Middle East conflicts to leave ‘lasting scars’: IMF

Middle East conflicts to leave ‘lasting scars’: IMF
Above, displaced people rest in their temporary shelter at Martyrs’ Square in the city center, where many people spend the night fleeing the ongoing Israeli strikes in southern Beirut on Oct. 30, 2024. (Reuters)
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Updated 31 October 2024
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Middle East conflicts to leave ‘lasting scars’: IMF

Middle East conflicts to leave ‘lasting scars’: IMF
  • IMF lowers its predicted growth for the Middle East and Central Asia to 2.1 percent for 2024
  • IMF forecasts for Lebanon, where conflict with Israel has sharply escalated this month, have been suspended

DUBAI: Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan will take decades to recover from the conflicts raging on their soil, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday after downgrading the region’s growth forecast.
Israel’s military actions against Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Sudan’s civil war would have enduring impacts, the IMF said.
“The damage caused by these conflicts will leave lasting scars at their epicenters for decades,” the global lender said in a statement.
The IMF has lowered its predicted growth for the Middle East and Central Asia to 2.1 percent for 2024, a drop of 0.6 percent due to the wars and lower oil production.
Depending on the conflicts, growth should rise to 4.0 percent next year, according to the IMF’s Regional Economic Outlook which was compiled in September.
“This year has been challenging with conflicts causing devastating human suffering and lasting economic damage,” Jihad Azour, the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department director, told reporters in Dubai.
“The recent escalation in Lebanon has greatly increased the uncertainty in the whole MENA region.”
IMF forecasts for Lebanon, where conflict with Israel has sharply escalated this month, have been suspended. But “conservative” estimates show a 9.0-10 percent contraction this year, Azour said.
“The impact (on Lebanon) will be severe and it will depend how long this conflict will last,” said the former Lebanese finance minister.
Saudi-led oil cuts through the OPEC+ group, aimed at propping up prices, “are contributing to sluggish near-term growth in many economies,” the IMF said.
For the region’s oil exporters, “medium-term growth is projected to moderate, as economic diversification reforms will take time to yield results,” it added.
Downside risks continue to dominate, the lender said, including fluctuating commodity prices, conflicts and climate shocks.


Egyptian foreign minister to visit China this week

Updated 13 sec ago
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Egyptian foreign minister to visit China this week

Egyptian foreign minister to visit China this week
  • The two countries will hold a foreign ministers’ level strategic dialogue, Mao added
BEIJING: Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty will visit China from Dec. 12-13, Mao Ning, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, told a regular press conference on Wednesday.
The two countries will hold a foreign ministers’ level strategic dialogue, Mao added. The Arab League, an assembly of 22 Middle Eastern and North African nations, including Syria, is headquartered in Cairo, Egypt’s capital.

Syria seeks stability and reconstruction after Assad’s fall, HTS leader tells Sky News  

Syria seeks stability and reconstruction after Assad’s fall, HTS leader tells Sky News  
Updated 5 min 11 sec ago
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Syria seeks stability and reconstruction after Assad’s fall, HTS leader tells Sky News  

Syria seeks stability and reconstruction after Assad’s fall, HTS leader tells Sky News  

DUBAI: Foreign nations have no reason to fear Syria following the ousting of Bashar al Assad's regime, the leader of the rebel group responsible for toppling the government has told Sky News on Wednesday.

In his first interview with a Western outlet since Assad fled, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, head of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), reassured that such concerns are unwarranted.

Golani, a former member of the Islamic State of Iraq, previously led al Qaeda's affiliate group in Syria before severing ties in 2016. He is now attempting to present himself as a more moderate Islamist leader. However, HTS remains designated as a terrorist organization by the UN, US, UK, and other nations.

“The country will be rebuilt,” Golani said during an interview in Damascus with Sky News' international news editor, Zein Jaafar, and Middle East producer, Celine al Khaldi.

He added, “The fear stemmed from the regime’s presence. Syria is now on a path toward development, reconstruction, and stability.”

Despite his reassurances, HTS's rapid rise to power has sparked fears among Syria’s minorities, including Kurds, Alawites, and Christians.

Golani emphasized that Syrians, weary from years of war, are not seeking further conflict. "The country isn’t ready for another war, nor will it enter one," he stated.

He also highlighted the removal of Iranian militias, Hezbollah, and Assad’s regime as pivotal for Syria's recovery, saying, “Their absence is the solution. The current situation rules out a return to panic.”

Golani praised the efforts of his fighters who, he claims, took charge of Syria without any foreign support or interference.

In a clear reference to previous Russian and Iranian support for the Assad regime, he noted that all former "colonisers" had failed to control the country.


Israeli strike on northern Gaza kills 26, Palestinian medics say

Israeli strike on northern Gaza kills 26, Palestinian medics say
Updated 48 min 47 sec ago
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Israeli strike on northern Gaza kills 26, Palestinian medics say

Israeli strike on northern Gaza kills 26, Palestinian medics say
  • Israel has been waging a renewed offensive against Hamas militants in northern Gaza

CAIRO: Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 26 people overnight and into Wednesday, including one that hit a home where displaced people were sheltering in the isolated north, killing 19, according to Palestinian medical officials.
That strike occurred in the northern town of Beit Lahiya near the border with Israel, according to the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital, which received the bodies. Hospital records show that a family of eight were among those killed, including four children, their parents and two grandparents.
Another strike in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed at least seven people, according to the Awda Hospital. Records show the dead included two children, their parents and three relatives.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military. Israel has been waging a renewed offensive against Hamas militants in northern Gaza since early October. The military says it tries to avoid harming civilians and accuses militants of hiding among them, putting their lives in danger.
The army said militants in central Gaza fired four projectiles into Israel on Wednesday, two of which were intercepted. The other two fell in open areas, and there were no reports of casualties.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250 people, including children and older adults. Around 100 hostages are still inside Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 44,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to local health officials. They say women and children make up more than half the dead but do not distinguish between fighters and civilians in their count. Israel says it has killed over 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.


Airline pilots, crews voice concerns about Middle East routes

Airline pilots, crews voice concerns about Middle East routes
Updated 11 December 2024
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Airline pilots, crews voice concerns about Middle East routes

Airline pilots, crews voice concerns about Middle East routes
  • Some pilots, crew unions worry about certain Middle Eastern flight routes — letters to airlines, regulators
  • The safety debate about flying over the region is playing out in Europe largely because pilots there are protected by unions, unlike other parts of the world

LONDON: In late September, an experienced pilot at low-cost European airline Wizz Air felt anxious after learning his plane would fly over Iraq at night amid mounting tensions between nearby Iran and Israel.
He decided to query the decision since just a week earlier the airline had deemed the route unsafe. In response, Wizz Air’s flight operations team told him the airway was now considered secure and he had to fly it, without giving further explanation, the pilot said.
“I wasn’t really happy with it,” the pilot, who requested anonymity from fear he could lose his job, told Reuters. Days later, Iraq closed its airspace when Iran fired missiles on Oct. 1 at Israel. “It confirmed my suspicion that it wasn’t safe.”
In response to Reuters’ queries, Wizz Air said safety is its top priority and it had carried out detailed risk assessments before resuming flights over Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries.
Reuters spoke to four pilots, three cabin crew members, three flight security experts and two airline executives about growing safety concerns in the European air industry due to escalating tensions in the Middle East following Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023, that prompted the war in Gaza.
The Middle East is a key air corridor for planes heading to India, South-East Asia and Australia and last year was criss-crossed daily by 1,400 flights to and from Europe, Eurocontrol data show.
The safety debate about flying over the region is playing out in Europe largely because pilots there are protected by unions, unlike other parts of the world.
Reuters reviewed nine unpublished letters from four European unions representing pilots and crews that expressed worries about air safety over Middle Eastern countries. The letters were sent to Wizz Air, Ryanair, airBaltic, the European Commission and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) between June and August.
“No one should be forced to work in such a hazardous environment and no commercial interests should outweigh the safety and well-being of those on board,” read a letter, addressed to EASA and the European Commission from Romanian flight crew union FPU Romania, dated Aug. 26.
In other letters, staff called on airlines to be more transparent about their decisions on routes and demanded the right to refuse to fly a dangerous route.
There have been no fatalities or accidents impacting commercial aviation tied to the escalation of tensions in the Middle East since the war in Gaza erupted last year.
Air France opened an internal investigation after one of its commercial planes flew over Iraq on Oct. 1 during Tehran’s missile attack on Israel. On that occasion, airlines scrambled to divert dozens of planes heading toward the affected areas in the Middle East.
The ongoing tensions between Israel and Iran and the abrupt ousting of President Bashar Assad by Syrian rebels at the weekend have raised concerns of further insecurity in the region.
The use of missiles in the region has revived memories of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014 and of Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 en route from Tehran in 2020.
Being accidentally shot-down in the chaos of war is the top worry, three pilots and two aviation safety experts told Reuters, along with the risk of an emergency landing.
While airlines including Lufthansa and KLM no longer fly over Iran, carriers including Etihad, flydubai, Aeroflot and Wizz Air were still crossing the country’s airspace as recently as Dec. 2, data from tracking service FlightRadar24 show.
Some European airlines including Lufthansa and KLM allow crew to opt-out of routes they don’t feel are safe, but others such as Wizz Air, Ryanair and airBaltic don’t.
AirBaltic CEO Martin Gauss said his airline meets an international safety standard that doesn’t need to be adjusted.
“If we start a right of refusal, then where do we stop? the next person feels unhappy overflying Iraqi airspace because there’s tension there?” he told Reuters on Dec. 2 in response to queries about airBaltic flight safety talks with unions.
Ryanair, which intermittently flew to Jordan and Israel until September, said it makes security decisions based on EASA guidance.
“If EASA says it’s safe, then, frankly, thank you, we’re not interested in what the unions or some pilot think,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary told Reuters in October, when asked about staff security concerns.
EASA said it has been involved in a number of exchanges with pilots and airlines on route safety in recent months concerning the Middle East, adding that disciplining staff for raising safety concerns would run counter to a “just culture” where employees can voice worries.
Insufficient reassurances
One Abu Dhabi-based Wizz Air pilot told Reuters he was comfortable flying over the conflict-torn region as he believes the industry has a very high safety standard.
But for some pilots and crew members working at budget airlines, the reassurances of the companies are insufficient.
They told Reuters pilots should have more choice in refusing flights over potentially dangerous airspace and requested more information about airline security assessments.
“The fact that Wizz Air sends emails asserting that it’s safe is irrelevant to commercial employees,” read a letter from FPU Romania to Chief Operating Officer Diarmuid O’Conghaile, dated Aug. 12. “Flights into these conflict areas, even if they are rescue missions, should be carried out by military personnel and aircraft, not by commercial crews.”
Mircea Constantin, a former cabin crew member who represents FPU Romania, said Wizz Air never gave a formal response to this letter and similar ones sent earlier this year, but did send security guidance and updates to staff.
A pilot and a cabin crew member, who declined to be named for fear of retaliatory action, said they got warnings from their employers for refusing to fly on Middle Eastern routes or calling in sick.
Congested skies
Last month, 165 missiles were launched in Middle Eastern conflict zones versus just 33 in November 2023, according to the latest available data from Osprey Flight Solutions.
But airspace can only be enforcably restricted if a country chooses to shut it down, as in the case of Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Several airlines have opted to briefly suspend flights to places like Israel when tension rises. Lufthansa and British Airways did so after Iran bombarded Israel on April 13.
But this limits the airspace in use in the already congested Middle Eastern skies.
Choosing to fly over Central Asia or Egypt and Saudi Arabia to avoid Middle Eastern hot spots is also more costly as planes burn more fuel and some countries charge higher overflight fees.
Flying a commercial plane from Singapore to London-Heathrow through Afghanistan and Central Asia, for instance, cost an airline $4,760 in overflight fees, about 50 percent more than a route through the Middle East, according to two Aug. 31 flight plans reviewed by Reuters.
Reuters could not name the airline as the flight plans are not public.
Some private jets are avoiding the most critical areas.
“At the moment, my no-go areas would be the hotspot points: Libya, Israel, Iran, simply because they’re sort of caught up in it all,” said Andy Spencer, a Singapore-based pilot who flies private jets and who previously worked as an airline pilot.
Spencer, who has two decades of experience and flies through the Middle East regularly, said that on a recent flight from Manila to Cuba, he flew from Dubai over Egypt and north through Malta before refueling in Morocco to circumvent Libyan and Israeli airspace.
EASA, regarded by industry experts as the strictest regional safety regulator, issues public bulletins on how to fly safely over conflict zones.
But these aren’t mandatory and every airline decides where to travel based on a patchwork of government notices, third-party security advisers, in-house security teams and information sharing between carriers, leading to divergent policies.
Such intelligence is not usually shared with staff.
The opacity has sown fear and mistrust among pilots, cabin crew and passengers as they question whether their airline has missed something carriers in other countries are aware of, said Otjan de Bruijn, a former head of European pilots union the European Cockpit Association and a pilot for KLM.
“The more information you make available to pilots, the more informed a decision they can make,” said Spencer, who is also an operations specialist at flight advisory body OPSGROUP, which offers independent operational advice to the aviation industry.
When Gulf players like Etihad, Emirates or flydubai suddenly stop flying over Iran or Iraq, the industry sees it as a reliable indicator of risk, pilots and security sources said, as these airlines can have access to detailed intelligence from their governments.
Flydubai told Reuters it operates within airspace and airways in the region that are approved by Dubai’s General Civil Aviation Authority. Emirates said it continuously monitors all routings, adjusting as required and would never operate a flight unless it was safe to do so. Etihad said it only operates through approved airspace.
Passenger rights groups are also asking for travelers to receive more information.
“If passengers decline to take flights over conflict zones, airlines would be disinclined to continue such flights,” said Paul Hudson, the head of US-based passenger group Flyers Rights. “And passengers who take such flights would do so informed of the risks.”


A mother in Gaza hasn’t seen her daughter since Israeli troops raided their home

A mother in Gaza hasn’t seen her daughter since Israeli troops raided their home
Updated 11 December 2024
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A mother in Gaza hasn’t seen her daughter since Israeli troops raided their home

A mother in Gaza hasn’t seen her daughter since Israeli troops raided their home
  • Ajour is one of dozens of Palestinians that an Israeli legal group

DEIR AL-BALAH: Reem Ajour says she last saw her husband and then 4-year-old daughter in March, when Israeli soldiers raided a family home in northern Gaza. She is haunted by those chaotic last moments, when the soldiers ordered her to go – to leave behind Talal and Masaa, both wounded.
Eight months later, the 23-year-old mother still has no answers about their fate. The military says it does not have them. Troops leveled the house where they were staying soon after the raid.
“I am living and dead at the same time,” she said, breaking down in sobs.
Ajour is one of dozens of Palestinians that an Israeli legal group, Hamoked, is helping in their search for family members who went missing after being separated by Israeli soldiers during raids and arrests in the Gaza Strip.
Their cases — a fraction of the estimated thousands who have gone missing during the 14-month-long war — highlight a lack of accountability in how the Israeli military deals with Palestinians during ground operations in Gaza, Hamoked says.
Throughout the war, the military has conducted what amounts to a mass sifting of the Palestinian population as it raids homes and shelters and sends people through checkpoints. Troops round up and detain men, from dozens to several hundreds at a time, searching for any they suspect of Hamas ties, while forcing their families away, toward other parts of Gaza. The result is families split apart, often amid the chaos of fighting.
But the military has not made clear how it keeps track of everyone it separates, arrests or detains. Even if troops transfer Palestinians to military detention inside Israel, they can hold them incommunicado for more than two months – their whereabouts unknown to families or lawyers, according to rights groups.
When people vanish, it’s nearly impossible to know what happened, Hamoked says.
“We’ve never had a situation of mass forced disappearance from Gaza, with no information provided for weeks and weeks to families,” said Jessica Montell, the director of Hamoked. Israel’s High Court of Justice has refused to intervene to get answers, despite Hamoked’s petitions, she said.
Asked by The Associated Press about the cases of Ajour and two other families it interviewed, the Israeli military declined comment.
4-year-old Masaa Ajour was shot, then separated from her mother
The Ajours were sheltering at a home in Gaza City that belonged to Talal’s family after being displaced from their own house earlier in the war. Israeli troops raided the home on March 24, opening fire as they burst in, Ajour said.
Ajour, who was three months pregnant, was shot in the stomach. Talal was wounded in his leg, bleeding heavily. Masaa lay passed out, shot in the shoulder – though Ajour said she saw her still breathing.
As one soldier bandaged the little girl’s wound, another pointed his gun in Ajour’s face and told her to head out of Gaza City.
She said she pleaded that she couldn’t leave Masaa and Talal, but the soldier screamed: “Go south!”
With no choice, Ajour collected her younger son and went down to the street. “It was all in a blink of an eye. It was all so fast,” she said. Still bleeding, she walked for two and a half hours, clutching her son.
When they reached a hospital in central Gaza, doctors treated her stomach wound and found her fetus’ pulse. Weeks later, doctors found the pulse had gone. She miscarried.
Ajour said that several weeks later, a Palestinian released from a prison in southern Israel told her family he had heard her husband’s name called out over a loudspeaker among a list of detainees.
The rumor has kept her hope alive, but the military told Hamoked it had no record of Masaa or Talal being detained.
Another possibility is that they died on the scene, but no one has been able to search the rubble of the family’s building to determine if any bodies are there.
The storming of their building came as Israeli forces were battling Hamas fighters in surrounding streets while raiding nearby Shifa Hospital, where it claimed the militants were based. Troops cleared families out of nearby homes and often then destroyed or set the buildings ablaze, according to witnesses at the time.
The military itself may not know what happened to Ajour’s husband and daughter, said Montell of Hamoked.
“That illustrates a broader problem,” she said.
Ajour and her son now shelter in a tent camp outside the central Gaza town of Zuweida.
Masaa, she said, “was my first joy” — with blond hair and olive-colored eyes, a face “white like the moon.”
Masaa’s fifth birthday was in July, Ajour said, sobbing. “She turned five while she is not with me.”
Does the military document what troops do in Gaza?
Under a wartime revision to Israeli law, Palestinians from Gaza taken to military detention in Israel can be held for over two months without access to the outside world.
Israel says the law is necessary to handle the unprecedented number of detainees as it seeks to destroy Hamas following the Oct. 7 2023, attack on Israel that killed 1,200 and took around 250 people hostage inside Gaza. The military has transferred some 1,770 of its Gaza detainees to civilian prisons, according to rights groups, but it has not revealed the number still in its detention.
Milena Ansari, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Israel is obligated under international law to document what happens during every home raid and detention. But the military is not transparent about the information it collects on detainees or on how many it is holding, she said.
Hamoked has asked the military for the whereabouts of 900 missing Palestinians. The military confirmed around 500 of them were detained in Israel. It said it had no record of detaining the other 400.
The group petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice seeking answers in 52 cases, including that of Masaa and two other children, where witnesses testified that the missing were handled by troops before their disappearances.
“The judges just dismiss the cases, without even inquiring what measures might be necessary to prevent such cases in the future,” said Montell.
A court spokesperson said it often asks the military to provide additional information but isn’t authorized to investigate if the military says it is not detaining them.