Tunisia says it has intercepted 70,000 Italy-bound migrants in 2023

Tunisia says it has intercepted 70,000 Italy-bound migrants in 2023
Migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are stopped by Tunisian Maritime National Guard at sea during an attempt to get to Italy, near the coast of Sfax, Tunisia. (AP)
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Updated 10 December 2023
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Tunisia says it has intercepted 70,000 Italy-bound migrants in 2023

Tunisia says it has intercepted 70,000 Italy-bound migrants in 2023
  • Tunisia, alongside Libya, is the principal departure point for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe

TUNIS: Close to 70,000 migrants were intercepted trying to cross the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Italy this year, more than double the 2022 figure, the Tunisian National Guard told AFP on Saturday.
Tunisia, alongside Libya, is the principal departure point for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe.
The number intercepted by Tunisian authorities was 69,963 for the first 11 months of 2023, compared to 31,297 in the same period last year, according to data from the National Guard.
Foreigners made up 78 percent, while the rest were Tunisians.
That was a significant shift from 2022, when 59 percent were foreign migrants.
The exodus accelerated in February after Tunisia’s President Kais Saied denounced the arrival of “hordes of illegal migrants” from sub-Saharan Africa whom he claimed were part of a “criminal plan” aimed at “changing the demographic composition” of the country.
The speech triggered a violent anti-migrant campaign, prompting several African countries, notably the Ivory Coast and Guinea, to repatriate thousands of their citizens, while many migrants attempted to flee by boat, leading to a number of sinkings.
Tunisia has been accused by the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs of “expelling” migrants to Libya and Algeria, which Tunisian authorities deny.
International humanitarian sources told AFP that at least 5,500 migrants have been expelled to the border with Libya and 3,000 to that with Algeria since June, including a large number caught trying to leave for Europe.
More than 100 migrants have died in the Libyan-Tunisian desert this summer, they said, adding that “collective expulsions to Libya and Algeria continue.”
Most of the intercepted migrants were caught on Tunisia’s eastern coastline close to Sfax, which is only around 130 kilometers (80 miles) from the Italian island of Lampedusa.
This summer, a wave of departures was triggered by a brawl in Sfax in which a Tunisian was killed, leading police to send hundreds into the desert.


Turkiye says Hezbollah’s Nasrallah will be hard to replace

Turkiye says Hezbollah’s Nasrallah will be hard to replace
Updated 21 sec ago
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Turkiye says Hezbollah’s Nasrallah will be hard to replace

Turkiye says Hezbollah’s Nasrallah will be hard to replace
  • Hakan Fidan said the “helplesness” of the United States and other Western countries was allowing the violence to continue

ANKARA: Turkiye’s foreign minister said on Saturday that Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was an important figure for Lebanon and the region and would be hard to replace after he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut a day earlier.
Speaking to state broadcaster TRT Haber in New York, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan also said Turkiye believed Israel would not stop in Lebanon and would spread the war in Gaza to the wider region.
He said the “helplesness” of the United States and other Western countries was allowing the violence to continue.

 


Iraq PM says Israel crossed ‘all red lines’ with Nasrallah killing

Iraq PM says Israel crossed ‘all red lines’ with Nasrallah killing
Updated 13 min 28 sec ago
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Iraq PM says Israel crossed ‘all red lines’ with Nasrallah killing

Iraq PM says Israel crossed ‘all red lines’ with Nasrallah killing
  • Zionist entity has crossed all the red lines,” Sudani said in a statement

BAGHDAD: Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani condemned on Saturday the Israeli killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as a “crime.”
The Friday attack on Hezbollah’s south Beirut stronghold that killed the Iran-backed group’s leader was a “shameful attack” and “a crime that shows the Zionist entity has crossed all the red lines,” Sudani said in a statement, calling Nasrallah “a martyr on the path of the righteous.”
 

 


Syria condemns ‘despicable’ Israeli killing of Nasrallah

Syria condemns ‘despicable’ Israeli killing of Nasrallah
Updated 25 min 57 sec ago
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Syria condemns ‘despicable’ Israeli killing of Nasrallah

Syria condemns ‘despicable’ Israeli killing of Nasrallah
  • The government announced three days of official mourning, SANA reported

DAMASCUS: Syria on Saturday condemned Israel’s killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, one of Damascus’s key supporters in years of civil war, and declared public mourning.
A foreign ministry statement carried by state news agency SANA said that the late Friday air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs that killed Nasrallah was a “despicable aggression.”
“The Zionist entity (Israel) confirms through this despicable aggression, once again... its barbarism and wanton disregard for all international standards and laws,” it said.
“The Syrian people... have never for a day forgotten (Nasrallah’s) positions of support,” the statement added.
The government announced three days of official mourning, SANA reported.
Hezbollah since 2013 has openly backed the forces of President Bashar Assad in his country’s civil war, which broke out after the repression of anti-government protests.
Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in the country since the war began in 2011, mainly targeting army positions and Iran-backed fighters, including from Hezbollah.
Along with Russia, Hezbollah backer Iran has helped Assad regain territory lost earlier in the civil war.
While Damascus condemned Nasrallah’s killing, in areas outside government control, some were celebrating, including in the Idlib jihadist-run rebel bastion.
Many Syrian opposition supporters and activists consider Hezbollah responsible for their woes, after the group fought Syrian rebels in a number of areas, leading to heavy losses among opposition factions and forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee.
 

 


Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut

Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut
Updated 33 min 18 sec ago
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Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut

Hundreds of fleeing families sleep on beaches and streets after Israel’s strikes shake Beirut
  • Lines of people trudged up to the mountains above the Lebanese capital, holding infants and a few belongings

BEIRUT: Smoke was still rising from Beirut’s southern suburbs Saturday morning, visible to many of the families who had fled their homes there the night before to escape Israel’s massive bombardment.
It had been a harrowing night — getting out amid earthshaking explosions, looking in vain for space in one of the overflowing schools-turned-shelters. By the morning, hundreds of families were sleeping in public squares, on beaches or in cars around Beirut.
Lines of people trudged up to the mountains above the Lebanese capital, holding infants and a few belongings.
Overnight, Israel unleashed a series of strikes on various parts of Dahiyeh, the predominantly Shiite collection of suburbs on Beirut’s southern edge where tens of thousands of residents live. The biggest blasts to hit Beirut in nearly a year of conflict killed the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, Friday.
The assault was part of a rapid escalation of Israeli strikes the past week that has killed more than 700 people in Lebanon. Israel has vowed to cripple Hezbollah and put an end to 11 months of its fire onto Israeli territory in what Nasrallah described as a “support front” for his ally Hamas in Gaza.
The newly displaced swell the numbers Beirut is absorbing
The people escaping Friday night’s mayhem joined tens of thousands who have fled to Beirut and other areas of southern Lebanon the past week to escape Israel’s bombardment.
For many residents of Dahiyeh, the forced evacuation was disconcertingly familiar.
Some were Lebanese who had lived through the bruising monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, when Israel leveled large parts of the Beirut suburbs. Others were Syrians who had taken refuge from the long civil war in their own country.
Fatima Chahine, a Syrian refugee, slept on the Ramlet Al-Bayda public beach in Beirut with her family and hundreds of strangers. The night before she, her husband and their two children had piled onto a motorcycle and raced out of Dahiyeh, with “bombing below us and strikes above us.”
“Thank God, no one was wounded,” she said.
The government has opened up schools in Beirut to take in the displaced. But Syrians have reported that some sites turn them away to reserve the few spaces for Lebanese. Chahine said her family came directly to the beach.
“We only want a place where our children won’t be afraid,” she said. “We fled from the war in Syria in 2011 because of the children and we came here, and now the same thing is happening again.”
Since Monday, some 22,331 Syrians in Lebanon have crossed back into Syria, along with 22,117 Lebanese, according to Lebanese authorities.
Chahine said returning is not an option for her family; she is from an opposition area and so could face reprisals from the Syrian government.
At the beach, the displaced were spread out over the sidewalk or in cars parked by the curb. Others were camped out in beach pagodas or on blankets in the sand.
“We spent more than three hours going in circles between schools and shelters and we didn’t find one with room,” said Talal Ahmad Jassaf, a Lebanese man who slept on the beach with his family. He said he is considering going to the relative safety of Syria. But he worries about airstrikes on the road between Beirut and Damascus.
Some people are left without aid

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, said this week’s escalation had more than doubled the number of people displaced by the conflict in Lebanon. There are now over 211,000 people displaced, including some of the humanitarian workers who should be responding to the crisis, it said. Around 85,000 of them are sleeping in shelters, it said.
“Humanitarian capacities to respond have been severely overstretched,” it added.
Displaced people sleeping outside in Beirut largely told The Associated Press that they had not received assistance from any humanitarian organization.
A stadium in the seaside neighborhood of Manara owned by the Nejmeh soccer club opened its doors to the displaced, who spent the night sleeping on bleachers.
Among them was Mariam Darwish, her husband and five children. She fled her home in Dahiyeh earlier in the week when the first Israeli strikes hit there.
Darwish said they had received water from the soccer club but that no organization had brought food, blankets or other supplies.
“People are helping each other out, family and friends are getting things for each other,” she said.
She and her husband had fled during the 2006 war, when their oldest son was a baby, and returned to their home when the war ended. They hope their house will still be standing to return to this time, she said.
“We’re worried about our children and the schools, that they’ll lose out on their future,” she said. “What can we do? We can only say thank God.”
She added, “May the resistance be victorious.” At the time of the interview, Hezbollah had not yet confirmed Nasrallah’s death.
Despite their battered-down circumstances, others also struck a defiant tone.
Jamal Hussein fled Dahiyeh at 3 a.m. with his extended family amid ongoing bombing and spent the night sleeping on the seaside promenade in Beirut’s upscale Ain Mreisseh district.
“Of course we aren’t afraid for ourselves, but we have children,” he said. “We are steadfast and ready to sacrifice more than this.”


Netanyahu says Israel ‘settled the score’ with Nasrallah’s killing

Netanyahu says Israel ‘settled the score’ with Nasrallah’s killing
Updated 43 min 56 sec ago
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Netanyahu says Israel ‘settled the score’ with Nasrallah’s killing

Netanyahu says Israel ‘settled the score’ with Nasrallah’s killing
  • The Israeli premier said his country was on the cusp of “what appears to be a historic turning point” in the fight against its “enemies”

JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israel had “settled the score” with the killing of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike in Beirut.
“We settled the score with the one responsible for the murder of countless Israelis and many citizens of other countries, including hundreds of Americans and dozens of French,” he said in his first statement since Nasrallah’s death on Friday.
He was alluding to 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed 63 people at the US embassy and 241 US marines and 58 French paratroopers at their barracks.
Netanyahu said that as long as “terrorist” Nasrallah was alive, he “would quickly restore the capabilities we had eroded from Hezbollah” in a series of recent operations.
“So, I gave the order — and Nasrallah is no longer with us.”
The Israeli premier said his country was on the cusp of “what appears to be a historic turning point” in the fight against its “enemies.”
According to Netanyahu, who has faced growing criticism at home and abroad over his war policy after nearly a year of fighting in the Gaza Strip, the killing of the Hezbollah leader was essential for achieving Israel’s goals.
“Nasrallah’s elimination is a necessary condition for achieving the goals we set: the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes and the long-term alteration of the balance of power in the region,” he said.
It will also help facilitate the return of hostages seized by Hamas during its October 7 attack and still held in Gaza, he said.
“The more (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar sees that Hezbollah will no longer come to his aid, the greater the chances of returning our captives,” Netanyahu said.
“We are winning. We are determined to continue striking our enemies, returning our residents to their homes and bringing back all our hostages. We do not forget them for a moment.”