasteful, all while seeking a greater portion of the water resources it shares with its ally Iran.
Tehran has factored “its water disputes with Iraq into its larger geopolitical calculations,” said Keynoush.
“Progress on resolving these water issues has also been subjected to political and geopolitical negotiations” involving both Baghdad and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, added the expert.
In November, for example, “Iran decided to release some water into the Zab... just to minimize some tensions with the Kurdistan regional government,” Keynoush noted.
It is “vital” for Iran to prevent any “major upheavals” on its borders, politically but also environmentally, she said.

Qaladiza governor Bakr Baez said water disputes are “essentially a political problem,” but failed attempts to resolve them have had dire real-life consequences.
Farmers now do not have enough water to irrigate their fields, and the vast majority of the area’s 257 fish farms have been affected by the shortages, according to Baez.
Kochar Jamal, the manager of an Iraqi dam downstream, downplayed the impact of the Iranian “cuts” on the water reservoirs he oversees.
This year, water levels at the Dukan dam rose compared to 2023, Jamal said, attributing the increase to greater “amounts of rain in winter and spring.”
To keep his fish alive, Qaladiza farmer Ali Hassan has begun digging in the hopes of reaching the water table.
“It’s been three days that we haven’t been able to change the water in the tanks,” said the man in his 50s, standing next to a large digger that was burrowing into the ground.
“Without it, the water will heat up, the fish will die. They need fresh water.”
Losing his fish would also mean a financial loss of at least $13,000, said Hassan.
Driving the digger is another farmer, 48-year-old Omar Mohamed, who said water shortages meant “we can no longer cultivate anything.”
“I’ve had orchards, they’re gone,” he said.
“A neighbor tried to plant okra, another, watermelon. They all failed.”
 

 


Amnesty denounces eastern Libya ‘crackdown on critics’

Amnesty denounces eastern Libya ‘crackdown on critics’
Updated 11 September 2024
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Amnesty denounces eastern Libya ‘crackdown on critics’

Amnesty denounces eastern Libya ‘crackdown on critics’
  • The rights group said “dozens of people, including women and men in their 70s” have been subjected to “arbitrary detentions” since the start of the year, with some held “for months without being allowed to contact their families or lawyers”

TUNIS: Libya’s eastern-based forces have enabled a crackdown on dissidents and a spike in arbitrary detentions that has resulted in at least two deaths in custody in recent months, Amnesty International said Tuesday.
The energy-rich North African country has been wracked by unrest since the 2011 overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising.
It is split between a UN-recognized government in the capital Tripoli and a rival administration in the east backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
The eastern-based Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) “has enabled the Internal Security Agency (ISA) to intensify its crackdown on critics and political opponents in recent months,” Amnesty said in a report.
The rights group said “dozens of people, including women and men in their 70s” have been subjected to “arbitrary detentions” since the start of the year, with some held “for months without being allowed to contact their families or lawyers.”
The report also mentioned “enforced disappearances for periods reaching 10 months” in some cases.
Kept at “ISA-controlled facilities,” none of those arrested have been “brought before civilian judicial authorities, allowed to challenge the legality of their detention, or were formally charged with any offenses,” Amnesty said.
At least “two people died in custody,” it added.
“The spike in arbitrary detentions and deaths in custody in recent months highlights how the existing culture of impunity has empowered armed groups to violate detainees’ right to life without fearing any consequences,” the report said.
“Deaths in custody add to the catalogue of horrors committed by the ISA against those who dare to express views critical of LAAF,” it added, calling the armed force “the de facto authorities in eastern and southern Libya.”
Amnesty urged the LAAF to “suspend from positions of power ISA commanders and members reasonably suspected of crimes under international law and serious human rights violations.”
The group called on authorities across Libya, including in the west, to “ensure the immediate release of all those arbitrarily detained solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression.”