BEIRUT: The people of Lebanon will on Wednesday mark the first anniversary of the devastating explosion at Beirut’s port, the country’s worst peacetime disaster.
The massive blast that destroyed a large section of the capital on Aug. 4, killed at least 214 people and injured more than 6,500. It was caused by 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored at the port for several years without proper safety precautions.
The families of those who died will hold a commemorative religious service at the port, business owners have said they will cover the city with black ribbons on Wednesday, and activists are planning anti-government demonstrations.
Lebanese flags were raised over balconies and shops in the city on Monday ahead of the anniversary.
A year after the tragedy, the families of the victims remain determined to ensure justice is served and those responsible for the failures that resulted in the explosion are held to account.
“Our protests will soon become fiercer,” said Ibrahim Hoteit, whose brother, Tharwat, died.
He condemned “the heinous state that did not even bother to console us,” and added: “(They) removed Judge Fadi Sawan just because he came close to (their) sectarian and political idols. Today, this whole play is being repeated under a new title: ‘immunity’ (from prosecution).”
Sawan, who was appointed to investigate the explosion, was removed from the investigation in February after two former ministers he had accused of negligence filed a complaint. In addition, requests for immunity to be lifted from a number of top officials so that they can be questioned have not been granted.
Hoteit, who said he was speaking on behalf of the families of the victims, gave “the state 30 hours to lift immunity from the defendants, including former ministers, present lawmakers and security officials.”
He added: “The authorities are asking us to pacify the street movements on Aug. 4 — we are not the police of discipline. The people of Lebanon have the right to express their anger and rage by all available and legitimate means after you destroyed the country. Never expect us to be your mediators.”
A committee of the victims’ families announced on Monday that they reject any attempt to politicize their cause.
In a statement issued for the anniversary of the explosion, rights group Amnesty International accused the Lebanese authorities of spending “the past year shamelessly obstructing the victims’ quest for truth and justice in the aftermath of the catastrophic blast.”
Waleed Taha, 67, who was only a few hundred meters from the explosion, told Arab News: “If someone can help me on Wednesday, I will certainly take part in the mourning day with the families of the victims, the wounded and protesters.
“I feel like doing something crazy, maybe destroying something, but my mind is stopping me. Anger will not do me any good and will not heal the wounds I have been suffering from since the explosion, which broke my ribs, shoulder and knee and has left me sleepless ever since.”
Taha, who is an electrical engineer, worked in Jeddah for 10 years before returning home to Beirut in 2015 to be with his family. He loves fishing and had obtained a permit from Lebanon’s General Security that allowed him to fish at the port. He said that Aug. 4 was the first day he had gone there to fish after a COVID-19 lockdown was lifted. He was at dock 11, where the Orient Queen cruise ship was docked. At about 5 p.m., he called his wife and told her he could see a fire at dock 9, only 300 meters away. He thought the silo there contained only fireworks.
“I spoke to the other fishermen and we decided to stay because it was just fireworks,” he said.
However the sounds of explosions got louder and louder, he said.
“I was standing in front of the cruise ship and could not see what was happening,” he said. “At around 6 p.m. an explosion occurred and sent rocks flying to where I was standing. I rushed to my car. Filipino hostesses from the cruise ship’s staff were walking on the dock and one of them came to my car for protection.
“When the second, massive blast hit, the car was thrown intro the sea — but the waves, which were as high as a 10-story building, threw us back to where we were. I lost consciousness until my son came looking for me in the rubble.
“I heard his voice calling me and all I was able to do was raise my head and tell him ‘I am here.’ He called the Civil Defense, who rescued me and took me to the hospital. My son had to walk between tens of bodies and injured people who were bleeding.”
Taha said that three of his closest friends died on the dock “including two retired officers and a greengrocer fishing to provide for his family.”
He added: “On that day, more than 50 people were jogging on the port’s docks. Some of them died, some of them were injured and disabled. A friend of mine survived the blast because he had moved to dock 14 to find more fish. The Filipino girls that were near me disappeared, maybe drowned in the sea.”
Taha said he paid his own treatment and recovery expenses and that “no one cared for the injured and their fates.”
He added: “I am reliving the shock every single day; I probably need therapy, I do not know. But I lost my job as I cannot walk long distances and I am in pain.”
He is pessimistic about the chances of the truth about the explosion and those responsible being revealed, saying that the truth about the assassination of former US president John F. Kennedy would be known before who is to blame for the Beirut blast. He added that he feels hopeless about the prospects for justice in a country where the state does not care about its citizens.
“I used to pass in front of the silo that contained the ammonium nitrate every day,” Taha said. “It was an abandoned silo with a rusty door, where some people used to urinate.
“To enter the port, one had to pass through three security checkpoints where army intelligence, the general security and the army checked the identities of those going in and the permissions they had — but the explosion still happened.”
‘Our protests will become fiercer’ say families of Beirut blast victims
https://arab.news/972te
‘Our protests will become fiercer’ say families of Beirut blast victims
- Rights group Amnesty International accused the Lebanese authorities of spending “the past year shamelessly obstructing the victims’ quest for truth and justice in the aftermath of the catastrophic blast
Hamas releases video of two Israeli hostages alive in Gaza
- Israeli media identified the pair in the undated video as Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana
- The three-minute video released by Hamas shows one of the hostages visibly weak
JERUSALEM: Hamas’s armed wing released a video on Saturday showing two Israeli hostages alive in the Gaza Strip, with one of the two men calling to end the 19-month-long war.
Israeli media identified the pair in the undated video as Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana, who were kidnapped during Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war.
The three-minute video released by Hamas’s Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades shows one of the hostages, identified by media as 36-year-old Bohbot, visibly weak and lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket.
Bohbot, a Colombian-Israeli, was seen bound and injured in the face in video footage from the day of the Hamas attack. After a video of him was released last month, his family said they were “extremely concerned” about his health.
The second hostage, said to be Ohana, 24, speaks in Hebrew in the video, urging the Israeli government to end the war in Gaza and secure the release of all remaining captives — a similar message to statements made by other hostages, likely under duress, in previous videos released by Hamas.
Bohbot and Ohana, both abducted by Palestinian militants from the site of a music festival, are among 58 hostages held in Gaza since the 2023 attack, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Hamas also holds the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a 2014 war.
Israel resumed its military offensive across the Gaza Strip on March 18, after a two-month truce that saw the release of dozens of hostages.
Since the ceasefire collapsed, Hamas has released several videos of hostages, including of the two appearing in Saturday’s video.
Israel says the renewed offensive aims to force Hamas to free the remaining captives, although critics charge that it puts them in mortal danger.
Hamas’s October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Saturday that at least 2,701 people have been killed since Israel resumed its campaign in Gaza, bringing the overall death toll since the war broke out to 52,810.
Qataris search for bodies of Americans killed by Daesh in Syria
- Search mission discussed in Qatari trip to US, source says
- Daesh beheaded a number of Western hostages
- Qatari mission begins before Trump visit to Doha
A Qatari mission has begun searching for the remains of US hostages killed by Daesh in Syria a decade ago, two sources briefed on the mission said, reviving a longstanding effort to recover their bodies.
Daesh, which controlled swathes of Syria and Iraq at the peak of its power from 2014-2017, beheaded numerous people in captivity, including Western hostages, and released videos of the killings.
Qatar’s international search and rescue group began the search on Wednesday, accompanied by several Americans, the sources said. The group, deployed by Doha to earthquake zones in Morocco and Turkiye in recent years, had so far found the remains of three bodies, the sources said.
One of the sources — a Syrian security source — said the remains had yet to be identified. The second source said it was unclear how long the mission would last.
The US State Department had no immediate comment.
The Qatari mission gets under way as US President Donald Trump prepares to visit Doha and other Gulf Arab allies next week and as Syria’s ruling Islamists, close allies of Qatar, seek relief from US sanctions.
The Syrian source said the mission’s initial focus was on looking for the body of aid worker Peter Kassig, who was beheaded by Daesh in 2014 in Dabiq in northern Syria. The second source said Kassig’s remains were among those they hoped to find.
US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were among other Western hostages killed by Daesh. Their deaths were confirmed in 2014.
US aid worker Kayla Mueller was also killed in Daesh captivity. She was raped repeatedly by Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi before her death, US officials have said. Her death was confirmed in 2015.
“We’re grateful for anyone taking on this task and risking their lives in some circumstances to try and find the bodies of Jim and the other hostages,” said Diane Foley, James Foley’s mother. “We thank all those involved in this effort.”
The families of the other hostages, contacted via the Committee to Protect Journalists, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The extremists were eventually driven out of their self-declared caliphate by a US-led coalition and other forces.
APRIL VISIT
Plans for the Qatari mission were discussed during a visit to Washington in April by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani and the Minister of State for the foreign ministry, Mohammed Al Khulaifi — a trip also designed to prepare for Trump’s visit to Qatar, one of the sources said.
Another person familiar with the issue said there had been a longstanding commitment by successive US administrations to find the remains of the murdered Americans, and that there had been multiple previous “efforts with US government officials on the ground in Syria to search very specific areas.”
The person did not elaborate. But the US has had hundreds of troops deployed in northeastern Syria that have continued pursuing the remnants of Daesh.
The person said the remains of Kassig, Sotloff and Foley were most likely in the same general area, and that Dabiq had been one of Daesh’s “centerpieces” — a reference to its propaganda value as a place named in an Islamic prophecy.
Mueller’s case differed in that she was in Baghdadi’s custody, the person said.
Two Daesh members, both former British citizens who were part of a cell that beheaded American hostages, are serving life prison sentences in the United States.
Syrian interim President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who seized power from Bashar Assad in December, battled Daesh when he was the commander of another jihadist faction — the Al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — during the Syrian war.
Sharaa severed ties to Al-Qaeda in 2016.
33 killed in Sudan strikes blamed on paramilitary RSF
PORT SUDAN: At least 33 people have been killed in Sudan in attacks blamed on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023, first responders said Saturday.
The attacks came after six straight days of RSF drone strikes on the army-led government’s wartime capital Port Sudan damaged key infrastructure including the power grid.
On Friday evening, at least 14 members of the same family were killed in an air strike on a displacement camp in the vast western region of Darfur, a rescue group said, blaming the paramilitaries.
The Abu Shouk camp “was the target of intense bombardment by the Rapid Support Forces on Friday evening,” said the group of volunteer aid workers, which also reported wounded.
“Fourteen Sudanese, members of the same family, were killed” and several people wounded, it said in a statement.
The camp near El-Fasher, the last state capital in Darfur still out of the RSF’s control, is plagued by famine, according to the United Nations.
It is home to tens of thousands of people who fled the violence of successive conflicts in Darfur and the conflict that has been tearing Africa’s third largest country apart since 2023.
The RSF has shelled the camp several times in recent weeks.
Abu Shouk is located near the Zamzam camp, which the RSF seized in April after a devastating offensive that virtually emptied it.
The United Nations says nearly one million people had been sheltering at the site.
On Saturday, an RSF strike on a prison in the army-controlled southern city of El-Obeid killed at least 19 people and wounded 45, a medical source said.
The source told AFP that the jail in the North Kordofan state capital was hit by a RSF drone.
The war, which began as a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has spiralled into what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
It has effectively divided the country in two with the army controlling the north, east and center while the RSF and its allies dominate nearly all of Darfur in the west and parts of the south.
UN’s top anti-racism body calls for immediate Gaza aid access
- Civilian population ‘at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,’ statement warns
- Israel has blocked humanitarian aid entering Gaza since March in bid to ‘pressurize Hamas’
NEW YORK CITY: The UN’s top anti-racism body has called for immediate humanitarian access to Gaza in a bid to avoid “catastrophic consequences” for its civilian population.
The statement by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — comprised of independent experts — came hours after the World Central Kitchen charity said it was forced to end operations in Gaza due to a lack of food.
It also follows a commitment by Israel to “conquer” almost all of the enclave, as well as disputes involving Israel, the UN and US over the appropriate way to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians there.
The CERD committee is convening in Geneva for its latest session, ending today.
Gaza’s civilian population, “especially vulnerable groups such as children, women, the elderly and persons with disabilities,” are “at imminent risk of famine, disease and death,” the committee said.
The warning follows an earlier appeal by the World Food Programme, the UN’s food agency, which said that almost all food aid operations in Gaza had collapsed.
Late last month, the agency announced that the entirety of its food reserves in the enclave had been depleted.
Since March, Israel has blocked humanitarian aid into Gaza in a bid to build pressure on Hamas, which still holds Israeli hostages.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said last week: “Two months ago, the Israeli authorities took a deliberate decision to block all aid to Gaza and halt our efforts to save survivors of their military offensive.
“They have been bracingly honest that this policy is to pressurize Hamas.”
Expanded military operations by Israel in Gaza over the past two months “have dramatically worsened the humanitarian crisis and severely endangered the civilian population,” Friday’s CERD statement said.
The committee called on Israel to “lift all barriers to humanitarian access, allow the immediate and unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid, and cease all actions obstructing the provision of essential services to the civilian population in Gaza.”
The statement also highlighted worsening conditions across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including in East Jerusalem, where Israel closed six UNRWA schools this week.
Philippe Lazzarini, the Palestinian refugee agency’s chief, reacted with fury over the move, describing it as an “assault on children.”
The CERD statement called on all UN states to “cooperate to bring an end to the violations that are taking place and to prevent war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, including by ceasing any military assistance.”
UN committee warns of ‘another Nakba’ in Palestinian territories
- During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba”
GENEVA: The world could be witnessing “another Nakba” expulsion of Palestinians, a United Nations committee warned Friday, accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and saying it was inflicting “unimaginable suffering” on Palestinians.
For Palestinians, any forced displacement evokes memories of the “Nakba,” or catastrophe — the mass displacement in the war that accompanied to Israel’s creation in 1948.
“Israel continues to inflict unimaginable suffering on the people living under its occupation, whilst rapidly expanding confiscation of land as part of its wider colonial aspirations,” warned a UN committee tasked with probing Israeli practices affecting Palestinian rights.
“What we are witnessing could very well be another Nakba,” it said, after concluding an annual mission to Amman.
During the 1948 war, around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became known as “the Nakba.”
The descendants of some 160,000 Palestinians who managed to remain in what became Israel presently make about 20 percent of its population.
The UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories was established by the UN General Assembly in December 1968.
The committee is currently composed of the Sri Lankan, Malaysian and Senegalese ambassadors to the UN in New York.
“What the world is witnessing could very well be a second Nakba. The goal of wider colonial expansion is clearly the priority of the government of Israel,” they said in their report.
“Security operations are used as a smokescreen for rapid land grabbing, mass displacement, dispossession, demolitions, forced evictions and ethnic cleansing, in order to replace the Palestinian communities with Jewish settlers.”
