ALEPPO, Syria: Sitting by a bed strewn with rubble in Syria’s second biggest city, Umm Mounir refuses to leave her home even though the deadly earthquake has torn a gaping hole into the room.
Aleppo, once a major commercial hub, had already been battered by over a decade of war when the 7.8-magnitude quake struck in early February, killing more than 45,000 people across Turkiye and Syria and flattening entire neighborhoods.
The building adjacent to Umm Mounir’s collapsed, ripping the rear facade off her own home, but she said that neither natural disasters nor conflict can make her leave.
“Nothing will make me move out of my house except death,” said the 55-year-old, who lives by herself on the fourth floor of the heavily damaged seven-story building.
“I will only leave for the grave.”
Her city suffered great losses in the February 6 quake that flattened 54 of its buildings and damaged historic sites.
With at least 432 fatalities, Aleppo accounts for nearly a third of all deaths in government-held parts of Syria, according to state media.
Officials and medics across the war-ravaged country, including in rebel-controlled areas, put the overall Syrian death toll at more than 3,600 people.
The city witnessed brutal battles between rebels based in eastern Aleppo and Russian-backed regime forces from 2012 to 2016.
After a suffocating siege on rebel-held areas and a crushing offensive involving barrel bombs, rockets and shells, the army declared in December 2016 that it was in full control of the city.
“We are people of glory and wealth, but the war changed everything,” said Umm Mounir, glancing at the wreckage of her wooden furniture.
“Even in the harshest years of the war we were not displaced,” added the woman, whose home in the Masharika neighborhood was near the frontline. “We will not be displaced now.”
More than 30 people died in Masharika after the pre-dawn quake brought down two building over sleeping residents.
Seemingly incessant aftershocks spooked traumatized survivors, and a 6.4-magnitude tremor on Monday rocked the same areas of Turkiye and Syria.
When the new quake hit, Umm Mounir grabbed her 85-year-old neighbor Amina Raslan, who lives on the first floor, and they rushed out.
“She can’t run, so I held her hand and we walked as fast as we could,” Umm Mounir said.
Raslan’s son, who lives with his mother, said they “got used to the danger because our home used to be on the frontline” where rockets and missiles had rained down.
Puffing a cigarette, 55-year-old Ali Al-Bash said he wished they could leave their damaged home, but that “we have nowhere else to go.”
Raslan’s eyes welled with tears as she recalled the destruction of the home she said her family had lived in for 50 years.
“Everything collapsed,” she said as her grandchildren were playing around her.
The family, like many others, did not want to move to a shelter but could not afford to rent a new home, Raslan said.
“I lost two of my children during the war. I don’t want to leave my house... I don’t want to lose anything else.”
Some Aleppo residents, however, have left ravaged homes for tents.
Mohammed Jawish, 63, now lives in a makeshift camp with dozens of families after his building partially collapsed.
“If I still had a house I wouldn’t be here,” he said, watching his grandchildren — some of them barefoot in the winter cold — play with a worn-out football.
Jawish said the quake cost him his belongings and sent him “back to square one.”
“My chest feels tight when I’m in this small tent,” he said. “I feel I could die from sorrow.”
Syrian quake survivors shelter in crumbling Aleppo homes
https://arab.news/jy4zs
Syrian quake survivors shelter in crumbling Aleppo homes
- Aleppo, once a major commercial hub, had already been battered by over a decade of war when the 7.8-magnitude quake struck in early February
- Aleppo accounts for nearly a third of all deaths in government-held parts of Syria, according to state media
Lebanon security official says Israel struck central Beirut
“An Israeli air strike hit close to the Al-Zahraa Husseiniya in Zuqaq Al-Blat,” he told AFP requesting anonymity, referring to a Shiite place of worship in the densely-populated district. An AFP correspondent in a nearby area heard two blasts, while reporters in another part of Beirut heard ambulance sirens.
US hits Israeli settler group with sanctions over West Bank violence
- Sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets
- Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began
WASHINGTON: The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on an Israeli settler group it accused of helping perpetrate violence in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a rise in settler attacks on Palestinians.
The Amana settler group “a key part of the Israeli extremist settlement movement and maintains ties to various persons previously sanctioned by the US government and its partners for perpetrating violence in the West Bank,” the Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The sanctions also target a subsidiary of Amana called Binyanei Bar Amana, described by Treasury as a company that builds and sell homes in Israeli settlements and settler outposts.
The sanctions block Americans from any transactions with Amana and freeze its US-held assets. The United Kingdom and Canada have also imposed sanctions on Amana.
Israel has settled the West Bank since capturing it during the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians say the settlements have undermined the prospects for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Israel views the West Bank as the biblical Judea and Samaria, and the settlers cite biblical ties to the land.
Settler violence had been on the rise prior to the eruption of the Gaza war, and has worsened since the conflict began over a year ago.
Most countries deem the settlements illegal under international law, a position disputed by Israel which sees the territory as a security bulwark. In 2019, the then-Trump administration abandoned the long-held US position that the settlements are illegal before it was restored by President Joe Biden.
Last week, nearly 90 US lawmakers urged Biden to impose sanctions on members of members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.
Around 100 projectiles fired from Lebanon into Israel: army
- Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel
JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired around 100 projectiles from Lebanon into northern Israel on Monday, with the country’s air defense system intercepting some of them.
Israel’s first responders said two people, including a 65-year-old woman with a shrapnel wound to the neck, sustained light injuries in northern Israel and were taken to hospital.
The military said in a first statement that “as of 15:00 (1300 GMT), approximately 60 projectiles that were fired by the Hezbollah terrorist organization have crossed from Lebanon into Israel today.”
Later it said, “following the sirens that sounded between 15:09 and 15:11 in the Western Galilee area, approximately 40 projectiles were identified crossing from Lebanon into Israeli territory.”
Israel has escalated its bombing of targets in Lebanon since September 23 and has since sent in ground troops, following almost a year of limited, cross-border exchanges of fire begun by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in support of Hamas in Gaza.
‘No plan B’ to aid Palestinian refugees: UNRWA chief
- Israel ordered ban on organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza
- UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees
GENEVA: There is no alternative to the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, its chief said Monday, following Israel’s order to ban the organization that coordinates nearly all aid in war-ravaged Gaza.
“There is no plan B,” the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, told reporters in Geneva.
Within the UN “there is no other agency geared to provide the same activities,” providing not only aid in Gaza but also primary health care and education to hundreds of thousands of children, he said.
He has called on the UN, which created UNRWA in 1949, to prevent the implementation of a ban on the organization in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, which was approved by the Israeli parliament last month.
The ban, which is due to take effect in January, sparked global condemnation, including from key Israeli backer the United States.
UNRWA provides assistance to nearly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
Israel has long been critical of the agency, but tensions escalated after Israel in January accused about a dozen of its staff of taking part in Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
A series of probes found some “neutrality related issues” at UNRWA and determined that nine of the agency’s roughly 13,000 employees in Gaza “may have been involved” in the attack, but found no evidence for Israel’s central allegations.
Lazzarini was in Geneva for a meeting of UNRWA’s advisory commission to discuss the way forward at the organization’s “darkest moment.”
“The clock is ticking fast,” he told the commission, according to a transcript.
Describing Gaza as “an unrelenting dystopian horror,” he warned that “what hangs in the balance, is the fate of millions of Palestine refugees and the legitimacy of the rules-based international order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.”
Anton Leis, head of Spain’s international cooperation and development agency and chair of the advisory committee, told reporters that there was “simply no alternative to UNRWA,” which he said had seen more than 240 staff members killed in Gaza since the start of the war.
“It is the only organization that possesses the staff, the infrastructure and the capacity to deliver lifesaving assistance to Palestinian refugees at the scale needed, especially in Gaza,” he said.
Lazzarini agreed, saying that “If you are talking about bringing in a truck with food, you will surely find an alternative,” but “the answer is no” when it comes to education and primary health care.
Lazzarini warned that a halt to UNRWA’s activities in Israel and East Jerusalem would block it from coordinating massive aid efforts inside Gaza.
“This would mean we could not operate in Gaza,” he said, adding that it would not be possible to coordinate the deconfliction with Israeli authorities to ensure aid convoys can move safely.
“The environment would be much too dangerous,” he said.
The UNRWA chief has charged that Israel’s main objective in its attacks on the agency is to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, undermining efforts toward a two-state solution.
“We have to be clear, even if UNRWA today would cease its operation, the statue of refugee would remain,” he said.
Without the agency, he said, the responsibility for providing services to the Palestinian refugees “will come back to the occupying power, being Israel.”
If no one steps in to fill the void, he said, it “will create a vacuum ... (and) sow the seeds for more extremism, more hate in the future.”
He called on the international community to go beyond statements of condemnation and put far more pressure on Israel.
“We feel alone.”
‘Jordan stands firm against Israeli aggression on Gaza,’ King Abdullah says as he opens parliament
- Addressing lawmakers, King Abdullah said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war
RIYADH: Jordan stands firm against the “aggression on Gaza and Israeli violations in the West Bank,” the country’s King Abdullah said on Monday as he opened a newly elected parliament.
Addressing lawmakers, he said Jordan was working tirelessly through Arab and international efforts to stop the war.
“Jordan has exerted tremendous efforts, and Jordanians have valiantly been treating the wounded in the direst of circumstances. Jordanians were the first to deliver aid by air and land to people in Gaza, and we will remain by their side, now and in the future,” he said.
In his speech, the king told newly elected parliamentarians at the start of their four-year term that the current parliament was “the first step in the implementation of the political modernization project, on a track to bolster the role of platform-based parties and the participation of women and young people.”
“This requires parliamentary performance, collective action, and close cooperation between the government and parliament, in accordance with the constitution,” the king was reported as saying by Jordan News Agency.
King Abdullah said the government aimed to provide Jordanians with a decent life and empower youths while equipping them for the jobs of the future.
“We must continue implementing the Economic Modernisation Vision to unleash the potential of the national economy and increase growth rates over the next decade, capitalising on Jordan’s human competencies and international relations as catalysts for growth,” the king said.
