LEIDSCHENDAM, Netherlands: The daughter of a bystander who lost his life in the massive car bomb that killed former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri spoke Monday of her family’s harrowing search to find her father’s body.
Lama Ghalayini, 39, is the first victim to testify before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a UN-backed tribunal set up to prosecute those who murdered Hariri and 21 others in the huge February 14, 2005 suicide car bombing on Beirut’s busy seafront.
“In the beginning we always had hope that we would find something,” Ghalayini told judges, speaking via video link from the Lebanese capital.
Her voice at times trembling with emotion, Ghalayini described how her father Abdel-Hamid spoke to her the day before going for a walk in the area near the Beirut waterfront.
He was reported missing after news of the suicide bombing — blamed on five suspected members of the powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah, became known.
“We were completely lost, we were in a state of distress and we needed to know exactly what the situation was,” Ghalayini told a five-judge bench.
Looking for their relatives, the family was confronted with the scene of carnage at the blast site.
Ghalayini said they received no help from the authorities in their quest to find her father, a businessman and an amateur pilot.
At the scene “I found body parts. There were also pieces of metal and stones. It was complete chaos,” said Ghalayini.
The family was so desperate that they even hired their own sniffer dogs but to no avail.
Ghalayini’s body was eventually discovered some 17 days after the blast, buried beneath the rubble.
Monday’s hearing marks the first time victims were allowed to speak in the long-running trial which started in 2014 against the five suspects indicted by the court, based just outside The Hague.
However, the STL has quashed the case against one of the accused, Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badreddine, who is believed to have died in fighting in Syria in May last year.
Four others, Salim Ayyash, Hussein Oneissi, Assad Sabra and Hassan Habib Merhi are being tried in absentia.
The STL opened its doors in 2009 and is the only international ad-hoc tribunal with the jurisdiction to try an act of terror.
Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has previously dismissed the tribunal as a US-Israeli plot and vowed none of the defendants will ever be caught.
Victim's daughter testifies at Hariri assassination trial
Victim's daughter testifies at Hariri assassination trial
Lebanon says Israeli strike on south wounds 3 people including a child
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on a vehicle in south Lebanon on Saturday wounded three people, including a child, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after two months of all-out war.
“An Israeli enemy strike on a car in Majdal Zoun wounded three people including a seven-year-old child,” the health ministry said in a statement.
West faces ‘reckoning’ over Middle East radicalization: UK spy chief
- MI6 head Richard Moore cites ‘terrible loss of innocent life’
- ‘In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state’
LONDON: The West has “yet to have a full reckoning with the radicalizing impact of the fighting, the terrible loss of innocent life in the Middle East and the horrors of Oct. 7,” the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6 has warned.
Richard Moore made the comments in a speech delivered to the British Embassy in Paris, and was joined by his French counterpart Nicolas Lerner.
Moore said: “In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state. And the impact on Europe, our shared European home, could hardly be more serious.”
Daesh is expanding its reach and staging deadly attacks in Iran and Russia despite suffering significant territorial setbacks, he added, warning that “the menace of terrorism has not gone away.”
In October last year, Ken McCallum, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, said his agency was monitoring for increased terror risks in the UK due to the Gaza war. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in over a year of fighting.
In Lebanon, a 60-day truce agreed this week between Hezbollah and Israel brought an end to a conflict that has killed thousands of Lebanese civilians.
Israel military strikes kill 32 Palestinians in Gaza, medics say
- Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City
The Israeli military said it killed a Palestinian it accused of involvement in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel in a vehicle strike in Gaza, and is investigating claims that the individual was an employee of aid group World Central Kitchen.
At least 32 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes across Gaza overnight and into Saturday, with most casualties reported in northern areas, medics told Reuters.
Later on Saturday medics said seven people were killed when an Israeli air strike targeted a vehicle near a gathering of Palestinians receiving aid in the southern area of Khan Younis south of the enclave.
According to residents and a Hamas source, the vehicle targeted near a crowd receiving flour belonged to security personnel responsible for overseeing the delivery of aid shipments into Gaza.
Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City, according to a statement from the Gaza Civil Defense and the official Palestinian news agency WAFA early on Saturday.
The Gaza Civil Defense also reported that one of its officers was killed in attacks in northern Gaza’s Jabalia, bringing the total number of civil defense workers killed since October 7, 2023, to 88.
Earlier on Saturday, WAFA reported that three employees of the World Central Kitchen, a US-based, non-governmental humanitarian agency, were killed when a civilian vehicle was targeted in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
The World Central Kitchen has not yet commented on the incident.
Syria’s military ‘temporarily’ withdraws from Aleppo to prepare for counteroffensive
- Syrian military confirms militants enter Aleppo, says dozens of soldiers killed
AMMAN: The Syrian military said on Saturday that dozens of its troops had been killed during a militant attack in northwestern Syria and that militants had managed to enter large parts of Aleppo city, forcing the army to redeploy.
The Syrian military statement was the first public acknowledgement by the army that insurgents led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham had entered the government-held city of Aleppo in a surprise attack that began earlier this week.
“The large numbers of terrorists and the multiplicity of battlefronts prompted our armed forces to carry out a redeployment operation aimed at strengthening the defense lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers, and prepare for a counterattack,” the army said.
The insurgent attack marks the most significant challenge in years to President Bashar Assad, jolting the frontlines of the Syrian civil war that have largely been frozen since 2020.
The Syrian military statement said that the insurgents had not been able to establish fixed positions in Aleppo city due to the army’s continued bombardment of their positions.
Two Syrian military sources said earlier that Russian and Syrian warplanes targeted insurgents in an Aleppo suburb on Saturday. Russia deployed its air force to Syria in 2015 to aid Assad in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.
The insurgent force began its surprise offensive earlier this week, sweeping through government-held towns and reaching Aleppo nearly a decade after government forces backed by Russia and Iran drove militants from the city.
Speaking on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow regarded the militant attack as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty. “We are in favor of the Syrian authorities bringing order to the area and restoring constitutional order as soon as possible,” he said.
Israel says it struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites in Syria, testing a fragile ceasefire
- ‘Military infrastructure’ at the Syria-Lebanon border being used by Hezbollah for weapons smuggling
TEL AVIV: Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites along Syria’s border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said Saturday, testing a fragile, days-old ceasefire that halted months of fighting between the sides but has seen continued sporadic fire.
The military said it struck sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria to Lebanon after the ceasefire took effect, which the military said was a violation of its terms. There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities or activists monitoring the conflict in that country. Hezbollah also did not immediately comment.
The Israeli strike, the latest of several since the ceasefire began on Wednesday, came as unrest spread to other areas of the Middle East, with Syrian insurgents breaching the country’s largest city, Aleppo, in a shock offensive that added fresh uncertainty to a region reeling from multiple wars.
The truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, brokered by the United States and France, calls for an initial two-month ceasefire in which the militants are to withdraw north of Lebanon’s Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border.
The repeated bursts of violence — with no reports of serious casualties — reflected the uneasy nature of the ceasefire that otherwise appeared to hold. While Israel has accused Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire, Lebanon has also accused Israel of the same in the days since it took effect.
Many Lebanese, some of the 1.2 million displaced in the conflict, were streaming south to their homes, despite warnings by the Israeli and Lebanese militaries to stay away from certain areas.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that an Israeli drone attacked a car in the southern village of Majdal Zoun. The agency said there had been casualties but gave no further details. Majdal Zoun, near the Mediterranean Sea, is close to where Israeli troops still have a presence.
The military said earlier Saturday that its forces, who remain in southern Lebanon until they withdraw gradually over the 60-day period, had been operating to distance “suspects” in the region, without elaborating, and said troops had located and seized weapons found hidden in a mosque.
Israel says it reserves the right under the ceasefire to strike against any perceived violations. Israel has made returning the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis home the goal of the war with Hezbollah but Israelis, concerned Hezbollah was not deterred and could still attack northern communities, have been apprehensive about returning home.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its assault on southern Israel the day before. Israel and Hezbollah kept up a low-level conflict of cross-border fire for nearly a year, until Israel escalated its fight with a sophisticated attack that detonated hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters. It followed that up with an intense aerial bombardment campaign against Hezbollah assets, killing many of its top leaders including longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah, and it launched a ground invasion in early October.
More than 3,760 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon during the conflict, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel — over half of them civilians — as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
