French FM in Beirut, despite air strikes: ministry

France's then Deputy Minister for Europe Jean-Noel Barrot leaves after the weekly cabinet meeting at the presidential Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 31, 2024. (AFP)
France's then Deputy Minister for Europe Jean-Noel Barrot leaves after the weekly cabinet meeting at the presidential Elysee Palace in Paris, on May 31, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 30 September 2024
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French FM in Beirut, despite air strikes: ministry

French FM in Beirut, despite air strikes: ministry
  • Israel's military on Sunday said it struck more targets of Lebanon's Iran-backed group Hezbollah, after its leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a Beirut air raid on Friday

BEIRUT, Lebanon: French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot arrived in Lebanon on Sunday night, his ministry said, making him the first high-level foreign diplomat to visit since Israeli air strikes intensified one week ago.
The arrival of Barrot, who earlier called for an immediate halt to the strikes, came as the foreign ministry announced that a second French national had been killed in Lebanon, though details were unclear.
Barrot oversaw delivery of 11.5 tonnes of French humanitarian aid, Lebanon's Health Minister Firass Abiad said.
After a meeting about the status of French nationals, Barrot on Monday will meet officials including Prime Minister Najib Mikati.
He is also due to meet the UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon and members of the UN peacekeeping force in the south.
"We confirm the death of a second French national," his ministry said Sunday, adding that further details will be supplied later.
The death comes after an 87-year-old French woman died last Monday after a blast in a village in south Lebanon.
Israel's military on Sunday said it struck more targets of Lebanon's Iran-backed group Hezbollah, after its leader Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a Beirut air raid on Friday.
The violence has raised strong fears of even further escalation in the Middle East.
French President Emmanuel Macron has also appointed a former foreign and defence minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, as special envoy to Lebanon.
Le Drian has visited the country six times, most recently at the beginning of the week.
 

 


Israeli airstrike kills 20 in northern Lebanon, local officials say

Israeli airstrike kills 20 in northern Lebanon, local officials say
Updated 9 sec ago
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Israeli airstrike kills 20 in northern Lebanon, local officials say

Israeli airstrike kills 20 in northern Lebanon, local officials say
  • Strike on Sunday occurred in the village of Aalmat, north of Beirut, and far from the areas in the south and east of the country where the Hezbollah militant group has a major presence
DEIR AL-BALAH: Lebanon’s Health Ministry says an Israeli airstrike has killed at least 20 people.
It says the strike on Sunday occurred in the village of Aalmat, north of Beirut and far from the areas in the south and east of the country where the Hezbollah militant group has a major presence.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
An Israeli strike early Sunday on a home sheltering displaced people in the northern Gaza Strip killed at least 17 people, according to the director of a nearby hospital that received the bodies.
Dr. Fadel Naim, director of the Al-Ahly Hospital in Gaza City, said the dead include nine women, and that the toll was likely to rise as rescue efforts continue.
He said they were killed in a strike on a home in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya, where Israel has been carrying out an offensive for over a month.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
Israeli forces have encircled and largely isolated Jabaliya and the nearby towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun for the past month, allowing in only a trickle of humanitarian aid. Hundreds of people have been killed since the offensive began on Oct. 6, and tens of thousands of people have fled to nearby Gaza City.
On Friday, experts from a panel that monitors food security said famine is imminent in the north or may already be happening. The growing desperation comes as the deadline approaches for an ultimatum the Biden administration gave Israel to raise the level of humanitarian assistance allowed into Gaza or risk possible restrictions on US military funding.
The northern third of Gaza, including Gaza City, was the first target of Israel’s ground invasion and has suffered the heaviest destruction of the 13-month-old war, which was triggered by Hamas’ attack into southern Israel. As in other areas of Gaza, Israel has sent forces back in after repeated operations, saying Hamas has regrouped.
The military says it only targets militants, whom it accuses of hiding among civilians in homes and shelters. Israeli strikes often kill women and children.
The war began when Hamas-led militants blew holes in the border fence and stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. They killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. Some 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed over 43,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities who do not distinguish between civilians and militants in their count but say over half the fatalities were women and children.
Israeli bombardment and ground invasions have left vast areas of Gaza in ruins and displaced around 90 percent of the population of 2.3 million people, often multiple times. Hundreds of thousands of people are living in crowded tent camps with few if any public services and no idea of when they might return to their homes or rebuild.
Ceasefire talks mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt have repeatedly stalled since the start of the year.
Qatar, which has served as a key mediator with Hamas, said over the weekend that it had suspended its efforts and would only resume them when “the parties show their willingness and seriousness to end the brutal war and the ongoing suffering of civilians.”

IAEA Chief to visit Iran on Wednesday — Tasnim

IAEA Chief to visit Iran on Wednesday — Tasnim
Updated 10 November 2024
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IAEA Chief to visit Iran on Wednesday — Tasnim

IAEA Chief to visit Iran on Wednesday — Tasnim

DUBAI: UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi will visit Iran next Wednesday and start consultations with Iranian officials the following day, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Sunday. 


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.


Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say

Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say
Updated 10 November 2024
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Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say

Dozens killed and wounded in Israeli strike on northern Gaza's Jabalia, medics say
  • The first strike on a house in Jabalia in northern Gaza killed ‘at least 25’ people

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Dozens of people were killed and wounded in an Israeli strike on a house in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip at dawn on Sunday, Palestinian medics said.
Footage circulating on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed about a dozen bodies wrapped in blankets and laid to the ground at a hospital. Residents said the building that was hit had housed at least 30 people.
The Palestinian official news agency WAFA and Hamas media put the number of people killed at 32. There was no immediate confirmation of the tally by the territory’s health ministry.
The Civil Emergency Service says its operations have been halted by an ongoing Israeli raid into two towns and a refugee camp in northern Gaza that began on Oct 5. It also could not provide a figure for those killed in the attack.
Israel says it sent forces into Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun in the north of the enclave to fight Hamas militants waging attacks from there and to prevent them from regrouping. It says its troops have killed hundreds of militants in those areas since the new offensive began.
In Gaza City, an Israeli airstrike on a house in Sabra neighborhood killed Wael Al-Khour, an official at the Welfare Ministry, and seven other members of his family including his wife and children on Sunday, medics and relatives said.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the reports on the strike in Jabalia and in the Sabra neighborhood.


US, Britain launch raids on Yemeni capital Sanaa, elsewhere, Al-Masirah TV says

US, Britain launch raids on Yemeni capital Sanaa, elsewhere, Al-Masirah TV says
Updated 10 November 2024
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US, Britain launch raids on Yemeni capital Sanaa, elsewhere, Al-Masirah TV says

US, Britain launch raids on Yemeni capital Sanaa, elsewhere, Al-Masirah TV says
  • Houthi media and residents said about nine raids had targeted the Sanaa, its suburbs and Amran governorate
  • Iran-aligned Houthi militants have launched attacks on international shipping near Yemen since November last year

Washington: US warplanes staged multiple strikes Saturday night on Iran-backed Houthi advanced weapons storage facilities in Yemen, the Pentagon said.
The facilities contained various weapons used to target military and civilian vessels navigating international waters throughout the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, according to information provided to AFP by the Pentagon.
The Houthi-run Al Masirah television network reported three American and British raids that targeted the capital Sanaa’s southern Al Sabeen district.
“Eyewitnesses said they heard intense flying, along with explosions in different parts of the capital Sanaa,” Al Masirah said.
The United States and Britain have repeatedly struck Houthi targets in Yemen since January in response to attacks by the rebels on shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
The rebels say the strikes, which have disrupted maritime traffic in a globally important waterway, target vessels linked to Israel and are intended to signal solidarity with Palestinians during the Gaza war.
The attacks have seriously disrupted the Red Sea route which carries 12 percent of global trade.
In more than 100 Houthi attacks over nearly a year, four sailors have been killed and two ships have sunk, while one vessel and its crew remain detained since being hijacked last November.
Saturday’s strikes come three days after the Houthi’s leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi criticized US president-elect Donald Trump for supporting Israel.
Houthi said that normalization deals between Arab countries and Israel brokered by Trump had failed to bring an end the Middle East conflict and that he would fail again in his second term.