Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah

Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah
Palestinians set out with their belongings from Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan area after it was encircled by Israeli forces on March 23, 2025. (AFP)
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Updated 31 March 2025
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Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah

Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah
  • Israel ended ceasefire with Hamas and renewed its war earlier this month
  • The evacuation orders appear to cover nearly all of Rafah and nearby areas

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The Israeli military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.
Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept changes to the truce agreement.
The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas. The military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid Al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, last May, leaving large parts of it in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel.
Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceasefire it signed with Hamas in January under US pressure, but it later refused to, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.
Israel has vowed to intensify its military operations until Hamas releases the remaining 59 hostages it holds — 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has also demanded that Hamas disarm and leave the territory, conditions that were not included in the ceasefire agreement and which Hamas has rejected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would take charge of security in Gaza after the war and implement US President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gaza’s population in other countries, describing it as “voluntary emigration.”
That plan has been universally rejected by Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion from their homeland, and human rights experts say it would likely violate international law.
Hamas, meanwhile, has insisted on implementing the signed agreement, which called for the remainder of the hostages to be released in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. Negotiations over those parts of the agreement were supposed to have begun in February but only preliminary talks have been held.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rampaging through army bases and farming communities and killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The militants took another 251 people hostage, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. At its height, the war had displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s population, with many fleeing multiple times.
Large areas of Gaza have been completely destroyed, and it’s unclear how or when anything will be rebuilt.


Trump lands in Abu Dhabi on last leg of Gulf tour

Trump lands in Abu Dhabi on last leg of Gulf tour
Updated 5 sec ago
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Trump lands in Abu Dhabi on last leg of Gulf tour

Trump lands in Abu Dhabi on last leg of Gulf tour

ABU DHABI: US President Donald Trump arrived Thursday in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates' capital, on the final stop of his multi-day Gulf tour, AFP journalists on Air Force One said.
After visits to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week, Trump is hoping to secure billions of dollars in business deals with the UAE that seeks to become an artificial intelligence hub.


Drones drag Sudan war into dangerous new territory

Drones drag Sudan war into dangerous new territory
Updated 6 min 40 sec ago
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Drones drag Sudan war into dangerous new territory

Drones drag Sudan war into dangerous new territory
  • RSF has sought to demonstrate its strength, discredit the army and disrupt its supply lines
  • Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair said “this is intended to undermine the army’s ability to provide safety and security in areas they control“

CAIRO: Paramilitary drone strikes targeting Sudan’s wartime capital have sought to shatter the regular army’s sense of security and open a dangerous new chapter in the war, experts say.

Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) group has been at war with the army, which has recently recaptured some territory and dislodged the paramilitaries from the capital Khartoum.

The latter appeared to have the upper hand before Sunday, when drone strikes began blasting key infrastructure in Port Sudan, seat of the army-backed government on the Red Sea coast.

With daily strikes on the city since then, the RSF has sought to demonstrate its strength, discredit the army, disrupt its supply lines and project an air of legitimacy, experts believe.

According to Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair, “this is intended to undermine the army’s ability to provide safety and security in areas they control,” allowing the RSF to expand the war “without physically being there.”

For two years, the paramilitaries relied mainly on lightning ground offensives, overwhelming army defenses in brutal campaigns of conquest.

But after losing nearly all of Khartoum in March, the RSF has increasingly turned to long-range air power.

RSF has hit strategic sites hundreds of kilometers (miles) away from their holdout positions on the capital’s outskirts.

Michael Jones, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, says the RSF’s pivot is a matter of both “strategic adaptation” and “if not desperation, then necessity.”

“The loss of Khartoum was both a strategic and symbolic setback,” he told AFP.

In response, the RSF needed to broadcast a “message that the war isn’t over,” according to Sudanese analyst Hamid Khalafallah.

The conflict between Sudan’s de facto leader, army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has split Africa’s third-largest country in two.

The army holds the center, north and east, while the RSF controls nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur and, with its allies, parts of the south.

“It’s unlikely that the RSF can retake Khartoum or reach Port Sudan by land, but drones enable them to create a sense of fear and destabilize cities” formerly considered safe, Khalafallah told AFP.

With drones and loitering munitions, it can “reach areas it hasn’t previously infiltrated successfully,” Jones said.

According to a retired Sudanese general, the RSF has been known to use two types of drone — makeshift lightweight models with 120mm mortar rounds that explode on impact, and long-range drones capable of delivering guided missiles, including the Chinese-manufactured CH95.

According to Mohaned Elnour, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, the RSF’s “main objective is to divert the army’s attention” and position itself as a potential government, which it has said it will form.

“It’s much easier for them to attack quickly and withdraw, rather than defend territory,” Elnour said.

Crossing Sudan’s vast landmass — some 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) from RSF bases in Darfur to Port Sudan — requires long-range drones such as the Chinese-made Wing Loong II, or the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 used by the army, according to Amnesty.

Both sides in Sudan are in a race to “destroy each other’s drone capacity,” Khair said.

Two years into the devastating war, the RSF has another incentive to rely on drones, she said.

“It allows them to spare their troops” after reports that RSF recruitment has dipped since the war began.

“Initial recruitment was high based on the opportunity to loot, and there’s very little left to loot now,” she said.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes including targeting civilians, but the RSF is specifically accused of rampant looting, ethnic cleansing and systematic sexual violence.


Lufthansa group suspends Tel Aviv flights following Houthi attacks on Israel

Lufthansa group suspends Tel Aviv flights following Houthi attacks on Israel
Updated 15 May 2025
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Lufthansa group suspends Tel Aviv flights following Houthi attacks on Israel

Lufthansa group suspends Tel Aviv flights following Houthi attacks on Israel
  • Airline group Lufthansa will suspend its flights to Tel Aviv through May 25

BERLIN: Airline group Lufthansa will suspend its flights to Tel Aviv through May 25, it said on Thursday, citing the “current situation.”
This affects flights operated by Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, ITA Airways, Brussels Airlines and Lufthansa Cargo, it added.
Global airlines have again halted their flights to and from Tel Aviv after a missile fired by Yemen’s Houthis toward Israel on May 4 landed near the country’s main international airport in Tel Aviv.


Jordan evacuates second group of cancer patients from Gaza

Jordan evacuates second group of cancer patients from Gaza
Updated 15 May 2025
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Jordan evacuates second group of cancer patients from Gaza

Jordan evacuates second group of cancer patients from Gaza

AMMAN: Jordan’s government on Wednesday began evacuating four child cancer patients and 12 family members from Gaza.

They are the second group of patients evacuated for treatment under the Jordan Medical Corridor initiative, started in March this year, that aims to treat 2,000 Gazan children.

The children and their families were evacuated by the Royal Jordanian Air Force in cooperation with the World Health Organization and the Ministry of Health.

They will be treated at the King Hussein Cancer Center.

The first evacuees were 29 children and 44 family members. Seventeen of these children have since returned to Gaza with their families after completing their treatment.


Trump says US close to a nuclear deal with Iran

Trump says US close to a nuclear deal with Iran
Updated 15 May 2025
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Trump says US close to a nuclear deal with Iran

Trump says US close to a nuclear deal with Iran
  • Trump says the US is in serious negotiations with Iran to reach a long-term peace

DUBAI: US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the United States was getting very close to securing a nuclear deal with Iran, and Tehran had “sort of” agreed to the terms.

“We’re in very serious negotiations with Iran for long-term peace,” Trump said on a tour of the Gulf, according to a shared pool report by AFP.

“We’re getting close to maybe doing a deal without having to do this... there (are) two steps to doing this, there is a very, very nice step and there is the violent step, but I don’t want to do it the second way,” he said.

An Iranian source familiar with the negotiations said there were still gaps to bridge in the talks with the United States.

Fresh talks between Iranian and US negotiators to resolve disputes over Tehran’s nuclear program ended in Oman on Sunday with further negotiations planned, officials said, as Tehran publicly insisted on continuing its uranium enrichment.

Though Tehran and Washington have both said they prefer diplomacy to resolve the decades-long nuclear dispute, they remain divided on several red lines that negotiators will have to circumvent to reach a new deal and avert future military action.

Iran’s president reacted to Trump’s comments on Tuesday calling Tehran the “most destructive force” in the Middle East.

“Trump thinks he can sanction and threaten us and then talk of human rights. All the crimes and regional instability is caused by them (the United States),” Masoud Pezeshkian said.

“He wants to create instability inside Iran.”

US officials have publicly stated that Iran should halt uranium enrichment, a stance Iranian officials have called a “red line” asserting they will not give up what they view as their right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil.

However, they have indicated a willingness to reduce the level of enrichment.

Iranian officials have also expressed readiness to reduce the amount of highly enriched uranium in storage— uranium enriched beyond the levels typically needed for civilian purposes, such as nuclear power generation.

However, they have said it would not accept lower stockpiles than the amount agreed in a deal with world powers in 2015 — the deal Trump quit.

The Iranian source said that while Iran is prepared to offer what it considers concessions, “the issue is that America is not willing to lift major sanctions in exchange.”

Western sanctions have severely impacted the Iranian economy.

Regarding the reduction of enriched uranium in storage, the source noted: “Tehran also wants it removed in several stages, which America doesn’t agree with either.”

There is also disagreement over the destination to which the highly enriched uranium would be sent, the source added.