AIN AL-HELWEH, Lebanon: Fruit and vegetable seller Ismail Akkawi had no choice but to brave days of intermittent but deadly fighting in Lebanon’s biggest Palestinian refugee camp in order to make ends meet.
The produce market at the heart of the restive Ain Al-Helweh camp — in the southern coastal city of Sidon — is usually bustling with vendors, but few have ventured out since clashes broke out in the camp late Saturday.
“I have to leave the house, despite the horrific circumstances for selling vegetables,” said Akkawi, who is in his sixties.
If the violence continues, “who will put food on the table for me and my family?” he asked.
Outbreaks of violence are common in the camp, but 11 people have been killed in the current flare-up — the worst in years, pitting members of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement and Islamist militants.
It is not yet known why the latest clashes broke out.
Ain Al-Helweh is home to more than 54,000 registered refugees. It was created for Palestinians who were driven out or fled during the 1948 war that coincided with Israel’s creation.
Thousands of Palestinians who sought refuge from Syria’s civil war have also joined the camp in recent years.
Palestinian factions said they had agreed on a truce on Sunday but it failed to hold, and fighting continued on Monday and Tuesday with automatic weapons and rockets being used.
Deserted buildings stand riddled with bullet holes on the front lines, while charred cars litter the camp’s southern district of Hittin, which witnessed clashes and shelling.
Bread vendor Mukhtar, 62, said panicked residents were stocking up on supplies.
“People are buying two bags of bread, fearing shortages due to the security situation,” he said, declining to give his surname.
The fighting has prompted the United Nations to suspend its activities in Ain Al-Helweh, while shops and public institutions have also closed in Sidon, the largest city in southern Lebanon.
“Arrangements are under way to establish a serious cease-fire,” senior Fatah official Mounir Makdah told AFP on Tuesday.
Palestinian security forces are working “to remove the gunmen from the streets and form an investigation committee” to identify those responsible for the violence, he added.
“All factions have collectively decided to hold perpetrators of breaches and security incidents to account,” Makdah said.
Tiny Lebanon hosts an estimated 250,000 Palestinian refugees, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Most live in one of Lebanon’s 12 official camps, and face a variety of legal restrictions, including on employment.
By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps, leaving the factions themselves to handle security.
Residents fearful as clashes rock Palestinian camp in Lebanon
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Residents fearful as clashes rock Palestinian camp in Lebanon
- Ain Al-Helweh is home to more than 54,000 registered refugees. It was created for Palestinians who were driven out during the 1948 war
Israeli forces order new evacuation at besieged northern Gaza town, residents say
- Israeli forces instruct Beit Hanoun residents to leave, causing new displacements
- Palestinian officials say evacuations worsen Gaza’s humanitarian conditions
CAIRO: Israeli forces carrying out a weeks-long offensive in northern Gaza ordered any residents remaining in Beit Hanoun to quit the town on Sunday, pointing to Palestinian militant rocket fire from the area, residents said.
The instruction to residents to leave caused a new wave of displacement, although it was not immediately clear how many people were affected, the residents said.
Israel says its almost three-month-old campaign in northern Gaza is aimed at Hamas militants and preventing them from regrouping. Its instructions to civilians to evacuate are meant to keep them out of harm’s way, the military says.
Palestinian and United Nations officials say no place is safe in Gaza and that evacuations worsen humanitarian conditions of the population.
Much of the area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya has been cleared of people and razed, fueling speculation that Israel intends to keep the area as a closed buffer zone after the fighting in Gaza ends.
The Israeli military announced its new push into the Beit Hanoun area on Saturday.
The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service said it had lost communication with people still trapped in the town, and it was unable to send teams into the area because of the raid.
On Friday, Israeli forces stormed the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. The military said it was being used by militants, which Hamas denies.
The raid on the hospital, one of three medical facilities on the northern edge of Gaza, put the last major health facility in the area out of service, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a post on X.
Some patients were evacuated from Kamal Adwan to the Indonesian Hospital, which is not in service, and medics were prevented from joining them there, the Health Ministry said. Other patients and staff were taken to other medical facilities.
On Sunday, health officials said an Israeli tank shell hit the upper floor of the Al-Ahly Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza City near the X-ray division.
Meanwhile, Palestinian health officials said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 16 people on Sunday. One of those strikes killed seven people and wounded others at Al-WAFA Hospital in Gaza City, the Palestinian civil emergency service said in a statement.
The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,300 Palestinians, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of the population of 2.3 million has been displaced and much of Gaza is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strike on hospital kills 7
- Strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
- Military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant
GAZA STRIP: Gaza’s civil defense agency said an air strike hit a hospital Sunday, killing at least seven people, while Israel said it had targeted militants at the no longer functioning facility.
“Seven martyrs and several injured people, including critical cases, have been recovered following the Israeli strike on the upper floor of Al-Wafaa Hospital in central Gaza City,” a civil defense agency statement said.
Israel’s military said it had carried out a “precise strike” targeting members of Hamas’s aerial defense unit operating from a “command and control center in a building that served in the past as the Al-Wafaa hospital.”
“The building does not currently serve as a hospital,” the military said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the hospital was still in use.
“The Al-Wafaa Hospital is partially operational, providing care to patients with physical disabilities,” the ministry’s director general, Munir Al-Barsh, told AFP.
“The hospital had been rehabilitated and was getting ready to receive patients. Had it not been targeted by Israeli shelling today, it would have been ready to fully reopen in the next few days,” he said.
The strike on Al-Wafaa Hospital came a day after the military ended a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, an assault the World Health Organization reported left the facility empty of patients and staff.
The military also detained the hospital’s chief, Hossam Abu Safiyeh, saying he was suspected of being a Hamas militant.
Since October 6, Israel’s operations in the Palestinian territory have focused on northern Gaza, where it says its land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
However, the military has also carried out air strikes and shelling in other areas of Gaza as it presses on with its campaign against the militants.
Asma Assad barred from UK to seek cancer treatment
- UK foreign secretary says she is ‘not welcome’ in Britain
- Former Syrian first lady’s passport expired in 2020
LONDON: Asma Al-Assad is effectively barred from returning to the UK after her British passport expired, The Times newspaper reported.
The wife of former Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad will not be able to return to her birthplace, London, despite reports that she is critically ill with leukemia.
The 49-year-old has been given a 50-50 chance of surviving the illness, according to sources.
The news comes as her father, Fawaz Akhras, a renowned cardiologist, left his work at the privately run Cromwell Hospital in Kensington, west London, to care for his daughter in Moscow, where the Assad family was granted asylum this month.
Asma Assad’s British passport expired in September 2020, and it is unclear whether UK ministers have blocked renewal or if the former first lady simply allowed the document’s validity to lapse.
Yvette Cooper, the UK home secretary, said that Assad will be prevented from entering the UK to seek treatment.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said that the former investment banker is “not welcome” in Britain.
Asma Assad became Syria’s first lady in 2000 after marrying the country’s new president.
Leaked emails show that she ordered luxury goods in London and Paris during the civil war in her country, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
She played a key role in supporting her husband’s brutal crackdown on opposition protests during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Asma Assad reportedly fled to Moscow weeks before her husband this month during a lighting offensive by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.
Her three children, Hafez, 23, Zein, 21, and Karim, 19, are also in Moscow, where the family own luxury properties.
Sources told The Telegraph last week that the former first lady was being kept in isolation during medical treatment.
“Asma is dying. She can’t be in the same room as anyone,” one source said.
Her father and his wife, Sahar, 75, were placed under US sanctions along with Asma’s younger brothers in 2020, although none of her family has been blacklisted by the UK.
Gaza health officials say baby dies from ‘severe cold’
- Jumaa Al-Batran died from the cold, while his twin brother remains in the intensive care unit at a local hospital
- The vast majority of the territory’s residents have been displaced since the Israeli offensive
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Gaza health officials said that a 20-day-old baby died on Sunday from “severe cold” as the war-ravaged Palestinian territory grapples with winter weather.
Jumaa Al-Batran died from the cold, while his twin brother remains in the intensive care unit at a local hospital, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said in a statement.
Marwan Al-Hamas, head of field hospitals in Gaza, confirmed the death. He said it brought to five the total number of children “who have died due to severe cold” in recent weeks.
“There is no electricity. The water is cold and there is no gas, heating or food,” said Yahya Al-Batran, the father of the child.
“My children are dying in front of my eyes and nobody cares. Jumaa has died and I fear that his brother Ali may follow.”
Yahya Al-Batran said he and his wife were living in a tattered tent in the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are crammed into unsuitable tents, most of which were hastily set up in Deir el-Balah and in the southern areas of Khan Yunis and Rafah.
Since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October last year, Gaza’s 2.4 million residents have endured severe shortages of electricity, drinkable water, food and medical services.
The vast majority of the territory’s residents have been displaced at least once since the war broke out with Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Tourist killed in shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort
- There are sharks in the Red Sea but encounters with them are relatively rare
- Ministry said the attack occurred in deep water outside the designated swimming zone near the jetties in northern Marsa Alam
CAIRO: One tourist was killed and another was injured in a shark attack in Egypt’s Marsa Alam resort, the environment ministry said in a statement on Sunday without giving the nationalities of those involved.
There are sharks in the Red Sea but encounters with them are relatively rare.
The ministry said the attack occurred in deep water outside the designated swimming zone near the jetties in northern Marsa Alam, adding that swimming out from the jetties was prohibited and the jetties would be closed for two days from Monday.
Marsa Alam is an Egyptian coastal town known for its coral reefs, marine life and beaches.
The last similar incident was in June 2023 when a tiger shark killed a Russian national in Hurghada, another coastal city on the Red Sea north of Marsa Alam.
Last month a tourist boat capsized in the same area, leaving four dead and seven missing.
