ADEN, Yemen: Authorities on Yemen’s Socotra island burned two tons of the mild narcotic drug qat on Saturday, a shipment seized from smugglers trying to defy last week’s ban by the archipelago’s governor, local officials said.
Yemenis have chewed qat for centuries and although widespread, its use is seen as a social ill by some, sapping productivity and finances. Sessions begin in the afternoon and can last long into the night.
The national pastime has survived the last few years of turmoil in the impoverished Arab country, including the war that began last year involving air and ground troops from an Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia. It is not uncommon to see Yemeni fighters and soldiers with a wad of qat leaves in their cheeks.
But last week the governor of Socotra, a sparsely populated island renowned for its exotic wildlife, sought to stamp out the habit by banning the import or chewing of qat.
According to Yemeni media, Saeed Ba Huqaiba introduced to the ban due to the health risks and financial consequences of qat use.
Local officials said on Saturday they had intercepted and burned a shipment of two tons of qat smuggled from the Hadramout province on the Yemeni mainland.
Qat is classified by the World Health Organization as a “drug of abuse that can produce mild to moderate psychological dependence.” Its physical symptoms can include hallucinations, depression and tooth decay.
Past surveys in Yemen suggest at least 80 percent of men, about 60 percent of women and increasing numbers of children under 10 — settle down most afternoons to chew.
(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf, writing by Sami Aboudi)
Yemen’s Socotra burns qat after island bans drug
Yemen’s Socotra burns qat after island bans drug
Trump blames Biden for Mideast crises, Russia-Ukraine war in Al-Arabiya interview
- “If I were president, that war would have never started,” he said.
- Trump said that he would work Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman to restore peace in the region.
RIYADH: Former US President Donald Trump criticized Joe Biden and his administration’s foreign policy failures for the wars on multiple fronts saying that if he were president, the Oct. 7 attack on Israel wouldn’t have happened.
In an exclusive interview with Al-Arabiya’s Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, aired on Sunday, Trump said: “If I were president, that war would have never started. You wouldn’t have all those dead people... (and) demolished cities and areas. (We) wouldn’t have had Oct. 7.”
The Republican presidential candidate also discussed the escalating conflict between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel, the Russia-Ukraine war and his desire to expand the Abrahams Accords if he wins the elections.
It was when Trump was US president that the Israel signed normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, in what had become known as the Abraham Accords. With Trump as at the White House on September 15, 2020, the accord was by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the UAE and Bahrain.
In their bilateral agreements, the UAE and Bahrain recognized Israel’s sovereignty, enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations. Sudan and Morocco followed suit by signing their own agreements with Israel.
Recently, however, Bahrain’s parliament moved to end the country’s economic ties to Israel following Israel’s indiscriminate and unrelenting assault in Gaza, which has left at least 42,603 people dead and 99,795 injured as of Sunday October.
Disregarding growing calls for an end to hostilities, Israel has expanded the violence by attacking wide areas of Lebanon in its war with Iran-backed Hezbollah and Palestinian groups and their allies.
US President Biden’s failure to restrain Netanyahu has divided American Muslim voters on whether or not to support the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, in the November 5 US presidential election.
In a press conference on Sept. 27, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has said that he could get Israel to end the war, which he said must end “one way or another.”
In the Al-Arabiya interview on Sunday, Trump said that if he becomes president again he would work with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman to restore peace in the region.
UN peacekeepers say Israel army ‘demolished’ Lebanon watchtower, fence
- An Israeli “army bulldozer deliberately demolished an observation tower and perimeter fence of a UN position in” southern Lebanon, UNIFIL said in a statement
BEIRUT, Lebanon: UN peacekeepers in Lebanon on Sunday said the Israeli army “deliberately” damaged one of their positions in southern Lebanon, in the latest incident reported by the force that remains deployed in all positions.
An Israeli “army bulldozer deliberately demolished an observation tower and perimeter fence of a UN position in” southern Lebanon, UNIFIL said in a statement, adding that its forces remain in all positions “despite the pressure being exerted.”
Senior Israeli commander killed in north Gaza: army
- Daksa, 41, was a member of the Druze community and was appointed brigade commander four months ago
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military announced on Sunday the death of a brigade commander in a blast in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces have been engaged in a sweeping assault targeting Hamas.
Col. Ahsan Daksa, commander of the 401st Brigade, was killed in the Jabalia area when an explosive struck him as he left his tank, military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said in a briefing.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a separate statement that Daksa was killed “while fighting Hamas terrorists.”
Hagari said that another battalion commander and two officers were lightly wounded in the incident.
They stepped outside “to observe the area and were struck by an explosive,” he said.
Daksa, 41, was a member of the Druze community and was appointed brigade commander four months ago. He was one of the most senior army commanders killed in the year-long Gaza war.
His brigade “was leading the offensive” in Jabalia, said Hagari.
Israeli forces launched a withering land and air assault in Jabalia and other parts of northern Gaza on October 6, which the military says aims to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping.
The civil defense agency in the Hamas-run territory said that more than 400 people have been killed in the two-week assault, which was still underway on Sunday.
Daksa had been decorated for rescuing wounded soldiers during Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah. The two sides are currently again at war in Lebanon.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called Daksa “a hero,” saying his death was a “loss to Israel and for Israeli society.”
His death brings Israel’s military fatalities to 358 in the Gaza campaign since the start of the ground offensive in the Palestinian territory on October 27, 2023.
Gaza war, settler attacks ruin Palestinian olive harvest
- 68% of Gaza’s agricultural areas damaged by conflict, and farmers are unable to irrigate their land, UN says
AL-ZAWAYDA: After a year of relentless war, Gaza’s olive harvest is set to suffer, while in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian farmers fear tending to their groves due to settler attacks.
For generations, olive harvests have been central to Palestinian life and culture.
“We are happy that the olive season has started, but we are afraid because we are in a state of war,” said Rami Abu Asad, who owns a farm in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza.
Workers picking the olives by hand stay alert, listening for drones or warplanes that could bomb without warning.
“But it is evident (to Israeli forces) that we are workers, and we do nothing else,” he said, noting a sweeping Israeli military operation in Jabalia, less than 20 km last year, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory onslaught in Gaza has killed 42,603 people, a majority of them civilians, according to data from the Health Ministry in the territory, which the UN considers reliable.
The ongoing war has reduced vast areas of Gaza to rubble, with about 68 percent of the territory’s agricultural regions damaged by the conflict and farmers unable to fertilize or irrigate their land, the UN says.
“The number of remaining olive trees is minimal, and the costs are very high,” Asad added.
Jamal Abou Shaouish, an agricultural engineer, expects this year’s harvest in Gaza to net just 15,000 tonnes, sharply down from around 40,000 tonnes in the years before the war.
Supply shortages and destruction caused by the war will also impact the quality of olives while pressing prices have soared due to the lack of fuel needed to run the machinery required for sorting and pressing the oil.
In the West Bank, the harvest has been marred by perennial fears of attacks by Israeli settlers, who regularly prevent Palestinians from accessing their olive groves or outright destroy their orchards.
For Khaled Abdallah, he has made the tough decision not to harvest the olives this season on his land near the Beit El settlement.
“I didn’t even consider going to these lands close to the colony because the situation is hazardous,” he said, saying he will instead focus on harvesting olives from a separate property in the village of Jifna, north of Ramallah.
Like other Palestinians who own olive groves near the settlements, Abdallah coordinated with Israeli advocacy organizations to obtain special permits for the crops.
“But there are no longer any rights organizations capable of protecting us from settler attacks, and there is no longer any coordination,” he lamented.
Olive groves have long been essential to the economy and culture of the West Bank but have also been the site of bloody clashes between farmers and encroaching Israeli settlers for decades, with the disputes hinging on access to land.
Israel warns of strikes on Hezbollah financial arm, tells Lebanese to evacuate
- Israel said the target is Al-Qard Al-Hassan, a Hezbollah unit that’s used to pay operatives of the Iran-backed militant group and help buy arms
- An hour after the evacuation warnings that included wide areas of Lebanon, explosions began in Beirut’s southern suburbs
BEIRUT/CAIRO: Israel’s military announced Sunday it is now taking aim at the Lebanon-based Hezbollah’s financial arm and will attack a “large number of targets” in Beirut and elsewhere. Explosions began in Beirut’s southern suburbs about an hour later.
Evacuation warnings affected southern Beirut, the eastern Bekaa valley and parts of southern Lebanon.
The warning came hours after Israel said it hit Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters in the Lebanese capital Beirut, while officials in Gaza said rescuers were still recovering people from the rubble after an Israeli attack on Saturday that killed dozens.
“Residents of Lebanon, the IDF (Israeli military) will begin attacking infrastructure belonging to the Hezbollah Al-Qard Al-Hassan Association — get away from it immediately,” the military’s spokesperson said in a statement on X.
The strikes will target Al-Qard Al-Hassan “all over Lebanon,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said. The financial institution has more than 30 branches across Lebanon including 15 across central Beirut and its suburbs.
Al-Qard Al-Hassan is a Hezbollah unit that’s used to pay operatives of the Iran-backed militant group and help buy arms, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with army regulations.
The registered nonprofit provides financial services and is also used by ordinary Lebanese. Its name in Arabic means “the benevolent loan,” and Hezbollah has used it to entrench its support among the Shiite population in a country where state and financial institutions have failed in recent years.
“It’s a big deal,” said David Asher, an expert on illicit financing who has worked at the US Defense and State Departments and is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
“AQAH is a cash-based organization. The cash will be trash” in the event of strikes, he said, adding that it has large accounts with big Lebanese banks.
Al-Qard Al-Hassan in a statement called the decision to target it a sign of Israel’s “bankruptcy” and assured customers it had taken “measures” to ensure their funds were safe. A stream of people left the areas surrounding its branches in Beirut.
Panic and confusion
In one evacuation notice, for the Choueifat area south of Beirut, the Israeli military mislabeled one target, causing confusion and panic. The location was labeled as Grand Cinema ABC Verdun, a theater in an upscale shopping mall in central Beirut more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.
A year of escalating tensions and frequent cross-border fire between Israel and Hezbollah over the war in Gaza turned into all-out war last month. Israel sent ground troops into Lebanon early this month.
Israel’s announcement came a day after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called civilian casualties in Lebanon “far too high” in the Israel-Hezbollah war, and urged Israel to scale back some strikes, especially in and around Beirut.
In the northern Gaza Strip, officials said rescuers were still recovering people from the rubble after an Israeli attack on Beit Lahiya that left 87 people dead or missing on Saturday, according to the health ministry — one of the highest death tolls for months from a single attack.
Israel said it was investigating reports of the incident.
It marked an intensification of Israel’s offensives against Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza and Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, days after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar raised hopes of an opening for ceasefire negotiations to end more than a year of conflict.
With US elections approaching, officials, diplomats and other sources in the region say Israel is seeking through military operations to try to shield its borders and ensure its rivals cannot regroup.
Israel is also preparing to retaliate for an Iranian missile barrage earlier this month, though Washington has pressed it not to strike Iranian energy facilities or nuclear sites.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was the subject of an assassination attempt by “Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah” on Saturday when a drone was directed at his holiday home. In a call with former US President Donald Trump, the prime minister reiterated that Israel would make decisions based on its own interests, according to a statement from Netanyahu’s office.
Israel’s government has spurned several attempts by the United States, its main ally and military backer, to broker ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon.
Beirut strikes
In Beirut, Israel said its air force had followed strikes on Saturday with an attack on Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters there as well as an underground weapons workshop.
Fighter jets killed three Hezbollah commanders, the Israeli military said.
Reuters witnesses saw smoke rising from Beirut’s southern suburbs, once a densely populated zone that also housed Hezbollah offices and underground installations.
On a visit near the border, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said forces were dismantling Hezbollah tunnels, weapons stores and infrastructure. “Our goal is to completely ‘clean’ the area so that Israel’s northern communities may return to their homes,” he added.
Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the strikes, but said it had fired missiles at Israeli forces in Lebanon and at a base in northern Israel.
Cross-border fighting between Israel and Hezbollah erupted a year ago when the group began launching rockets in support of Hamas.
At the start of October, Israel launched a ground assault inside Lebanon in an attempt to stabilize the border region for its citizens who had fled rocket attacks in northern Israel.
On Sunday in southern Lebanon, security and civil defense sources said two aid workers were killed in an Israeli strike on a house being used as a clinic, while the Lebanese military said three of its soldiers were killed in a strike on an army vehicle.
Over the last year, Lebanese officials estimate that more than 2,400 people have been killed and more than 1.2 million people displaced. Fifty-nine people have been killed in northern Israel and the occupied Golan Heights over the same period, say Israeli authorities.
Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages in the attack that sparked the war, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s military response in Gaza has left more than 42,500 people dead, Palestinian officials say.
Evacuation orders
A 41-year-old Israeli colonel was killed, and another officer was wounded in combat in northern Gaza on Sunday, the Israeli military said. Israel’s Channel 12 and public broadcaster Kan reported an explosive device had gone off under a tank.
Gaza’s health ministry said rescue operations following the strike in Beit Lahiya were being hindered by communications problems and by ongoing Israeli military operations.
The strike came two weeks into a major assault around Jabalia, just south of Beit Lahiya, where Israel says its troops have been trying to root out remaining Hamas fighters.
Israel said the strike hit a Hamas target, questioning an earlier death toll of 73 released by the Hamas media office.
As the fighting has continued, two of the three remaining hospitals in northern Gaza have been hit and patients, medical staff and displaced people injured, according to the United Nations. The UN has been urgently seeking access.
Israel says militants use civilian areas including schools and hospitals for cover, a charge Hamas denies.
More than 5,000 Palestinians left Jabalia via designated routes, an Israeli military spokesperson said on X.
Evacuation orders have fueled fears among many Palestinians that the operation is intended to clear them from northern Gaza to enable Israeli control of the area after the war.
Israel has denied this, saying it is trying to protect civilians and separate them from Hamas fighters.
Palestinians were also shocked by footage appearing to show people in a street in Jabalia being hit by a strike as they approached to rescue someone who had already been hit. Reuters verified the location of the footage, but not the date. Israeli officials had no immediate comment.
The Israeli offensive, triggered by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, has made most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people homeless, caused widespread hunger and destroyed hospitals and schools.
