Archaeological discoveries confirm Arab Gulf region’s long history of religious coexistence

The discovery of an ancient Christian monastic site on Siniyah Island, off the coast of Umm Al-Quwain in the UAE, paints a picture of a thriving community. (Reuters)
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Updated 13 December 2022
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Archaeological discoveries confirm Arab Gulf region’s long history of religious coexistence

  • First evidence of Christian occupation — fragments of plaster crosses — was unearthed in 1994 off Abu Dhabi coast
  • There is enough evidence testifying to Christianity’s existence along Gulf shores from at least the 4th century AD

LONDON: One day, in late February 1986, a young man from Jubail in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province decided to put his new 4WD through its paces on the sand dunes west of the coastal city. Before very long, however, he made two startling discoveries.

The first was that neither he nor his new car were well suited to dune-bashing, as both man and machine soon found themselves stuck fast in the sand.

But then, in the words of a paper published in the journal “Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy” in 1994, “in the process of digging out, (he) discovered he was on top of a wall which disappeared down into the sand.”

Although the young man had no idea what he had found, he realized it must have been very old. Having freed his vehicle and returned to Jubail, he alerted the authorities about his discovery.

What he had stumbled on, it would later transpire, was the remains of a Christian church, long buried beneath the drifting sands.

Archaeologists who later excavated the site would find an open, walled courtyard, about 20 meters long, with doorways leading onto three rooms.

Although Christianity began to wane as Islam rose, Christians were not seen as outsiders at that time, for the simple reason “they were family.” (Department of Archaeology and Tourism Umm al-Quwain)




Although Christianity began to wane as Islam rose, Christians were not seen as outsiders at that time, for the simple reason “they were family.” (Department of Archaeology and Tourism Umm al-Quwain)

The central room, at the eastern end of the structure, was determined to be the sanctuary, where the altar would have stood. The room to the north was where the bread and wine for the Christian ritual of the Eucharist would have been assembled. To the south was the sacristy, where the sacred vessels and the priest’s robes were kept.

All the walls were covered in gypsum plaster, in which there were clear impressions of four crosses, the distinctive symbol of Christianity, each about 30 cm tall.

Several stone columns remained intact, as did a pair of decorative plaster friezes, featuring a pattern of flowers linked by vine motifs.

This, it turned out, was not just any church. Dated by archaeologists to the 4th century AD, it predated the coming of Islam by about 300 years, and proved to be among the oldest known Christian churches in the world.

The discovery was just one small piece in a historical jigsaw puzzle which has since been all but completed, assembling a picture of a time when two faiths, Islam and Christianity, coexisted along the shores of the Arabian Gulf.

Now, 36 years after that young Saudi’s discovery, another major piece has been added to the puzzle with the excavation of a Christian monastery on Siniyah Island, just off the coast of Umm Al-Quwain in the UAE.

Using pottery and carbon dating of organic remains found in the foundations of the complex, the monastery has been dated to between 534 and 656 AD, a period that spans the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, who was born around the year 570 and died in 632.

The site appears to have been abandoned during the 8th century — not as a result of a clash between the two faiths, but because of an internal conflict within Islam, archaeologists believe.

“Eventually the walls collapsed, and the windblown sands moved over them, leaving low mounds with building debris, and pottery, glass and coins, which were visible on the surface,” said Tim Power, associate professor of archaeology at the UAE University in Al-Ain and co-director of the Siniyah Island Archaeology Project.




The site where the Christian altar once stood against the rear wall of the Siniyah Island building’s sanctuary. (Siniyah Island Archaelogy Project)

“But there is absolutely no evidence of destruction, or of deliberate damage to the site. We even have the stem of the glass chalice that was being used to deliver the Eucharist, in its original place, and the bowl that was used for mixing the Eucharist wine, also in situ.

“It really does feel like they just got up one day and walked away.”

Power believes the site was abandoned not because of religious differences, “but because of the Abbasid invasion of 750 AD, which fits with our ceramic dating and radio-carbon dating for the abandonment.”

In 750 AD, the Abbasid caliphate, based in Mesopotamia, overthrew the Umayyads. “We know from the Arabic historical sources that the Abbasid invasion was very violent, and the coastal towns of the emirates were destroyed,” he said.

“So I think these people fled in terror at the prospect of the invasion by the imperial authorities in Iraq, which were trying to maintain control of their restive provinces. It was a conflict between two different groups of Muslims.”

The existence of the monastery right up until this moment in the mid-8th century, more than a hundred years after the death of Prophet Muhammad, is evidence that “there was clearly a degree of intercommunal, interfaith tolerance at the local level.”

Power says it is a common mistake to assume that the Christians of the Gulf at the time of the rise of Islam were outsiders.

“It is worth remembering that Christianity is a Middle Eastern religion. Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic, which was the language of the Middle East at the time of the Arab conquests. These churches and monasteries were most likely not built by foreigners visiting these shores, but built by and for the local Christian Arab community.

“There is a great deal of historical and inscriptional evidence which tells us that probably the majority of the Arabian Peninsula until the rise of Islam was Christianized.”




Power says it is a common mistake to assume that the Christians of the Gulf at the time of the rise of Islam were outsiders. (Department of Archaeology and Tourism Umm al-Quwain)

And although Christianity began to wane as Islam rose, Christians were not seen as outsiders at that time, for the simple reason “they were family.”

“Over the course of several generations Christian Arabs started to convert to Islam. But as a Muslim you might have a cousin, say, who’s a Christian and, as they are still today, these were very strongly kinship communities.

“Membership of a tribe was probably the crucial piece of your identity, and religious affiliation almost secondary.”

This is the second discovery of a Christian monastery in the UAE. In 1992, the newly formed Abu Dhabi Islands Archaeological Survey, founded by the UAE’s then-president, Sheikh Zayed, began investigations on three islands.

On one of them, Sir Bani Yas, just 7 km off the coast in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, they quickly found some tantalizing clues — the remains of several courtyard houses and fragments of pottery dated to between the 6th and 7th centuries AD.

The first evidence of Christian occupation was unearthed in 1994 — fragments of plaster crosses that bore a striking resemblance to others that had been found previously at several locations in the Gulf.

Over the next two seasons, as the survey reported in a paper published in 1997, “a very large, complex structure emerged ... which now proves to be a monastery, with a church standing in its center within a courtyard.”

There is now a wealth of evidence, both textual and archaeological, testifying to the existence of Christianity in the Gulf from at least the 4th century AD until the first couple of centuries of Islam.

According to sources written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic spoken by Christian communities in the Middle East from about the 1st to the 8th century AD, the Church of the East, which was also known as the Nestorian Church, thrived in a region known as Beth Qatraye.




A frieze from a Christian monastery on Sir Bani Yas. (DCT Abu Dhabi)

According to the Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, published by the Syriac Institute, which exists to promote the study and preservation of the Syriac heritage and language, Beth Qatraye, “land of the Qataris,” included “not only the peninsula of Qaṭar, but also its hinterland Yamama” — today a historic region within Saudi Arabia — “and the entire coast of northeast Arabia as far as the peninsula of Musandam, in present-day Oman, along with the islands” of the Gulf.

References to Beth Qaṭraye are found in a number of Christian documents written in the years leading up to the emergence of Islam. The earliest comes from the “Chronicle of Arbela,” written in Syriac and supposedly composed between 551 and 569 AD by a monk from what is now Irbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The chronicle refers to the existence of several Christian dioceses in the Gulf, and specifically in the area of Beth Qatraye, dating back as far as 225 AD.

First “rediscovered” in 1907, the chronicle has fallen in and out of favor with ecclesiastical historians. But although its authenticity has been challenged, many of its details appear to have been confirmed by subsequent archaeological discoveries in the Gulf.

There is, however, no doubt among scholars about the authenticity of preserved church correspondence that shows Christianity was established in Beth Qaṭraye by at least the 4th century.

Ishoyahb III, Patriarch of the Church of the East from 649 to 659, left a wealth of letters for historians to pore over, including five sent from his base in Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia to the clergy and faithful of Beth Qatraye.

Another valued source that mentions the region of Beth Qatraye is the “Book of Governors,” a monastic history written in the mid-9th century by Thomas, a bishop of Marga, an east Syriac diocese in the metropolitan province of Adiabene, a province of the Sasanian Empire in Mesopotamia.




Archaeologists who later excavated the site would find an open, walled courtyard, about 20 meters long, with doorways leading onto three rooms. (Supplied)

There is also an abundance of archaeological evidence of a Christian presence in the Gulf. The first clues were found in 1931 at Hira, an ancient city in south-central Iraq, which in about the 3rd century AD became the capital of the Lakhmids, a Christian tribe originally from Yemen.

In 1960, the French archaeologist Roman Ghirshman excavated a 7th-century Christian monastery on Iran’s Kharg Island, and in 1988 a church was discovered at Al-Qusur on Failaka Island, Kuwait.

Shortly before the church at Jubayl was discovered, three Christian crosses were found nearby at Jabal Berri, a rock outcrop about 10 km southwest of the city, some 7 km inland from the coast. Two were made of bronze, and the third, just 5 cm tall, was carved from a single piece of mother of pearl.

Ecclesiastical and Arabic records not only point to considerable Christian activity in areas that are now part of Saudi Arabia, but also demonstrate that “far from undergoing a decline, Christianity flourished in the Gulf immediately after the Muslim conquest,” as Robert Carter, professor of Arabian and Middle Eastern archaeology at UCL Qatar, wrote in the 2013 book, “Les preludes de l’Islam.”

Indeed, there was “a burst of Christian activity from the late 7th and/or 8th century, extending into the early 9th century at Kharg.”

One of the sites where Christianity flourished was on the island of Tarut, just off the modern-day governorate of Qatif in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. It was here in 635 AD that Muslim forces put an end to the “ridda,” the apostasy movement in the eastern region, in a final battle that was fought at Darin on the island.

However, “the Muslim conquest did not put an end to the Nestorian community here,” as Daniel Potts, professor of ancient Near Eastern archaeology and history at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, wrote in a paper published in the journal “Expedition” in 1984.

There are records of a major synod, or church council, having taken place on the island more than 40 years later, in 676.

This was a significant gathering, as it was at this synod that the Christian practice of marriage in a church was first established, when George I, the chief bishop of the Church of the East, issued a ruling that henceforth only those unions blessed by a priest would be regarded as legitimate.




“There is absolutely no evidence of destruction or of deliberate damage to the Siniyah Island site,” Tim Power, associate professor of archaeology, UAE University, Al-Ain. (Supplied)

In mid-November this year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced that up to SR2.64 billion ($703 million) had been allocated for the development of the island of Tarut, which today is home to 120,000 people, to preserve its heritage and enhance its potential as a tourism destination.

Tarut was not the only Christian site in what is now Saudi Arabia. Other centers or churches mentioned in Syrian texts included “Hagar” and “Juwatha,” both believed to have been located somewhere in Al-Hasa oasis, and at nearby Al-Qatif and Abu Ali Island, just north of Jubail.

Eventually, all these Christians sites, from Jubail in Saudi Arabia to Umm Al-Quwain in the UAE, disappeared from history. According to John Langfeldt, an American priest and historian who wrote the first paper about the church in Jubail after visiting the site in 1993, they did so as part of a peaceful process of assimilation.

“There was no forced conversion of the populace to Islam (and) Christianity remained the primary religious allegiance of the vast majority of the population,” Langfeldt wrote in a paper published in the journal “Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy in 1994.”

“Gradually, over several centuries, probably due to several factors — such as the burden of ... tax, isolation from outside Christian contact, convenience, some fine qualities of Islam, and the excellent witness of its adherents — almost all of the population was Islamized.”

 


Syria announces ceasefire after sectarian clashes, but more fighting and abuse alleged

Updated 6 sec ago
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Syria announces ceasefire after sectarian clashes, but more fighting and abuse alleged

  • Tuesday’s announcement follows deadly sectarian clashes between Druze factions and Sunni Bedouin tribes that killed over 30 people
  • That’s according to Syria’s Interior Ministry. However, fighting and allegations of civilian abuses by security forces continue
BUSRA AL-HARIR: Syria ‘s defense minister announced a ceasefire shortly after government forces entered a key city in southern Sweida province on Tuesday, a day after sectarian clashes killed dozens there. Neighboring Israel again launched strikes on Syrian military forces, saying it was protecting the Druze minority.
The latest escalation under Syria’s new leaders began with tit-for-tat kidnappings and attacks between local Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze armed factions in the southern province, a center of the Druze community.
Syrian government forces, sent to restore order on Monday, also clashed with Druze armed groups.
A ceasefire announcement
On Tuesday, Syrian Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra said an agreement was struck with the city’s “notables and dignitaries” and that government forces would “respond only to the sources of fire and deal with any targeting by outlaw groups.”
However, scattered clashes continued after his announcement — as did allegations that security forces had committed violations against civilians.
Syria’s Interior Ministry said Monday that more than 30 people had been killed, but has not updated the figures since. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said Tuesday that 166 people had been killed since Sunday, including five women and two children.
Among them were 21 people killed in “field executions” by government forces, including 12 men in a rest house in the city of Sweida, it said. It did not say how many of the dead were civilians and also cited reports of members of the security forces looting and setting homes on fire.
Syrian interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa said in a statement that he had tasked authorities with “taking immediate legal action against anyone proven to have committed a transgression or abuse, regardless of their rank or position.”
Associated Press journalists in Sweida province saw forces at a government checkpoint searching cars and confiscating suspected stolen goods from both civilians and soldiers.
Israel’s involvement draws pushback
Israeli airstrikes targeted government forces’ convoys heading into the provincial capital of Sweida and in other areas of southern Syria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strikes sought to “prevent the Syrian regime from harming” the Druze religious minority “and to ensure disarmament in the area adjacent to our borders with Syria.” In Israel, the Druze are seen as a loyal minority and often serve in the armed forces.
Meanwhile, Israeli Cabinet member and Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli called on X for Al-Sharaa to be “eliminated without delay.”
A soldier’s story
Manhal Yasser Al-Gor, of the Interior Ministry forces, was being treated for shrapnel wounds at a local hospital after an Israeli strike hit his convoy.
‘We were entering Sweida to secure the civilians and prevent looting. I was on an armored personnel carrier when the Israeli drone hit us,” he said, adding that there were “many casualties.”
The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Israeli strikes had killed “several innocent civilians” as well as soldiers, and called them “a reprehensible example of ongoing aggression and external interference” in Syria’s internal matters.
It said the Syrian state is committed to protecting the Druze, “who form an integral part of the national identity and united Syrian social fabric.”
Suspicion over Syria’s new government
Israel has taken an aggressive stance toward Syria’s new leaders since Al-Sharaa’s Sunni Islamist insurgents ousted former President Bashar Assad in December, saying it doesn’t want militants near its borders. Israeli forces have seized a UN-patrolled buffer zone on Syrian territory along the border with the Golan Heights and launched hundreds of airstrikes on military sites in Syria.
Earlier Tuesday, religious leaders of the Druze community in Syria called for armed factions that have been clashing with government forces to surrender their weapons and cooperate with authorities. One of the main Druze spiritual leaders later released a video statement retracting the call.
Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri, who has been opposed to the government in Damascus, said in the video that the initial Druze leaders’ statement had been issued after an agreement with the authorities in Damascus but that “they broke the promise and continued the indiscriminate shelling of unarmed civilians.”
“We are being subjected to a total war of annihilation,” he claimed, without offering evidence.
Some videos on social media showed armed fighters with Druze captives, beating them and, in some cases, forcibly shaving men’s moustaches.
Sectarian and revenge attacks
The Druze religious sect began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria. Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.
Since Assad’s fall, clashes have broken out several times between forces loyal to the new Syrian government and Druze fighters.
The latest fighting has raised fears of more sectarian violence. In March, an ambush on government forces by Assad loyalists in another part of Syria triggered days of sectarian and revenge attacks. Hundreds of civilians were killed, most of them members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect. A commission was formed to investigate the attacks but no findings have been made public.
The videos and reports of soldiers’ violations spurred outrage and protests by Druze communities in neighboring Lebanon, northern Israel and in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights, where the Israeli military said dozens of protesters had crossed the border into Syrian territory.
The violence drew international concern. The US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, called the violence “worrisome on all sides” in a post on.
“We are attempting to come to a peaceful, inclusive outcome for Druze, Bedouin tribes, the Syrian government and Israeli forces,” he said.

UN says 875 Palestinians have been killed near Gaza aid sites

Updated 16 July 2025
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UN says 875 Palestinians have been killed near Gaza aid sites

  • The United Nations has called the GHF aid model “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality standards

GENEVA: The UN rights office said on Tuesday it had recorded at least 875 killings within the past six weeks at aid points in Gaza run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and convoys run by other relief groups, including the United Nations.
The majority of those killed were in the vicinity of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites, while the remaining 201 were killed on the routes of other aid convoys.
The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to get supplies into Gaza, largely bypassing a UN-led system that Israel alleges has let Hamas-led militants loot aid shipments intended for civilians. Hamas denies the allegation.
The GHF, which began distributing food packages in Gaza in late May after Israel lifted an 11-week aid blockade, previously told Reuters that such incidents have not occurred on its sites and accused the UN of misinformation, which it denies.
The GHF did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest UN figures.
“The data we have is based on our own information gathering through various reliable sources, including medical human rights and humanitarian organizations,” Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters in Geneva.
The United Nations has called the GHF aid model “inherently unsafe” and a violation of humanitarian impartiality standards.
The GHF said on Tuesday it had delivered more than 75 million meals to Gaza Palestinians since the end of May, and that other humanitarian groups had “nearly all of their aid looted” by Hamas or criminal gangs.
The Israeli army previously told Reuters in a statement that it was reviewing recent mass casualties and that it had sought to minimize friction between Palestinians and the Israel Defense Forces by installing fences and signs and opening additional routes.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has previously cited instances of violent pillaging of aid, and the UN World Food Programme said last week that most trucks carrying food assistance into Gaza had been intercepted by “hungry civilian communities.” 

 


UN finds rising child malnutrition in Gaza, where officials say Israeli strikes kill 93 people

Updated 16 July 2025
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UN finds rising child malnutrition in Gaza, where officials say Israeli strikes kill 93 people

  • Strike in Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa district Monday evening kills 19 members of same family
  • Gaza’s Health Ministry says bodies of 93 people killed by Israeli strikes brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Malnutrition rates among children in the Gaza Strip have doubled since Israel sharply restricted the entry of food in March, the UN said Tuesday. New Israeli strikes killed more than 90 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children, according to health officials.
Hunger has been rising among Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians since Israel broke a ceasefire in March to resume the war and banned all food and other supplies from entering Gaza, saying it aimed to pressure Hamas to release hostages. It slightly eased the blockade in late May, allowing in a trickle of aid.

Zainab Abu Haleeb, a five-month-old Palestinian girl diagnosed with malnutrition, according to medics, lies on a bed as she receives treatment at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip July 15, 2025. (REUTERS)

UNRWA, the main UN agency caring for Palestinians in Gaza, said it had screened nearly 16,000 children under age 5 at its clinics in June and found 10.2 percent of them were acutely malnourished. By comparison, in March, 5.5 percent of the nearly 15,000 children it screened were malnourished.
New airstrikes kill several families
One strike in the northern Shati refugee camp killed a 68-year-old Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature, as well as a man and a woman and their six children who were sheltering in the same building, according to officials from the heavily damaged Shifa Hospital, where the casualties were taken.
One of the deadliest strikes hit a house in Gaza City’s Tel Al-Hawa district on Monday evening and killed 19 members of the family living inside, according to Shifa Hospital. The dead included eight women and six children. A strike on a tent housing displaced people in the same district killed a man and a woman and their two children.
The Israeli military did not comment on the strikes.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said in a daily report Tuesday afternoon that the bodies of 93 people killed by Israeli strikes had been brought to hospitals in Gaza over the past 24 hours, along with 278 wounded. It did not specify the total number of women and children among the dead.
The Hamas politician killed in a strike early Tuesday, Mohammed Faraj Al-Ghoul, was a member of the bloc of representatives from the group that won seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in the last national elections, held in 2006.
The Israeli military says it only targets militants and tries to avoid harming civilians. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in densely populated areas. But daily, it hits homes and shelters where people are living without warning or explanation of the target.
Malnutrition grows
UNICEF, which screens children separately from UNRWA, also reported a marked increase in malnutrition cases. It said this week its clinics had documented 5,870 cases of malnutrition among children in June, the fourth straight month of increases and more than double the around 2,000 cases it documented in February.
Experts have warned of famine since Israel tightened its lengthy blockade in March.
Israel has allowed an average of 69 trucks a day carrying supplies, including food, since it eased the blockade in May, according to the latest figures from COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of coordinating aid. That is far below the hundreds of trucks a day the UN says are needed to sustain Gaza’s population.
On Tuesday, COGAT blamed the UN for failing to distribute aid, saying in a post on X that thousands of pallets of supplies were inside Gaza waiting to be picked up by UN trucks. The UN says it has struggled to pick up and distribute aid because of Israeli military restrictions on its movements and the breakdown in law and order.
Israel has also let in food for distribution by an American contractor, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. GHF says it has distributed food boxes with the equivalent of more than 70 million meals since late May at the four centers it runs in the Rafah area of southern Gaza and in central Gaza.
More than 840 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,600 others wounded in shootings as they walk for hours trying to reach the GHF centers, according to the Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli forces open fire with barrages of live ammunition to control crowds on the roads to the GHF centers, which are located in military-controlled zones.
The military says it has fired warning shots at people it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. GHF says no shootings have taken place in or immediately around its distribution sites.
No breakthrough in ceasefire efforts
The latest attacks came after US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held two days of talks last week that ended with no breakthrough in negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release.
Israel has killed more than 58,400 Palestinians and wounded more than 139,000 others in its retaliation campaign since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Just over half the dead are women and children, according to the ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants in its tally.
Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after its attack 21 month ago, in which militants stormed into southern Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. They abducted 251 others, and the militants are still holding 50 hostages, less than half of them believed to be alive.
US calls for probe into killing of Palestinian-American
In a separate development, US Ambassador Mike Huckabee called on Israel to investigate the killing of a 20-year-old Palestinian-American whose family said was beaten to death by Jewish settlers over the weekend in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Huckabee wrote on X.
Seifeddin Musalat, born in Florida, and a local friend were killed Friday. Musalat was beaten to death by Israeli settlers on his family’s land, his cousin Diana Halum told reporters. The family had called on the US State Department to investigate his death and hold the settlers accountable.
The Israeli military said a confrontation erupted after Palestinians hurled stones at Israelis in the area earlier in the day, lightly wounding two people.
Huckabee, like many in the Trump administration, is a strong supporter of Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal by most of the international community and seen by the Palestinians as a major obstacle to peace.
Israel strikes Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley
Also on Tuesday, Israel launched a series of strikes in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, targeting what the military said were compounds of the Hezbollah militant group.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said that one of the strikes hit a Syrian refugee camp, killing seven Syrians. Altogether, the strikes killed 12 people and wounded eight, it said. Hezbollah said one of the strikes hit a rig used to drill water wells.
Israel has continued to carry out near-daily strikes in Lebanon since a US-brokered ceasefire agreement nominally brought an end to the latest Israel-Hezbollah war in November. Some 4,000 people were killed in Lebanon during the war and more than 250 since the ceasefire.

 


UN-backed experts focusing on Palestinian rights quit

Updated 16 July 2025
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UN-backed experts focusing on Palestinian rights quit

  • Council spokesman Pascal Sim said the move marked the first joint resignations of Commission of Inquiry members since the council was founded in 2006

GENEVA: A team of three independent experts working for the UN’s top human rights body with a focus on Israel and Palestinian areas say they are resigning, citing personal reasons and a need for change, in the panel’s first such group resignation.
The resignations, announced Monday by the UN-backed Human Rights Council that set up the team, come as violence continues in Palestinian areas with few signs of letup in the Israeli military campaign against Hamas and other militants behind the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Israeli government has repeatedly criticized the panel of experts, known as the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, and denied their repeated requests to travel to the region or otherwise cooperate with the team.
Council spokesman Pascal Sim said the move marked the first joint resignations of Commission of Inquiry members since the council was founded in 2006. 
The team said in a statement that the resignations had “absolutely nothing to do with any external event or pressure.”
Navi Pillay, 83, a former UN human rights chief who has led the commission for the last four years, said in a letter to the council president that she was resigning effective Nov. 3 because of “age, medical issues and the weight of several other commitments.”    

 


Survivors bury dead after RSF attack devastates Sudan village

Updated 15 July 2025
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Survivors bury dead after RSF attack devastates Sudan village

  • The Emergency Lawyers reported on Monday that nearly 300 people were killed in North Kordofan villages
  • The area is home to several armed tribes that have refused to pledge allegiance to the RSF

PORT SUDAN: It took a full day for the villagers of Shaq Al-Nom, in Sudan’s North Kordofan state, to bury their dead after an attack by paramilitary fighters that left the village in ruins, a survivor told AFP on Tuesday.

The Saturday attack by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — the paramilitary force at war with the regular army since April 2023 — was part of a series of raids in recent days on villages in North Kordofan, some 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of the capital Khartoum.

“On Sunday, we collected the bodies from the village streets and inside the houses, and we buried 200 bodies,” Saleh Abdel Rahim, 34, told AFP.

The Emergency Lawyers, a group that documents atrocities by both sides in the war, reported on Monday that nearly 300 people were killed in North Kordofan villages between Saturday and Sunday.

Tolls are nearly impossible to independently verify in Sudan, with many medical facilities forced out of service and limited media access.

“It was indescribable,” Abdel Rahim said, using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation because he had fled to an area close to RSF positions.

“Under artillery shelling, houses burned with their families inside,” he told AFP via satellite Internet connection to circumvent a communications blackout.

Since it began, the war has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises, with 14 million Sudanese currently displaced inside the country and across borders.

The Emergency Lawyers reported on Monday that paramilitaries had killed women and children, abducted civilians and looted livestock in the villages surrounding the RSF-controlled city of Bara.

In Shaq Al-Nom, “RSF vehicles arrived in the village, in an attempt to storm it” on Saturday under a hail of machine gun fire and drone strikes, according to Abdel Rahim.

“We had no choice but to resist in defense,” he said, adding that “all of the villagers of the Bara countryside have fled.”

The area is home to several armed tribes that have refused to pledge allegiance to the RSF.

North Kordofan, key to the RSF’s fuel smuggling route via Libya, has been an important battleground between the army and the paramilitaries for months.

The RSF has tried to encircle the North Kordofan state capital of El-Obeid — the only road link between Khartoum and the vast western region of Darfur, which the RSF has all but conquered.

It has been unable, however, to seize the North Darfur state capital of El-Fasher despite an ongoing siege for more than a year.

Sudanese analyst Kholood Khair told AFP that “they want to consolidate that road that links El-Fasher to El-Obeid and other parts of Kordofan, so effectively they’re in a race against time to consolidate in the west before the rains come.”

Sudan’s rainy season, which peaks in August, renders much of the country’s roads inaccessible, making it impossible for either side to capture territory until the floods start clearing in September.