CAIRO: Traders at the textile market in Cairo’s Al-Azhar district were once used to seeing their shops filled with customers, but soaring prices have driven many away.
The reason for the spiraling costs — drastic reforms that the government pledged would bring benefits to the turmoil-hit nation.
But far from improvements, many Egyptians say they feel worse off, and the economic woes could present the major challenge for President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as he approaches an election essentially unopposed.
“People who want to get married these days have to wait; there is no money for anyone to buy anything,” said Shaimaa, a homemaker in her 30s, as she looked for some fabric.
“Years ago, the salary was enough and there was even a surplus, but now a salary that is even as high as three thousand, or four thousand pounds a month is not enough.”
Egypt’s presidential vote from March 26-28 is the third since a 2011 uprising toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak, and Sisi looks certain to win a second four-year term.
Most of his rivals have either been sidelined or withdrawn and the only other candidate, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, has himself previously expressed support for the ex-military chief.
While there is little competition at the ballot box the economic discontent facing many Egyptians could prove a bigger political issue.
Shaken by the 2011 revolt and the years of turmoil that followed, Egypt implemented a set of radical economic reforms linked to a three-year $12-billion loan the International Monetary Fund approved in November 2016.
The steps included the adoption of a value-added tax, energy subsidy cuts, and floating the pound, which halved its value against the dollar in the import-reliant country.
Sayyed Mahmoud, 50, one of the biggest fabrics merchants in Al-Azhar district, sits outside his store, blaming “the pound’s flotation” for the slump.
“This decision changed everything. Prices went up threefold and fourfold,” said Mahmoud.
“A blanket that was 200 pounds, now costs 800 pounds,” said Mahmoud.
Since the currency move the inflation rate has soared, reaching a high of 34.2 percent in July.
Meanwhile some 28 percent of Egyptians, or 93 million people, now live under the poverty line, according to official figures.
While some of the government’s measures were positive, floating the pound was handled “the worst,” said Alia El Mahdi, the former dean of the faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University.
“If the economic improvement comes at the expense of people’s living standards, then the target of the reform program was not met,” she said.
Despite the soaring inflation and rising poverty, Sisi insists that his first term has seen an “unprecedented boom.”
Since his election in 2014 after the military ouster of Mohamed Morsi, Egypt has been working on a series of mega projects.
The large-scale national projects included the expansion of the Suez Canal, which ended in 2015, about year after Sisi’s inauguration.
After its completion, Sisi announced another ambitious project: a new capital that is currently being built over about 170 square kilometers and should begin functioning next year.
“We are about to finish about 11,000 projects ... with a cost of about two trillion pounds,” Sisi said in January.
Hailing the economic successes during his term he pointed to a rise in foreign currency reserves to $37 billion and a drop of unemployment to 11.9 percent.
But economists like Mahdi said that if the government wanted to build sustainable growth it needed to focus on bolstering “industry, agriculture, and services to reduce unemployment in a lasting and real way.”
“National projects only need temporary workers,” she said.
And while the IMF in January declared a “favorable” economic outlook for Egypt after growth of 4.2 percent in the fiscal year to June 2017, many are not feeling it.
Like fabric vendor Mahmoud, who is adamant that he has not seen any improvements.
“The state’s political leadership works correctly and has accomplished many massive projects, and I support Sisi through and through, but where is the return for me at the moment?”
Egyptians, facing soaring prices, not tasting fruit of government reforms
Egyptians, facing soaring prices, not tasting fruit of government reforms
Israeli military chief resigns over October 7 ‘failure’: statement
JERUSALEM: The head of Israel’s military, Major General Herzi Halevi, resigned on Monday over his responsibility for its “failure” during the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023.
In his resignation letter, released by the army, Halevi said he was leaving “due to my acknowledgement of responsibility for the (military’s) failure on October 7,” saying he was leaving at a time of “significant successes” for the military.
Palestinians confront a landscape of destruction in Gaza’s ‘ghost towns’
- “As you can see, it became a ghost town,” said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose home in the southern city of Rafah was flattened
- Critics say Israel has waged a campaign of scorched earth to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza
RAFAH: Palestinians in Gaza are confronting an apocalyptic landscape of devastation after a ceasefire paused more than 15 months of fighting between Israel and Hamas.
Across the tiny coastal enclave, where built-up refugee camps are interspersed between cities, drone footage captured by The Associated Press shows mounds of rubble stretching as far as the eye can see — remnants of the longest and deadliest war between Israel and Hamas in their blood-ridden history.
“As you can see, it became a ghost town,” said Hussein Barakat, 38, whose home in the southern city of Rafah was flattened. “There is nothing,” he said, as he sat drinking coffee on a brown armchair perched on the rubble of his three-story home, in a surreal scene.
Critics say Israel has waged a campaign of scorched earth to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza, accusations that are being considered in two global courts, including the crime of genocide. Israel denies those charges and says its military has been fighting a complex battle in dense urban areas and that it tries to avoid causing undue harm to civilians and their infrastructure.
Military experts say the reality is complicated.
“For a campaign of this duration, which is a year’s worth of fighting in a heavily urban environment where you have an adversary that is hiding in among that environment, then you would expect an extremely high level of damage,” said Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank.
Savill said that it was difficult to draw a broad conclusion about the nature of Israel’s campaign. To do so, he said, would require each strike and operation to be assessed to determine whether they adhered to the laws of armed conflict and whether all were proportional, but he did not think the scorched earth description was accurate.
International rights groups. including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, view the vast destruction as part of a broader pattern of extermination and genocide directed at Palestinians in Gaza, a charge Israel denies. The groups dispute Israel’s stance that the destruction was a result of military activity.
Human Rights Watch, in a November report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, said “the destruction is so substantial that it indicates the intention to permanently displace many people.”
From a fierce air campaign during the first weeks of the war, to a ground invasion that sent thousands of troops in on tanks, the Israeli response to a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, has ground down much of the civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, displacing 90 percent of its population. The brilliant color of pre-war life has faded into a monotone cement gray that dominates the territory. It could take decades, if not more, to rebuild.
Airstrikes throughout the war toppled buildings and other structures said to be housing militants. But the destruction intensified with the ground forces, who fought Hamas fighters in close combat in dense areas.
If militants were seen firing from an apartment building near a troop maneuver, forces might take the entire building down to thwart the threat. Tank tracks chewed up paved roads, leaving dusty stretches of earth in their wake.
The military’s engineering corps was tasked with using bulldozers to clear routes, downing buildings seen as threats, and blowing up Hamas’ underground tunnel network.
Experts say the operations to neutralize tunnels were extremely destructive to surface infrastructure. For example, if a 1.5-kilometer (1-mile) long tunnel was blown up by Israeli forces, it would not spare homes or buildings above, said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli army intelligence officer.
“If (the tunnel) passes under an urban area, it all gets destroyed,” he said. “There’s no other way to destroy a tunnel.”
Cemeteries, schools, hospitals and more were targeted and destroyed, he said, because Hamas was using these for military purposes. Secondary blasts from Hamas explosives inside these buildings could worsen the damage.
The way Israel has repeatedly returned to areas it said were under its control, only to have militants overrun it again, has exacerbated the destruction, Savill said.
That’s evident especially in northern Gaza, where Israel launched a new campaign in early October that almost obliterated Jabaliya, a built up, urban refugee camp. Jabaliya is home to the descendants of Palestinians who fled, or were forced to flee, during the war that led to Israel‘s creation in 1948. Milshtein said Israel’s dismantling of the tunnel network is also to blame for the destruction there.
But the destruction was not only caused from strikes on targets. Israel also carved out a buffer zone about a kilometer inside Gaza from its border with Israel, as well as within the Netzarim corridor that bisects north Gaza from the south, and along the Philadelphi Corridor, a stretch of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt. Vast swaths in these areas were leveled.
Amir Avivi, a retired Israeli general, said the buffer zones were an operational necessity meant to carve out secure plots of land for Israeli forces. He denied Israel had cleared civilian areas indiscriminately.
The destruction, like the civilian death toll in Gaza, has raised accusations that Israel committed war crimes, which it denies. The decisions the military made in choosing what to topple, and why, are an important factor in that debate.
“The second militants move into a building and start using it to fire on you, you start making a calculation about whether or not you can strike,” Savill said. Downing the building, he said, “still needs to be necessary.”
Trump expected to bring peace to Ukraine, though picture unclear on Middle East: WEF panel
- Expert predicts war in Ukraine would end within the next six months
- Despite bringing a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump’s presidency does not signal guaranteed peace in Palestine, warn analysts
DUBAI: Donald Trump’s US presidency will likely bring peace in Ukraine even if the future of the Middle East remains unclear, panelists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos said on Tuesday.
The annual meetings, which got into full swing on Tuesday, comes a day after Trump was sworn in for his second term as the 47th US president, marking perhaps the greatest political comeback in American history.
In one of the earliest sessions, a panel of political analysts and experts shared their “early thoughts” on Trump’s actions on his first day back in office as speculation rises about the implications of his presidency on the domestic and international fronts.
Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, predicted the war in Ukraine would end within the next six months.
“If you look at [Trump’s] inaugural speech and the press conference, he wants to be not only a deal maker, but an international deal maker who’s a peacemaker,” said Allison, adding the new president would leverage his power to strike a deal with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky or starve Kyiv of Washington’s military aid.
However, prospects of peace seem unclear in the Middle East, where a major paradigm shift took place last year with the decline of Iran and its proxies, as well as the new governments that rose to power in Syria and Lebanon.
Trump took credit for implementing a fragile ceasefire in Gaza after 14 months of negotiations.
“You can see a paradigm shift without peace. Israel has had a strategic problem since the 1940s (in) that it wins wars but cannot get to a stable peaceful arrangement. And I think that that remains the case,” said Walter Mead, Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute.
He noted the decline of the “Iranian challenge” as the only factor destabilizing the Middle East was no guarantee of lasting peace in the Middle East.
“Peace in the Middle East perhaps remains a beautiful but maybe distant dream,” warned Mead.
Despite bringing a ceasefire in Gaza, Trump’s presidency does not signal guaranteed peace in Palestine given his desire to expand the Abraham Accords and resume pressure on Tehran.
Panelists warned of the consequences of Trump’s return to power.
Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, warned against treating Trump as “just another president” given his victory despite impeachments and criminal indictments.
“It’s a very unusual time to have an individual that is in no way concerned about, or constrained by, rule of law,” said Bremmer, referring to the global power that Trump has amassed in light of America’s post-COVID-19 economic growth and tech dominance, combined with the weakening of Washington’s adversaries like China, Russia and Iran.
“To understand what Trump will do is to understand who pays him.”
In his first two days in office, Trump has already taken major decisions that include withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization and the Paris Agreement on climate change for the second time.
Although panelists signaled optimism towards his domestic economic policies, they disagreed on Washington’s projected relationship with China during his tenure.
“I think that we are heading towards a trade war and towards a more strategic decoupling of the economies. One reason for that is because Trump isn’t just focusing on tariffs on China, but he’s also focusing on third countries where there are pass-throughs to the US,” said Bremmer.
Trump unexpectedly held off tariffs on China on his first day back at the White House and delayed the ban on short video app TikTok. But in an unprecedented move he floated the possibility of a joint venture, saying he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between Washington and Chinese owner ByteDance.
“Getting to a deal with China will require a level of execution implementation that’s far more complicated across the Trump administration, not to mention some support from the GOP and Congress, and we’re nowhere close to that,” said Bremmer.
However, Allison predicted positive relations between both economic powers as their leaders enjoy a “very right relationship” and could find common areas of cooperation, including ending the war in Ukraine.
He added: “In terms of their interests, while fundamentally in the long run there is rivalry of a rising and ruling power, but if I look at the agency and the opportunities for agency here, doing a deal to conclude a war in Ukraine is not hard for [Xi Jinping] to be part of.”
World leaders, business titans, and policymakers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the WEF’s 55th annual meeting, which runs until Jan. 24.
This year’s conference explores ways to tackle shared challenges like climate change, technology, and economic inequality through global collaboration.
UN says no aid convoy looting in Gaza since ceasefire
- Throughout the conflict in Gaza, the UN has denounced obstacles restricting the flow and distribution of aid into the battered Palestinian territory
GENEVA: The United Nations on Tuesday said that there had been no reports of aid convoys being looted in war-ravaged Gaza since a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas came into effect.
“These two first days of entry: there have been no records of looting or attacks against aid workers,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told reporters in Geneva.
During the 15-month war, “there has been a sad, tragic history of looting happening,” he said.
“The past two days, we have not seen any looting. We have not seen any organized armed gangs or groups, whatever you want to call them, attacking the aid that is coming in.”
Throughout the conflict in Gaza, the UN has denounced obstacles restricting the flow and distribution of aid into the battered Palestinian territory.
Desperately-needed humanitarian aid has begun to flow into Gaza after Israel and Hamas on Sunday conducted the first exchange of hostages for prisoners agreed under the terms of the ceasefire.
More than 900 trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered Gaza on Monday, the United Nations said.
The day the deal came into force, 630 trucks entered Gaza.
Laerke said that aid organizations were eager to “maximize delivery through this opening. Hunger is widespread. People are homeless.”
The war has devastated much of the Gaza Strip and displaced the vast majority of its population of 2.4 million, many of them multiple times.
Laerke said that it was important to see the issue of looting “in the wider picture as to why were these gangs there in the first place.”
With only a trickle of aid coming into the territory before the ceasefire deal, he pointed out that “whatever came into Gaza... had extremely high value.”
“So there were incentives to do that (looting). Now, of course, the more aid that comes in... those incentives will probably not be there as much.”
Israeli minister says he welcomes Trump’s reversal of US sanctions on settlers
- Trump’s decision is a reversal of a major policy action by former President Joe Biden’s administration
JERUSALEM: Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich welcomed US President Donald Trump’s reversal of sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on Israeli settler groups and individuals accused of being involved in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The pro-settler Smotrich, in a message to Trump on Tuesday, called the move an “expression of your deep connection to the Jewish people and our historical right to our land.”
Trump’s decision is a reversal of a major policy action by former President Joe Biden’s administration that had imposed sanctions on numerous Israeli settler individuals and entities, freezing their US assets and generally barring Americans from dealing with them.
“These sanctions were a severe act of foreign interference in the internal affairs of the State of Israel, undermining democratic principles and the mutual relationship between the two friendly nations,” Smotrich said.
Smotrich added that Israel looked forward to “continued fruitful cooperation to strengthen its national security, expand settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel, and strengthen Israel’s position in the world.”
US sanctions on settlers were imposed after the Biden administration repeatedly urged the Israeli government to take action to hold extremists to account for actions that Washington believes set back hopes for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians.
Since the 1967 Middle East war, Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River, which Palestinians want as the core of an independent state. It has built Jewish settlements there that most countries deem illegal. Israel disputes this and cites historical and Biblical ties to the land.
