BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said on Thursday that Lebanon would not force refugees to return to Syria but called for more international help in dealing with the refugee crisis.
More than a million Syrians fled into neighboring Lebanon after war broke out in their country in 2011 and now account for about a quarter of its population.
As the Syrian regime has gained control over more territory, and as fighting has ended in more parts of Syria, some Lebanese politicians have called for Syrian refugees to return.
“My government’s position is very clear. Nobody’s going to force anyone to go back if they don’t want to go back,” Hariri said.
In a speech at a donor conference in Beirut calling for $2.68 billion in humanitarian aid for the crisis this year, Hariri warned that refugees would try to move to other countries if there was not enough support for them in Lebanon.
“We need more from the international community because we are doing a public service for the international community. Otherwise, these people, if we do not do more, if you do not do more, they will seek refuge somewhere else,” he said.
Separately, at least 20 civilians were killed Thursday in Syrian regime’s airstrikes on opposition-held territory in the country’s north, a war monitor said.
Elsewhere three children were reported killed in artillery strikes on opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, while state news agency SANA said seven people died in apparent retaliatory shelling of nearby regime-held Damascus.
The aerial bombardments in the north pounded several areas in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib, where regime troops are waging a Russian-backed assault against opposition fighters and radicals.
“Regime raids hit two villages in the south of Aleppo province, killing 15 civilians,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In the neighboring province of Idlib, regime airstrikes killed five civilians in the town of Saraqeb, said the observatory, a Britain-based war monitor.
That broad region is held by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which is dominated by Al-Qaeda’s one-time affiliate in Syria.
Regime troops launched a ferocious offensive in late December to retake parts of Idlib and secure a key road leading from Aleppo south to the capital. Regime forces have made key gains, recapturing the Abu Duhur military airport and dozens of nearby villages.
Since it erupted in 2011, Syria’s conflict has morphed from a protest movement into a brutal and complex war that has left 340,000 people dead.
In an attempt to bring an end to the fighting, backers of opposing sides last year agreed to four “de-escalation” zones in the country.
Idlib makes up part of one zone. The other three are in Syria’s south, the central province of Homs, and the area of Eastern Ghouta, an opposition enclave near Damascus.
Hariri: Lebanon will not force Syrian refugees to return
Hariri: Lebanon will not force Syrian refugees to return
Israeli settlers set sights on Trump support for full control of West Bank
- Settlements expand rapidly under Netanyahu’s pro-settler coalition
- Trump’s potential support for annexation raises hopes among settlers
*
*
*
Move would risk US goals, end hope of two-state solution, says former US envoy
SHILO, West Bank: After a record expansion of Israeli settlement activity, some settler advocates in the occupied West Bank are looking to Donald Trump to fulfil a dream of imposing sovereignty over the area seen by Palestinians as the heart of a future state. The West Bank has been transformed by the rapid growth of Jewish settlements since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned at the head of a far-right nationalist coalition two years ago. During that time, an explosion in settler violence that has led to US sanctions.
In recent weeks, Israeli flags have sprouted on hilltops claimed by some settlers in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, adding to worries among many local Palestinians of greater control of those areas. Some settlers prayed for Trump’s victory before the election.
“We have high hopes. We’re even buoyant to a certain extent,” said Yisrael Medad, an activist and writer who supports Israel absorbing the West Bank, speaking to Reuters about Trump’s victory in the house he has lived in for more than four decades in the West Bank settlement of Shilo. Settlers have celebrated Trump’s nomination of a clutch of officials known for pro-Israel views, among them ambassador Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has said the West Bank is not under occupation and prefers the term “communities” to “settlements.” And over the past month, Israeli government ministers and settler advocates who have cultivated ties with the US Christian right have increasingly pushed the once fringe idea of “restoring sovereignty” over the West Bank in public comments. The Netanyahu government has not announced any official decision on the matter. A spokesperson at Netanyahu’s office declined to comment for this story. It is by no means certain Trump will give backing to a move that puts at risk Washington’s strategic ambition of a wider deal under the Abraham Accords to normalize Israel’s ties with Saudi Arabia, which, like most countries in the world, rejects Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.
“Trump’s desire for expansion of the Abraham Accords will be a top priority,” Dennis Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for Democratic and Republican administrations said, based on his own assessment of Trump’s foreign policy considerations.
“There’s no way the Saudis will think seriously about joining if Israel formally absorbs the West Bank,” he said. Annexation would bury any hope of a two-state solution that creates an independent Palestine and also complicate efforts to resolve more than a year of war in Gaza that has spilled over into neighboring Lebanon. In his first term, Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and ended Washington’s long-held position that the settlements are illegal. But, in 2020, his plan to create a rump of a Palestinian state along existing boundaries derailed efforts by Netanyahu for Israeli sovereignty over the area.
The president-elect has not revealed his plans for the region. Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt did not answer questions about policy, saying only that he would “restore peace through strength around the world.” Nonetheless, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the most prominent pro-settler ministers in the government, said last week he hoped Israel could absorb the West Bank as early as next year with the support of the Trump administration.
Israel Ganz, the head of the Yesha Council, an umbrella group of West Bank Jewish municipalities, said in an interview that he hoped the Trump administration would “let” Israel’s government move ahead.
Ganz led a prayer session for a Trump victory in the ruins of an old Byzantine basilica in Shilo before the Nov. 5 election.
“We prayed that God will lead to better days for the people of the United States of America and for Israel,” he said. Shilo has been a popular stop for visiting US politicians, including both Huckabee and Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense.
Last week, Huckabee told Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news outlet aligned with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism movement, that any decision on annexation would be a matter for the Israeli government. Huckabee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Senior Palestine Liberation Organization official Wasel Abu Yousef said any such action by the Israeli government “will not change the truth that this is Palestinian land.”
SURROUNDED
Together with the neighboring settlement of Eli, Shilo sits near the center of the West Bank, an hour from Jerusalem along Route 60, a smooth motorway that contrasts sharply with the potholed roads that connect the area’s Palestinian cities.
Bashar Al-Qaryouti, a Palestinian activist from the nearby village of Qaryut, said the expansion of Shilo and Eli had left Palestinian villages in the central West Bank surrounded.
Al-Qaryouti described an increase in settlers constructing without waiting for formal paperwork from the Israeli government, a trend also noted by Peace Now, an Israeli activist group that tracks settlement issues.
“This is happening on the ground,” Al-Qaryouti told Reuters by phone. “Areas across the center of the West Bank are under the control of settlers now.”
The West Bank, which many in Israel call Judea and Samaria after the old Biblical terms for the area, is a kidney shaped region about 100 km (60 miles) long and 50 km (30 miles) wide that has been at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since it was captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Most countries consider the area as occupied territory and deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position upheld by the UN’s top court in July.
Around 750,000 Palestinians were displaced with the creation of Israel in 1948, according to UN estimates. The West Bank is claimed by Palestinians as the nucleus of a future independent state, along with the Mediterranean enclave of Gaza to the south.
But the spread of Jewish settlements, which have mushroomed across the West Bank since the Oslo interim peace accords 30 years ago, has transformed the area.
Revered as the site of the tabernacle set up by the ancient Israelites after they returned from exile in Egypt and kept there for 300 years, modern Shilo was established in the 1970s and has the air of a gated community of quiet streets and neat suburban homes. Its population in 2022 was around 5,000 people.
For supporters of Jewish settlements, the Biblical connection is what gives them the right to be there, whatever international law may say.
“Even if the Byzantines, the Romans, the Mameluks and Ottomans ruled it, it was our land,” said Medad.
As such, settler advocates reject the term “annexation,” which they say suggests taking a foreign territory. Settlement construction in the West Bank reached record levels in 2023. Since the war started in Gaza last October, a spate of new roads and ground works have changed the appearance of hillsides across the area visibly.
Criticism from the Biden administration has done nothing to stop it. At the same time, violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has spiralled, including around Shilo, drawing international condemnation and US and European sanctions, as recently as this week, against individuals deemed to have taken a prominent part.
Settler leaders including Ganz say violence has no place in their movement. The settler movement has argued that they provide security for the rest of Israel with their presence in areas near Palestinian towns and cities.
“IRREVERSIBLE FACT”
A series of steps have been taken to consolidate Israel’s position in the West Bank since Netanyahu’s government came to power with a coalition agreement stating “The Jewish people have a natural right to the Land of Israel.”
“We’re changing a lot of things on the ground to make it a fact that Israel is in Judea and Samaria as well,” said Ohad Tal, chairman of Smotrich’s parliamentary faction, speaking beside a red Trump MAGA hat on a shelf in his Knesset office.
A whole mechanism has been built “to effectively apply sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, to make it an irreversible fact that Jewish presence is there and to stay.”
Many functions relating to settlements previously handled by the military have been handed to the Settlement Administration, a civilian body answerable directly to finance minister Smotrich, who has an additional defense ministry portfolio that puts him in charge of running the West Bank.
In 2024, nearly 6,000 acres (2,400 hectares) have been declared Israeli state land, a classification that makes it easier to build settlements, the biggest annual growth on record and accounting for half of all areas declared state land in the past three decades, Peace Now said in a report in October.
At least 43 new settler outposts have been established over the past year, compared with an average of under 7 a year since 1996, according to a separate analysis from Peace Now.
The outposts, often satellites of existing settlements on nearby hilltops that allow the original location to expand, have been served with kilometers of new roads and other infrastructure. Often built illegally according to Israeli law, the Yesha Council has said almost 70 were extended government support this year.
“It’s clever because it’s boring looking,” said Ziv Stahl, a director of Yesh Din, another Israeli group that tracks settlements. “They are not legislating now, saying ‘We are annexing the West Bank’, they are just doing it.”
Turkiye replaces pro-Kurdish mayors with state officials in two eastern cities
ANKARA: Turkiye stripped two elected pro-Kurdish mayors of their posts in eastern cities on Friday, for convictions on terrorism-related offenses, the interior ministry said, temporarily appointing state officials in their places instead.
The local governor replaced mayor Cevdet Konak in Tunceli, while a local administrator was appointed in the place of Ovacik mayor Mustafa Sarigul, the ministry said in a statement, adding these were “temporary measures.”
Konak is a member of the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, which has 57 seats in the national parliament, and Sarigul is a member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). Dozens of pro-Kurdish mayors from its predecessor parties have been removed from their posts on similar charges in the past.
CHP leader Ozgur Ozel said authorities had deemed that Sarigul’s attendance at a funeral was a crime and called the move to appoint a trustee “a theft of the national will,” adding his party would stand against the “injustice.”
“Removing a mayor who has been elected by the votes of the people for two terms over a funeral he attended 12 years ago has no more jurisdiction than the last struggles of a government on its way out,” Ozel said on X.
Earlier this month, Turkiye replaced three pro-Kurdish mayors in southeastern cities over similar terrorism-related reasons, drawing backlash from the DEM Party and others.
Last month, a mayor from the CHP was arrested after prosecutors accused him of belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), banned as a terrorist group in Turkiye and deemed a terrorist group by the European Union and United States.
The appointment of government trustees followed a surprise proposal by President Tayyip Erdogan’s main ally last month to end the state’s 40-year conflict with the PKK.
Gaza civil defense says 19 killed in Israeli strikes
- More than 40 others wounded in three massacres caused by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip
Gaza City: Gaza’s civil defense agency said that 19 people, some of them children, were killed in Israeli air strikes and tank fire on Saturday.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that “19 people were killed and more than 40 others wounded in three massacres caused by Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip between midnight and this morning,” as well as by tank fire in Rafah in the territory’s south.
11 dead as powerful Israeli airstrike shakes central Beirut
- Attack destroyed an eight-story building and caused a large number of fatalities and injuries
BEIRUT: A powerful airstrike killed 11 people in central Beirut on Saturday, the Lebanese civil defense said, shaking the capital as Israel pressed its offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
The attack destroyed an eight-story building and caused a large number of fatalities and injuries, Lebanon’s National News Agency said. Footage broadcast by Lebanon’s Al-Jadeed station showed at least one destroyed building and several others badly damaged around it.
Israel used bunker buster bombs in the strike, leaving a deep crater, the agency said. Beirut smelled strongly of explosives hours after the attack.
The blasts shook the capital at around 4 a.m. (0200 GMT). Security sources said at least four bombs were dropped in the attack.
It marked the fourth Israeli airstrike this week targeting a central area of Beirut, in contrast to the bulk of Israel’s attacks on the capital region, which have hit the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs. On Sunday an Israeli airstrike killed a Hezbollah media official in the Ras Al-Nabaa district of central Beirut.
Rescuers searched through rubble, in an area of the city known for its antique shops.
HOSPITALIZED DAUGHTER
A man whose family was hurt tried to comfort a traumatized woman outside a hospital. Car windows were shattered.
“There was dust and wrecked houses, people running and screaming, they were running, my wife is in hospital, my daughter is in hospital, my aunt is in the hospital,” said the man, Nemir Zakariya, who held up a picture of his daughter.
“This is the little one, and my son also got hurt – this is my daughter, she is in the American University (of Beirut Medical Center), this is what happened.”
Israel launched a major offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon in September, following nearly a year of cross-border hostilities ignited by the Gaza war, pounding wide areas of Lebanon with airstrikes and sending troops into the south.
Israeli strikes killed at least 62 people and injured 111 in Lebanon on Thursday, bringing the toll since October 2023 to 3,645 dead and 15,355 injured, Lebanon’s health ministry said. The figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Hezbollah and the Lebanese government accuse Israel of indiscriminate bombing that kills civilians. Israel denies the allegation and says it takes numerous steps to avoid the deaths of civilians.
Hezbollah strikes in the same period have killed more than 100 people in northern Israel and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. They include more than 70 soldiers killed in strikes in northern Israel and the Golan Heights and in combat in southern Lebanon, according to Israel.
The conflict began when Hezbollah, Tehran’s most important ally in the region, opened fire in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas after it launched the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.
A US mediator traveled to Lebanon and Israel this week in an effort to secure a ceasefire. The envoy, Amos Hochstein, indicated progress had been made after meetings in Beirut, before going to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.
Orchestra conductor mourns childhood home’s destruction in Israel’s southern Lebanon offensive
- Destruction of Lubnan Baalbaki’s childhood home in October came during Israel’s offensive in Lebanon
- Baalbaki’s family home in Odaisseh, designed by his late father, held more than just personal memories
BEIRUT: Lubnan Baalbaki, the conductor of the Lebanese Philharmonic Orchestra, watched on his phone screen as an aerial camera pointed to a village in southern Lebanon. In seconds, multiple houses erupted into rubble, smoke filling the air. The camera panned right, revealing widespread devastation.
He zoomed in to confirm his fears: His family’s house in the border village of Odaisseh, where his parents are buried, was now in ruins.
“To see your house getting bombed and in a split second turned into ash, I don’t think there is description for it,” Baalbaki said.
The destruction of his childhood home in October came during Israel’s offensive in Lebanon. The aim, Israel says, is to debilitate the Hezbollah militant group, push it away from the border and end more than a year of Hezbollah fire into northern Israel.
The Israeli military has released videos of controlled detonations in areas along the border, saying it is targeting Hezbollah facilities and weapons.
But the bombardment has also wiped out entire residential neighborhoods or even villages. The World Bank in a recent report said over 99,000 housing units have been “fully or partially damaged” by the war in Lebanon.
Baalbaki’s family home in Odaisseh, designed by his late father, renowned Lebanese painter Abdel Hamid Baalbaki, held more than just personal memories. It held a collection of Abdel Hamid’s paintings, his art workshop and over 1,500 books. All were destroyed along with the house.
What cut even deeper, Baalbaki said, was the loss of the letters his parents exchanged during his father’s art studies in France. Only a few remain as digital photos.
“The language of passion and love they shared was filled with poetry,” Baalbaki said.
In a book of poems and photographs his father created for his wife following her sudden death in a car accident, the first page reads, “Dedication to Adeeba, the partner of my most precious days, the love bird that left its nest too soon.”
Abdel Hamid painstakingly designed his wife’s tombstone. Later, he was laid to rest beside her in the garden next to the house. For their son, watching his childhood home go up in smoke brought back the pain of losing them.
It was a moment he had feared for months.
Hezbollah began firing missiles into Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. Israel responded with airstrikes and shelling. For nearly a year, the conflict remained limited.
After the war dramatically escalated on Sept. 23 with intense Israeli airstrikes on southern and eastern Lebanon as well as Beirut’s southern suburbs, Baalbaki and his siblings frequently checked satellite images for updates on their village.
On Oct. 26, explosions in and around Odaisseh triggered an earthquake alert in northern Israel. That day, videos circulated online, one of which showed their home being obliterated.
Until a few days before that, the satellite images showed their house still standing.
Now, Baalbaki said, he is resolved to honor his father’s dream.
“The mourning phase started to turn to determination to rebuild this project,” he said.
When the war is over, he plans to rebuild the house as an art museum and cultural center.
