UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups

UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups
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Irish peacekeepers sit together inside a bunker during a Reuters’ visit at Camp Shamrock where Irish and Polish peacekeepers of the UNIFIL are stationed near Maroun Al-Ras village close to the Lebanese-Israeli border, on Nov. 29, 2023. (Reuters)
UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups
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A UN vehicle drives, during a Reuters’ visit at Camp Shamrock where Irish and Polish peacekeepers of the UNIFIL are stationed near Maroun Al-Ras village close to the Lebanese-Israeli border on Nov. 29, 2023. (Reuters)
UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups
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Polish peacekeepers stand together at Camp Shamrock where Irish and Polish peacekeepers of the UNIFIL are stationed near Maroun Al-Ras village close to the Lebanese-Israeli border on Nov. 29, 2023. (Reuters)
UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups
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UN peacekeepers stand together during Reuters' visit at Camp Shamrock where Irish and Polish peacekeepers of the UNIFIL are stationed near Maroun al-Ras village close to the Lebanese-Israeli border, in southern Lebanon on Nov. 29, 2023. (Reuters)
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Updated 30 November 2023
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UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups

UN peacekeepers try to stay safe amid Lebanon-Israel border flare-ups
  • Troops from the UNIFIL have repeatedly sheltered in bunkers during “intense shelling and rocket launches,” said Lt. Col. Stephen MacEoin
  • He hoped the truce in Gaza between Hamas and Israel would be extended, as it was civilians “who suffer most”

MAROUN AL-RAS, Lebanon: While trying to fulfil their mandate to keep the peace, UN soldiers deployed along Lebanon’s border with Israel during the worst hostilities there in nearly 20 years have another urgent concern: keeping their own forces safe.
Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza seven weeks ago, troops from the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have repeatedly sheltered in bunkers during “intense shelling and rocket launches,” a senior commander said during a Reuters visit to a UNIFIL base in southern Lebanon.
“I’ve got to maintain force protection as a priority while also carrying out the mission,” said Lt. Col. Stephen MacEoin, battalion commander of the Irish and Polish soldiers stationed at Camp Shamrock in the village of Tiri, near Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
The conflict in Gaza, some 200 km (124 miles) away to the south, has seen Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, an ally of Hamas, trading fire daily along the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Israeli attacks have killed about 100 people in Lebanon — 80 of them Hezbollah fighters — since Oct. 7.
MacEoin said he hoped the truce in Gaza between Hamas and Israel would be extended, as it was civilians “who suffer most” from conflict, be it in Lebanon or Gaza, and the violence in Gaza was linked to the situation in southern Lebanon.
“The concerns of the mission are that, after so many weeks of exchanges of fire, now we have a truce, a moment of calm, but that intensive changes of fire can really trigger a much wider cycle of conflict,” said UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti.
“This is the real warning and danger that everyone is facing not only in the south but in the region.”
He said UNIFIL communicated with both sides in the flare-ups on the Lebanon-Israel border to try to “de-escalate tensions.”
No peacekeepers have been killed since the escalation of hostilities. But two peacekeepers have been injured in two separate incidents and UNIFIL compounds and bases have been hit and damaged by mortar shells several times, Tenenti told Reuters.
“We’ve had a lot of firing north and south of the Blue Line...a lot of close incidents,” MacEoin said, referring to a 120-km (74 mile) demarcation drawn by the United Nations that marks the line to which Israeli forces withdrew when they left south Lebanon in 2000.
In the latest incident, a UNIFIL patrol was hit by Israeli gunfire in the vicinity of Aytaroun of southern Lebanon, although there were no casualties. The UN force called the attack on “deeply troubling.”
UNIFIL was established by the Security Council in 1978 after Israel invaded Lebanon. Its scope and size were expanded after a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah that killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 158 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
The force is deployed in southern Lebanon with the primary role of helping maintain international peace and security.
The mission says it currently has about 10,000 troops drawn from 47 countries, and about 800 civilian staff, stationed in 45 positions throughout a 1,060 square km (409 square mile) area between the Litani River and the Blue Line.
Last December, an Irish soldier serving in UNIFIL was killed after the UNIFIL vehicle he was traveling in was fired on as it traveled in southern Lebanon. Seven people were charged by a Lebanese military tribunal in January for his death, the first fatal attack on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon since 2015.
Calm had prevailed on the border since Hamas and Israel agreed a temporary truce that began on Nov. 24. But on Thursday morning the Israeli military said it intercepted an “aerial target” that crossed from Lebanon. Earlier on Thursday the two sides struck a last-minute agreement to extend the truce.


Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
Updated 6 sec ago
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Netanyahu says spoke again with Trump about Iran ‘threat’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump.
  • “We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” Netanyahu said

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday he had spoken three times with US president-elect Donald Trump over the past few days about the “Iranian threat” to Israeli security.
“In the last few days, I have spoken three times with President-elect Donald Trump... Talks designed to further tighten the strong alliance between Israel and the US,” Netanyahu said, quoted in a statement issued by his office.
“We see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in every aspect,” he added during a weekly cabinet meeting, according to the statement.
Netanyahu also said he had talked to Trump about “great opportunities before Israel in the field of peace and its expansion.”
The United States is Israel’s top ally and military backer, and the election came at a critical time for the Middle East amid wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Analysts believe Netanyahu had hoped for a Trump return to the White House, given the longstanding personal friendship between the two as well as the former president’s hawkishness on Israel’s arch-foe Iran.
During his first term, Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights and helped normalize ties between Israel and several Arab states under the so-called Abraham Accords.


Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor

Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor
Updated 10 November 2024
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Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor

Israeli strike near Damascus kills three: war monitor
  • “An Israeli air strike killed three people in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
  • “The Israeli attack targeted (Hezbollah) figures in the building,” said the monitor which has a network of sources inside Syria

DAMASCUS: An Israeli strike on an apartment belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah group killed three people Sunday in a stronghold of pro-Iran groups south of Damascus, a war monitor said.
“An Israeli air strike killed three people in the Sayyida Zeinab area,” Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
“The Israeli attack targeted (Hezbollah) figures in the building,” said the monitor which has a network of sources inside Syria.
It said that two locations “where Hezbollah members live” near the Sayyida Zeinab municipality were hit.
Syria’s official SANA news agency reported an “Israeli aggression targeting a residential building in the Sayyida Zeinab” area that killed and injured an unspecified number of people.
On Saturday, four pro-Iran fighters were among five people killed in Israeli strikes in north and northwest Syria, the Observatory reported.
Since Syria’s civil war broke out in 2011, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria, mainly targeting army positions and fighters including from Hezbollah.
Israeli authorities rarely comment on the strikes, but have repeatedly said they will not allow arch-enemy Iran to expand its presence in Syria.


Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
Updated 49 min 40 sec ago
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Lebanon says 7 children among 23 dead in Israeli strike north of Beirut

People inspect a site of an Israeli strike, in the town of Almat in Jbeil district, Lebanon November 10, 2024. (Reuters)
  • The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region
  • It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon

BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on Sunday killed 23 people, including seven children, in the village of Almat north of the capital Beirut.
AFPTV footage showed rescuers rummaging with their bare hands through the wreckage of a house that had been completely razed, pulling out bodies wrapped in blankets while an excavator moved the rubble.
The Shiite Muslim majority village of Almat, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Beirut, is located in a mostly Christian region. It is outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds of south Beirut and south and east Lebanon, which Israel has heavily bombed since late September in its war against the Iran-backed movement.
“The Israeli enemy strike on Almat in the Jbeil district killed 23 people including seven children, in an updated but not final toll,” the health ministry said in a statement.
It also said body parts had been recovered from the site and were being identified.
A pile of broken concrete and the twisted metal structure that made up the roof lay at the bottom of a staircase leading to the destroyed house, AFP images showed.
Hezbollah lawmaker Raed Berro, one of the members of parliament representing the Jbeil district, was at the site of the strike and denied Israeli claims that Hezbollah members or weapons were embedded among civilians.
“Important military and security figures are usually on the frontlines... not at the rear,” he told AFP,
“Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women,” he said.
Facebook user Ali Haydar posted a picture of the home, which he said belonged to his family, before it was destroyed. He added that people displaced from the eastern Baalbek region had sought refuge there.
“There were 35 relatives of ours from Baalbek in the house” including women and children, he said.
“Most of them have been martyred” in the strike, Haydar added.
The area was cordoned off by Lebanese security forces and Hezbollah members in civilian clothing, an AFP correspondent at the scene saw.
Dozens of people packed their belongings in their cars and fled the village, the correspondent said.
The health ministry also said Israeli strikes killed three Hezbollah-affiliated rescuers in south Lebanon.
Earlier, Lebanese official media reported an Israeli strike on a house in the main eastern city of Baalbek, which was not preceded by an Israeli army evacuation warning.
“Enemy aircraft launched a strike on a house in the Al-Laqees neighborhood” of the city, the state-run National News Agency said.
Israel intensified its air campaign mainly targeting Hezbollah bastions in Lebanon on September 23 and a week later sent in ground troops.
The escalation came after nearly a year of low-intensity, cross-border attacks by Hezbollah in support of its ally Hamas following the Palestinian Islamists’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
More than 3,130 people have been killed in Lebanon since the cross-border exchanges began, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, most of them since September 23.


UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media
Updated 10 November 2024
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UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

UN atomic watchdog chief to arrive in Iran Wednesday: state media

TEHRAN: The chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, Rafael Grossi, will visit Iran in days for talks with senior officials, Iranian state media reported on Sunday.
“The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency will arrive in Iran on Wednesday ... at the official invitation of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
Grossi will meet Iranian officials on Thursday, the agency added.
The IAEA confirmed Grossi’s visit to Iran this week, without specifying the date in a post on X.
It said the visit would include talks with Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.
The agency also quoted Grossi as calling for “substantive progress” on a March 2023 deal that had outlined basic cooperation, including on safeguards and monitoring.
In a September interview with AFP, Grossi said Iran was showing “willingness” to re-engage on the nuclear issue, but it was not willing to walk back on a decision it took to ban some of the IAEA’s inspectors.
Iran withdrew the accreditation of several inspectors last year, a move the UN agency described at the time as “extreme and unjustified.”
Tehran had said then its decision was a consequence of “political abuses” by the United States, France, Germany and Britain.
Grossi last visited Iran in May, when he called for “concrete” measures to help bolster cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program at a news conference in Isfahan province, home to the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
His visit this month will come after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
During his first term in office, Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from a pivotal nuclear deal that aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Efforts mediated by the European Union have failed to bring Washington back on board and to get Tehran to again comply with the terms of the accord.
Iran has rolled back its commitments to caps on nuclear activities under the deal, and tensions have repeatedly flared between Tehran and the IAEA over its compliance.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, who took office in July, has favored reviving that agreement and called for ending his country’s isolation.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was “not looking to do damage to Iran” but noted that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
Iran has always denied having ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon, insisting its activities are entirely peaceful.
On Saturday, Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif urged Trump to reassess his “maximum pressure” policy which has seen the US impose punishing sanctions on Tehran.
He blamed that policy for leading to the surge in enrichment levels “to reach 60 percent from 3.5 percent.”
Enrichment levels of around 90 percent are required for military use.
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Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
Updated 10 November 2024
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Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum

Syrians, Iraqis archive Daesh jail crimes in virtual museum
  • They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed
  • In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.

Paris: After jihadists jailed him in 2014, Iraqi religious scholar Muhammad Al-Attar said he would sometimes pull his prison blanket over his head to cry without other detainees noticing.
Daesh group extremists arrested Attar, then 37, at his perfume shop in Mosul in June 2014 after overrunning the Iraqi city, hoping to convince the respected community leader to join them.
But the former preacher refused to pledge allegiance, and they threw him into prison where he was tortured.
In his group cell of at least 148 detainees at Mosul’s Ahdath prison, at times “there was nothing left but to weep,” Attar said.
But “I couldn’t bear the thought of the younger men seeing me cry. They would have broken down.”
So he hid under his blanket.
Daesh, also called Daesh, seized control of large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq and declared a so-called caliphate there in 2014, implementing its brutal interpretation of religion on inhabitants.
The militants banned smoking, mandated beards for men and head-to-toe coverings for women, publicly executed homosexuals and cut off the hands of thieves.
They threw perceived informants or “apostates” into prison or makeshift jails, many of whom never returned.
Attar’s story is one of more than 500 testimonies that dozens of journalists, filmmakers and human rights activists in Syria and Iraq have collected since 2017 as part of an online archive called the Daesh Prisons Museum.
The website, which includes virtual visits of former jihadist detention centers and numerous tales about life inside them, became public this month.
The project is holding its first physical exhibition, including virtual reality tours, at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN’s culture and education agency, until November 14.
Syrian journalist Amer Matar, 38, is director of the web-based museum.
“IS abducted my brother in 2013, and we started to look for him,” he told AFP.
After US-backed forces started to expel jihadists from parts of Syria and Iraq in 2017, “I and my team got the chance to go inside certain former IS prisons,” he said.
They found thousands of prison documents from the group whose caliphate was eventually defeated in 2019, but also detainee scratchings on the walls.
Etched inside the football stadium in the Syrian city of Raqqa, for example, the team found prisoner names and Qur’anic verses, as well as lyrics from a 1996 television drama about peace eventually prevailing.
Inside one solitary cell, they discovered exercise instructions to keep fit in English.
Matar says he was detained twice at the start of the Syrian civil war, in a government jail for covering protests against President Bashar Assad.
“I too would write my name on the wall because I didn’t know if I’d get out or if they’d kill me,” he said.
“People usually write their names, cries for help or stories about someone who was killed,” he added.
“They’re messages into the future so that people can find someone.”
Matar and his team decided to film the former prison sites and archive all the material within them before they disappeared.
“Many were homes, clinics, government buildings, schools or shops” that people were returning to and starting to repair, said Matar, who is now based in Germany.
They managed to capture 3D footage of around 50 former Daesh jails and 30 mass graves before they were transformed, he said.
In total they have documented 100 prison sites, interviewed more than 500 survivors and digitised over 70,000 Daesh documents.
Younes Qays, a 30-year-old journalist from Mosul, was in charge of data collection in Iraq.
“To hear and see the crimes inflicted on my people was really tough,” he said, recounting being particularly shocked by the tale of a woman from the Yazidi minority who was raped 11 times in IS captivity.
Robin Yassin-Kassab, the website’s English editor, said the project aimed to “gather information and cross-reference it” so it could be used in court.
“We want legal teams around the world to know that we exist so that they can come and ask us for evidence,” he said.
Matar has not found his brother.
But within the coming year, he hopes to launch a sister website called Jawab, “Answer” in Arabic, to help others find out what happened to their loved ones.