ALEPPO: Syrian escapees from Daesh languished for hours on the sizzling concrete pavements at Aleppo’s main bus station, their faces gaunt and eyes rimmed by dark circles.
Just six months ago, the Ramussa station was the main transit point for thousands of people bussed out of second city Aleppo as part of a landmark evacuation deal.
Now, buses are starting to trickle through again — this time carrying traumatized families fleeing Daesh’s dwindling territory to regime-held zones in the rest of the country.
“It’s a miracle that we’re here,” said Umm Hammoud, 45, who fled Daesh’s bastion city Raqqa with her 10 children aboard a pickup truck.
She spoke to AFP while waiting for a bus to take her to Syria’s third city Homs, where she will be reunited with long-lost relatives.
Before Syria’s civil war started in 2011, it took Umm Hammoud just two hours to make the 200-km westward bus trip from her native Raqqa to Aleppo.
This time, it took her and her family a month.
“We fled Raqqa at the beginning of Ramadan after each paying 150,000 Syrian pounds,” or around $300, Umm Hammoud told AFP.
She recounted a terrifying journey delayed by heavy airstrikes on terrorist-held villages and difficulty negotiating with smugglers.
“When we got here, we could barely believe that we survived,” she said as she struggled to soothe her wailing six-month-old in the scorching heat.
Umm Hammoud and her family skirted land mines, airstrikes, and a Daesh patrol unit tracking down anyone trying to flee the city.
But when they reached Aleppo, they did not find the bustling commercial metropolis they had once known.
Previously Syria’s industrial hub, Aleppo had been ravaged by four years of battles between opposition groups and the army before the December evacuation deal allowed the military to retake full control.
“I visited Aleppo as a child with my parents. We’d eat at restaurants, it was beautiful,” Umm Hammoud recalled, her voice cracking.
Much of the city is now in ruins, a shadow of its former self — like the Ramussa station.
For months, opposition fighters and regime battled hard over the bus station to gain access to the route leading out of Aleppo to other regime-controlled parts of Syria.
When the evacuation deal was reached, thousands of opposition fighters and civilians were bussed out of the then-snowy streets of Aleppo via Ramussa.
The station reopened in July, but the main garage remains almost empty save for a few charred cars and mangled metal barricades.
Ticketing offices that were once teeming with customers are mostly abandoned.
“In the past, there was a bus leaving every 30 minutes. It used to be packed here,” said Mohammed, a ticketing officer at Al-Eman bus company, one of the few that returned to Ramussa when it reopened.
Now, officials estimate that no more than 15 buses pass through daily, their passengers in dire conditions.
“There are sick people that haven’t taken any medicine in years. The children arriving are famished,” Mohammed said.
“Sometimes they spend 24 hours just waiting” for the next bus, he said.
Elderly shepherd Abbud Al-Sayah was waiting in Ramussa for a bus west to Latakia, a regime bastion on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
He fled Raqqa province three months ago as the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) battled across the arid farmland there to reach its provincial capital.
“I lived in the desert and took care of a flock of sheep with some relatives,” Sayah, wearing thick glasses, told AFP.
Ruqaya, 66, had traveled the farthest to reach Aleppo.
She crossed nearly 400 km from the Daesh-held town of Mayadeen near Syria’s eastern border with Iraq.
Mayadeen has been battered by airstrikes from the US-led coalition battling Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and Ruqaya said she was lucky to have survived.
It cost her family more than $3,700 to be smuggled out, and their four-day journey turned into a macabre tour of towns and cities devastated by Syria’s six-year war.
“We went from one scene of wreckage to another. Tabqa (west of Raqqa) was totally ravaged,” the mother of five said.
“In Aleppo, which was once a paradise, I saw the hospital where one of my sons used to work. It was completely flattened,” she said.
“Why all this destruction? Why are you chasing people from their homes?”
For families fleeing Daesh, a way station in Aleppo
For families fleeing Daesh, a way station in Aleppo
Israel’s Netanyahu says certain progress made in hostage negotiations
During a speech in Israel’s Knesset, Netanyahu said Israel had made “great achievements” militarily on several fronts and that military pressure on Hamas had led its leaders to soften their previous demands.
The prime minister, in between heckles from opposition members, said Israel had solidified its stance as a “regional power” and that he planned to expand the Abraham Accords together with Israel’s “American ally.”
Netanyahu said Israel’s economy was strong and encouraged foreign investors to invest.
Nine killed in Iran as bus, fuel truck collide — state media
- Iran has a poor road safety record, with over 20,000 deaths recorded between March 2023 and March 2024
- In August, 28 Pakistani Muslim pilgrims en route to Iraq were killed when their bus crashed in central Iran
TEHRAN: At least nine people were killed on Monday when a bus collided with a fuel truck in Iran’s southeast, state media reported, the second mass casualty road accident within days.
Mohammad Mehdi Sajjadi, head of the Red Crescent Society in Sistan-Baluchestan province, told the official IRNA news agency that “nine people lost their lives and 13 others were injured in the accident in which a bus collided with a fuel truck near Zahedan.”
On Saturday, 10 people were killed when a bus plunged into a ravine in Iran’s western Lorestan province.
Iran has a poor road safety record, with more than 20,000 deaths in accidents recorded between March 2023 and March 2024, according to figures from the judiciary’s Forensic Medicine Organization cited by local media.
In August, 28 Pakistani Muslim pilgrims en route to Iraq were killed when their bus crashed in central Iran.
Impoverished Sistan-Baluchestan, which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan, saw one of Iran’s deadliest accidents in 2004, when a gasoline tanker collided with a bus, sparking a massive fire that killed more than 70 people.
Gaza official says Israel strikes on hospital ‘terrifying’
- The area has been the focus of an intense air and ground campaign by Israeli forces since October 6, aimed at prevent Hamas from regrouping
GAZA STRIP: An official from one of only two functioning hospitals in northern Gaza told AFP on Monday that Israeli forces were continuing to target his facility and urged the international community to intervene before “it is too late.”
Hossam Abu Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan hospital in the city of Beit Lahia, described the situation at the medical facility as “extremely dangerous and terrifying” owing to shelling by Israeli forces.
An Israeli military spokesman denied that the hospital was being targeted.
“I am unaware of any strikes on Kamal Adwan hospital,” he told AFP.
Safiyeh reported that the hospital, which is currently treating 91 patients, had been targeted on Monday by Israeli drones.
“This morning, drones dropped bombs in the hospital’s courtyards and on its roof,” said Safiyeh in a statement.
“The shelling, which also destroyed nearby houses and buildings, did not stop throughout the night.”
The shelling and bombardment have caused extensive damage to the hospital, Safiyeh added.
“Bullets hit the intensive care unit, the maternity ward, and the specialized surgery department causing fear among patients,” he said, adding that a generator was also targeted.
“The world must understand that our hospital is being targeted with the intent to kill and forcibly displace the people inside.
“We face a constant threat every day. The shelling continues from all directions... The situation is extremely critical and requires urgent international intervention before it is too late,” he said.
On Sunday, Safiyeh said he received orders to evacuate the hospital, but the military denied issuing such directives.
Located in Beit Lahia, the hospital is one of only two still operational in northern Gaza.
The area has been the focus of an intense air and ground campaign by Israeli forces since October 6, aimed at prevent Hamas from regrouping.
Most of the dead and injured from the offensive are brought to Kamal Adwan and Al-Awda hospitals.
The United Nations and other organizations have repeatedly decried the worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, particularly in the north, since the latest military offensive began.
Rights groups have consistently appealed for hospitals to be protected and for the urgent delivery of medical aid and fuel to keep the facilities running.
Israeli officials have accused Hamas militants of using the hospitals as command and control centers to plan attacks against the military.
The war in Gaza broke out on October 7 last year after Hamas militants launched an attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 45,259 people, a majority of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, figures the UN says are reliable.
Some gaps have narrowed in elusive Gaza ceasefire deal, sides say
- Palestinian official familiar with the talks said some sticking points had been resolved
- But identity of some of Palestinian prisoners to be released by Israel in return for hostages yet to be agreed
CAIRO/JERUSALEM: Gaps between Israel and Hamas over a possible Gaza ceasefire have narrowed, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials’ remarks on Monday, though crucial differences have yet to be resolved.
A fresh bid by mediators Egypt, Qatar and the United States to end the fighting and release Israeli and foreign hostages has gained momentum this month, though no breakthrough has yet been reported.
A Palestinian official familiar with the talks said while some sticking points had been resolved, the identity of some of the Palestinian prisoners to be released by Israel in return for hostages had yet to be agreed, along with the precise deployment of Israeli troops in Gaza.
His remarks corresponded with comments by the Israeli diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, who said both issues were still being negotiated. Nonetheless, he said, the sides were far closer to reaching agreement than they have been for months.
“This ceasefire can last six months or it can last 10 years, it depends on the dynamics that will form on the ground,” Chikli told Israel’s Kan radio. Much hinged on what powers would be running and rehabilitating Gaza once fighting stopped, he said.
The duration of the ceasefire has been a fundamental sticking point throughout several rounds of failed negotiations. Hamas wants an end to the war, while Israel wants an end to Hamas’ rule of Gaza first.
“The issue of ending the war completely hasn’t yet been resolved,” said the Palestinian official.
Israeli minister Zeev Elkin, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet, told Israel’s Army Radio that the aim was to find an agreed framework that would resolve that difference during a second stage of the ceasefire deal.
Chikli said the first stage would be a humanitarian phase that will last 42 days and include a hostage release.
HOSPITAL
The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has since killed more than 45,200 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
At least 11 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes on Monday, medics said.
One of Gaza’s few still partially functioning hospitals, on its northern edge, an area under intense Israeli military pressure for nearly three months, sought urgent help after being hit by Israeli fire.
“We are facing a continuous daily threat,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital. “The bombing continues from all directions, affecting the building, the departments, and the staff.”
The Israeli military did not immediately comment. On Sunday it said it was supplying fuel and food to the hospital and helping evacuate some patients and staff to safer areas.
Palestinians accuse Israel of seeking to permanently depopulate northern Gaza to create a buffer zone, which Israel denies.
Israel says its operation around the three communities on the northern edge of the Gaza Strip — Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia — is targeting Hamas militants.
On Monday, the United Nations’ aid chief, Tom Fletcher, said Israeli forces had hampered efforts to deliver much needed aid in northern Gaza.
“North Gaza has been under a near-total siege for more than two months, raising the specter of famine,” he said. “South Gaza is extremely overcrowded, creating horrific living conditions and even greater humanitarian needs as winter sets in.”
Palestinians in Jenin observe a general strike
- The Palestinian Authority exercises limited authority in population centers in the West Bank
JENIN: Palestinians in the volatile northern West Bank town of Jenin are observing a general strike called by militant groups to protest a rare crackdown by Palestinian security forces.
An Associated Press reporter in Jenin heard gunfire and explosions, apparently from clashes between militants and Palestinian security forces. It was not immediately clear if anyone was killed or wounded. There was no sign of Israeli troops in the area.
Shops were closed in the city on Monday, the day after militants killed a member of the Palestinian security forces and wounded two others.
Militant groups called for a general strike across the territory, accusing the security forces of trying to disarm them in support of Israel’s half-century occupation of the territory.
The Western-backed Palestinian Authority is internationally recognized but deeply unpopular among Palestinians, in part because it cooperates with Israel on security matters. Israel accuses the authority of incitement and of failing to act against armed groups.
The Palestinian Authority blamed Sunday’s attack on “outlaws.” It says it is committed to maintaining law and order but will not police the occupation.
The Palestinian Authority exercises limited authority in population centers in the West Bank. Israel captured the territory in the 1967 Mideast War, and the Palestinians want it to form the main part of their future state.
Israel’s current government is opposed to Palestinian statehood and says it will maintain open-ended security control over the territory. Violence has soared in the West Bank following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza, which ignited the war there.
