CAIRO: Lebanon's parliament voted on Tuesday to hold legislative elections on March 27, parliamentary sources said, giving Prime Minister Najib Mikati's government only a few months to try to secure an IMF recovery plan amid a deepening economic meltdown.
Lebanon's financial crisis, labelled by the World Bank as one of the deepest depressions of modern history, had been compounded by political deadlock for over a year before Mikati put together a cabinet alongside President Michel Aoun.
The currency has lost 90% of its value and three quarters of the population have been propelled into poverty. Shortages of basic goods such as fuel and medicines have made daily life a struggle.
Mikati, whose cabinet is focused on reviving talks with the International Monetary Fund, had vowed to make sure elections are held with no delay and Western governments urged the same.
But a row over the probe into last year's Beirut port blast that killed over 200 people and destroyed large swathes of the capital is threatening to veer his cabinet off course.
Some ministers, aligned with politicians that lead investigator Judge Tarek Bitar is seeking to question over the explosion, last week demanded that the judge be removed from the probe.
Mikati has since said the cabinet will not convene another meeting until an agreement is reached on how to deal with the matter.
On Thursday, Beirut witnessed the worst street violence in over a decade with seven people killed in gunfire when protesters from the Hezbollah and Amal Shi'ite movements made their way to demonstrate against Judge Bitar.
The bloodshed, which stirred memories of the 1975-1990 civil war, added to fears for the stability of a country that is awash with weapons.
The early election date - elections were originally expected to be held in May - was chosen in order not to clash with the holy Islamic fasting month of Ramadan.
Once a new parliament is elected, the Mikati cabinet will only act in a caretaker role until a new prime minister is given a vote of confidence and tasked with forming a new government.
Lebanese parliament confirms March polls amid efforts to secure IMF rescue
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Lebanese parliament confirms March polls amid efforts to secure IMF rescue
Israel’s Netanyahu announces four soldiers killed in Gaza
The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday the deaths of four soldiers in Gaza, with local journalists who cover the military reporting they were all killed in a booby-trapped building.
Netanyahu extended his condolences “to the families of our four fallen heroes in Gaza in the fight to defeat Hamas and bring back our hostages,” naming two of the soldiers as Staff Sergeant Yoav Raver and reservist Sergeant Major Chen Gross.
“Our four fighters sacrificed their lives for the safety of all of us,” he added.
The names of the other two soldiers have not yet been cleared for publication, the military said.
Their deaths bring the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of the ground offensive in Gaza to 429.
The military said the four were killed in southern Gaza, with Israeli media reporting they were in
a house in the city of Khan Yunis when it exploded.
The army said another reserve officer was severely wounded in the same incident.
Israel recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 7, 2023 attack sparked the war.
Israel army issues evacuation warning for parts of Gaza City
- The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday
- Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza
GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: The Israeli military issued an evacuation order for residents of parts of Gaza City on Friday ahead of an attack, as it presses an intensified campaign in the battered Palestinian territory.
“This is a final and urgent warning ahead of an impending strike,” army spokesman Avichay Adraee said.
The army “will strike all areas from which rockets are launched.”
The evacuation order comes at the beginning of the Eid Al-Adha holiday, one of the main religious festivals of the Muslim calendar.
The Israeli military has recently stepped up its campaign in Gaza in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 2023 attack sparked the war.
International calls for a negotiated ceasefire have grown in recent weeks.
Hamas’s lead negotiator, Khalil Al-Hayya said on Thursday that the Palestinian Islamist group was ready to enter a new round of talks aimed at sealing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Talks aimed at brokering a new ceasefire have failed to yield a breakthrough since the last brief truce fell apart in March with the resumption of Israeli operations in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas appeared close to an agreement late last month, but a deal proved elusive, with each side accusing the other of scuppering a US-backed proposal.
Israel has faced mounting pressure to allow more aid into Gaza, after it imposed a more than two-month blockade that led to widespread shortages of food and other essentials.
It recently eased the blockade and has worked with the newly formed, US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to implement a new aid distribution mechanism via a handful of centers in south and central Gaza.
But since its inception, the GHF has been a magnet for criticism from the UN and other members of the aid world — which only intensified following a recent string of deadly incidents near its facilities.
Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
According to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, at least 4,402 people have been killed since Israel resumed its offensive on March 18, taking the war’s overall toll to 54,677, mostly civilians.
Homes smashed, help slashed: no respite for returning Syrians
- The community center, funded by UNHCR, offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war
- “We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four
DAMASCUS: Around a dozen Syrian women sat in a circle at a UN-funded center in Damascus, happy to share stories about their daily struggles, but their bonding was overshadowed by fears that such meet-ups could soon end due to international aid cuts.
The community center, funded by the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR), offers vital services that families cannot get elsewhere in a country scarred by war, with an economy broken by decades of mismanagement and Western sanctions.
“We have no stability. We are scared and we need support,” said Fatima Al-Abbiad, a mother of four. “There are a lot of problems at home, a lot of tension, a lot of violence because of the lack of income.”
But the center’s future now hangs in the balance as the UNHCR has had to cut down its activities in Syria because of the international aid squeeze caused by US President Donald Trump’s decision to halt foreign aid.
The cuts will close nearly half of the UNHCR centers in Syria and the widespread services they provide — from educational support and medical equipment to mental health and counselling sessions — just as the population needs them the most. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees returning home after the fall of Bashar Assad last year.
UNHCR’s representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, said the situation was a “disaster” and that the agency would struggle to help returning refugees.
“I think that we have been forced — here I use very deliberately the word forced — to adopt plans which are more modest than we would have liked,” he told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation in Damascus.
“It has taken us years to build that extraordinary network of support, and almost half of them are going to be closed exactly at the moment of opportunity for refugee and IDPs (internally displaced people) return.”
BIG LOSS
A UNHCR spokesperson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the agency would shut down around 42 percent of its 122 community centers in Syria in June, which will deprive some 500,000 people of assistance and reduce aid for another 600,000 that benefit from the remaining centers.
The UNHCR will also cut 30 percent of its staff in Syria, said the spokesperson, while the livelihood program that supports small businesses will shrink by 20 percent unless it finds new funding.
Around 100 people visit the center in Damascus each day, said Mirna Mimas, a supervisor with GOPA-DERD, the church charity that runs the center with UNHCR.
Already the center’s educational programs, which benefited 900 children last year, are at risk, said Mimas.
Nour Huda Madani, 41, said she had been “lucky” to receive support for her autistic child at the center.
“They taught me how to deal with him,” said the mother of five.
Another visitor, Odette Badawi, said the center was important for her well-being after she returned to Syria five years ago, having fled to Lebanon when war broke out in Syria in 2011.
“(The center) made me feel like I am part of society,” said the 68-year-old.
Mimas said if the center closed, the loss to the community would be enormous: “If we must tell people we are leaving, I will weep before they do,” she said
UNHCR HELP ‘SELECTIVE’
Aid funding for Syria had already been declining before Trump’s seismic cuts to the US Agency for International Development this year and cuts by other countries to international aid budgets.
But the new blows come at a particularly bad time.
Since former president Assad was ousted by Islamist rebels last December, around 507,000 Syrians have returned from neighboring countries and around 1.2 million people displaced inside the country went back home, according to UN estimates.
Llosa said, given the aid cuts, UNHCR would have only limited scope to support the return of some of the 6 million Syrians who fled the country since 2011.
“We will need to help only those that absolutely want to go home and simply do not have any means to do so,” Llosa said. “That means that we will need to be very selective as opposed to what we wanted, which was to be expansive.”
ESSENTIAL SUPPORT
Ayoub Merhi Hariri had been counting on support from the livelihood program to pay off the money he borrowed to set up a business after he moved back to Syria at the end of 2024.
After 12 years in Lebanon, he returned to Daraa in southwestern Syria to find his house destroyed — no doors, no windows, no running water, no electricity.
He moved in with relatives and registered for livelihood support at a UN-backed center in Daraa to help him start a spice manufacturing business to support his family and ill mother.
While his business was doing well, he said he would struggle to repay his creditors the 20 million Syrian pounds ($1,540) he owed them now that his livelihood support had been cut.
“Thank God (the business) was a success, and it is generating an income for us to live off,” he said.
“But I can’t pay back the debt,” he said, fearing the worst. “I’ll have to sell everything.”
Netanyahu admits Israel supporting anti-Hamas armed group in Gaza
- Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab
JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel is supporting an armed group in Gaza that opposes the militant group Hamas, following comments by a former minister that Israel had transferred weapons to it.
Israeli and Palestinian media have reported that the group Israel has been working with is part of a local Bedouin tribe led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
The European Council on Foreign Relations (EFCR) think tank describes Abu Shabab as the leader of a “criminal gang operating in the Rafah area that is widely accused of looting aid trucks.”
Knesset member and ex-defense minister Avigdor Liberman had told the Kan public broadcaster that the government, at Netanyahu’s direction, was “giving weapons to a group of criminals and felons.”
“What did Liberman leak? That security sources activated a clan in Gaza that opposes Hamas? What is bad about that?” Netanyahu said in a video posted to social media on Thursday.
“It is only good, it is saving lives of Israeli soldiers.”
Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, told AFP that the Abu Shabab clan was part of a Bedouin tribe that spans across the border between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Some of the tribe’s members, he said, were involved in “all kinds of criminal activities, drug smuggling, and things like that.”
Milshtein said that Abu Shabab had spent time in prison in Gaza and that his clan chiefs had recently denounced him as an Israeli “collaborator and a gangster.”
“It seems that actually the Shabak (Israeli security agency) or the (military) thought it was a wonderful idea to turn this militia, gang actually, into a proxy, to give them weapons and money and shelter” from army operations, Milshtein said.
He added that Hamas killed four members of the gang days ago.
The ECFR said Abu Shabab was “reported to have been previously jailed by Hamas for drug smuggling. His brother is said to have been killed by Hamas during a crackdown against the group’s attacks on UN aid convoys.”
Israel regularly accuses Hamas, with which it has been at war for nearly 20 months, of looting aid convoys in Gaza.
Hamas said the group had “chosen betrayal and theft as their path” and called on civilians to oppose them.
Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, said it had evidence of “clear coordination between these looting gangs, collaborators with the occupation (Israel), and the enemy army itself in the looting of aid and the fabrication of humanitarian crises that deepen the suffering of” Palestinians.
The Popular Forces, as Abu Shabab’s group calls itself, said on Facebook it had “never been, and will never be, a tool of the occupation.”
“Our weapons are simple, outdated, and came through the support of our own people,” it added.
Milshtein called Israel’s decision to arm a group such as Abu Shabab “a fantasy, not something that you can really describe as a strategy.”
“I really hope it will not end with catastrophe,” he said.
Gaza marks the start of Eid Al-Adha with outdoor prayers among the rubble and food growing ever scarcer
- Israeli offensive has destroyed large parts of Gaza and displaced around 90 percent of its population of roughly 2 million Palestinians
- After blocking all food and aid from entering Gaza for more than two months, Israel began allowing a trickle of supplies to enter
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Palestinians across the war-ravaged Gaza Strip marked the start of one of Islam’s most important holidays with prayers outside destroyed mosques and homes early Friday, with little hope the war with Israel will end soon.
With much of Gaza in rubble, men and children were forced to hold the traditional Eid Al-Adha prayers in the open air and with food supplies dwindling, families were having to make do with what they could scrape together for the three-day feast.
“This is the worst feast that the Palestinian people have experienced because of the unjust war against the Palestinian people,” said Kamel Emran after attending prayers in the southern city of Khan Younis. “There is no food, no flour, no shelter, no mosques, no homes, no mattresses ... The conditions are very, very harsh.”
The Islamic holiday begins on the 10th day of the Islamic lunar month of Dhul-Hijja, during the Hajj season in Saudi Arabia. For the second year, Muslims in Gaza were not able to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform the traditional pilgrimage.
The war broke out on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 hostages. They are still holding 56 hostages, around a third of them believed to be alive, after most of the rest were released in ceasefire agreements or other deals. Israeli forces have rescued eight living hostages from Gaza and recovered dozens of bodies.
Since then, Israel has killed more than 54,000 Palestinians in its military campaign, primarily women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry which does not distinguish between civilians or combatants in its figures.
The offensive has destroyed large parts of Gaza and displaced around 90 percent of its population of roughly 2 million Palestinians.
After blocking all food and aid from entering Gaza for more than two months, Israel began allowing a trickle of supplies to enter for the UN several weeks ago. But the UN says it has been unable to distribute much of the aid because of Israeli military restrictions on movements and because roads that the military designates for its trucks to use are unsafe and vulnerable to looters.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome said Thursday that Gaza’s people are projected to fall into acute food insecurity by September, with nearly 500,000 people experiencing extreme food deprivation, leading to malnutrition and starvation.
“This means the risk of famine is really touching the whole of the Gaza Strip,” Rein Paulson, director of the FAO office of emergencies and resilience, said in an interview.
Over the past two weeks, shootings have erupted nearly daily in the Gaza Strip in the vicinity of new hubs where desperate Palestinians are being directed to collect food. Witnesses say nearby Israeli troops have opened fire, and more than 80 people have been killed according to Gaza hospital officials.
Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid and trying to block it from reaching Palestinians, and has said soldiers fired warning shots or at individuals approaching its troops in some cases.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a newly formed group of mainly American contractors that Israel wants to use to replace humanitarian groups in Gaza that distribute aid in coordination with the UN, said Friday that all its distribution centers were closed for the day due to the ongoing violence.
It urged people to stay away for their own safety, and said it would make an announcement later as to when they would resume distributing humanitarian aid.
