Migrants in Morocco limbo as they cling to Europe dreams

A man looks on while standing with other sub-Saharan migrants at a tramway rail construction site near the Ouled Ziane bus station in Morocco's Atlantic coastal city of Casablanca. (AFP)
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Updated 26 January 2023
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Migrants in Morocco limbo as they cling to Europe dreams

  • Morocco taken periodic steps to regularise the status of migrants on its territory
  • EU considering a 500 million euro grant for Rabat to tackle clandestine migration.

Casablanca: Oumar left home in Guinea five years ago in search of a better life in Europe, but today he inhabits a daily purgatory of hunger, cold and police violence in Morocco.
“Just surviving every day is a battle,” said the 25-year-old.
“It’s exhausting not eating enough, not sleeping under a roof, not feeling safe, experiencing racism.”
He spends his nights camped out on the pavement outside a Casablanca bus station, the makeshift home of hundreds of sub-Saharan Africans whose dreams of reaching Europe are on hold in Morocco.
“We get chased away early in the morning by the police. Then we wander around and come back to the same place at the end of the day,” said Oumar.
Like the other migrants interviewed in this report, Oumar’s name has been changed.
He has tried several times to reach Spanish territory from Morocco but has so far been unsuccessful.
Oumar sits killing time opposite the Oulad Ziane bus station with a few dozen, mostly Guinean migrants.
Some cook in a makeshift kitchen while others lie exhausted on the pavement.
Someone has hung clothes and blankets on a nearby wall to dry.

Bakary, also from Guinea, said he had been living here for three years. “This is our sad reality but nobody wants to see it,” the 18-year-old said.
The migrants set up this makeshift camp on the edge of the coastal port city of 4.2 million people because of its proximity to the bus station, a major transport hub.
Today, the down-at-heel neighborhood sees repeated flare-ups with the authorities.
This month, six migrants were arrested following clashes during a police operation to evict people camping on the site of a tramway extension.
Today, they’re back on the same site, divided into groups by country of origin with everyone pitching in to survive.
“Wherever we set up camp, they chase us away,” said Boubacar, 27, from Mali. “It’s not as if we want to sleep on the tram tracks, but they don’t offer us any alternative.”
Most residents were reluctant to speak to a journalist, but one Moroccan sweets vendor said the migrants were “part of the landscape now, they don’t bother anyone.”
The station toilets are the only place the migrants have to wash.
“Sometimes they let us in, sometimes no,” said Boubacar, accusing residents of the neighborhood of racism.

 

Catholic charity Caritas provides migrants with basic medicines and health care.
The Moroccan press regularly voices opposition to the migrants. “End clandestine immigration!” said a recent headline in weekly newspaper Maroc Hebdo, calling it “a social, security and political problem that the state is struggling to manage.”
Noureddine Riadi of Morocco’s main human rights group, the AMDH, said the migrants were facing “difficult conditions” and called on authorities to do more to help.
“The most vulnerable should be housed in temporary residential centers,” he said.
Lamine, a 20-year-old who has tried five times to penetrate the heavily secured Spanish enclave of Melilla on Morocco’s northern coast, said he has almost given up.
“We’re struggling to keep believing, but my optimism is fading every day,” he said.
Morocco has taken periodic steps to regularise the status of migrants on its territory, many of whom arrive via the country’s desert border with Algeria, which is officially closed.
But it is under growing European pressure to strengthen border controls and restrict the movement of migrants within its territory.
Spanish newspaper El Pais has reported that the EU is considering a 500 million euro grant for Rabat to tackle clandestine migration.
In 2022, Moroccan police detained more than 32,000 migrants and arrested 566 people suspected of involvement in people trafficking, according to official figures.
But migrants in Casablanca say they are not giving up on the dream of reaching Europe.
Bakary said going home would mean “admitting defeat.”
“For me, it’s Europe or death,” he said.


Turkiye man kills seven before taking his own life

Updated 2 sec ago
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Turkiye man kills seven before taking his own life

Istanbul: A 33-year-old Turkish man shot dead seven people in Istanbul on Sunday, including his parents, his wife and his 10-year-old son, before taking his own life, the authorities reported on Monday.
The man, who was found dead in his car shortly after the shooting, is also accused of wounding two other family members, one of them seriously, the Istanbul governor’s office said in a statement.
The authorities, who had put the death toll at four on Sunday evening, announced on Monday the discovery near a lake on Istanbul’s European shore of the bodies of the killer’s wife and son, as well as the lifeless body of his mother-in-law.
According to the Small Arms Survey (SAS), a Swiss research program, over 13.2 million firearms are in circulation in Turkiye, most of them illegally, for a population of around 85 million.

2 Palestinians killed in Israeli raid in West Bank: PA

Updated 7 min 26 sec ago
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2 Palestinians killed in Israeli raid in West Bank: PA

  • The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli forces entered the village on Sunday night

Yabad: The Palestinian Authority said two Palestinians, including a teenage boy, were killed during an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank village of Yabad.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said Israeli forces entered the village on Sunday night, leading to clashes during which soldiers shot dead two Palestinians.
The two dead were identified by the Palestinian health ministry as Muhammad Rabie Hamarsheh, 13, and Ahmad Mahmud Zaid, 20.
“Overnight, during an IDF (Israeli army) counterterrorism activity in the area of Yabad, two terrorists hurled explosives at IDF soldiers. The soldiers responded with fire and hits were identified,” an Israeli military source told AFP.
Last week, the Israeli army launched several raids in the West Bank city of Jenin, killing nine people, most of them Palestinian militants.
Violence in the West Bank has soared since the war in Gaza erupted on October 7 last year after Hamas’s attack on Israel.
Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 777 Palestinians in the West Bank since the start of the Gaza war, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.
Palestinian attacks on Israelis have also killed at least 24 people in the West Bank in the same period, according to Israeli official figures.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.


Israel says hit Hezbollah command center in deadly weekend strike

Updated 44 min 45 sec ago
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Israel says hit Hezbollah command center in deadly weekend strike

  • The strike hit a residential building in the heart of Beirut before dawn Saturday
  • Since September 23, Israel has intensified its Lebanon air campaign

JERUSALEM: The Israeli army on Monday said it had struck a Hezbollah command center in the downtown Beirut neighborhood of Basta in a deadly air strike at the weekend.
“The IDF (Israeli military) struck a Hezbollah command center,” the army said regarding the strike that the Lebanese health ministry said killed 29 people and wounded 67 on Saturday.
The strike hit a residential building in the heart of Beirut before dawn Saturday, leaving a large crater, AFP journalists at the scene reported.
A senior Lebanese security source said that “a high-ranking Hezbollah officer was targeted” in the strike, without confirming whether or not the official had been killed.
Hezbollah official Amin Cherri said no leader of the Lebanese movement was targeted in Basta.
Since September 23, Israel has intensified its Lebanon air campaign, later sending in ground troops against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The war followed nearly a year of limited exchanges of fire initiated by Hezbollah in support of its ally Hamas after the Palestinian group’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which sparked the Gaza war.
The conflict has killed at least 3,754 people in Lebanon since October 2023, according to the health ministry, most of them since September this year.
On the Israeli side, authorities say at least 82 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed.


HRW says Israel strike that killed 3 Lebanon journalists ‘apparent war crime’

Updated 25 November 2024
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HRW says Israel strike that killed 3 Lebanon journalists ‘apparent war crime’

BEIRUT: Human Rights Watch said on Monday an Israeli air strike that killed three journalists in Lebanon last month was an “apparent war crime” and used a bomb equipped with a US-made guidance kit.
The October 25 strike hit a tourism complex in the Druze-majority south Lebanon town of Hasbaya where more than a dozen journalists working for Lebanese and Arab media outlets were sleeping.
The Israeli army has said it targeted Hezbollah militants and that the strike was “under review.”
HRW said the strike, relatively far from the Israel-Hezbollah war’s main flashpoints, “was most likely a deliberate attack on civilians and an apparent war crime.”
“Information Human Rights Watch reviewed indicates that the Israeli military knew or should have known that journalists were staying in the area and in the targeted building,” the watchdog said in a statement.
HRW “found no evidence of fighting, military forces, or military activity in the immediate area at the time of the attack,” it added.
The strike killed cameraman Ghassan Najjar and broadcast engineer Mohammad Reda from pro-Iran, Beirut-based broadcaster Al-Mayadeen and video journalist Wissam Qassem from Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television.
The watchdog said it verified images of Najjar’s casket wrapped in a Hezbollah flag and buried in a cemetery alongside fighters from the militant group.
But a spokesperson for the militant group said he “had no involvement whatsoever in any military activities.”
HRW said the bomb dropped by Israeli forces was equipped with a United States-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit.
The JDAM is “affixed to air-dropped bombs and allows them to be guided to a target by using satellite coordinates,” the statement said.
It said remnants from the site were consistent with a JDAM kit “assembled and sold by the US company Boeing.”
One remnant “bore a numerical code identifying it as having been manufactured by Woodard, a US company that makes components for guidance systems on munitions,” it added.
The watchdog said it contacted Boeing and Woodard but received no response.
In October last year, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed by Israeli shellfire while he was covering southern Lebanon, and six other journalists were wounded, including AFP’s Dylan Collins and Christina Assi, who had to have her right leg amputated.
In November last year, Israeli bombardment killed Al-Mayadeen correspondent Farah Omar and cameraman Rabih Maamari, the channel said.
Lebanese rights groups have said five more journalists and photographers working for local media have been killed in Israeli strikes on the country’s south and Beirut’s southern suburbs.


16 survivors rescued after tourist boat sinks off Egypt’s Red Sea coast

Updated 10 min 34 sec ago
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16 survivors rescued after tourist boat sinks off Egypt’s Red Sea coast

CAIRO: Egyptian authorities rescued 16 people after a tourist boat sank off its Red Sea coast, three security sources told Reuters on Monday, as search operations continued for the remaining passengers and crew members.
The boat, Sea Story, was carrying 45 people, including 31 tourists of varying nationalities and 14 crew, on a multi-day diving trip when it went down near the coastal town of Marsa Alam, according to a statement by the Red Sea Governorate.
Governor Amr Hanafi said some survivors were rescued using a helicopter and have been taken to medical care. Efforts to locate more survivors were ongoing in coordination with the Egyptian navy and army.
The governorate said a distress call was received at 5:30 a.m. (0330 GMT) and that the boat had departed from Porto Ghalib in Marsa Alam on Sunday, with plans to return to Hurghada Marina on Nov. 29.
The Red Sea is a popular diving destination renowned for its coral reefs and marine life, key to Egypt’s vital tourism industry.