Families of Syrians who disappeared during its civil war say the search must go on
Families of Syrians who disappeared during its civil war say the search must go on/node/2593838/middle-east
Families of Syrians who disappeared during its civil war say the search must go on
An aerial view of remaining buildings is seen which were not only destroyed during the civil war, they were also demolished by the government or stripped by thieves, at the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, outside Damascus, Syria, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)
Families of Syrians who disappeared during its civil war say the search must go on
A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the interim government led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared
Updated 17 March 2025
AP
DARAA, Syria: Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the country’s 14-year civil war gathered in the city of Daraa on Sunday to urge the newly installed interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.
The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared during the war, many of them detained by former President Bashar Assad’s network of intelligence agencies as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist Daesh group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing.
When rebels led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham overthrew Assad in December, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government’s dungeons. Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
On Sunday, the 14th anniversary of the countrywide uprisings that spiraled into civil war, Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government’s security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn’t heard from him since.
Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad’s ouster, trying to figure out her father’s whereabouts.
“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she said. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”
A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the interim government led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared. The commission also urged the new government to pursue perpetrators.
Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with Al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.
Syria’s civil war began after Assad crushed largely peaceful protests in 2011, one of the popular uprisings against Arab rulers known as the Arab Spring. Half a million people were killed during the conflict, and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.
US strikes overnight in Yemen kill at least 3 people, Houthis say
Houthis claim shooting down another American MQ-9 Reaper drone, showing footage of debris supposedly of the fallen UAV
Footage aired by the rebels’ Al-Masirah satellite news channel showed chaotic scenes of people carrying wounded to waiting ambulances
Updated 10 April 2025
AP
DUBAI: Suspected US airstrikes in Yemen overnight into Thursday killed at least three people, while the death toll in an earlier attack rose to 13 dead, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels said. The rebels meanwhile aired footage they said showed the debris left after shooting down yet another American MQ-9 Reaper drone.
The 13 killed in strikes Tuesday night around Hodeida’s Al-Hawak district made it one of the deadliest single incidents in the ongoing American campaign, the rebels said. Another 15 people were wounded. The Houthis described the majority of those killed as women and children, without providing a breakdown.
The area is home to the city’s airport, which the rebels have used in the past to target shipping in the Red Sea.
Since its start, the intense campaign of US airstrikes targeting the rebels over their attacks on shipping in Mideast waters — related to the Israel-Hamas war — has killed over 100 people, according to casualty figures released Wednesday by the Houthis.
Footage aired by the rebels’ Al-Masirah satellite news channel showed chaotic scenes of people carrying wounded to waiting ambulances and rescuers searching by the light of their mobile phones. The target appeared in the footage to be a home in a residential neighborhood, likely part of a wider decapitation campaign launched by the Trump administration to kill rebel leaders.
Early Thursday morning, the Houthis said airstrikes targeting the Al-Sabain District in the south of the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, killed at least three people. The area is home to Al-Sabeen Square and a major mosque that has been a gathering point for months for Houthi demonstrations against the war in the Gaza Strip. Other strikes hit the capital as well.
More airstrikes hit Kamaran Island in the Red Sea, the Houthis said.
The US military’s Central Command, which oversees American military operations, did not acknowledge the strikes. That follows a pattern for the command, which now has authorization from the White House to conduct strikes at will in the campaign that began March 15.
The American military also hasn’t been providing any information on targets hit. The White House has said over 200 strikes have been conducted so far.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking in the Oval Office on Monday during a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that America was “not going to relent” in its campaign targeting the Houthis. Oil shipments targeted as US drone reportedly shot down
On Wednesday, the State Department said the US “will not tolerate any country or commercial entity providing support to foreign terrorist organizations, such as the Houthis, including offloading ships and provisioning oil at Houthi-controlled ports.” That likely will further squeeze the rebels, who already have had problems in their territory with bad gasoline destroying vehicle engines.
The Houthis also aired footage of the burning wreckage of what they described as an MQ-9 Reaper drone shot down in Yemen’s Al-Jawaf governorate. One man poked at the debris with a stick as those gathered chanted the Houthis’ slogan: “God is the greatest; death to America; death to Israel; curse the Jews; victory to Islam.”
Central Command said it was aware of the report of the shoot down, but declined to answer further.
The Houthis say they shoot down the drones with locally made missiles. The Houthis have surface-to-air missiles — such as the Iranian missile known as the 358 — capable of downing aircraft.
Iran denies arming the rebels, though Tehran-manufactured weaponry has been found on the battlefield and in sea shipments heading to Yemen for the Shiite Houthi rebels despite a United Nations arms embargo.
General Atomics Reapers, which cost around $30 million apiece, can fly at altitudes over 40,000 feet (12,100 meters) and remain in the air for over 30 hours. They have been flown by both the US military and the CIA for years over Afghanistan, Iraq and now Yemen.
The Houthis claim they’ve shot down 22 MQ-9s over the country over the years, with 18 downed during the rebels’ campaign over the Israel-Hamas war.
The US military hasn’t acknowledged the total number of drones it has lost there. US airstrikes under Trump more intense than those under Biden
An AP review has found the new US operation against the Houthis under President Donald Trump appears more extensive than that under former President Joe Biden, as Washington moves from solely targeting launch sites to firing at ranking personnel and dropping bombs on cities.
The new campaign of airstrikes started after the rebels threatened to begin targeting “Israeli” ships again over Israel blocking aid entering the Gaza Strip. The rebels have loosely defined what constitutes an Israeli ship, meaning many vessels could be targeted.
The Houthis targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two of them and killing four sailors from November 2023 until January of this year. They also launched attacks targeting American warships without success.
The US campaign shows no signs of stopping, as the Trump administration has linked its airstrikes on the Houthis to an effort to pressure Iran over its rapidly advancing nuclear program as well.
What really happened to the Palestinian rescue workers killed in Gaza on March 23?
Israeli troops killed 15 medics in the deadliest attack on Red Cross and Red Crescent staff in eight years
Officials claim the rescuers were mistaken for terrorists, but UN agencies want an independent investigation
Updated 10 April 2025
ANAN TELLO
LONDON: Autopsies on 15 Palestinian emergency workers who were killed in Gaza on March 23 revealed they were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill,” according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. On Monday, the organization called for an international investigation into the incident.
The workers had set out in ambulances, a fire truck and a UN vehicle on a rescue mission in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip — only to be discovered buried with their vehicles in what the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, described as a “mass grave.”
International teams led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) dig for bodies of murdered humanitarian workers buried in mass graves by the Israeli military in Gaza. (X: @_jwhittall)
As the day drew to a close, the Palestine Red Crescent Society reported losing contact with its team, which had been dispatched to Rafah’s Al-Hashashin neighborhood to evacuate casualties wounded by an earlier Israeli bombardment.
In a subsequent post on X, the organization said Israeli forces were attacking their ambulances and that several emergency medical technicians had been injured during the operation.
Video That Exposes the Israeli Occupation’s Lies
The Palestine Red Crescent Society has obtained a video from the family of a martyred EMT, found on his mobile phone after his body was recovered from a mass grave in Gaza. He was among 15 ambulance and relief team members… pic.twitter.com/8iWqULxijC
By March 25, two days after their disappearance, the organization said in a statement that nine of its ambulance crew members were still missing “after they were besieged and targeted by Israeli occupation forces in Rafah.”
Similarly, Gaza’s Civil Defense reported that displaced Palestinians sheltering in Tal Al-Sultan — a neighborhood under heavy Israeli bombardment — were struck, and a rescue team sent to assist them was “surrounded by Israeli troops.”
Efforts to secure access for rescue teams through international organizations were reportedly blocked by Israeli authorities. Nearly a week later, on March 30, international teams gained access to the site and uncovered evidence of direct attacks on humanitarian workers.
Contrary to claims by the Israeli military, a video retrieved from the mobile phone of one of the victims showed that the vehicles were clearly marked as ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car. (AFP file photo)
The bodies of all 15 medics and emergency responders were found buried in what appeared to be a mass grave, the AP news agency reported. Their vehicles — clearly marked as ambulances, a fire truck and a UN car — were found mangled and half-buried, apparently by Israeli military equipment.
The victims included eight Red Crescent workers, six members of Gaza’s Civil Defense emergency unit and a staffer from the UN Relief and Works Agency. Ambulance officer Assad Al-Nassasra remains missing.
OCHA said in a statement that all but one body was recovered on March 30; one Civil Defense member’s body was retrieved earlier on March 27 during attempts to access the area.
15 emergency & aid workers in Gaza – from @PalestineRCS, Palestinian Civil Defense and UN - were found buried by their wrecked & well-marked vehicles. Our condolences to their families.⁰⁰They were killed by Israeli forces while trying to save lives. We demand answers & justice. https://t.co/TudYttukQF
The UN agency also stated that “available information indicates that the first team was killed by Israeli forces on 23 March.”
It further noted that additional emergency teams dispatched to rescue their colleagues were also “struck one after another over several hours.” All operations, according to the Civil Defense, took place during daylight hours.
Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defense, said Israeli soldiers “handcuffed” the victims’ bodies and “decapitated one of them before executing them, marking a dangerous escalation of crimes against civilians and relief teams.”
"Returning the next day, we were finally able to reach the site and discovered a devastating scene: ambulances, the UN vehicle, and fire truck had been crushed and partially buried," wrote
Jonathan Whittall, OCHA’s head of office for the Occupied Territories, wrote on X. (X: @_jwhittall)
He added: “The occupation directly executed Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense teams and desecrated the bodies of humanitarian workers before burying them in mass graves.”
The Red Crescent said the workers and their vehicles were clearly marked with medical and humanitarian insignia. The organization accused Israeli forces of killing them “in cold blood.”
Initially, Israel defended its actions by claiming its troops opened fire because the convoy approached “suspiciously” at night without identification or headlights. It also claimed that nine members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident but provided no evidence.
Foreign Minister Gideon Saar reiterated these claims during a press conference, claiming the Israeli Defense Forces “did not randomly attack an ambulance” but rather identified “several uncoordinated vehicles” advancing “suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals.”
The IDF did not randomly attack an ambulance on March 23. Let me walk through what happened step-by-step:
1. Last Sunday, several uncoordinated vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals. IDF troops then… https://t.co/VdtyXd8qj5
“IDF troops then opened fire at the suspected vehicles,” he said, adding that “following an initial assessment, it was determined that the forces had eliminated a Hamas military terrorist, Mohammed Amin Ibrahim Shubaki, who took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, along with eight other terrorists from Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.”
An Israeli military official, briefing journalists over the weekend on condition of anonymity, said troops first fired at a vehicle carrying members of Hamas internal security forces, killing two and detaining another.
Two hours later, at 6 a.m. on March 23, the soldiers “received a report from the aerial coverage that there is a convoy moving in the dark in a suspicious way towards them” and “opened fire from far.”
“They thought they had an encounter with terrorists,” said the official.
On Monday, Israeli government spokesman David Mencer said six Hamas militants were among the 15 killed. “What were Hamas terrorists doing in ambulances?” he said.
However, the narrative unraveled after mobile phone footage emerged debunking Israel’s account. A video filmed by Rifaat Radwan, a paramedic killed in the attack, showed the vehicles had their lights on and were clearly marked.
Originally shared by the New York Times, the mobile video begins inside a moving vehicle, capturing a red fire truck and ambulances driving in the dark. Both vehicles and paramedics were clearly marked as humanitarian, and the paramedics wore reflective hi-vis uniforms.
As Radwan and his colleagues arrive and exit their vehicles, a barrage of gunfire erupts without warning and lasts around five minutes. The medic is heard reciting the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith traditionally spoken when death is near.
The 18-minute video also captured Radwan’s final words: “Mom, forgive me. This is the path I chose. I wanted to help people.” Moments later, voices of Israeli soldiers are heard approaching the vehicles.”
Following this revelation, Israel admitted its earlier account was inaccurate and attributed it to errors made by troops involved in the incident.
An IDF official stated during an April 5 press conference that soldiers buried the bodies “to protect them from wild animals” and moved vehicles to clear roads but denied allegations of close-range executions or handcuffing.
Trey Yingst, chief foreign correspondent at the New York Times, said he spoke with the IDF multiple times about the incident and was told “several vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights, or emergency signals.”
Sharing Radwan’s footage on X, he added: “That is clearly not true.”
New video shows Israeli forces open firing on medics in Gaza.
I’ve spoken with the IDF multiple times about this day and was told “several vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights, or emergency signals.”
Likewise, Munther Abed, a surviving paramedic who bore witness to his colleagues’ fate, told the BBC the ambulances had their lights on and denied his colleagues were linked with any militant group.
The IDF promised a “thorough examination” of the incident, saying it wanted to “understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation.”
The footage has drawn widespread condemnation from international observers. UN human rights chief Volker Turk called for an independent investigation into what he described as apparently systematic killings of emergency workers.
“The subsequent discovery of their bodies eight days later in Rafah, buried near their clearly marked destroyed vehicles, is deeply disturbing,” he said in a statement on April 1. “This raises significant questions with regard to the conduct of the Israeli army during and in the aftermath of the incident.”
Stressing that medical personnel must be protected under international humanitarian law, Turk highlighted significant concerns about Israel’s conduct during and after the incident.
He also noted that the incident took place at a moment when “tens of thousands of Palestinians need help while they are reportedly trapped in Tal Al-Sultan, Rafah, with the entire governorate under a displacement order.”
Likewise, the Palestine Red Crescent and Germany, one of Israel’s closest allies in the EU, called for an urgent investigation into the incident.
Germany’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Christian Wagner, said on Monday: “There are very significant questions about the actions of the Israeli army now. An investigation and accountability of the perpetrators are urgently needed.”
Whether or not a thorough probe is carried out is “a question that ultimately affects the credibility of the Israeli constitutional state,” he added.
Israeli army chief Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir has ordered a more in-depth investigation into the attack after an initial probe was completed by the military.
Israel's newly appointed armed forces chief, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, visits the Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem on March 5, 2025. (AFP)
“The chief of staff has instructed a deeper investigation to be conducted and completed in the coming days,” the military said in a statement.
“The preliminary inquiry indicated that the troops opened fire due to a perceived threat following a previous encounter in the area.”
The March 23 incident was not the first time Israel is alleged to have targeted humanitarian or emergency workers, but the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies described this latest attack as the deadliest on its personnel in eight years.
Since the Gaza war was triggered by the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel in 2023, the IDF is reported to have killed more than 100 Civil Defense workers, more than 1,000 health workers, and at least 408 aid workers, including more than 280 UNRWA staff, according to UN figures.
Paramedics transport out of an ambulance some of the bodies of Palestinian first responders, who were killed a week before in Israeli military fire on ambulances, into Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on March 30, 2025. (AFP)
The latest uptick in violence prompted the heads of six UN agencies on Monday to call for an immediate renewal of the ceasefire, which Israel unilaterally broke, and the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza, blocked since March 2.
On March 18, Israel renewed its bombardment of Gaza, shattering the fragile ceasefire that had been in place since January. Since then, at least 1,200 Palestinians have been killed in the war-torn enclave, according to local health authorities.
James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, condemned what he described as “unprecedented breaches” of international humanitarian law linked to the resumption of Israeli air and ground operations in Gaza.
Echoing these concerns, IFRC spokesperson Tommaso Della Longa warned that hospitals “are literally overwhelmed” and running out of medicine and medical equipment. A lack of fuel and damage to infrastructure have knocked “more than half” of the Palestine Red Crescent’s ambulance teams out of action, he added.
The IDF began operations in Gaza in retaliation for the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, which left 1,200 people dead, the majority of them civilians, and saw 240 taken hostage, many of them non-Israelis.
Since then, Israel’s military operations against Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in the enclave have killed at least 50,800 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, according to local health officials.
In November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Warrants were also issued for several Hamas officials, who have since been killed in Israeli strikes.
Separately, Israel faces a case at the International Court of Justice, accused of committing genocide, a claim that Israeli officials and their US allies have rejected.
Bombed-out Gaza university becomes refuge for displaced
The families say they took shelter in the university because the UN schools-turned-shelters are already overwhelmed
More than 400,000 Palestinians across Gaza have been displaced by Israeli evacuation orders since it resumed its campaign
Updated 10 April 2025
AP
The main auditorium of the Islamic University of Gaza is a gutted, burned-out wreck. Giant holes have been blasted through its blackened walls. The banks of seats are mangled and twisted.
And now the stage, once the scene of joyous graduation ceremonies, is crowded with the tents of the displaced. The campus has become a refuge for hundreds of families in northern Gaza since Israel broke a ceasefire in March and relaunched the war.
The families say they took shelter in the university because the UN schools-turned-shelters are already overwhelmed. More than 400,000 Palestinians across Gaza have been displaced by Israeli evacuation orders since it resumed its campaign, according to the UN Most have already been displaced multiple times during the war.
Like all of Gaza’s 17 universities and colleges, the Islamic University has been decimated by Israeli bombardment and ground offensives over the past 18 months. Palestinians and several international academic groups have condemned it as “scholasticide,” the systematic destruction of the territory’s educational system.
Any sense that this was once a university is gone.
Families have set up tents in lecture halls and classrooms. They take books from the library and burn them in cooking fires because they have no fuel. Kids run around in gardens reduced to fields of debris and mounds of earth.
Manal Zaanin, a mother of six, has converted a filing cabinet into a makeshift oven to bake pita bread, which she sells to other families. Her children and other relatives lay out the dough on mattresses in one of the classrooms.
Families pool their resources to buy fuel for tractors to bring in large containers of water. A makeshift market has been set up under the archway of the main gate.
Their struggle to survive has worsened because Israel has cut off the entry of food, fuel, medicine and all other goods into Gaza for more than a month, straining the limited supplies of aid agencies on which nearly the entire population relies.
One of the territory’s largest, the Islamic University of Gaza had some 17,000 students before the war, studying everything from medicine and chemistry to literature and commerce. More than 60 percent of its students were women.
The campus has been pummeled by airstrikes and raids by Israeli ground troops. Strikes have killed at least 10 of its professors and deans, including the university president; prominent physicist Sufian Tayeh, who was killed along with his family when their home was bombed; and one of its best known professors, Refaat Alareer, an English teacher who organized workshops for young writers from Gaza.
At Israa University, troops blew up the main buildings in a controlled detonation, leveling them to the ground in January 2024. No campuses are functioning in the territory, though some universities, including the Islamic University of Gaza, conduct limited online courses.
US has hit more than 100 targets in Yemen since mid-March
American forces have hit the Houthis with near-daily air strikes since March 15
Strikes have destroyed command and control facilities, weapons stores and factories, US official says
Updated 09 April 2025
AFP
WASHINGTON: The United States has struck more than 100 targets in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen since beginning the latest phase of its air campaign against the Iran-backed militia last month, a US defense official said Wednesday.
American forces have hammered the Houthis with near-daily air strikes since March 15 in a bid to end the threat they pose to civilian shipping and military vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
“The US has hit more than 100 targets in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen,” the defense official said in response to a question on the number of American strikes since mid-March.
“We have destroyed command and control facilities, weapons manufacturing facilities, and advanced weapons storage locations,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Despite the strikes, the Houthis — who control large swathes of Yemen and have been at war with the internationally recognized government since 2015 — have continued to claim attacks against both US vessels and Israel.
The militants began targeting shipping in late 2023, claiming solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which has been devastated by a military campaign launched by Israel after a shock Hamas attack in October of that year.
Houthi attacks have prevented ships from passing through the Suez Canal — a vital route that normally carries about 12 percent of world shipping traffic — forcing many companies into a costly detour around the tip of southern Africa.
The United States first began conducting strikes against the Houthis under the Biden administration, and President Donald Trump vowed last week that military action against the militia would continue until they are no longer a threat to shipping.
“The choice for the Houthis is clear: Stop shooting at US ships, and we will stop shooting at you. Otherwise, we have only just begun, and the real pain is yet to come, for both the Houthis and their sponsors in Iran,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
France could recognize Palestinian state ‘in June’: Macron
“We must move toward recognition, and we will do so in the coming months,” Macron said
Formal recognition by Paris of a Palestinian state would mark a major policy switch and risk antagonizing Israel
Updated 09 April 2025
AFP
PARIS: France plans to recognize a Palestinian state within months and could make the move at a UN conference in New York in June on settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.
“We must move toward recognition, and we will do so in the coming months,” Macron, who this week visited Egypt, told France 5 television.
“Our aim is to chair this conference with Saudi Arabia in June, where we could finalize this movement of mutual recognition (of a Palestinian state) by several parties,” he added.
“I will do it (...) because I believe that at some point it will be right and because I also want to participate in a collective dynamic, which must also allow all those who defend Palestine to recognize Israel in turn, which many of them do not do,” he added.
Such recognition would allow France “to be clear in our fight against those who deny Israel’s right to exist — which is the case with Iran — and to commit ourselves to collective security in the region,” he added.
France has long championed a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including after the October 7, 2023 attack by Palestinian militants Hamas on Israel.
But formal recognition by Paris of a Palestinian state would mark a major policy switch and risk antagonizing Israel which insists such moves by foreign states are premature.
In Egypt, Macron held summit talks with President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
