ABOARD THE GEO BARENTS: Two vessels rescued around 190 Europe-bound migrants, including women and children, off the coast of Libya, charities operating the vessels said Monday.
The rescues came amid a spike in attempted crossings of the Mediterranean Sea.
More than 24,000 migrants have been intercepted and returned to Libya by the country’s coast guard so far this year, according to the UN migration agency. That’s more than double the number from 2020, when about 11,890 migrants were brought back to shore in the conflict-ridden country.
More than a thousand more are believed to have drowned in just the first half of the year, according to the agency’s figures.
Migrants waved to rescuers from a flimsy rubber dinghy at midday Monday before they were given life vests and transferred onboard the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel operated by the charity Doctors without Borders. They numbered 54 in total, according to Barbara Deck, the organization’s project coordinator.
Among them were two dozen minors, six women and a 6-week-old baby, who was among the first to disembark, crying, after being carefully placed in a large orange life vest. The migrants’ original vessel had been packed, with no shade and barely room for all onboard to sit down.
The migrants were not immediately available for comment. They were rushed for medical inspection by workers for the aid agency known by its French name as Medecins Sans Frontieres. Some appeared exhausted and smiled in relief after their rescue, with a few dancing and singing. Among them were migrants from African countries including Ivory Coast, Cameron, Mali, Somalia and Burkina Faso, according to Deck.
It was unclear why this year has seen so many crossings but mid to late summer is typically a peak time for attempts on the Central Mediterranean route because of good weather. Rescues along this route have become routine during the warmer months. Economic hardship, sometimes exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, is a driver for many of the migrants.
Earlier in the day, the Geo Barents also rescued six men in a small fiberglass boat, three of them from Libya, two from Tunisia and one from Morocco. The men had been trying down the rescue ship, according to MSF staff.
The migrants told rescuers that the dinghy’s engine had stopped working, according to Mattijs Melsen, deputy search and rescue leader with MSF.
“The boat was not designated for such a voyage,” he said.
The Ocean Viking, also working in the same area off Libya, rescued around 130 Europe-bound migrants over the past three days, said Claire Juchat, a communications officer for the SOS Mediterranee charity, which operates the vessel.
The migrants, including 44 children and 12 women, were on four separate boats, Juchat said. There were two migrants with critical health conditions whom the Italian coast guard evacuated along with four family members early Monday, she said.
The remaining migrants will stay onboard the two vessels until their missions are completed, then they will be taken to Europe.
Libya has for years been a hub for African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing war and poverty in their countries and hoping for a better life in Europe. The oil-rich country plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
Traffickers have exploited the chaos and often pack desperate families into ill-equipped small boats that stall and founder along the perilous Central Mediterranean route. Thousands have drowned along the way. Some Libyan militiamen have been implicated in widespread abuses of migrants, including torture and abduction for ransom.
Ships rescue 190 Europe-bound migrants off Libya
https://arab.news/26jbc
Ships rescue 190 Europe-bound migrants off Libya
- The rescues came amid a spike in attempted crossings of the Mediterranean Sea
- Over 24,000 migrants have been intercepted and returned to Libya by the country’s coast guard so far this year, according to the UN migration agency
Fighter jet slips off the hangar deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, one minor injury
The crew members who were in the pilot seat of the Super Hornet and on the small towing tractor jumped out before the jet and the tug went into the Red Sea. One sailor sustained a minor injury, the Navy said.
“The F/A-18E was actively under tow in the hangar bay when the move crew lost control of the aircraft. The aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the Navy said in a statement. The jet was part of Strike Fighter Squadron 136.
Fighter jets are routinely towed around the hangar deck to park them where they are needed for any flight operations or other work. It is unclear whether there will be an effort to recover the jet, which costs about $60 million. The incident is under investigation.
The Truman has been deployed to the Middle East for months and recently has been involved in stepped-up military operations against the Yemen-based Houthi rebels. US Central Command has said that the military has conducted daily strikes, which have been done by fighter jets, bombers, ships and drones.
The Truman’s deployment has already been extended once by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by about a month.
Israeli army flattens Rafah ruins
- Gazans fear a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground
CAIRO: Israel’s army is flattening the remaining ruins of the city of Rafah on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, residents say, in what they fear is a part of a plan to herd the population into confinement in a giant camp on the barren ground.
No food or medical supplies have reached the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip in nearly two months, since Israel imposed what has since become its longest ever total blockade of the territory, following the collapse of a six-week ceasefire.
Israel relaunched its ground campaign in mid-March and has since seized swaths of land and ordered residents out of what it says are “buffer zones” around Gaza’s edges, including all of Rafah, which comprises around 20 percent of the Strip.
Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported on Saturday that the military was setting up a new “humanitarian zone” in Rafah, to which civilians would be moved after security checks to keep out Hamas fighters. Private companies would distribute aid.
Residents said massive explosions could now be heard unceasingly from the dead zone where Rafah had once stood as a city of 300,000 people.
“Explosions never stop, day and night, whenever the ground shakes, we know they are destroying more homes in Rafah. Rafah is gone,” Tamer, a Gaza City man displaced in Deir Al-Balah, further north, told Reuters by text message.
He said he was getting phone calls from friends as far away as across the border in Egypt whose children were being kept awake by the explosions.
Abu Mohammed, another displaced man in Gaza, stated by text: “We are terrified that they could force us into Rafah, which is going to be like a cage of a concentration camp, completely sealed off from the world.”
Israel imposed its total blockade on Gaza on March 2.
UN agencies say Gazans are on the precipice of mass hunger and disease, with conditions now at their worst since the war began on Oct. 7, 2023.
Gaza health officials said on Monday that at least 23 people had been killed in the latest Israeli strikes across the Strip.
At least 10, some of them children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia in the north and six were killed in an airstrike on a cafe in the south.
Footage circulating on social media showed some victims critically injured as they sat around a table at the cafe.
Talks have so far failed to extend the ceasefire, during which Hamas released 38 hostages and Israel released hundreds of prisoners and detainees.
Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in Gaza, fewer than half of them believed to be alive. Hamas says it would free them only under a deal that ended the war; Israel says it will agree only to temporary pauses in fighting unless Hamas is completely disarmed, which the fighters reject.
On Friday, the World Food Programme said it had run out of food stocks in Gaza after the longest closure the Gaza Strip had ever faced.
Some residents toured the streets looking for weeds that grow naturally on the ground.
Others picked up dry leaves from trees.
Desperate enough, fishermen turned to catching turtles, skinning them, and selling their meat.
“I went to the doctor the other day, and he said I had some stones in my kidney and I needed surgery that would cost me around $300. I told him I would rather use a painkiller and use the money to buy food for my children,” one Gaza City woman said.
“There is no meat, no cooking gas, no flour, and no life. This is Gaza in simple but painful terms.”
Since October 2023, Israel’s offensive on the enclave has killed more than 51,400, according to Palestinian health officials.
Israel’s Shin Bet chief announces resignation, to step down June 15, Israeli media reports
- Shin Bet has been at the center of a growing political battle pitting Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government against an array of critics
JERUSALEM: The head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service, Ronen Bar, has announced his resignation and will step down on June 15, Israeli media reported late on Monday, six weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to oust the security chief.
The Shin Bet, which handles counter-terrorism investigations, has been at the center of a growing political battle pitting Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government against an array of critics ranging from members of the security establishment to families of hostages in Gaza.
Netanyahu said on March 16 that he had long ago lost confidence in Bar and that trust in the head of the domestic security service, whose roles include counter-terrorism and security for government officials, was especially crucial at a time of war.
The Supreme Court later temporarily froze the government’s bid to sack Bar, who claimed that Netanyahu wanted to fire him after he refused to fulfill requests that included spying on Israeli protesters and disrupting the leader’s corruption trial.
Netanyahu, in response to the accusations, accused Bar of lying.
Israel army says hit more than 50 ‘terror targets’ in Lebanon in past month
- On Sunday, Israel struck south Beirut for the third time since the fragile November 27 ceasefire went into effect
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to stop Hezbollah from using Beirut’s southern suburbs as a 'safe haven'
JERUSALEM: Israel’s military said Monday that it had struck more than 50 “terror targets” across Lebanon over the past month, despite a November ceasefire that ended a war between it and Hezbollah militants.
On Sunday, Israel struck south Beirut for the third time since the fragile November 27 ceasefire went into effect, prompting Lebanese President Joseph Aoun to call on its guarantors France and the United States to force a halt.
“Over the past month, the IDF (military) has struck more than 50 terror targets across Lebanon. These strikes were carried out following violations of the ceasefire and understandings between Israel and Lebanon, which posed a threat to the State of Israel and its citizens,” the military said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Sunday’s strike targeted a building used by Hezbollah to store “precision-guided missiles,” and vowed to stop the Iran-backed militant group from using Beirut’s southern suburbs as a “safe haven.”
Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem said in a speech Monday that the attack “lacks any justification,” going on to call it “a political attack aimed at changing the rules by force.”
Israel has continued to carry out regular strikes in Lebanon despite the truce, which sought to halt more than a year of hostilities with Hezbollah that culminated in a heavy Israeli bombing campaign and ground incursion.
Under the deal, Hezbollah was to pull its fighters north of Lebanon’s Litani River, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli border, and dismantle any remaining military infrastructure to its south.
Israel was to withdraw all its forces from south Lebanon, but troops remain in five positions that it deems “strategic.”
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill at least 40
- Eight people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Abu Mahadi family home in Jabalia
- An Israeli strike on the Al-Agha family home killed five people in an area of Khan Yunis in the south
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: Gaza’s civil defense agency said Israeli strikes on Monday killed at least 40 people across the Palestinian territory, which has been under an Israeli aid blockade for more than 50 days.
Israel resumed its military campaign in the Gaza Strip on March 18. A ceasefire agreement that had largely halted the fighting for two months before that collapsed over disagreements between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, whose 2023 attack triggered the war.
Civil defense official Mohammed Al-Mughayyir told AFP that 40 people had been killed since dawn on Monday.
They included eight people who were killed in an Israeli strike on the Abu Mahadi family home in Jabalia, in the north of the territory.
“They were sleeping in their homes, feeling safe, when missiles hit... this scene makes the body shiver,” said Abdul Majeed Abu Mahadi, 67, who added that his brother was killed in the attack.
“If a person looked at this scene, they would have seen children, women and elderly men cut into pieces, it makes the heart ache, but what can we do?“
The civil defense agency reported that another 10 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Al-Ghamari family home in the Al-Sudaniya area northwest of Gaza City.
A strike on the Al-Agha family home killed eight others in an area of Khan Yunis in the south, it added.
Fourteen others were killed in four separate strikes across the territory, the civil defense said, including one that hit a tent sheltering displaced people in the Al-Shafii camp, west of Khan Yunis.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Monday that at least 2,222 people have been killed since Israel resumed strikes, bringing the overall death toll since the war broke out to 52,314.
The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still being held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel says its renewed military campaign aims to force Hamas to free the remaining captives.
