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Gaza strike kills an international UN staffer and wounds 5 others

Update Gaza strike kills an international UN staffer and wounds 5 others
In this picture, taken from Israel's southern border with the Gaza Strip, smoke rises over destroyed buildings in northern Gaza on March 19, 2025. Israel on March 18 launched its most intense strikes on the Gaza Strip since a January 19 ceasefire with Palestinian militant group Hamas ended more than 15 months of war. ( AFP)
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Updated 19 March 2025
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Gaza strike kills an international UN staffer and wounds 5 others

Gaza strike kills an international UN staffer and wounds 5 others
  • The head of the UN Office for Project Services declined to say who carried out the strike
  • “Israel knew this was a UN premise, that people were living, staying and working there”
Updated 19 March 2025
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GAZA: The United Nations says an international staffer was killed and five others wounded in a strike in the Gaza Strip.
Jorge Moreira da Silva, head of the UN Office for Project Services, declined to say who carried out the strike but said the explosive ordnance was “dropped or fired” and the blast was not accidental or related to demining activity.
UNOPS operates the mechanism tracking aid trucks into Gaza, does demining and helps bring fuel in. He did not provide the nationalities of those killed and wounded.
The Israeli military, which has carried out a heavy wave of airstrikes since early Tuesday, denied earlier reports that it had targeted the UN compound.
But Moreira da Silva said strikes had hit near the compound on Monday and struck it directly on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, when the staffer was killed.
He said the agency had contacted the Israeli military after the first strike and confirmed that it was aware of the facility’s location. “Israel knew this was a UN premise, that people were living, staying and working there,” he said.
The attack came a day after Israel carried out a wave of heavy strikes that killed over 400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, shattering the ceasefire with Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the wave of strikes Tuesday was “only the beginning” and that Israel would press ahead until it achieves all of its war aims — destroying Hamas and freeing all hostages held by the militant group since its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel ignited the fighting.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 436 people, including 183 children and 94 women, have been killed since Israel launched airstrikes Tuesday.
Zaher Al-Waheidi, head of the ministry’s records department, described it as the deadliest day in Gaza since the start of the war. Its records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Topics: War on Gaza Israel UN

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Hundreds of Syrian Druze clerics head to Israel on pilgrimage

Hundreds of Syrian Druze clerics head to Israel on pilgrimage
Updated 25 April 2025
AFP
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Hundreds of Syrian Druze clerics head to Israel on pilgrimage

Hundreds of Syrian Druze clerics head to Israel on pilgrimage
  • Hundreds of clerics from Syria’s Druze minority on Friday are heading to Israel where they will conduct a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine, the second such visit since longtime ruler Bashar Assad’s
Updated 25 April 2025
AFP

DAMASCUS:Hundreds of clerics from Syria’s Druze minority on Friday are heading to Israel where they will conduct a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine, the second such visit since longtime ruler Bashar Assad’s ouster.
The clerics from the esoteric, monotheistic faith, are to cross the border on foot, according to a Syrian official and a local news organization, despite Israel and Syria being technically at war.
The delegation will visit the Nabi Shuaib shrine in north Israel’s Galilee region, where an annual pilgrimage is held from April 25-28 each year.
Abu Yazan, the official from Hader on the Syrian Golan Heights, said that 400 clerics from his town and from the Damascus suburb of Jaramana will head to Israel after the Israeli authorities gave their approval.
Asking not to be identified by his full name, he said the trip was “purely religious” in nature.
Suwayda24, a news organization from nearby Sweida province, said some 150 Druze clerics from that area would also participate.
The group notified the Syrian government of its plan to go to Israel, though it received no response, the website added.
Unlike during a smaller visit to the shrine last month, the clerics will spend the night in Israel this time.
Abu Yazan, who is one of the participants, said that “we requested to stay for a week to visit the shrine” and other members of the religious community “but the Israeli side only authorized one night.”
The Druze are mainly divided between Syria, Israel and Lebanon.
They account for about three percent of Syria’s population and are heavily concentrated in the south.
Israel seized much of the strategic Golan Heights from Syria in a war in 1967, later annexing the area in 1981 in a move largely unrecognized by the international community.
After Islamist-led forces ousted Assad in December, Israel carried out hundreds of air strikes on Syria and sent troops into the demilitarised buffer zone of the Golan.
Israeli authorities have also voiced support for Syria’s Druze and mistrust of the country’s new leaders.
In March, following a deadly clash between government-linked forces and Druze fighters in Jaramana, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said his country would not allow Syria’s new rulers “to harm the Druze.”
Druze leaders rejected the warning and declared their loyalty to a united Syria.

Topics: Syria Druze

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Rescuers say death toll from Israeli strike on north Gaza home rises to 23

Rescuers say death toll from Israeli strike on north Gaza home rises to 23
Updated 25 April 2025
AFP
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Rescuers say death toll from Israeli strike on north Gaza home rises to 23

Rescuers say death toll from Israeli strike on north Gaza home rises to 23
  • Gaza’s civil defense agency reported on Friday that the death toll from an Israeli air strike the day before on a house in the north of the Palestinian territory had risen to 23
Updated 25 April 2025
AFP

GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defense agency reported on Friday that the death toll from an Israeli air strike the day before on a house in the north of the Palestinian territory had risen to 23.
“Civil defense teams recovered 11 bodies last night and this morning following the Israeli bombing that targeted a residential house ... in Jabalia,” Mohammed Al-Mughayyir, an official with the agency, told AFP.
“This is in addition to the 12 victims recovered at the time of the attack yesterday,” he added.
Gaza’s northern area of Jabalia has repeatedly been a focus Israel’s military offensive since the start of the war on October 7, 2023 following Hamas’s attack on Israel.
The military has returned to the district several times after announcing it had been cleared of militants, saying Hamas fighters had regrouped there.
In another strike in the area on Thursday, Israel hit what was previously a police station, rescuers said.
The toll from that attack has risen to 11, Mughayyir said, after initially announcing that nine people had been killed.
The military said on Thursday that it had struck a Hamas “command and control center” in the area of Jabalia, without specifying the target.
Israeli strikes continued on Friday, with the civil defense agency reporting that at least five people — a couple and their three children — had been killed when their tent was struck in the Al-Mawasi area of the southern city of Khan Yunis.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said that the deceased woman had been pregnant.
Since Israel resumed its offensive on March 18 after the collapse of a two-month ceasefire with Hamas, at least 1,978 people have been killed in Gaza, bringing the overall death toll of the war to 51,355, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

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UN voices concern over latest South Sudan clashes as civilians flee

UN voices concern over latest South Sudan clashes as civilians flee
Updated 36 min 58 sec ago
Reuters
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UN voices concern over latest South Sudan clashes as civilians flee

UN voices concern over latest South Sudan clashes as civilians flee
  • The United Nations agency warns that it may have to reduce the number of people it can help across the country, from May, if more funding does not come through from donors
Updated 36 min 58 sec ago
Reuters

GENEVA: The United Nations said Friday it was "deeply concerned" by clashes between South Sudan's military and opposition forces in a southern state, where displaced civilians told AFP they had been left without food.
The world's youngest nation, which is deeply impoverished, has long been troubled by insecurity and instability.
But recent fighting between factions allied to President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival Vice-President Riek Machar have sparked worries of renewed war.
International observers fear a return to the five-year civil war that cost some 400,000 lives and was ended by a 2018 peace deal which brought the two together in a unity government, but which appears to be unravelling.
Clashes between the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (SSPDF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Army-in Opposition (SPLA-IO) in neighbouring Morobo and Yei counties in Central Equatoria State "have led to civilian displacement and casualties", the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said.
The state includes the capital, Juba, and under the 2018 agreement was split into areas controlled by government and opposition forces.
Pro-Machar forces denounced government attacks on a military cantonment in the area earlier this week, urging civilians to leave. The army did not comment.
The UN did not give further details of the clashes, but urged an "immediate cessation of hostilities", especially given the "already fragile political and security conditions".
Morobo County Commissioner Charles Data Bullen said the situation in the area "remains volatile".
Margret Ileli, 28, said she heard gunshots nearby on Tuesday afternoon "and we started running leaving everything behind".
She was now sheltering in Morobo town but told AFP: "I am confused and I don't know what to do next."
Charles Likambo, 30, was also displaced with his family of five, telling AFP he was forced to abandon his crops and goats.
"Me and my family have not received any food assistance, and my children keep on crying because they are hungry," he said, urging humanitarian organisations to help.

Topics: World Food Programme Sudan

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Morocco volunteers on Sahara clean-up mission

Morocco volunteers on Sahara clean-up mission
Updated 25 April 2025
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Morocco volunteers on Sahara clean-up mission

Morocco volunteers on Sahara clean-up mission
  • It may be the gateway to the vast Sahara desert, but that does not mean it’s free of that modern scourge of the environment — the rubbish humanity discards
Updated 25 April 2025
AFP

M’HAMID EL GHIZLANE:It may be the gateway to the vast Sahara desert, but that does not mean it’s free of that modern scourge of the environment — the rubbish humanity discards.
In southern Morocco, volunteers are hunting for waste embedded in the sand, and they do not have to look far.
Bottles, plastic bags — “there are all kinds,” noted one helper who has joined the initiative cleaning up the edge of a village bordering the Sahara.
The initiative marks the 20th International Nomads Festival, which is held in mid-April every year in M’Hamid El Ghizlane in Zagora province in southeast Morocco.
Around 50 people, gloved and equipped with rubbish bags, toiled away for five hours — and collected 400 to 600 kilos of waste, the organizers estimated.
“Clean-up initiatives usually focus on beaches and forests,” festival founder Noureddine Bougrab, who lives in the village of around 6,600 people, told AFP.
“But the desert also suffers from pollution.”
The campaign brings together artists, activists and foreign tourists, and is a call for the “world’s deserts to be protected,” said Bougrab, 46.
He said the clean-up began at the northern entrance of the village, “which was badly affected by pollution,” and extended through to the other end of town and the beginning of the “Great Desert.”
The rubbish is “mainly linked to the massive production of plastic products, low recycling rates and atmospheric pollutants carried by the wind,” said anthropologist Mustapha Naimi.
Morocco has a population of almost 37 million and they generate about 8.2 million tons of household waste each year, according to the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development.
“This is equivalent to 811 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — enough to fill 2,780 Olympic swimming pools with compacted waste,” said Hassan Chouaouta, an international expert in sustainable strategic development.
Of this amount, “between six and seven percent” is recycled, he said.


Their morning alarm went off “early,” according to one volunteer, New York-based French photographer Ronan Le Floch, who said the initiative’s aim was “to show that it’s important to take care of this type of environment.”
Another helper was Ousmane Ag Oumar, a 35-year-old Malian member of Imarhan Timbuktu, a Tuareg blues group.
He called the waste a direct danger to livestock, which are essential to the subsistence of nomadic communities.
Naimi, the anthropologist, agreed. “Plastic waste harms the Saharan environment as it contaminates the land, pasture, rivers and nomadic areas,” he said.
Pastoral nomadism is a millennia-old way of life based on seasonal mobility and available pasture for livestock.
But it is on the wane in Morocco, weakened by climate change and with nomadic communities now tending to stay in one place.
The most recent official census of nomads in Morocco dates to 2014, and returned a population of 25,274 — 63 percent lower than a decade earlier in 2004.
Mohammed Mahdi, a professor of rural sociology, said the country’s nomads had “not benefited from much state support, compared to subsidies granted to agriculture, especially for products intended for export.”
“We give very little to nomadic herders, and a good number have gone bankrupt and given up,” he said.
Mohamed Oujaa, 50, is leader of The Sand Pigeons, a group that specializes in the “gnawa” music practiced in the Maghreb by the descendants of black slaves.
For him, a clean environment is vital for future generations, and he hopes the initiative will be “just the first in a series of campaigns to clean up the desert.”

Topics: Morocco

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Syria’s new foreign minister to appear at the UN in his first US visit

Syria’s new foreign minister to appear at the UN in his first US visit
Asaad al-Shibani speaks during the 163rd GCC Ministerial Council meeting with Syria in Mecca. (AFP)
Updated 25 April 2025
AP
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Syria’s new foreign minister to appear at the UN in his first US visit

Syria’s new foreign minister to appear at the UN in his first US visit
  • The three-starred flag that had previously been used by opposition groups has replaced the two-starred flag of the Assad era as the country’s official emblem
  • European Union has begun to roll back its sanctions
Updated 25 April 2025
AP

BEIRUT: Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shibani was set to raise his country’s new flag at the United Nations headquarters in New York Friday and to attend a UN Security Council briefing, the first public appearance by a high-ranking Syrian government official in the United States since the fall of former President Bashar Assad in a lightning rebel offensive in December.
The three-starred flag that had previously been used by opposition groups has replaced the two-starred flag of the Assad era as the country’s official emblem.
The new authorities in Damascus have been courting Washington in hopes of receiving relief from harsh sanctions that were imposed by the US and its allies in the wake of Assad’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in 2011 that spiraled into a civil war.
A delegation of Syrian officials traveled to the United States this week to attend World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington and UN meetings in New York. It was unclear if Trump administration officials would meet with Al-Shibani during the visit.
The Trump administration has yet to officially recognize the current Syrian government, led by Ahmad Al-Sharaa, an Islamist former insurgent who led the offensive that toppled Assad. Washington has also so far left the sanctions in place, although it has provided temporary relief to some restrictions. The militant group Al-Sharaa led, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, remains a US-designated terrorist organization.
Two Republican members of the US Congress, Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana and Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, arrived in Damascus last week on an unofficial visit organized by a Syrian-American nonprofit and met with Al-Sharaa and other government officials.
Mills told The Associated Press before meeting with Al-Sharaa that “ultimately, it’s going to be the president’s decision” to lift sanctions or not, although he said that “Congress can advise.”
Mills later told Bloomberg News that he had discussed the US conditions for sanctions relief with Al-Sharaa, including ensuring the destruction of chemical weapons left over from the Assad era, coordinating on counter-terrorism, making a plan to deal with foreign militants who fought alongside the armed opposition to Assad, and providing assurances to Israel that Syria would not pose a threat.
He also said that Al-Sharaa had said Syria could normalize relations with Israel “under the right conditions,” without specifying what those conditions are.
Other Western countries have warmed up to the new Syrian authorities more quickly. The British government on Thursday lifted sanctions against a dozen Syrian entities, including government departments and media outlets, and the European Union has begun to roll back its sanctions.

Topics: Syria Fall of Assad

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